Shakespeare, Richard Rohr, and Prayer

I just listened to the beginning of a sermon by my beloved “Brother” Richard Rohr from 1999.  He was speaking about prayer and explaining that it is more than most of us do when we pray, very aware that, as T.S. Eliot noted, “Prayer is more than an order of words, or the sound of the voice praying, or the conscious occupation of the praying mind…”  He explained about prayer being an attentive, keen awareness of the Presence of the moment, a “Presence” which is God Him/Herself.  Rohr knows that this is a moment of attunement with that Ground of our Being which is everything that we are…in our Essence.

A quip from Shakespeare immediately came to my mind about this meditative focus from another dear “Brother” of mine, William Shakespeare.  In his play, “Hamlet,” King Claudius was kneeling in prayer, not knowing that his stepson Hamlet was approaching with a drawn sword, preparing to take vengeance on the King who, though he was the brother of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, had killed the king so that he could marry young Hamlet’s mother. Hamlet roiled with the notion of the “incestuous bed” that Claudius and Gertrude were sleeping in.  Still not hearing the approaching footsteps, Claudius prayed, “My thoughts fly up but my words remain below.  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

This memorable line from the play stunned me from the first time I read it decades ago.  It revealed a grasp of language that was finding an entryway into my own heart at that time, beginning a 35 year trek into the intricacy of language.  Shakespeare knew that the word was not the thing, that words were only pointers as in the Buddhist wisdom, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.” That moment in 1986 was the beginning of a life-changing transformation for me, my first “tippy-toeing” into the depths of my own heart, a venture which is giving me today some faint understanding of the human heart.

(Rohr is the founder and director of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  I invite you to check out his daily blog at—https://cac.org/category/daily-meditations/)

The Cathartic Power of Language

Another one of my “girlfriends” has shaken me out of my literary doldrum!  One of them, Emily Dickinson, often does this but this morning a contemporary girlfriend, Julia Kristeva, has intervened.  Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born linguist and psychoanalyst, educated in France and now practicing in Paris.  Upon awakening, for some reason I plucked from my bedside bookshelf, “Black Sun:  Depression and Melancholia” and opened it to a bookmark from earlier readings and found the following observation:

Once solitude has been named, we are less alone if words succeed in infiltrating the spasm of tears—provided they can find an addressee for an overflow of sorrow that had up to then shied away from words.

Or as George Eliot put it in the 19th century, “Speak words which give shape to our anguish…”

Oh, the power of language!  I now realize that in my early youth when I discovered language I had found my home, a sacred domain which provided an haven from the morass of poverty and incest of my culture.  And in my clinical training and practice I often witnessed the power of words being discovered by my clients…often with my facilitation…allowing them to “name the demons” that were haunting them. Leonardo Da Vinci realized this power of language in 15th century Italy, telling us:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them. Leonardo da Vinci, from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.

Is There, “A Destiny That Doeth Shape Our Ends…”?

Shakespeare thought there was and added that, “rough hew it though we may” the result will be the same.  In the following Wendell Berry poem, the energy of this “destiny” is described as an “hunger organized” by the simple sparrow. The wisdom of these two wordsmiths tells us that we are lived by energy that we can never fully understand but even in the “rough hewing” that we do, there is purpose. This encourages me as I embark on another day of “rough hewing”!!!

A sparrow is

his hunger organized.

Filled, he flies.

before he knows he’s going to.

And he dies by the

same movement, filled

with himself, he goes

By  the eye-quick 

reflex of his flesh,

out of sight, 

leaving his perfect

absence without a thought.

“Palimpsest: The Deceitful Portrait” by Conrad Aiken

I chat via phone with a very gifted writer from New York City who lived here in Taos, New Mexico until about two years ago. This “confab” that we have bi-weekly is one of the most spiritually invigorating experiences I have in my life. She is writing an essay now on eidetic memory which brought to my tangentially-oriented mind the word “palimpsest.” And this, in turn, brought that same “tangentially-oriented” mind to the poet who introduced me to that term decades ago when I discovered the poet, Conrad Aiken.

