Tag Archives: W. H. Auden

The Subtle Imbibing of Spiritual Darkness

Leave a reply

Last evening I was sitting in my living room, dinner underway, my lovely wife and Peety at my side. (That precious little boy waves his tail so beautifully! ) We had just watched Air Force One approach its landing for Trump’s “festival” at Mt. Rushmore. Here my family is doing “lemming” again and watching this version of “The Trump Story” airing. But, I am not apologizing; we wanted to watch it! The pandemic, one expression of which is Trumpism, has challenged Trump’s ability to get the ego reward of huge throngs bowing at his feet. But last night a crowd of 7500 prostrated itself before him, feverishly giving him the validation for which his two year old soul hungers. That hunger is a gaping maw, sucking into its demonic depths, a crowd of “true believers” who have made him their avatar.

I am reminded of one of the 20th century’s greatest prophets . W. H. Auden, who told us, “We are afraid of pain, but more afraid of silence.” Early in Trump’s life his innocent heart hungered for the “noise” of a validation from his parents, especially his mother. It is in this gap, this “absence” from which we all emerge, that Donnie did not get mirrored., aka”loved.” His precious heart hungered desperately for an empathic response from his mother, the absence of which was related to his aloof and emotionally-tyrannical father. It was in that moment of vulnerability that young Donnie accepted the wooing of a nascent psychosis which 73 years later exploded into full “glory,” albeit a dark, demonic “glory.”

A “black-hole” sucks into its depths everything that tarries too long in the periphery of its orbit. Two people immediately come to my mind, Kelly-Anne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The toll on Conway is seen in the depleted, haggard, frightened visage that she proffers whenever she crawls out of the hole in which Trump has imprisoned her. Sanders was an “innocent,” a simple little Baptist girl from Arkansas with a powerful father who was genetically wired to “drink the kool-aid.” (The image of these two innocent little girls brings to my mind an image from T.S. Eliot, “Men and bits of paper whirled by the cold wind which blows before and after time.”) These two little girls deserved better; but genetically and socio-culturally they got “dumped on”. But that is no excuse as we humans share the same fate of an emotional/spiritual “baggage” that we acquire in our formative years. We can surmount that burden only with the courage that maturity offers, gracing our lives with a whiff of “self”-awareness. That “whiff” is usually squashed before it comes to our conscious mind. As Auden noted,”Truth met him (her) and held out her hand. But he (she) clung in panic to his (her) tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

Poetry Arises With a Stirring in the Heart

2 Replies

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)

Arnold knew that poets harnessed energy in a different way than most of us.  Being immersed in poetry myself, though not being a poet, I think I understand what he meant.  Human beings are in essence merely energy, “pulsating” energy, and most of us have the “pulsating” curtailed into structured behavior and thought…and even feeling.  But poets are different; you might even say they have a screw loose, or to borrow from Emily Dickinson, “a splinter in their brain.”  Thus, they have free-floating energy which, being gifted with the poetry muse, they can “subdue” and thus “scan, not his (“their) own course, or heart, “but that of man.”  (The quip about “loose screw” was not meant with any disrespect!!!)

Poetry, therefore, offers us a glimpse into the depths of the human heart.  To some it will fall on deaf ears and that is not to dismiss them in the least; their lot in life is different.  But it speaks to those of us who at least have an ear…and a heart…for its wisdom.  In the mid 1980’s a friend of mine gave me a copy of W. H. Auden’s “Collected Longer Poems” and I was stunned by Auden’s wisdom.  This was the first time poetry had penetrated the linear-thinking prison I had spent my first three and a half decades in.  That little paperback book only recently broke completely in half, down the spine, just where “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” began; but I will never throw it away, even though I have a hard bound collection of his complete poetry.

