INSATIABLE HUNGER

 Eleanor Wilner—MAGNIFICAT

When he had suckled there, he began

to grow: first, he was an infant in her arms,

but soon, drinking and drinking at the sweet

milk she could not keep from filling her,

from pouring into his ravenous mouth,

and filling again, miraculous pitcher, mercy

feeding its own extinction....soon he was

huge, towering above her, the landscape,

his shadow stealing the color from the fields,

even the flower going gray. And they came

like ants, one behind the next, to worship

him—huge as he was, and hungry; it was

his hunger they admired most of all.

So they brought him slaughtered beasts:

goats, oxen, bulls, and finally, their own

kin whose hunger was a kind of shame

to them, a shrinkage, even as his was

beautiful to them, magnified, magnificent.

The day came when they had nothing left

to offer him, having denuded themselves

of all in order to enlarge him, in whose

shadow they dreamed of light: and that

is when the thought began to move, small

at first, a whisper, then a buzz, and finally,

it broke out into words, so loud they thought

it must be prophecy: they would kill him,

and all they had lost in his name would return,

renewed and fresh with the dew of morning.

Hope fed their rage, sharpened their weapons.

And who is she, hooded figure, mourner now

at the fate of what she fed? And the slow rain,

which never ends, who is the father of that?

And who are we who speak, as if the world

were our diorama—its little figures moved

by hidden gears, precious in miniature, tin soldiers,

spears the size of pins, perfect replicas, history

under glass, dusty, old fashioned, a curiosity

that no one any longer wants to see,

excited as they are by the new giant, who feeds

on air, grows daily on radio waves, in cyberspace,

who sows darkness like a desert storm,

who blows like a wind through the Boardrooms,

who touches the hills, and they smoke.

This poem does everything a good poem should do, it seems to me. It invites the reader to think, to consider a different point of view, to tell a story, and, most importantly, to ask the reader to incorporate the poem into his/her own life context. It also asks the reader to take the poem apart and put it back together to see what lies within the words the poet has chosen to use. And to see where the power and energy of the poem lie as well as to ask if the poem is at all meaningful.

I was intrigued by the title of this poem and dimly recollected it had something to do with Mary and a story about her in one of the gospels of the Bible. The story is in Luke 1:46-55 and is about Mary pondering the meaning of her divinely chosen role in the life of Jesus and his legacy in the world.

“His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation.

“He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.”

From the very beginning, then, this is a story about hunger. There are the associated references to hunger from the first stanza on: suckling, drinking, pouring into the mouth, hungry, fed, feeds. The story proceeds from the hunger and its failed satiation to the growth of a huge being compared to the worshipers as “ants,” so small, that are drawn to the giant in awe. The hunger of the ants and their children is deemed shamefully small compared to the hunger of the giant, which they find “beautiful … magnified, magnificent.”

When I first read this poem, I was overtaken by the idea that it was a cynical poem, maybe a warning. I read it as if someone, like Donald Trump, were the evil giant with an insatiable narcissistic hunger. I read it as if it were echoing the work of Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism and pointing out how a cult is formed around someone who has grown into a symbol of power but who then is, in the course of events, sacrificed for another growing giant in the way history portrays the rise and fall of dictators. And the poet wonders what the giant's mother thinks of what she has done and how pervasive the evil giant has become. So powerful has the influence become for so many of us of someone like Trump that it is the matrix within which we measure so many aspects of our lives. )This poem was written in 2004 and so Poet Wilner couldn't have had Trump in mind). Instead, this speaks to the power of idolatry and its manifestations, always feeding, with the giant's insatiable hunger and the peoples' hunger to make the idol magnificent.

I did what the poet wanted me to do and that was to contextualize her poem in terms of my own life as a way of making the poem live on in time. But I was initially disappointed that I couldn't find any feeling of uplift in the poem as I had originally read it. I don't believe every poem needs to serve my need for inspiration and many poems of great effect are not intended to inspire, but maybe to expose darkness or give a warning. However, I do look for what Jane Hirshfield calls the opening of a window in the poem, a turning point at which more light is let into the darkest places of it. And so I asked myself: who, besides an evil person, a dictator, could be this giant? Could it be Jesus? Could the same human behaviors that create an evil giant also create a Jesus? And how might the two giants differ in the stories we write and tell about them?

And so I returned to the biblical story and started the poem over from the beginning, imagining that now the baby at Mary's breast was truly Jesus. And would this reading make sense throughout the poem? Now, there was still hunger and the growth of a baby into a giant worshiped by the faithful who offer “slaughtered beasts” and admit that they, too, have a shameful amount of hunger in comparison to that of the giant. But when the day came and they hadn't received in their own version of hunger all that they believed they should have been given, they plotted to kill him and the hope of doing so fed them in a way leading to violence. The crowd, the herd, too, had an insatiable hunger to be fed the power of the giant, only to destroy the source of their own sustenance.

And the poet then wonders how our temporal lives could compare to the energy and power of the giant, who by the third stanza has begun to feed on substances and spaces, even the “darkness like a desert storm,” and into places one wouldn't think were available for it to invade, like Boardrooms, and touching hills and setting fires. If one reads the giant as Jesus, then this is a way to portray the great power of his life to permeate all human and natural forms and to flow and sow onward in time. Sowing “darkness” is an echo of the giant's “shadow stealing the color from the fields, even the flower going gray” and, in the second stanza, the dissatisfaction of the herd when they realize that the light they expected from the giant's shadow has been a dream. What follows is the plot to kill.

