Tag Archives: World Literature

St Augustine Opines on Being and Nothingness

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St. Augustine and I are pals!  I never would have thunk it!  This is a profound observation about the majesty of God and his creation.  (This was posted this morning on (http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/)  By the way, I intend to do a better job of giving credit for where I “steal” some of this stuff!

 

My brothers and sisters, where does time go? The years slip and slide past us, day by day. Those things which were, no longer are; those things yet to come, are not here. The past is dead; the future is yet to come, but only to pass away in turn. Today exists only for the moment in which we speak. Its first hours are already over and behind us, the remainder do not as yet exist; they are still to come, but only to fall into nothingness.

Nothing in this world has constancy in itself. The body does not possess being; it has no permanence. It changes with age; it changes with time and place; it changes as a result of sickness or accident. The stars have as little consistancy; they are always changing in hidden ways, they go whirling into outer space. They are not stable, they do not possess being.

Nor is the human heart any more constant. How often it is disturbed by various conflicting thoughts and ambitions! How many pleasures draw it, one minute this way, and the next minute, that way, tearing it apart! The human spirit, although endowed by God with reason, changes; it does not possess being. It wills and does not will; it knows and does not know; it remembers this but forgets that. No one has unity of being in himself.

After so much suffering, disease, difficulties and pain, let us return humbly to God, to that one Being. Let us enter into that heavenly Jerusalem, that city whose citizens share in Being itself.
Augustine,Commentary on Psalm 121 (Hebrew Ps. 122); CCSL 40, pp. 1801-3; quoted by Robert Atwell,Celebrating the Seasons, Canterbury, 1999, p.416

Lowell

 

Handling Intense Emotion

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I recently posted about intense feelings and quoted the following poem by Marianne Moore.  Today I want to emphasize one line from this poem, “He who feels strongly behaves.”  Intense emotion is often an excuse to not behave and indeed tense emotion at times makes “behaving” impossible.

Shakespeare said of one of his characters, “He cannot buckle his distempered cause within the belt of rule.’  “Distempered cause” refers to a basic life force which I construe to mean energy or feeling.  Shakespeare was saying that regardless of how we feel we must keep it within “the belt of rule”  I think art and music are two means whereby this intense emotion is kept within the “belt of rule”

What Are Years?
By Marianne Moore
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt,—
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

Elif Shafak and Difference

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Elif Shafak is a Turkish novelist who is brilliant, insightful, and….yes, dare I say it, beautiful!  She has a TED lecture available on the internet which I strongly recommend on the subject of the Politics of Difference.  (See link below)

In this lecture she begins by telling of being raised by an educated and Westernized, single-mother in Istanbul.  She also tells of the influence of her mentally unstable grandmother who was somewhat of a natural-healer in the community.  One of the grandmother’s antics was to remove warts with prayer, incantations, and then drawing a circle around the wart with dark ink.  And Shafak declared that this procedure worked!  She once asked her grandmother about what the secret was and her grandmother told her, “Never underestimate the power of circles.”

Shafak then takes this image of the circle and developed the notion that anytime we draw circles, and do so rigidly, we kill anything within them  She explained how that when groups, for example, draw rigid boundaries around themselves they eventually do themselves great harm.  She argued that when we cocoon, when we ghetto-ize we are isolating ourselves and denying ourselves the necessary feedback from the world outside of ourselves.  Furthermore, she noted the obvious—when we are barricaded within our safe confines, we are prone to demonize all those on the outside, all those that are different, and at times we even seek to eradicate them.

And I close with my daily dose of W. H. Auden who noted, re this isolationism, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction.html

Thoughts re St. Augustine

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It is amazing to note change. I’m now reading St. Augustine’s Confessions and enjoying it immensely. When I labored through part of it in college, I found it excruciating. Now it is invigorating to read of another man’s struggles with his Source nearly 2000 years ago. And I had forgotten what a randy son-of-a-gun he was!

I really liked his description of his moment of conversion as “that moment wherein I was to become other than I was.” I wander if “W” would have any idea what he was talking about or even Romney? I bet O’Bama would.

I’d like to share again my favorite Shakespearean sonnet which pertains to this notion that we have a soul within which “pines” to be seen, recognized, and respected. This is the most pressing need of human kind, always has been and always will be. For, “getting there” is a process individually and collectively. Enjoy:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
(Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array),
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this the body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:

So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,

Ravished by God

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One of my favorite sonnets is by John Donne:

 Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,
Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

This is a beautiful portrayal of God’s persistent but gracious intervention in our lives.  It recognizes our bondage to reason, noting how that reason is “captiv’d” by subterranean forces, forces that I would describe as the ego.  As long as that bondage continues we will live a life “betroth’d unto your enemy” which I would also describe as the forces of the unconscious.  We will be what Colin Wilson described as a “sleep walker.”

And do note the sexual imagery there!

the “glib and oily art”

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In his play, King Lear, Shakespeare noted the “glib and oily art, to speak and purpose not.”  Words are usually trotted out….yes, glibly…and that is fine.  Words are the currency of any particular culture.  If we had to sit down and ponder re the meaning of what we were about to say, then our culture would quickly disintegrate into a morass of self-contemplation, “navel gazing.”  But the problem is that often people never into their entire life get beyond “the glib speech of habit, well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.”   (Conrad Aiken).  We are often verbal auto-matons, offering the appropriate “words and phrases” for the various circumstances in our life.  We then fail to ever offer an authentic word, a word spoken from the heart.  We fail to acknowledge the wisdom of Shakespeare in the concluding lines of King Lear, “The weight of this sad time we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”  It is sad to realize that many people…..most people…never speak an authentic “feeling” word.  Even more so it is so sad to realize that our culture is set up to prevent authenticity, it depends on people trotting out those “well worn words and ready phrases.”  We are fortunate to live in a culture where there is some freedom to individual expression, in spite of the weight of socio-economic pressure, in spite of social regimentation.

shakespeare sonnet

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SONNET 146 by William Shakespeare

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
(Thrall to) These rebel powers that thee array;
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

 

Shakespeare said it all.  No one has grasped the human psyche like that man.  Here he echoed the words of Jesus, who once posed the question, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?”  Shakespeare recognized that there is a center, a quiet place, which often goes without notice.  It is a place which is largely not recognized by our current culture.  We are busy compulsively “painting our outward walls so costly gay”, ignoring the admonishment to, “Within be fed, without be rich no more.”  We are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness, taking for real what is only ephemeral.  And the price tag for this is a loss of perspective, a missing connection with the spiritual dimension which alone gives life meaning.  John Masefield noted, “We chase the shade, and let the real be.”

 

Here is the Masefield sonnet:

 

Man has his unseen friend, his unseen twin,

His straitened spirit’s possibility,

The palace unexplored he thinks an inn,

The glorious garden which he wanders by.

It is beside us while we clutch at clay

To daub ourselves that we may never see.

Like the lame donkey lured by moving hay

We chase the shade but let the real be.

Yet, when confusion in our heaven brings stress,

We thrust on that unseen, get stature from it,

Cast to the devil’s challenge the man’s yes,

And stream our fiery hour like a comet,

And know for that fierce hour a friend behind,

With sword and shield, the second to the mind.