Franz Kafka offered wisdom about the impact that good literature can have on a person, how it can act as a “pick axe” to the frozen sea within us just as Auden’s work did to me three decades ago:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

A More “Aesthetic” and Poetic Approach to Judgement

Leave a reply

Today I’d like to approach the “judgement of God” more aesthetically.  Though I emphasized yesterday the metaphorical approach I had in mind, I want to further gloss the term over…if even possible… with a bit of poetic finesse. W.H. Auden wrote, “O blessed be bleak exposure on whose sword we are pricked into being alive.” Auden captured the starkness of those moments when reality stuns us, stripping us of the adornments of our personality of which we have become so comfortable.

Emily Dickinson, with her cryptic and even severe style, put it more starkly:

He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys —
Before they drop full Music on —
He stuns you by Degrees —

Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers — further heard —
Then nearer — Then so — slow —

Your Breath — has time to straighten —
Your Brain — to bubble Cool —
Deals One — imperial Thunderbolt —
That scalps your naked soul —

When Winds hold Forests in their Paws —
The Universe — is still —

Mercifully, as I’ve noted before, most of us get this “wisdom” gently over the years…if at all.  I like the way William Butler Yeats put it, “Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.  Now may I wither into the Truth.”

Boundaries is the subject matter here.  I might quip, “We can’t live with ‘em, we can’t live without ‘em.”  By that I mean part of us resists restraint but fortunately we are hard wired to appreciate the “reining in” of our deep-seated desire to be unrestrained.  Proverbs 16:32 captures this inner conflict beautifully, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”

Any Hope Here????

9 Replies

It is really a grim moment in the history of my country.  We really live in a “stupor”, that a reference to a W.H. poem which I will quote from in a moment.  The stupor lies in the fact that we are now divided between two mind sets, “I am right” and “I am right.”  An alternative would be, “There is a bit of right on either perspective and the goal would be to see how we can reconciliate our differences.”  But the hope of that reconciliation has a significant obstruction—the leader of one side of this argument is the President of the United States and he has absolutely no capacity to equivocate on his stance of being right.  If you want to have some fun, delve into two notions on google, “solipsism” and “aseity” both of which are relevant to deity and they are both relevant to Trump.  The problem is that when these two terms become relevant to a mere mortal, the “deity” is intrinsically a “dark” deity and the results can only be catastrophic for the body politic.  If you are conservative, and happened to have stumbled into this domain, do not dare google these two google terms.

Here is the poetic quote from an astute, spiritually astute poet, W.H. Auden:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

“Negation and despair” besets us.  Hopelessness.  Do we dare show an “affirming flame” in this dark moment?  Trump and his minions are but an epiphenomena, a passing shadow that will pass away, the “passing away” which we might not live long enough to witness.  We can only hope.  That is called, “Faith.”

The Perilous Safety of “Hunkerin’ Down”

4 Replies

There is a pale.  And there are those who spend their life beyond the pale, some so far beyond the pale that they merit the term “deviant.”  And then there are those who live very close to the pale, hovering just short of this boundary or just beyond it and do the work that offers art in its full gamut to the human race.  This pale is what defines reality and “reality” must have some definition if there is to be any civilization at all.  But there are times when the “energy” that has constellated at and just beyond the pale appears threatening to those who hover near the center of “reality” and then there is a tendency to “hunker down” and fiercely resist the precious offering of those “pale dwellers”—opportunities for change.  But the “hunker downers”, if they find a chieftain around whom they can rally, often will become adamant about maintaining the status quo and the social body will suffer, especially those who do not have the comfort of the “in crowd.”  Often those in the “out crowd” are easily manipulated and intimidated and can be convinced by their chieftain that it is in their own best interest to oppose the changes that would be good for the entirety of the social body, including themselves.

