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.