Perhaps it is not totally inappropriate to read the giant as a dictator (let's say Trump) or as Jesus because that illuminates how hunger can mean greed (Trump, a dictator) or redemption (Jesus), depending on the perspective one chooses. It is not hard to see the hunger of the dictator and the behavior of the crowd, but it is harder to see the hunger of Jesus to redeem human folly. Yet, in both cases, the giant is a human being, with Jesus hungering to redeem humans in their temporal lives. It points up how humans have a tendency to form cults around certain individuals and then to find replacements for the idols that no longer serve their blinkered purposes. The power of Jesus is to fly from his attachment to this “diorama” of ours to a form unlimited in scope, a movement missed by humans in their desire to have yet another idol to worship. But once freed from the human realm, perhaps Poet Wilner wants us to consider the resurrection of Jesus into eternity as a way to redeem the worst human temptations and follies.

It seems to me that any reading of this poem can't overlook the implied (or stated) danger that the giant represents. In the case of the evil giant, it is the danger of being oppressed and subject to the insatiable appetites of a demagogue. In the case of the good giant, let's call him Jesus, the danger is how our lives will be transformed by his appetite for our redemption, also insatiable to the extent that humankind will always be subject to its whims, failures, follies, selfishness, insincerity, etc. Jesus knows that it will take a giant's appetite for transformation to bring humans anywhere near the peace of redemption. Were we within the whirlwind of such energy during Jesus's life, would we have embraced the challenge of the dangerous moment or would we have fled? Do we now embrace the danger implied by the evil giant's behavior?

Wilner seems to invite all possible alternative interpretations of her poem, perhaps as a way to profile the various masks of the human psyche: our tendency to manufacture idols, our tendency to act as a herd in following our idols, to want our idols to serve human purposes and then kill them if they do not, to see that giants can be motivated to do evil or good, that there is a difference in scale and scope between a Jesus (or a dictator) and humans because of what we make of them, that it is difficult for humans to differentiate between a good or evil giant, and that we forget the humans at the beginning of every story about an evil or good giant (the mother, a “hooded figure, mourner now,” “and the slow rain, which never ends, who is the father of that?”). In this case of the magnificat, the mother weeps and the father is known only by the “slow rain that never ends” but whose human origins are absent, apparently. Is this father God, the father of his son, Jesus? It isn't clear from the poem. But whatever the origins of the giants, themselves, there is a figurative and actual release at the end of the poem that might be read as redemption or uplift or freedom from human tethers with power and energy to “touch the hills, and they smoke.” There is a reason Poet Wilner has italicized this last phrase of the poem. Perhaps it is to return to the title, Magnificat, and to the gospel verses in which both fear and hunger characterize the God of all things. And, perhaps, it is to emphasize the ongoing zeal and hunger of the giant Jesus to redeem humankind.

Have I over read this poem? To me, the power of a poem like this with its ambiguities and possibilities and complicated references makes it a poem to welcome and to get to know in all its dimensions. It is a poem that will continue to work on me as I dig even deeper into it. Wilner has offered the opportunity to consider how to think about her poem without telling us what to think. She wants us to read deeply enough to make us think and to form our own interpretations. A good poem, this. 

 

11-9-22,
SOREN KIERKEGAARD AND THE SOLITARY PATH

I have delayed for a long time tackling this piece about Soren Kierkegaard (SK) (1813-1855) and his little known work, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession. SK is a soaring presence in the world of theological philosophy and I have found him a formidable subject in my life as well as a subject for a short blog piece. This is why.

The story of how SK came into my life began decades ago when I was about 15 years old and a counselor at a summer camp in upstate Illinois, Pleasant Valley Farm, a branch of what was then named the Chicago City Missionary Society. I had gone to work there through a reference from one of my most loved teachers, Barb Williams, and her affiliation with it as a graduate of a theological seminary (McCormick Theological Seminary) in Chicago. I was way too young to embark on such a journey but as I look back now it was just an extension of a journey carved out before that and one that has continued all my life (including my experience in the Zen Buddhist chaplaincy program at Upaya). At that time in 1961 I was sick with some sort of respiratory illness and recuperating in the infirmary at the camp. I had borrowed SK's work from the camp library and read it while sick, not understanding much of the philosophical twists and turns but sure in my heart that this was a work that could impact my life. I held it as if it contained secrets about the spiritual life, this life being the one that I aspired to. I had no idea at the time just how complex that life could become as I aged and added all sorts of appendages to my life, like schooling and marriage and family and career. But I realized that the book could impact my life and so I stole it.

Now, at my age, I finally took that pilfered book (it seemed to belong to me in a strange alliance with the author) off the shelf and reread it with all the decades heaped up before it. At this stage of life I have begun to think of ways to simplify my life and that includes all aspects from the physical to the mental to the spiritual. But I found out that coming to a spiritual simplicity by way of SK and his powerful mind is a complex endeavor. Rather than offering our contemporary self-help bullet lists of things to do to unclutter a life, he made that process more difficult and even indicated that the “simplicity” he referred to involved some difficult and personally provocative work, a confrontation or goad on his part to the reader. I think it was this tone of the work that held me at bay for so long. I wanted to know the secrets of the spiritual life but I didn't want to do the hard work that would make that happen. SK was insistent in his intention to prepare me for my own confession. Here I am, then, confessing at the outset that I stole his book from a small library at a Christian summer camp.

There are many aspects of this work that apply to my life all along the way and he is one of many wisdom teachers who have opened their work to me. But he stands out as one who has lurked all these years in the background of my spiritual life, hectoring me silently just as others have done: William Blake, Saint Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer among them. I see their works on the library shelf and know that they contain the teachings my soul could use, but some form of laziness or aversion to confrontation has kept me away from them.

From the beginning SK insists that to achieve the purity of heart he means is for the individual to distinguish oneself (he lived in a time when all humankind was “he/him”) from the herd and it was only in this way that one could attain knowledge of “the Good,” which I interpret him to mean God. For him, the herd, the collective, the mass was a spiritually false and superficial comfort zone. It was the individual that had a private and deep connection to God. It is this connection that is eternal and a vocation given at birth, a cognitive and spiritual DNA of sorts that is a set of building blocks continually rearranged throughout life as identity is shaped over time.