Change is scary.  As Shakespeare put it, “We cling to these ills we have rather than fly to others we know not of.”  The Bard knew that often we will prefer to maintain our misery rather than dare to take the risk that would be entailed in taking actions that might alleviate our suffering.  A psychiatrist I worked with in a psych hospital one time quipped in a staffing about a patient that we both worked with, “She clings to her mental illness with the same tenacity that most of us cling to our mental health.”  “Hunkering down” gives one, or the whole of a group, the illusion of safety.  As W. H. Auden noted, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

***********************************************

Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Knowledge is Capricious

Leave a reply

Daniel Boorstin, a noted American historian declared in his book, “The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself,” that, “More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowing.” Boorstin in this quote had gleaned from his study of history that the comfort of “the feeling of knowing” often, if not most of the time, would triumph over knowledge itself.  Throughout history we have records of cultures in which “the feeling of knowing” proved to lead to their demise while letting that “feeling” give way to some critical thinking could have allowed them to continue, though with a moderated view of reality.

It is comforting to feel that one knows, permitting one to “know” that one knows.  It is so comforting that human nature has hard-wired us to prefer “knowing that we know” in the interest of preserving our tribe.  But when the world grows so small…as we are now experiencing…then “knowing what we know” begins to compete with other tribes who “know that they know” with equal conviction. Then violent conflict ensues unless leadership is available which will direct us to tolerate the notion that diametrically opposing ideas of reality can co-exist. There is no need to attempt to obliterate “them” just because we see “them” as, “not knowing correctly.”

The core issue is the comfort of “feeling that we know” not understanding the wisdom of poet W. H. Auden who told us that, “feeling knows no discretion but its own.”  Auden knew that our view of the world is not a rational matter, but one whose origin lies beneath the surface in the murky realm of feelings, closely akin to the unconscious.  But to recognize this truth is to take away the certainty that we can have in believing our beliefs and discounting anything or anyone that threatens them.  Another word for this realm of feelings is the heart, that center of our being which is unlocked only when we are willing to forego the tyranny of rational thinking and permit the grace of a non-tyrannical rationality which is quickened with the intuitive wisdom of the heart.

*****************************

Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Auden, Despair, Picnics, and, “Build that Wall!!”

1 Reply

W.H. Auden is probably the poet I quote most often here. The story of his life and his beautiful poetry has been a great inspiration because it encourages us to look beneath the surface of things and find that the effort is worth the pain of the process. The first step in this process is to recognize there is a “surface of things,” an insight which in itself is challenging; for any culture imprints into the depths of our being that the “surface of things” is something to take as a given and not to be questioned.  To ask one to question the existence of this “surface” is like asking a fish to see water.

In the following excerpt of Auden’s, “New Years Letter,” the reader is encouraged to peek beneath this surface of life though with a warning that only, “despair can shape the hero who will dare the desperate catabasis,” and face the “snarling abyss” which always lies beneath the surface of life’s contrivances. However, it must be noted that despair is not necessary for all who travel Auden’s road to redemption.  “Despair” is for the “heroes” such as poets, artists, religious and even political visionaries.  Most of us mercifully face only a watered-down version of despair and encounter a mid-life crisis, or some persistent duress which cues us to also look beneath the surface in our non-heroic manner and do battle with our relatively tame horde of demons.  Auden and his sort were faced with, “slaying the demons” and most of us merely have to step into the ring for a moment with our “benign” demons, and gain the wisdom from the encounter that is there to be had, and then return to our very routine life.  But the wisdom gained from the encounter can empower us to lead a more productive and meaningful life.

Auden described the superficies of life, those amusements which distract us from the gut-level issues of being a sentient human being as a, “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.”    Here Auden brings to our attention the façade of normal, everyday, routine life which is too subtle to actually notice.  This “jolly picnic” is delightful for some…let’s say, for example, “the haves,” though the “have nots” are not so fortunate and look sullenly, angrily, and despairingly at the picnic, wishing they could have been invited also. Auden also notes that those who have been invited to this picnic always, “bask” in comfort, “agreed on what we will not ask,” tanned and relaxed in the comfort of the, “accepted lie.”

