Emily Dickinson and John Donne Speak to Us

Emily Dickinson knew the human heart, as do any poet who is worth their poetic salt.  Therefore, she knew about meaning and understood that it was obtained only in the inner most depths of the heart which she captured with the following poem:

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
Dickinson knew that meaning comes from “heavenly hurt” and that it leaves, “no scar” to the casual observer, those who look only on the surface of things; but those who can withstand the pain will find, “internal difference—where the meanings are.”  This “internal difference” allows an ephemeral “certain slant of light” to daunt the citadel of the heart and bring into question certainties which had, to that point, been biases and premises unsullied by the “certain slant of light” of conscious awareness.  It is in the resulting disarray, confusion, doubt, and fear that “meaning” can surface in our heart and allow “words fitly spoken” to flow from our inner most being.

To borrow from another line of Dickinson poetry,  she called this intrusion into our consciousness of this, “slant of light,” a “splinter in the brain.”  This “splintering” is a violation, a penetration, not unrelated to what the famous poet John Donne had in mind when he noted that God would not be able to penetrate the stubborn rational fortress of his egoic self, “except thou ravish me,” which would come only after the answering of his prayer, “Batter my heart, three personed God.”

John Masefield, Stanley Kunitz, and “Continuity of Being”

John Masefield, the British poet laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967, is now running a close second to Shakespeare as my favorite sonneteer. He was a bookish lad, an addiction which his aunt, his guardian when his parents died in his childhood, sought to break by sending him to sea at age 13. But he there found lots of time to read and to write without the interference of the unappreciated aunt and also developed a lifetime passion for the maritime life. “Sea-Farer” is one of his best known poems and the sea, and water themes, are common in his work.

His adventures at sea, including the foreign lands he visited, gave him a global approach to life and made him an observer of the human situation which is a gift many poets have. In the following sonnet, he started with a line about the ephemeral nature of identity itself, noting a wish to “get within this changing I, this ever-altering thing which yet persists…” Masefield’s natural curiosity and educational accomplishments helped him see life as every bit turbulent and capricious as the sea, always changing yet persisting nevertheless.
Modern life in the late 19th century (he was born in 1878) was teeming with scientific discoveries and theories, including the work of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. To those exposed to higher education, life was not a static phenomenon but a dynamic process and even one’s own identity was an evolutionary process. But later in the sonnet he did recognize a “ghost in the machine” which some of us like to describe as “god” (i.e. “God”) which appeared often to be effecting some direction to the caprices of our day to day life. Even “in the brain’s most enfolded twisted shell,” he saw, “The King, the supreme self, the Master Cell” providing some mysterious teleology to our often-mischievous path. This notion brings to mind one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare, “There is a Divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”
If I could get within this changing I,
This ever altering thing which yet persists,
Keeping the features it is reckoned by,
While each component atom breaks or twists,
If, wandering past strange groups of shifting forms,
Cells at their hidden marvels hard at work,
Pale from much toil, or red from sudden storms,
I might attain to where the Rulers lurk.
If, pressing past the guards in those grey gates,
The brain’s most folded intertwisted shell,
I might attain to that which alters fates,
The King, the supreme self, the Master Cell,
Then, on Man’s earthly peak, I might behold
The unearthly self beyond, unguessed, untold.

Here I want to append an excerpt from another poem, by a United States poet laureate, Stanley Kunitz, entitled, “The Layers” in which he too recognized some mysterious “center” in the depth of one’s being from which one, “struggles not to stray” even in the infinite vicissitudes of life.

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.

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/

The Visitation of Poetry on a Meagre Life

“Poetry” first visited mere nearly 35 years ago and my life has never been the same. I’m not a poet, but a devotee to the art, and an appreciator of the following poet and his beautiful, profound personal note following this “Rattle” post today:

T.R. Hummer SURGE At the Senior Center, nobody is playing cards. The tables are folded and leaned against the wall; the Queen of Hearts is stuffed in a box upside-down and backward, jammed between a joker and the three of clubs. Down the street, the local diner is emptier than a Hopper painting, bacon grease coagulating in a cold tin can. No one in the shops, no one on the street except one black-masked old man in a worn peacoat with a dog-eared paperback stuffed in one pocket, sitting on a bus stop bench, clenching his fists and weeping. This is the way contagion works. The tears of the poet were in the reader all along. —from Rattle #78, Winter 2022

T.R. Hummer: “Having been writing poetry seriously for over 50 years, I have belatedly come to the same conclusion I came to when I was in my 20s: I don’t write poetry; poetry writes me. When I was young, I knew that but misunderstood it; now I misunderstand it in a completely different way. Then, I wanted poetry to remake me in some radical and idealized way that was beyond me to do on my own. Now, I feel it in what I imagine to be Heraclitus’s way: ‘Listening not to me, but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.’ At 22, I would have thought that sentence was a three-part non sequitur; now, I simply concur.”

Must We Be “Some”-Body?