“With the double-minded one, it is thus clear that time and eternity cannot rule in the same man. He cannot, he will not, understand the Good's slowness; that out of mercy, the Good is slow, that out of love for free persons, it will not use force; that in its wisdom toward the frail ones, it shrinks from any deception. He cannot, he will not, humbly understand that the Good can get on without him. He is double-minded, he that with his enthusiasm could apparently become an apostle, but can quite readily become a Judas, who treacherously wishes to hasten the victory of the Good.”

“But this I do believe...that at each man's birth there comes into being an eternal vocation for him, expressly for him. To be true to himself in relation to this eternal vocation is the highest thing a man can practice....”

Willing one thing for the individual is contrasted with the “double-mindedness” of the herd which is defined by compromise, leverage, coercion, temporality, and the immediate circumstances. It is a contrast between temporality and eternity. SK points out that even though the journey to the Good is by way of the heart and soul and spiritually sheltered, it by no means involves escaping the details of the mundane life. For him, to will one thing is to continually suffer all things. In fact, the journey to purity of heart is by way of all things that we suffer in our lives. I love this about SK. His philosophy is not some ethereal and disconnected approach to escapism. It is securely set within the confines of our messy, conflicted, compromised, and broken lives. He tells the reader that the road is difficult and involves what he calls “confession” which I interpret to mean an acknowledgment of the mess of our temporal lives. But confession also implies atonement, making amends, finding emancipation within the suffering, and defining the path to simplicity, purity of heart, a life in God that eliminates all comparisons with all things temporal folded into one. It is this emphasis on the unitive state that makes SK a mystical figure for me. But, as with most of the mystics I am familiar with, the unitive state is achieved only by one's engagement with and participation in the grittiness of life's vicissitudes, by making choices to separate from the herd and to start the long walk up the mountain from the lowlands of temporal life to the peaks of atonement.

“The outward impossibility of ridding oneself of suffering does not hinder the inward possibility of being able really to emancipate oneself within suffering—of one's own free will accepting suffering....”

Atonement is a vocation and another choice that can lead to amends. And it is making amends in my life that has meant repayment in the way of service to others. When I think of confession, I think of how it is misconstrued to mean absolution, a washing away of sins or conflictions or mistakes. But confession is the beginning of a process that leads to atonement (reparation, restitution, repayment) and perhaps the harder part of finding ways to atone in the temporal world. It leads to action that presumably is support for the purity of heart that SK writes about. It is a path of simplicity in the way that devotion to God eliminates all the tangles of a complex temporal life. The path from confession to atoning action is a path requiring hard work, attention, and intentions based on choices made. The act of repairing, of harmonizing, is itself more than confession. Making amends is to have found the Good and to have actualized one's ability to love in a way that only devotion to God makes possible. It is at the heart of the mystical experience and the mystical way of life.

SK doesn't dwell much on the word “love” in this treatise but implies that this is, in the end, what merging with the Good is all about: the simplicity, the eternal, suffering all but willing only the one thing that makes for purity of heart. The route to this existential state is characterized by patience, perseverance, pausing, and prayer. SK says that one's temporal suffering is a marker, a reminder, that one is on the right path. He makes no promises of reaching the summit of the mountain around which the path winds. In fact, there may not be a single peak but multiple ones in a range of them attained one at a time with the work of a lifetime of trekking. But SK also does not withhold summiting as a part of the journey, even though there may be many summits along the way. It seems to be a process of willing and confession and atonement, perhaps on a daily basis. But he writes that he can't imagine any other way of practicing humility, keeping sorrow and remorse only with God. Broadcasting one's humility is definitely not humility. One's personal abasement and forgiveness is singular, private, and beyond comparison, as there are no comparisons in the unitive state, in eternity. We are on this path as one of continual transformation. When we suffer and lose sight of the path, that alone is the reminder that the path is only temporarily obscured and we are brought back to it by purity of heart.

“But what does it profit a man if he goes further and further and it must be said of him: he never stops going further; when it must be said of him: there was nothing that made him pause? For pausing is not a sluggish repose. Pausing is also movement. It is the inward movement of the heart. To pause is to deepen oneself in inwardness. But going further is to go straight in the direction of superficiality. By that way one does not come to will only one thing.”

Perhaps all these circumlocutions have muddied more than clarified SK's work. He is relentless about his views and hard-nosed about his beliefs but I see them as offerings to my own spiritual life in this temporal life, difficult as they may be to swallow or follow. Thinkers like SK also have worked on their own conflictions and compromises with this temporal life and so that makes their works that much more important for me. SK's ideas about how to think about the spiritual life makes real and practical the trek that can be arduous but fulfilling. How to think about something gives context to the details alive and active in one's life and can consolidate intent and action. I suppose it is SK's uncompromising views that have held me back for so long. As I have matured in my life, I have discovered that hard work is attached to everything meaningful for me. It is attached to education, financial security, defining identity, interpersonal relationships, building a family, facing mortality, and of course love. This last attachment is the hardest and I am still not very far along in understanding how complex it is, but I at least know that it is complicated and personal and integral to my path (not part of the herd mentality so prevalent in our temporal lives today) of what SK says is “purity of heart.”

This piece has several intentions behind it, not the least of which is to confess to the theft of the book long ago, to describe its insistent presence in my life, and to somehow make amends in the way of keeping SK's valuable thoughts in play in a world fraught and compromised and defined in many ways by herd instincts. To “will one thing” is for one individual to aspire to “purity of heart.” Do I will one thing? Do you?

So, at long last, I have come to some terms with SK and his book, averting from his bookshelf gaze no more. But I know that is not the end of his influence or the possibility of a future return to this treatise. That is the mark of an important educational experience that is a contribution to a lifelong journey, a journey to simplicity and purity.