This “accepted lie” is essential for group coherence, providing the biases and premises which allow the group to exist in the first place.  For example, one basic premise of a group is exclusion; and Auden notes elsewhere there is no, “us” without a, “them.”  But these “lies” are necessary for the group to cohere, the problem lying only in circumstances in which the “lie” is so sacrosanct that it cannot be relaxed a mite to allow more access to those who are excluded.  But usually a siege mentality evolves in a social “lie” and letting down its guard and allowing any of the excluded to have some degree of access will be perceived as an existential threat.  Then will the cry go out far and wide, “Build that wall!”

Here is the relevant excerpt from Auden’s, “New Years Letter”:

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?
(Excerpted from “New Year Letter” – 1/1/1940)

*********************************

Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Catholicism, Politics, and the Peril of Ideology

Leave a reply

Ideologues, those entrapped in their self-serving ideology, can never recover from this malady.  They are like alcoholics who, in recovery-culture have the axiomatic bromide, “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.”  The culture of recovery uses this bromide to address the truth that even those in recovery are still an alcoholic and always will be.  And I personally must confess that I am an “ideologue” in recovery and will always be, a fact that is certainly related to by persistent focus on the peril of ideology and threat of “ideologues.”  This ideological malady is intrinsically related to this gift of thinking that makes us driven by instinct alone.

Religious culture of our day illustrates this problem just as does our political culture.  Religious people are susceptible to being so intoxicated with theology and religious tradition that the essence of their spirituality is obliterated by their enslavement to their ideas, the, “letter of the law.”  An identity plague with this malady is often so entrapped in his ideas of himself, in “ideas” about his spirituality that he is unable to recognize and acknowledge that his spirituality is largely, if not completely, “performance art.”

There is a related story in the news which broke yesterday about the Pope having fired a prominent member of the House of Cardinals, Theodore McCarrick, for his history of sexual abuse.  The evidence against this 88 year old man is extensive and could no longer be ignored by the Catholic hierarchy.  But this aged man persists in his innocence even in the face of overwhelming evidence that he is guilty.

I would conjecture that this man is a “good” man with the life-long spiritual emphasis of his career; for, “good men” can do very bad things.  But “good men,” steeped in the rigid structure of faith can gradually reach the place where their piety is so self-serving that they can and do overlook their gross “badness.”  It is possible that this ex-Cardinal truly does believe in his innocence as “ideas” are so intoxicating that they often keep us trapped in self-deception, even though this dishonesty is so apparent to those looking on.

This is now glaringly obvious in our political system with prominent politicians so obviously guilty of blatant lying yet be so unaware of their dishonesty that they can readily accuse their foes of, “lying.”  Yes, this is hypocrisy, but it is quite possible that some of these “hypocrites” really do believe what they are saying for being trapped in their ideas about themselves it is quite possible they do not believe they are lying.  But this is a human malady, not merely one exclusive to religious leaders and politicians.  It is very human to cling to our ideas of ourselves, our self-percept of our identity, rather than consider that beneath the surface there are unsavory dimensions to our psyche that need to be given the light of day occasionally.  But this “unconscious” dimension of our life is too readily kept buried as our “conscious” beliefs, “i.e. ‘ideas,’” about ourselves will not allow the darkness to be acknowledged.  This “darkness” would disrupt and even devastate our “ideological” identity even though spiritual teachings often present the notion that “in the darkness” there is, “light.”  As Auden summarized this wisdom poetically, “And Truth met him, and held out here hand.  But he clung in panic to his tall beliefs and shrank away like an ill-treated child.

Michel Foucault and “Difference” in Contemporary America

Leave a reply

Difference matters to me.  I was raised in a conservative, American South culture with religion being the paramount dimension in my particular subculture.  But this upbringing in a rigid, highly structured atmosphere of “us vs. them” troubled me and in my early adulthood I began to acquire a more inclusive, less linear-thinking oriented approach to life.  Now, in the latter stages of my life, the issue of sameness vs. difference is a paramount concern of mine, especially given the political climate in my country and in the world.