A biographical note is in order. Aiken was born to a 1889 to a respected Savannah, Georgia physician and eye surgeon and his wife, the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts Unitarian minister. When he was eleven years of age, one morning he heard two gun shots ring out in his home and discovered that his father had shot his mother and then himself.. You can imagine the terror that gripped him. I share this anecdote because of a note that W.H. Auden made in a poem about William Butler Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” For that murder-suicide to have happened, you can only imagine the madness the reigned in Conrad’s household and certainly “hurt” Conrad into poetry also.

Here I wish to share a bit of an Aiken poem, followed by a link to the entire poem. It begins with how we “walk through many lives” and carry a bit of each of them with us as we constellate an identity. With the resulting synthesis we “see but the small bright circle of our consciousness, beyond which lies the dark this powerful poem, Aiken explores the intricacies of identity, the art of subterfuge inherent in daily life, the sadness, the narcissism, the disappointment, and the courage we find to carry on before the taunting of despair:

And, as it is with this, so too with all things.
The pages of our lives are blurred palimpsest:
New lines are wreathed on old lines half-erased,
And those on older still; and so forever.
The old shines through the new, and colors it.
What’s new? What’s old? All things have double meanings,—
All things return. I write a line with passion
(Or touch a woman’s hand, or plumb a doctrine)
Only to find the same thing, done before,—
Only to know the same thing comes to-morrow. . . .

If this poem speaks to you in the least, I encourage you to follow the link provided as it is a deeply moving poem from the heart of a poet full of very intense emotion with consummate skill is conveying his heart’s sentiments.

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/conrad_aiken/poems/441

Further on How Truth Can Hide in Language

Yesterday, I blogged about Hibah Shabkhez and an essay of hers about how truth can be hidden in language. This duplicity occurs in the depths of the heart when language is employed, by necessity, to blog out primitive, old-brain terror One writer, Nikos Kazantsakis had this in mind when he quipped the language is “but 26 toys soldiers that guard us from the rim of the abyss.” But, as the Bible teaches us, when we are a child we must “speak as a child” but as an adult we must “put away childish things” and speak as an adult. We must speak the Truth which always means we must realize that we speak as, “we see through a glass darkly.”

Here is another poet, W. R. Rodgers, grasping this same truth in the World WarTwo era:

WORDS (an excerpt)

Once words were unthinking things, signaling

Artlessly the heart’s secret screech or roar,

Its foremost ardour or its farthest wish,

Its actual ache or naked rancour.

And once they were the gangways for anger,

Overriding the minds qualms and quagmires.

Wires that through weary miles of slow surmise

Carried the feverish message of fact

In their effortless core.  Once they were these,

But now they are the life-like skins and screens

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae,

To terrify or tame, cynical shows

Meant only to deter or draw men on,

The tricks and tags of every demagogue,

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys,

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.

Hibah Shabkhez, Poetry, and Truth

A Pakistani woman, a poet, essayest, and native of Pashtun, Hibah Shabkez, responds quite frequently to my musings in this blog. And, I am so, so honored with these visits from this extraordinary young soul who is now studying in Paris. She is about a third of my age but blessed with a wisdom, including a keen grasp of language, that I’m only now beginning to tippy-toe into,  I’ve been exploring her work on the internet, and now own a book of her poetry, “Alack, The Ashen Waves of the Sea: Selected Poetry,” which is available at Amazon.com for a very reasonable price.  But I will share here the most stunning bit of wisdom that I’ve seen put into words in my decades of spelunking about in the metaphysics of language. 

In her brief essay from the on-line journal, “Nighting Gale and Sparrow,” Hibah puts into words a linguistic complexity which has burdened me for decades.  Of late, I’ve come to somewhat understand this complexity but, have never been able to put into words as eloquently as she has. She explains that language initially blinds us to the Truth even as it assures us, often, that we have it most assuredly. The threat of understanding this wisdom that she offers is something I could not have handled most of my life; but now, it is immensely freeing, reminding me that all of us are in the same existential dilemma; and it is this “dilemma” that unites us all…if we can humbly accept its “condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  (T.S. Eliot)  It takes all the pressure off and gives new meaning to the old hymnological bromide, “Burdens are lifted at Calvary”; or to word it without the hint of religious savagery, “Chill out. Carry on.  All is well. We’re in this together.”