 11-6-22   THE USES OF SUFFERING

Zbigniew Herbert—MR. COGITO MEDITATES ON SUFFERING

All attempts to remove

the so-called cup of bitterness--

by reflection

frenzied actions on behalf of homeless cats

deep breathing

religion--failed

one must consent

gently bend the head

not wring the hands

make use of the suffering gently moderately

like an artificial limb

without false shame

but also without unnecessary pride

do not brandish the stump

over the heads of others

don't knock with the white cane

against the windows of the well-fed

drink the essence of bitter herbs

but not to the dregs

leave carefully

a few sips for the future

accept

but simultaneously

isolate within yourself

and if it is possible

create from the matter of suffering

a thing or person

play

with it

of course

play

entertain it

very cautiously

like a sick child

forcing at last

with silly tricks

a faint

smile

Suffering is one of the most stubborn existential states. It lodges somewhere in consciousness and tangles all the parts of the wholeness axis: body/mind/spirit. It challenges over time and takes on multiple masks and personae. It speaks loudly and recruits the ego. It is the subject of psychologists, theologians, and poets alike.

In this poem, Herbert moves us through many of the dimensions of suffering, many of its colors and transitions. He offers one way to view suffering and in doing so plots out how one might use suffering to good and bad effects in lives such as ours with all their accelerations and bypassing, all their anticipations and losses. I am in mind of The Buddha's Four Noble Truths: Suffering is part of life for all of us. There are known causes of suffering. There is the possibility of the mitigation of suffering. The mitigation of suffering is couched in the Eightfold Path. I don't believe The Buddha is offering a methodology for the elimination of suffering because of how stubborn suffering is and how prevalent and persistent and insistent it is in our daily lives. He is pointing in a direction to a path that helps us deal with the ongoing stream of suffering that is the human lot. To interpret his message as an “end” to suffering is to mistake it. That misinterpretation gives false hope about some future finality when our experience is that suffering will return to us in a different guise, even though we thought we had it licked once and for all by taking the steps along the Eightfold Path. The Path has only eight steps in it but I think that is to suggest eight ways out of thousands, perhaps, to work with suffering. Herbert offers his own formulation or at least some different ideas about how to work with one's suffering.

Mr. Cogito is a character of Herbert's that begins his meditation in his head, cogito coming from the Latin for “I think” and from the root word that connotes careful consideration or meditation. “Cogito, ergo sum” is the famous phrase from Descarte's philosophical works, indicating that our being is entirely dependent on our cognitive abilities. It is striking to me to see what Herbert's verbs do in this poem and how Mr. Cogito moves from a view located inside his cognitive consciousness to then include his body and his spirit:

remove (avert, eliminate)

consent

bend

wring

make use

brandish

knock

drink

leave

accept

isolate

create

play

entertain

forcing.

There is a definite flow of how Mr. Cogito thinks about suffering, moving from an effort to manage the suffering by thinking and willing, to a more gentle and physical (even embodied) approach, to an acceptance of suffering's reality, and a turn inward to create a more lighthearted and generous gift to oneself and, perhaps, to others.

The first stanza details how Mr. Cogito works inside his head to program the elimination of suffering, reflecting what many of today's self-help guides proclaim. The simplicity of meditation and yoga postures are favorite methodologies to combat anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, and depression, among many physical and psychological maladies. But this is thinking one's way into what is hoped will be a cure or at least a fix. We are stuck in thinking that certain methodologies, like meditation, are “tools” but the point of meditation is to have no goal or acquisition in mind. But all of them failed Mr. Cogito. Perhaps he discovered that such efforts are ultimately exhausting and unsuccessful, as many guides ultimately frustrate and disappoint us. So often we are impatient with process and discipline and seek quick fixes or short circuits to our efforts.

The second stanza opens us to a more gracious approach beginning with the intention to “consent” and then to begin to relax our physical selves as a way to open to the reality of suffering. In my initial reading of this stanza I puzzled over the use of suffering as an “artificial limb,” picturing an amputee victim of war's trauma experiencing anything akin to gentleness or moderation. It seemed to me that having been mutilated in this way would be a constant prod and reminder of the trauma and a source of continuing pain and bitterness, a source of shame (“false” because that implies one's own participation in a mutilating act, when in fact the act was a consequence of war's uncontrollable hellish intent). And I can imagine that having been mutilated in such a way might also be a badge of heroism (“unnecessary pride”), thus bypassing in a different way the reality of the suffering.

In the third stanza he tells us what to do with the stump of suffering and it is not to advertise one's disability to the world, especially to those whose experiences of suffering are not like ours. He suggests that we do this to victimize others while we ourselves are victimized repeatedly. This, it seems to me, is the path to superficial martyrdom. I speak from my own experience with suffering and can attest to the fact that it is possible to identify with suffering to the extent that its power is inflated by waving the stump in public to elicit pity. This is also to recruit others into one's circle of misery (misery, it is said, loves company). Advertising one's suffering in hopes of recruiting others assumes that what is personal and individual about your suffering is shared by others when, in fact, their suffering differs in the details. This is being stuck in the quicksand of suffering, attenuating one's own emotional responses and one's own hungering soul at the expense of the emotions of others. It is to be identified by the suffering rather than to identify with it. It is to harbor selfishness when selflessness opens the path to freedom. We are always manifesting as more than our suffering and holding our own suffering as just one more aspect of living life amidst the turmoil and chaos and never-ending traumas of daily life.

Mr. Cogito, in the fourth stanza, tells us to willingly drink what is most distasteful about suffering but to save some for the future when more suffering will most certainly be a part of life. If the initial cup of bitterness can be drunk, then saving some few sips means that it is possible to drink of it as a strangely nourishing thing and having some for future suffering. In a way, this is honoring suffering as essential to a whole life in which both joys and sorrows must be acknowledged. It is a prompt not to forget or bypass, not to cling or avert—joys or sorrows.