I’M NOBODY by Emily Dickinson

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

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

It is very challenging to be a “Nobody” as the Emily Dickinson poem shares with us.  Becoming a “nobody” is one of life’s greatest challenges as we are hardwired from birth on to find our place in the world though that doesn’t eliminated our desire to be “Somebody,” even if only vicariously through a cultural or political leader who vicariously satisfies that need of ours.

Dickinson knew that pursuit of this goal means prostituting ourselves to that “admiring bog,” those people “out there” who we early-on learned we must be likened unto.  Rene Girard and James Alison have powerfully offered us the notion of “mimetic engulfment” in which humans are taught to be a slave to “sameness” and therefore the need to fit in.  And “fitting-in” is part of being human but not when it is pursued so much that we completely forgo any impulse to find a vestige of autonomy as we participate in a social body.  It is the absence of personal autonomy that can turn a social body into a tyranny, an organized madness which will always find itself a voice to articulate its rage.

Notice that Dickinson described those masses whose attention we often seek to an “admiring bog,” before we often spend our life croaking like a frog. I’ve listened to movie stars and other famous people lament their realization that their loving and admiring fans often see them only as puppets of some sort, on the stage only to sing, dance, and perform for their mindless amusement.

One Picture Captures a Thousand Words!

Here is an image that captures the human dilemma. “May the Lord help us,” and She always does.

The Dilemma of Human Connection

Loneliness does not come from having no people around but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding views which are different from others.   Carl Jung

Solitude is very important, but so is social interaction and connection.  We are hard-wired to learn engagement with our fellow humans as our Creator knew, and knows, that one cannot be human without other people.  It is often a challenge to mature to the point of finding a home between these two extremes.  If we err toward the solitude, psychosis will be the result, relevant to an old bromide, “The one who lives by himself and for himself will be spoiled by the company he keeps.”  But the opposite extreme is equally deadly as the social demand to “fit in” can become so important that one has no solitude at all and the whole of his/her life can be marching in lockstep with the dictates of the tribe.  Group psychosis is equally deadly but is not recognized by those who have been consumed by the group.

The challenge of any group dynamic to lessen the risk of soul-destroying loneliness, especially on the family level, is to create an environment where each individual learns he/she has a voice and that this voice will be respected. Without this dynamic, sterility will set in and death-wielding toxicity will result. Paul Tillich called this toxic environment, an “empty world of self-relatedness.”

Vaclav Havel on Hope

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands for a chance to succeed. (Vaclav Havel)

“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world” and I would add, “a ‘mind’ working in harmony with a heart.”  This hope is grounded in the Spiritual, a Divinely inspired, intuitive understanding that is not based in what is so often an ersatz “joy” of the common-sense reality that most of us call home.  “Joy” is very wonderful but we often fall victim to a common-sense definition of that word which is but a quest for what C.S. Lewis called, ”a quest for immediate gratification over a believed-in pattern of glory.” Hope is most real when we face the grim dirge of hopelessness when circumstances seem beyond the pale of any rational hope.

Here is one of my favorite poetic approaches to this hope/hopelessness continuum from the pen of T. S. Eliot in “East Coker,” one of “The Four Quartets”:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

(AFTERTHOUGHT—Havel was the last president of Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic, serving from 1989-2003.  He was an author, a playwright, and memoroist whose literary skills were used to criticize the totalitarian Communist regime that oppressed Eastern Europe.)

The Southern Baptist Church And Sexual Abuse

The Southern Baptist Convention is being racked…again…by its history of sexual abuse and systematic efforts at covering it up.  I grew up in a Southern Baptist church….mine a split-off from the SBC which it castigated for being “too liberal”….and I know a lot about “hiding stuff.”  My life has been one ego-driven cover-up which is now mercifully being shredded, a dissolution allowing me to see, and even experience, what I so glibly back then described as “the Grace of God.”

Religion, in all forms and expressions, is subject to the whole gamut of “sins of the flesh.”  The riotousness of my  youth and most of my life was covered up with an hypocritical need to “not be found out.”  This is just the “sin” of being human as, per T.S. Eliot, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”  This is because if we allow reality to intrude into our little self-serving fortress, ou r facade would be in jeopardy and it is easier to just deny what is so very obvious to others.  This “intrusion,” if and when it comes, is always frightening, motivating our “flesh” dimension to double-down in its denial system.  This violation, though, I now realize can be a visitation from “the Spirit of God.”

In the following link, you can read a report of a former notable Southern Baptist Church leader, Russell Moore, castigating his erstwhile church for its hypocrisy on the matter of sexual abuse.  But the “hypocrisy” goes much further than sexuality as this church, like all religious traditions often falls prey to the very human temptation to use spirituality as a facade to cover up “the flesh,” whereas the Gospel taught us we could opt for more human-ness—vulnerability, anxiety, and even despair as the Spirit of God does Her work on us.

A caveat is in order.  Today, long past my Baptist years and its fundamentalism, I am still very proud of that tradition which offered me a “hunger and thirst after righteousness” which is being somewhat sated as I wrestle with that “beast” called “humility.” (See T.S. Eliot quote at conclusion.)  This tradition offered me the gift of Holy Writ, only the Bible at that point, but also an intuitive insight that there is more to the whole of life than the perfunctory.

…………………………………………………………………………………….