ScareZone by Hibah Shabkhez

When you touch the edge of something hot—a frying-pan, a clothes-iron—you gasp and flinch away, before the knowledge, before the shock and the hurt and the searing of flesh. Locked in the thumping of your heart then, there is the secret triumph of assault successfully withstood, the inexpressible comfort of knowing it could not and cannot hurt you because you did and can again make it stop. But the drenching heat of liquid cannot be flung off, only sponged and coaxed away from the skin. And so they say doodh ka jala, chhaachh bhi phook phook kar peeta hai. (Urdu translation, “Once bitten, twice shy.”) It doesn’t take all men, you see, it takes only one; and just so, it takes only one vile lie to break a language’s heart.

When first you write a lie, a real lie and not simply a truth incognito, whether it be falsehood or treacherous half-truth, language recoils from you in pain, vowing never to trust you with words again. But if you must go on writing lies, for money or grundy-respect, seize the language and let it feel the sting and the trickling fear of the skin parting company with the flesh, over and over and over again, as you hold it unscreaming under the current. You must let body and mind and heart and soul be quite maimed then, until there is no difference left for any of them between truth and lie, between the coldness of lassi (urdu–”buttermilk”) and the heat of milk-tides rising from the saucepan. Thereafter you may plunder with impunity all of language and force it to house your lies. And if you will never again find words to tell a truth in, it will not matter, for you will have no truths left to tell.

Distance, Metaphor, and Edgar Simmons

Last evening I stepped out into the bitter cold to witness Saturn and Jupiter come close to each other as if they were going to lovingly embrace, if you can consider “embracing” while separated by millions of miles. I can use the word embracing as in “touching” here only with the realization that in reality I am viewing this moment in our cosmic history from a physical distance of millions of miles. Even those two planets, appearing to be in “conjunction” are separated by five plus million miles. It is our “perspective” that allows us to witness this incredible moment in our history, giving us the necessary separateness that allows us to bring delight, joy, wonder and appreciation to the table. Before our perspective took roots in our early childhood we did not have the “luxury” of distance as we were part and parcel of a “moment” that we were immersed in and not able to cognitively/spiritually understand it. At that moment there was no “object separateness”…. to employ a bit of clinical jargon. It is the Biblical “fall” that gave us this detachment without which there would be no human culture. Spiritual maturity can gradually come to us in our “four-score and ten” when we grasp the wisdom of this Great Round of which we are but a part, a visitation of “Grace.”

The abysmal distance left us with a hunger to “close it up,” to find the lost connection and return to the delightful “Garden of Eden.” We pine for the relief from the burden of life in which we are separate and distinct, where culture seduces us into believing its artifice can give us that “Grand Conjunction” where grace awaits us. Culture, certainly language, can guide us in that direction but only if we see…and feel…that words will never suffice; they are but “pointers” to the Ultimate. The Buddhists so profoundly teach us, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

Here I want to share another Edgar Simmons poem which beautifully and profoundly captures the experience of distance:

THE MAGNETIC FIELD

Distance…which by definition
Indicates a separation from self
Is the healing poultice of metaphor,
Is the night-lighting of poetry.
As we allot to elements their weights
So to metaphor we need assign the
Weight of the ghost of distance.
Stars are stars to us
Because of distance: it is in the
Nothingness which clings us them
That we glory, tremble, and bow.
O what weight and glory lie abalance
In the stretch of vacant fields:
Metaphor: the hymn and hum of separation.

Political Wisdom From Ancient China Gives Us Political Instruction Today

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

A truly good man does nothing,
Yet nothing is left undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done

When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.
Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of the Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.

Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
 and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower,
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.