The fifth stanza begins with acceptance and dives into the resources of the inner life which are expansive and even infinite. Here, one can make the choice to mold from the clay of suffering (clay being the substance from which all of us have been created and which is preserved in our humanness, our “clay feet”) some image or subject or person with whom one can “play.” Play is a feature of being human that exposes the human penchant to seek and participate in communal relationships and in mutual storytelling. It is about openness and motion and the joy of being one among many in music or dance or poetry. Here sharing the joy of play is the antipode to the shallow sharing of our suffering we attempt with others, “brandishing the stump.”

And, finally in the sixth stanza, we go from wanting to play to wanting to share by entertaining in a “cautious” way how suffering can be part of the whole life, once again, and how it can take its place among the subtle joys that include a smile. Smiling is a social construct (how we meet and greet one another) as much as it is a subconscious expression of delight or joy and so in this final stanza it emerges as the most personal and transformed version of suffering.

The transitions in this poem are within the words, the verbs, as well as the images of pain and bitterness Mr. Cogito paints for us. The transitions also include a sure flow from the cognitive to the physical (the stump) to the spiritual (that which is within). It is a transition from the thinking/willing self to embodiment to compassionate action on behalf of self and others. It suggests that we cannot know the suffering of others (assumed to exist because we are human) until we know our own suffering. This is the essence of peacemaking in a world fraught with pain, suffering, hate, and violence.

The poem is very powerful and perhaps describes a different multi-step path to the mitigation of suffering, all the while making no attempt to hide that suffering persists and might arise in anyone's life. It also points to the possibility that our suffering can be the clay from which we fashion something more cautious and subtle and beautiful—maybe a smile. Maybe just a smile, but enough beauty and peace to make suffering more tolerable. And if we are able to tolerate the drink of bitter herbs but save some of the dregs, then we are practicing the transformation of suffering, a lifelong process of becoming and growing and being whole, actualizing a reality that also contains joy.

 10-30-22  ENTANGLEMENT

 C. Day-Lewis—WALKING AWAY

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-

A sunny day with leaves just turning,

The touch-lines new-ruled—since I watched you play

Your first game of football, then, like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature's give-and-take—the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show--

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

If the writing of poetry for the poet is to gain clarity or to probe mystery, then the reading of poetry is to do the same things based on the reader's life context and the lenses through which he views life. Of course, I am thinking of my own approach to poetry. I have been away from poetry for quite a long time, longer than I can ever remember not having poetry in my daily life. In this era of my life, I have abandoned poetry even when it continues to come to me. This era of my life has included some unsettling and dismembering of assumptions and a desire for simplicity. It is an era that includes reality testing and dementia. There have been confusion and basic emotions surfacing which have surprised me and forced me to confront the me and the not me.

This poem by Lewis (1904-1972), taken at its face, is about many things, all involving attachment and detachment. It is about a father's feelings watching his son spin out of a cohort to make his way towards something that seems familiar but isn't on a familiar path. It is the father imagining how it must be for the son to be caught in the eddies of youth, like a circular course of water at the edges of a stream. And isn't this a good picture of what it is like to be young and restless? Yet, the father has a feeling of attachment to make the path for the son, to prevent “scorching ordeals” from harming his boy. But the father also knows that such inclinations are not possible, as those same ordeals will continue to shape his son's character regardless of his determination to change everything.

So this poem is also about change and what we are able to influence in the lives of others. This brings to mind a connection to the satellite reference. The connection comes from quantum physics in what is referred to as “entanglement,” the idea that atomic bodies will continue to have interactions with their siblings or parents even after separating from them at some distance, a distance that otherwise would seem too great for such a relationship. I want to think this is true for humans who leave the parental orbit or the orbit of relationship with someone else and wobble off seemingly independent but actually still dependent on attachments to the other. This speaks to the interdependence that Buddhists have taught for centuries but which we now translate from the behavior of physical particles.

So, there are the observations of the father of the son in this poem and in each stanza the father opens up his emotional responses to what he observes. Certainly, the idea of being “wrenched” and “drifting” give the sense that the father is interpreting the boy's actions in an emotional way, a way of disconnection and perhaps confusion. In the second stanza he nails his emotion with the tenderness that “pathos” generates and to see his loved one wander into a “wilderness” that is the substance of youth. In the third stanza, the father sees his boy as unsteady, “eddying,” and subject to the forces of nature that buffet all of us as we get older, the “scorching ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.” And the emotional gnawing of the fourth stanza is impartially resolved (as it always will be in letting go of what one loves) for the father in seeing what might be a grander plan at work, invoking God's love for those of us who are lost but moving ahead.

As I thought more deeply about this poem and having a need to understand why it was so powerful for me, I realized that I was viewing it through the lens of my life right now which is all about dementia. Dementia is a very real world situation that is incredibly complex and confusing and challenges reality as well as what context is operative on any given day. I have read and reread this poem over the course of a few days and it was only when I could hear its connections with my life that I have been able to clarify my own feelings about where I am right now. I give credit to this poem for bringing me back into the gardens, the lights, and the darks of poetry as a way to interpret what is happening in my own life.

So, I read this poem as how I or anyone else might view the dementia of a loved one. The one afflicted with dementia is a lost soul, buffeted about by forces that are oftentimes uninterpretable by the caregivers. They are being wrenched out of a familiar orbit and drifting away, all attachments eventually given up. And, yes, the person is wandering into a wilderness, unprepared for this journey, and stumbling along without direction. I remember someone referring to this wilderness as a different “country” with its own borders and internal functions. But the idea is that the person with dementia is wandering farther and farther from those to whom she has been attached in so many ways, yet maintaining some “entangled” connections. This is what can be observed outside the borders of that new country.