Today I stumbled across a book in my library, “The Order of Things” by Michel Foucoult, heavily marked up from my “youthful” enthusiasm of decades past.  In the quote which I will share, Foucoult explores the relationship between “sympathy” (i.e. sameness”) vs. “antinomy” (difference) and the dialogic imperative of an interaction between these two complementary dimensions of the human soul.

Sympathy is an instance of the same so strong and so insistent that it will not rest content to be merely one of the forms of likeness; it has the dangerous power of assimilating, of rendering things identical to one another, of mingling them, of causing their individuality to disappear—and thus rendering them foreign to what they were before.  Sympathy transforms.  It alters, but in the direction of identity, so that if its power were not counter-balanced it would reduce the world to a point, to a homogeneous mass, to the featureless form of the same:  all its parts would hold together and communicate with one another without a break, with no distance between them, like those metal chains held suspended by sympathy to the attraction of a single magnet.

But then Foucault presents “antipathy” as the opposite life-force, equally necessary, which seeks to counter the otherwise stultifying power of the demand for sameness.  What he calls “antipathy” is merely a drive for difference, an innate desire to not be swallowed by the whole of sameness, a “whole” which would be merely a “black hole” without consideration of this “antipathy” or difference.  Foucault declares:

Sympathy is compensated by its twin, antipathy.  Antipathy maintains the isolation of things (i.e. the difference, the desire and demand for independence) and prevents their assimilation; it encloses every species within its impenetrable difference and its propensity to continue to being what it is.

This notion of continuing “to being what it is” is an essential dimension of identity, an ability to “hang onto” a core of what/who one is even when beset by the challenges of difference.  With maturity, i.e. “ego integrity,” one can hang onto a core of who one is even as he negotiates with difference, (i.e. “antipathy”) and knowing that he can survive…and even thrive…with the benefit of “difference” (i.e. something new) into its mindset.

Poet Stanley Kunitz offered wisdom re this inner-core, this essence of who we are:

The Layers
BY STANLEY KUNITZ
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.

 

Emily Dickinson and the Imprisonment of Specious Truth

3 Replies

The subject of truth continues to fascinate me with the term “fake news” becoming synonymous with any viewpoint that does not fit with ours.  Truth appears increasingly to be very relative with no real standard being applicable.  Oh sure, I’m a “relativist” myself but then I continue to believe in some basic standard of veracity which, should I breach it, I would evoke some sense of shame and an attempt to apologize.

But the wonderful 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson knew that it was possible for the human soul to select its constituent elements and fashion a private, “society” that would be, “proof and bulwark” (borrowing a term from Shakespeare) against truth.  She was a keen observer of the human situation in her day and noted how people tended to create a very private reality for themselves, congregate with like-minded souls, and then repel any contrary viewpoint.  Here is how she put it:

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present 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 —

Note that Dickinson observed that after constructing this autistic shell of a world view, the individual would, “shut the door” and then assume a “Divine majority,” that is assuming a Divinity to which nothing could be “presented” any more.  She knew that at this point an individual had said, in the depths of his heart, “My mind is made up.  Don’t confuse me with facts.”

But often in this closed-minded world, Dickinson knew that Truth often visited and “kneeled at her low-gate,” bidding for admission.  But she had already pledged her troth to a particular viewpoint and “closed the valves of her attention like stone.”  The imagery of valves of attention, “closing like stone” is powerful, evoking an auditory image of the gates of attention clanging shut with finality.  When one has barricaded him/herself into a prison of specious certainty, and labeled it Truth, there is no way for those chariots that are always passing by to breach the force-field it faces.  The poison that results inside such a prison always makes me think of Westboro Baptist Church, David Koresh and his disciples, and Jim Jones and the Jonestown, South Africa disaster.

W. H. Auden offered relevant wisdom, “And Truth met him, and held out Her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”