Tao te Ching–(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)

W. R. Rodgers and Rumi On Language

Language is my forte.  To a fault, in some sense, “too much of a good thing” at times.  But I’ve learned that words can be hollow, merely formulaic to manipulate people into mirroring my performance-art of an inauthentic life.  The W. R. Rodgers poem excerpt I shared yesterday so elegantly described how language can decay and even die, becoming what is called a “dead language.”  And Rodgers singled out politicians in the cited poem, accusing them of falsifying language to accomplish selfish ends: 

Words are “now they are the life-like skins and screens 

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae, 

To terrify or tame, cynical shows 

Meant only to deter or draw men on, 

The tricks and tags of every demagogue, 

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys, 

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells 

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep 

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.” 

(PLEASE NOTE, AM HAVING TROUBLE WITH EDITOR; COULD NOT ITALICIZE ABOVE QUOTE)

This morning I discovered relevant wisdom from the 13^th century Persian mystic Rumi who emphasized the importance of living a dual life, abiding in and respecting the “false” world that Rodgers had in mind and another where authentic moments are available here and there.  He described this “in-between” residence as a “small market between towns.”  He presents a solitude that one will find there, which the mystics and many artists are very familiar 

A small market between towns 

There’s a town where the soul is fed, where love hears truth and thrives, and another town that produces lies that degrade and starve love. Your voice is a small market set up between the two towns. Goods arrive from both directions, flimsy, fake items and honestly made, wholehearted tools and wares. Some travelers immediately know which is which. Some voices open a shop and spend sixty years cheating customers, gossiping when they leave, and flattering women to get their attention. Others weary of the marketplace altogether and rarely go there. 

Rumi 
Version by Coleman Barks, in “The Soul of Rumi” 
HarperCollins, 2001 

“Well Worn Words and Ready Phrases….

…Build Comfortable Walls Against the Wilderness.” This quip from poet Conrad Aiken has captivated me for decades now as his work and that of other poets continue to erode my “comfortable walls.”

I was born into poetry but the hyper-conservative, linear-thinking community in which I found myself disallowed any consideration of a nuanced way of perceiving and organizing my world.  That is not to assign blame; if I had to assign blame, I would have to blame myself for lamely imbibing into the depths of my heart the world view and experience that was proffered me; I did not even try to find my own voice. I desperately felt the need to fit in, to belong, which is a very human “need.” But my desperation to obtain this belonging-ness probably created a sense of dis-ease with many of my classmates.  Decades later I would learn the label for this existential malaise was “alienation.” 

But in the mid-eighties, the breath of life breached my endungeoned heart when a friend gave me a copy of W. H. Auden poetry and I fell upon a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  I have quoted Kafka on the resulting experience often before, citing his note that literature is like a pick-axe that “fractures the frozen sea within.”  And that “fracturing” of my soul was painful, and continues to be…and will always be…as the “einfall” of Carl Jung will often be. (Jung employed the German term for an irruption into a person’s psyche of what had been excluded.)

Language is not static…though static hearts can attempt to “static” it, or “staticize” it, and often succeed at least temporarily.  But poetry, or some visit from the arts, will often breach the walls of the stale prison of thinking inside a bubble, even if the bubble is inside one’s own head!  But when the bubble takes place in a group, the value of language itself is threatened as words will be used merely for perpetuating group think and the language itself will die spiritually. Here is a poem by an Irish poet, W. R. Rodgers that addresses this issue and poignantly notes the “death” that hides in a sterile language. 

WORDS (an excerpt) 

By W. R. Rodgers 

Once words were unthinking things, signaling 

Artlessly the heart’s secret screech or roar, 

Its foremost ardour or its farthest wish, 

Its actual ache or naked rancour. 

And once they were the gangways for anger, 

Overriding the minds qualms and quagmires. 

Wires that through weary miles of slow surmise 

Carried the feverish message of fact 

In their effortless core.  Once they were these, 

But now they are the life-like skins and screens 

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae, 

To terrify or tame, cynical shows 

Meant only to deter or draw men on, 

The tricks and tags of every demagogue, 

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys, 

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells 

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep 

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.