The emotional responses of the caregivers mirror those of the father for the wandering son. The poet says he has had “worse partings” but none quite like watching his son move away from him. The decline of dementia is very often slow, as it is now with one in my life. The untethering is gradual with dips and plateaus. There is the potential for wrenchings and eddyings but, for the most part, the loosening is often subtle. I as a caregiver have wrestled with emotions that have bypassed logic and measure. They well up unbidden and sometimes stay on the surface of things like paste. These are painful times and hard to dislodge in any way. The cry is to find some way to soothe the pain and for everything to be reversed, fixed, cured, and returned to a state of well-being. None of that happens except to note, along with Lewis, that what one knows as God can light the path of one walking away and to show that this is love expressed in letting someone go.

I am no mystic and no religious adept. But I believe, as Lewis does, that God is operative in our world and that his spirit is actualized in how we as humans care for one another. We are the translators of his infinite compassion and love and we prove his love for us by loving more deeply one another. By letting go of attachments; be they casual acquaintances or family members, how we identify ourselves through our work, our ambitions, our desires, our relationships to money or things, or how we reflect the fads and prejudices of the society that surrounds us, we get practice in untethering. It seems to me that this practice also prepares us for the ultimate letting go and that is to monitor our own aging and mortality and eventual death. We who will die but are attached to someone declining faster than us must manifest the love that bonded the attachment in the first place. This is the love that God has cemented in our lives and that will remain, part in the wandering soul and part in the caregiver. Our “selfhood” includes not only how we have become someone in our lives but also who we are in God's protective embrace. Each of us is someone precious, even as we lose parts of the self that have identified us in the past. In essence, we continue to shape selfhood as long as we draw breath—and maybe beyond.

Lewis has offered multiple portals of interpretation in this poem, clarifying the particular and opening it out onto a higher plane. I think the reader will always interpret poetry through personal lenses and that makes poetry the entry point for understanding more deeply what troubles us and what brings us joy in our own lives and the lives of others in our orbit.

 8-9-22--SAINT FRANCIS AND MARTYRDOM

Martyr: One who chooses to suffer death rather than renounce religious principles. One who makes great sacrifices or suffers in order to further a belief, cause, or principle. One who makes a great show of suffering in order to arouse sympathy.

Saint: An extremely virtuous person.

Which of the definitions above fits the life of Saint Francis? Perhaps all three might qualify him as a martyr at different times. He was known early in his life as a gadabout, a troubadour, someone chasing sensual pleasures. He was perfectly capable of making a show of ascetic preferences in order to be someone to garner attention. As he grew older and grew into his skin of dedication he exchanged pleasure and prestige for a way of life characterized by shedding all unnecessary clothing and appurtenances and appendages that stood in the way of his transformational relationship with God. And as he grew even further in his spiritual journey to God, he not only welcomed hardship and pain and sufferings, but he also invited a death that transported him to a realm beyond the one of his trials, not because he was looking for an easy escape from them but because he hungered for God's embrace.

Saint Francis makes a good case for martyrdom. I have read several biographies of him (Nikos Kazantzakis and G. K. Chesterton) and each recounts the few known events in his life in slightly different ways, each essentially a work of fiction. What slim elements of truth there are speak to me in a powerful way. Both books add an element of drama to his character and that adds to the power of his life, his voice, and his message.

There is a reason that individuals in religious traditions (Catholic as well as Quaker) are deemed saints. It is because they have performed “miracles” that spring spontaneously into their lives and upon which they have acted, usually in the service of an impoverished person. It isn't so much that the miracles are part of a life plan but that they are called upon in certain circumstances to act in a saintly way. All of which is to say that they break out of their limited egos and act on behalf of someone else.

The story of Francis resonates with me just now because of the times in which I am living. These are times of turmoil and dissent and even inexplicable violence. The violence is a force seeking a victim and innocents are a boundless mass of potential victims. The subjects of a saint's life are also innocent victims, often of violence or diseases (leprosy, polio, plague) or natural disasters. In these times we see a rise of individualism and partisan tribal divisions as well as impatience and social upheaval. We observe the dark sides of technology with privacy invasions, bullying on social media, manipulation of ideas and truth, propaganda to gain minority privilege. Some of this is not new to humankind. Much of it is tied to the uses and misuses of technology beyond the projects that expand our lives into new fields of inquiry and connections.

When I think about my own situation of existential life with its challenges related to relationships, aging, and identity, it occurs to me that there is a case to be made for martyrdom in daily life. That sounds a bit odd, as martyrdom traditionally has focused on lives from ancient times, lives lived in defiance of social customs and authorities. And martyrdom also contains the inevitable consumption of the martyr's life. In some instances, the consumption came at the hands of soldiers following orders or mobs disenchanted with the martyr's message and devoted following. In most cases, the consumption emerged from fear, fear of influence, fear of disorder, fear of insurrection and loss of power. And it may have been the case that martyrdom followed a life of service to the poor and disenfranchised, whose large numbers were a threat to the authorities, particularly if the saint's actions mobilized and empowered large numbers of people in their disenchantments. Has much changed today?

The life of Saint Francis was different from those of more traditional martyrs. Yes, he did flaunt established order and the assumptions of what it was to be born into a privileged caste. He did give up all his possessions to those who were more in need. He did leave his family and important relationships that turned out to be important in his emotional life. He gave his love to the less fortunate and to the beings and things that populated his world. His heart was open all the time. What made his martyrdom different, I think, is that he invited into his life all the turmoil and sacrifices that most humans would avoid. He wanted to move as close to God as possible and to do that he had to strip his life of convenience and privilege and expose himself to the exigencies of Nature and human nature. He was unsatisfied with the occasional deprivation but placed himself inside the freezing cold and the blinding sun as a way of devoting himself to the power of God. He seemed never to be satisfied with the trials he experienced and his bleeding feet and his insomnia. He called for more from God, unlike Job who suffered the plagues and boils delivered to him, achieving martyrdom of sorts by abiding. Job was eventually rewarded for his suffering with a long life and restitution of wealth and family. Job could not qualify for sainthood because of his religious affiliation and because of the restitution of wealth and privilege.