T. S. Eliot, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill-done, and done to others harm, which once you took for exercise of virtue.” (The Four Quartets)

Link to news story about the SBC sex scandal—https://www.rawstory.com/southen-baptists-abuse/

Borges, Jung, and Individuation

Time is the substance I am made of.  Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger;  It is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.  Jorge Luis Borges

I often have second thoughts when I post here on this blog.  Last week when I offered this wisdom of Jorge Luis Borges I had another flurry of recriminations stemming from the childhood fear, “Oh, my this is just too crazy to be thinking.”  I now realize that in my very early life I feared I was not “thinking right” but had an uncanny awareness of this “flaw” and so quickly set my precocious little mind/heart dynamo to learning how to “think right.”  And I’m glad I did as otherwise I would have had a very hard time finding a place in the world in which I found myself and would have created great difficulty for myself and others, especially my family.  But as I hyper focused on thinking, and behaving, in the “right way” I did subscribe to linearity but with some reservation, a hesitancy which has dissipated here in my later years.

Borges with this astute poetic observation put into words the profound Mystery I discovered upon my birth in 1952.  And, yes, it was a “discovery” even then as my innocent little mind/heart contrivance was alive and kicking, and had been even in the womb, as it is with all of us…… and the conclusions we draw shape the balance of our lives.  These “conclusions” are in the realm of perception which precedes cognition, a realm which will then shape the cognitive framework we formulate. Depending upon our neurological wiring and the familial/cultural environment in which we find ourselves, we can often find ourselves “hard-wired” in a cognitive framework from which we can never escape.  This framework is an algorithm which will dictate how we think and seek to make sure that we think in an “appropriate” way as defined by the social venue in which we find ourselves ensconced. We are then set on the path in which the Jungian phenomenon of individuation is challenging or even impossible.  The resulting quandary will be my focus next time.

Jorge Luis Borges Summarizes Life

Time is the substance I am made of.  Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger;  It is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.  Jorge Luis Borges

I’ve stumbled across Borges for decades and appreciated his wisdom, but this little poem totally grabbed me this morning, encouraging me to “wikipedia” him.  I’m glad for this brief Wikipedia venture into his very profound, complicated, and even troubling life.

“Time is the substance I am made of” is a description of our physical existence, the mundane life that we all live.  But when I call it “mundane” I say that only for emphasis to point out its other dimension, that “river which sweeps me along.”  It is this “river” that makes this otherwise “mundane” world Sublime if we ever deign to look beneath the surface of life as Borges did.  In a sense this “mundane” world is the only one that “is” but it is the Sublime that gives it value if we ever find the courage and humility to let Her peek into our lives. There is more to life than meets the eye.  But it is human nature to prefer “what meets the eye” without any further inquiry, any “internal dialogue” as Hannah Arend put it in her study of Nazi totalitarianism.  We prefer to see only the “small bright circle of our consciousness” rather than to acknowledge that “beyond lies the darkness.”

Borges here puts into words the infinite complexity of this “fall” into existence which we know as Life. At one time in my life I would have wanted to run screaming from the classroom where a teacher had presented this little poem, perhaps looking back and flashing a sign of the cross. Borges puts on the table for us a complexity which the rational mind cannot comprehend, but which, if we have the courage and humility, can read between the lines and see it only as a pointer to the Ultimate, Iliminatible, Mystery of Life..

Miguel de Unamnuno Wisdom

“One must look for the eternal in the alluvium of the insignificant, in that which revolves around the eternal like an erratic comet, without ever entering its ordered constellation.” This great Spanish mystic/philosopher from the early 20th century grasped what C.S. Lewis described as the “sin of misplaced concreteness.” Our hard-wired familiarity with the mundane of this beautiful world in which we live can keep us from paying “attention” to the Life flowing around us often in the most easily overlooked phenomena of our day to day life. The “ordered constellation” of the mundane is certainly important; but if we never learn to meditate, perhaps on something as mundane as a flickering candle flame, or the giggles of a baby, or the “birds of the air…and the flowers of the field”, we will need to ponder the profound question of humans, like Jesus, who have asked, “What shall it profit a man/woman if s/he gains the whole world and loses his/her own soul, or what shall a human give in exchange for his/her soul?” Western culture assuages its rapacity with an attraction for “stuff,” failing to appreciate Shakespeare’s parallel quip to the Jesus-question above, “Within be rich, without be fed no more.”

Wisdom From Novelist Joan Didion

Wisdom comes from a “literary” grasp of our life and world. It means having a relationship with the metaphor. The word metaphor means “to reach across” or venture from a concrete-thinking world into our adjoining world of meaning. Taking this step across means to loosen one’s moorings, to follow the wisdom of poet Stefan George, “To journey to a far world, it is necessary to lose sight of the shore.” Joan Didion who just died this week offered really profound wisdom in the quip I will now share with you:

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all….I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

Stanley Kunitz, a former poet laureate of the United States put it this way, “We have walked through many lives, some of them my own. I am not the one I was, though some remnant of being remains from which I struggle not to stray.” Following is a link to this poem, “The Layers”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54897/the-layers