Francis not only welcomed calamity and misfortune but he invited all of it with a joyful heart, not once that I can remember lamenting his fate. He did at times question God's presence but that only caused him to call upon himself greater catastrophe. I think the point of the story is to illustrate the relationship between a human being and a power of spirit beyond himself, thus showing what a small life we humans have in space/time and in the vast unknown that is God, God in his universality and eternality. We do not celebrate such a micro/macro sense of life today and do not include anything like the power of God and higher authority in our puny human scenarios. We are so smitten with our potential for power and control, for prestige, profit, pleasure and privilege that we cannot look beyond the miracle of our lives and wonder how we are to act with humility and gratitude. Just now we are receiving incredible photographs from the James Webb Telescope of galaxies beyond galaxies some 500 million light years away and beyond. We can be in awe of this technology and crow about our sophistication. It is a technological accomplishment, to be sure, but it is also an opportunity for us to ponder the importance of those activities we now deem critical to human existence (profits on Wall Street, partisan political issues such as abortion and gun rights) and to compare them to the vast and eternal mystery at the edges of the universe brought to us by the space telescope. It seems to me this begs the question about how we might gain a larger perspective of human existence and how we might so alter our behavior so that the space/time we inhabit here on Earth more fully benefits all who have pain and suffer.

Francis was eternally humble and grateful for his relationship with God and taught through voice and actions how accessible such a relationship was for anyone. Is it possible to do good works for others and still harbor pride at doing so? Is it possible that we can give away possessions but save back a few for ourselves? Is it possible to claim martyrdom and not lose one's life because of it? In the long run and the scheme of things, all of us in one sense can claim martyrdom as we approach death. If we acknowledge that our lives are small but let soul conquer ego, then we are able to give up our earthly life for a higher level of existence in a realm we cannot imagine. We can do as Francis did and see life and death as part of a grand cycle that ends in giving over to a mystery that will always remain an unknown. When the time comes for all of us we can welcome death as our ultimate act of dedication to life. Zen Buddhists say that we can practice this willingness every day by focusing on death/life as a continuum. I think Francis was in this frame of mind most of his adult life, the part he devoted to his relationship with God.

The context of the life for Francis was all of life, no exclusions and no excuses. His relationships were with all things and beings—and with God whose presence was as real as any other being. The appropriate view of his life is to see that humans reach beyond themselves, beyond the claims Nature has on them, beyond the circumstances that an earthly life manufactures and delivers, and to invite whatever will enter a whole life. What can be excluded? It isn't necessary to hold onto a concept of God in order to emulate the joy of inclusion that Francis experienced. Such behavior calls upon humans to act in the most virtuous ways and to dedicate effort to all things and beings regardless of religious affiliation or none at all. All of us can strip away the layers of complexities and find the freedom that is our wondrous legacy in being alive. Saint Francis is a model of a life well-lived even in the face of sacrifice and a will to devote one's efforts to the benefit of all things—and to do so with great joy. Can we replace the elusive chase after happiness with the heart/mind core of joy? What does this mean to you?

The most powerful aspect of the message of Saint Francis, and the most impossible to emulate, is that the deepest love a human can manifest is an all-inclusive love for the other based on the inexplicable and altogether mysterious love God has for us. This love blossoms in the face of rejection and traumas of all kinds. It is the love Francis taught when he invited into his life everything and everyone, friend or foe, jilted or beaten for it, blessing those who treated him worst. It is powerful just as it is and to state its terms is to have no boundaries with which to circumscribe it. It is nearly impossible because it challenges humans to a state of not only acceptance but invitation of the best and worst of us. We humans have such a narrowed and individualistic grasp of what we think reality is when, in fact, the most enduring reality is one that includes poverty, charity, and the love of Saint Francis for the world, even if the world turns on us.

Love is a very complex emotion and an even more complex intention. The love of Saint Francis for the world was a radical love in that it was love in its purest form. I have thought that love was not of real substance if it wasn't reciprocated. I now think that it is exactly the opposite. I think that the love of Saint Francis is very simple, having stripped out all qualifications and emotions of reciprocation based on human psychology and human needs. It is radical because it is one-way and not reciprocated. It is an outpouring of generous spirit that emanates from God. It is all-inclusive and all-giving. It is given without the expectation of return. In fact, if one's love is reciprocated then one might think it has been coerced or manipulated in some human way. It is for this reason, I think, that Francis experienced great joy if the love he gave in the face of harm and rejection was not returned, as it was an even deeper expression of God's faith and grace because the love given was simple and pure. I think Francis experienced the spiritual crises he did because he felt, at times, that his love was inadequate and insufficient and smacked of self-absorption and neediness. He realized that no matter how one's intention was to achieve no-self and a merger with God's love, a human would not be able to reproduce such simple and pure love in an earthly setting. Yet, he continued to try and did his best as long as his life on Earth lasted.

I don't for one second think my life is anything like that of Saint Francis. I do not think I will ever emulate his radical love of purity and simplicity. But it is my intention to work hard at what I think it is in its ideal state, knowing that chasing an ideal is often a foolish waste of time. It is a high bar to leap over and I know myself well enough to know that I have too many personal failings and flaws to make the mark. This is just another aspect of the life of Saint Francis that is so powerful for me. But I also know that it is one of my personality traits to take on challenges, even if they are difficult or maybe even impossible. Maybe that is what Saint Francis intended with his life of service to the world.

 

4-22-22, Friday

VIEW FINDER

What I understand about systems thinking are the biologic organic processes underpinning anything having to do with Mother Nature. And it is from those underpinnings that we humans derive our poetry, music, theater, relationships, changing life contexts, thoughts and ideas, emotions, physiological processes, technological advances, novels, sense of history, and even our politics and wars. I was reading a few excerpts from poet Ross Gay's Book of Delights in which he records a “delight” every day of the year from one birthday to the next. And what he often records is process, a spin-off of thinking in terms of systems. He sees one part as confluent with a larger whole, a stream of observations and inspirations. And it is this view that makes his book so compelling and so right for Earth Day today. And so appropriate for deeper explorations.

This leads me into recording my own ideas about processes and systems as they emerge from pondering one of the Buddha's Eight Fold Path. The traditional reference is to the Buddha's “path,” but I find it a bit more organic and illustrative to think of it as a stream where one element merges with the next and all are commingled, just as a stream would be. The first element in that stream is “right view.” And what I think “right” refers to is “appropriate” context. There is nothing fixed or prescriptive about it. (I recall Rilke's “You must change your life,” the last sentence in his poem Archaic Bust of Apollo) It is a fluid concept that is as contemporary as it is ancient wisdom. While we are not meant to invent contexts we are to probe our imaginations in light of the reality of our own lives and experiences. The right view is the one we discern for ourselves and which serves to establish a mindset that we use as a tool for our thoughts and actions. Of course, this is a changing and evolving proposition and something of a moving target, but if we are able to separate out any particular idea or response then we can use the mindset as a grounding space, a base from which to think or act. His “right view” is the first element in the process of exploring how to think but not what to think, which comes later.

Sometimes, when I am talking to someone, I hear myself saying things I have said just that way once or many times before and I wonder why it is that I can't find new language or a new metaphor to use. The sound of scripting reminds me too much of partisan political rhetoric and how unimaginative that is in general. However, when I think back to the most potent lessons of wisdom I have read from wisdom elders over millennia, I see that the best teachers scripted their teachings for disciples and for the unschooled alike. I return to the Buddha's Eight Fold Path and know that this is one of those infinitely revealing and universal scripts. The Path/Stream is an invitation to all of us to explore the root causes of our suffering as a way to mitigate the effects of it. The Buddha never promised that his Way would cure or eliminate suffering, given that suffering is an ongoing condition of being human. Just as we all suffer, so we have the option of changing the conditions of our mental lives that offer some relief from the burdens of suffering.

These conditions were on my mind when I read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. This is a book of far-reaching influences and effects when read in the light of the Buddha's teachings. Frankl experienced a hell in Nazi concentration camps that most of us can't begin to imagine and so categorize it as marginal (perhaps not so distantly now with the tragic and evil acts of the Russians in the war in Ukraine). But hell it remains now in history and in contemporary acts of oppression and torture across the globe. What are we to make of all of this? What is relevant today? How can we begin to think about the events? What mindset is appropriate?

The title of Frankl's book lets us know that it is about finding meaning. It is said that humans are meaning makers and that we construct narratives from the pieces we have at hand as a way to make sense of situations that may or may not reveal themselves in an obvious way. Certainly, we are not living in the hell Frankl did for a few years. How did he survive mentally when he survived physically? He describes the mindset he adopted to survive the incomprehensible conditions of the concentration camps, even though he had no idea that he would, indeed, outlive the treachery, evils, and suffering that permeated every aspect of his life.

Frankl:

“In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people … were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom.”

“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in live.”

In another reference that is contributory here is Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry, written in 1949, just after the great war that had incarcerated Frankl in his hell. What she says about poetry is this:

Rukeyser:

“The search of man is a long process towards this reality [finding meaning], the reality of relationships. One meaning of that search is love; one meaning is progress; one meaning is science; and one is poetry.”

“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”

“In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions.”

And isn't this similar to what Frankl is saying?

Frankl:

“The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. ...man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

“...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”

“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.”

The poem is not one thing, one object. The right view is not a prescribed view, just as there is no single meaning to what life holds for any one of us. All are processes in a state of flux, no matter how static they may seem to us at any given moment. What we witness is open for our interpretations and we get to change them as often as the elements themselves change and stream. I don't know if everything is relative, that there is nothing that is the fixed point for all of this. Might it be love or Spirit or God or even the singularity that is said to have existed before the Big Bang? What I sense is that we can have a defined mindset that allows for all of this change. We can invest in knowing how to think. We can adopt a view, a mindset, that allows us to put random pieces and incomplete phrases into a narrative that makes sense in the given moment. And we can change our minds. We can enlist memories and history, personal experiences, and sensory information and add them to how we see the present world.

I am writing this on Earth Day and nothing speaks to process and systems living more than the natural world. Today is a day that should be celebrated more widely by more people, especially in light of the real possibilities of climate change, most of which we can't anticipate just yet. But we do know some of the associations and still can't manage any collective action to curtail some of the more obvious consequences. That said, our mindset that accommodates change and flux may open up imaginations to explore solutions to problems that contribute to our unhealthy planet. Frankl might say we can choose a new attitude. Rukeyser might say that we will find meaning in poetry, in science [she wrote Willard Gibbs: American Genius, 1942, about a physicist and referred to a work by Darcy Wentworth Thompson, Growth and Form, 1917, about the processes of morphogenesis in nature], and in what amounts to a complicated love. The Buddha many centuries ago suggested a means of discernment in our quest for meaning. As with all great teachers, he has left it up to all ages to make of right view what is appropriate for any given context and for any resultant interdependent relationships. He has offered us a portal on freedom. Are we smart enough and bold enough to walk through the doorway? Or will our view, our mindset, be fixed, rigid, and eventually the source of our prejudices and dogmas and ideologies?

Mindsets have been shown to change meanings. Fixed mindsets lead to the stagnant thoughts and ideas that infiltrate all corners of our lives. Growth mindsets are more experimental and work with uncertain outcomes but lead to more creative ideas and, perhaps, a broader perspective about life and its vicissitudes, its joys and sorrows, and its great diversity of cultures. The growth mindset can alter our acceptance of human failings and the beliefs of those different from us. All of this entails engaging processes and systems thinking. It hinges on a healthy sense of curiosity and a willingness to discover something new in the world and a new way of seeing.