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.

 

W.E.B. DU BOIS AND WHITE NOISE

White noise seems an appropriate metaphor for my own orientation to the problem of white supremacy in our times and to the history of slavery. White noise refers to sound of random signals of different frequencies but of equal intensity. It is often suggested as a sleep aid but neuroscience research points out that it may lead to maladaptive changes in the brain that degrade neurological health and compromise cognition. It is my thought that my experience of Black history and Black life has been obscured by white noise. My own life experiences are set against the background of being white by accident of my birth, by growing up in a white family in a white town in a predominantly white state. I don't recall having any fellow students, people of color, in any of my classes in school all the way through high school. It wasn't until I went to college that I was in classes with Blacks. There was one teacher in high school who was a Black person and I had him for German. Other than that, my life was an environment of enveloping white noise.

The only exception to the above story was an exceptional experience I had two years in high school when I was a counselor at a rural camp in Illinois. It was designed as a working farm and the camp brought children together from different parts of Chicago's inner city for periods of ten days. We had breaks between camp sessions when the male counselors shared a dormitory space. It was then that I met three Black college students from schools in the South. I don't recall ever being discriminated against by them (I was the only white boy in the group) and I don't ever remember feeling prejudiced against them. In fact, I looked up to them as older and more sophisticated because they were ahead of me in school. During one of the camp breaks, I spent ten days at a storefront church in the inner city and lived with several of the neighborhood residents, my guides. They were Black, also. They were very kind to a white kid straight out of a protected environment and I became very fond of them. They showed me around the neighborhood and told me how to act. During that time, I went to a church service at The First Church of Deliverance where there was a congregation of Blacks and a choir of one hundred voices. The ushers were dressed in black suits and black ties and had white gloves as they passed the collection plates. We visitors were not allowed to enter without a tie and coat and, not knowing this and attending in our casual clothes, we had to select one of each from a rack in the hallway in order to be included in the service. I remember to this day the mighty sound of the choir and almost nothing else. Yet, I did not feel out of place because of the color of my skin—only because of my under dressing. These experiences were the only ones I had in a community of people of color but perhaps they were formative for me.

Perhaps I was just too naive to understand the dynamics of race and racial tensions, even though my first year at the camp was punctuated by civil rights demonstrations in Grant Park in Chicago and the Black counselors spent their spare weekends in the city demonstrating. It was the summer of 1962 and very hot. It was even rumored that Jesse Jackson would be coming to the camp for a retreat from his civil rights work but he never came. There was a significant connection between the Black students at camp and the civil rights leaders in Chicago. I was aware of all of this but I think my white noise background crowded out the calls for Black recognition and equal rights. Perhaps I was afraid of getting too close to something I didn't fully understand at that point in my life.

The issue of slavery was an academic subject for me, one that I knew about from my American history classes. It wasn't something vitally alive in my own experience, despite my experiences with Black people. I think my only excuse (and it is an excuse, I see now) was that the only sounds I could hear were those of white noise. Now, at this stage in my life, I am beginning to understand more fully the extent to which slavery and the idea of race has been present in cultures and societies for a very long time. The rise of Trump and the January 6, 2021 invasion of the Capitol by white supremacists has galvanized my own soul and I am embarking on a study of race by reading all that I can. There is a new awakening to this history now, I think, for the same reasons I have been shocked by events. Learning about race is now a pot luck dinner of offerings in books, online series of contributors giving voice to the Black experience. There are personal memoirs and new histories of Black life and surveys of issues of race and racial injustices (carceral histories and assessments, for instance). I have known of the Quaker abolitionists but not much about those Quakers who were slave owners. I knew growing up of my Grandmother's support of Blacks and Black rights and of my dad's love of jazz and the careers of Black entertainers like Louie Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. But it was mostly in an ocean of white noise for me.

I wonder how much of this recollection is a cover for some version of my own prejudice. Maybe I am rationalizing my way out of white noise and white blindness. Perhaps this year of reading is a time for me to answer some of those questions and to notice how my life, too, has been infused with white prejudice against people of color. I allow this as a possibility and an opportunity to be chastened and to learn more.

I didn't know where to start in my year-long study and so chose the most famous work of a Black author I knew and that was W.E.B Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903). I was looking for a road map to follow and turned to him for help. Of course, his work is not comprehensive of the Black experience by any means. But his is an articulate and poetic voice and yet most certainly strongly uncompromising (taking on Booker T. Washington who was considered to be something of an apologist for Black inferiority). He seemed a good choice and a place to start on a journey that takes me to James Baldwin and more contemporary works on Black history and Black life.

A start with Du Bois begins with the distinctions I make among the terms “emancipation,” “liberation,” and “freedom.” The dictionary defines all of them in terms of the others but, for me, there is a distinction that helps me understand each better and to see how each one figures differently in the work of Du Bois. Emancipation refers to the legal act of freeing a group of people from bondage or oppression, as in the Emancipation Proclamation. Liberation is the state of being emancipated, to be set free from confinement or control. Freedom is the experiential condition of being free of constraints with the capacity to exercise choice and free will and having the ease or facility of movement. It also includes the power to engage in certain actions without control or interference. So, it seems possible to be emancipated, liberated, and still not free. That is how I tend to view how racism has found a lasting presence in our society. That is the background picture painted by Du Bois.

His book is a series of essays beginning with the desires or “strivings” of Blacks. (He can be forgiven for his lack of gender sensitivity in his references to “man” and “manhood.”) This chapter lays out the educational and economic realities of Black people in a world dominated by white people. He emphasizes education, voting rights, and freedom in the sense in which it is defined above. Here he refers to the “Negro problem” for America where those “strivings” are denied.

Chapter Two contains the reference to the “color line.” This line demarcates the lives of Black and white folks. It defines the cleft between all advantages given to one group and denied to the other. He documents to short lived efforts after the Civil War to give Blacks opportunities in education.

“...the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.”

The disappointed efforts to extend suffrage to Blacks “ended a Civil War by beginning a race feud.”

Chapter Three on the work of Booker T. Washington “and others” is a studied criticism of what is now called the “assimilationist” approach to Black integration.

“Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission ….”

“...the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.”

“His (Washington's) doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.”

This passage contains the same passionate calls James Baldwin makes almost half a century later in his speeches and writings.

Chapter Four is a personal memoir of Du Bois's experiences as a teacher in rural Tennessee and his return visit ten years later, noting that no real progress had been made in the lives of those he knew.

Chapter Five is a reflection on the diminished role of teachers and preachers in the lives of Black folk.

“In the Black world, the preacher and teacher embodied once the ideals of this people,--the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing....”

“The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a center of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.”

It wasn't until the Civil Rights movement that preachers like Martin Luther King, Jr. would emerge as spiritual and political uplifters of Black people and, even then, he was criticized for not adopting a more activist stance in support of Black people.

Chapter Six paints a broader picture of what is necessary for the education of Black people in attaining the “social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and co-operation.”

Chapter Seven is another personal memoir of his experiences through southern Georgia, documenting oppression and few successes of Black people on the land to which they had been chained by the brutality of slavery and its vestiges.

Throughout his work Du Bois continued to emphasize the high ideals of self-improvement and societal acceptance while documenting the reality of the desperate conditions under which Blacks struggled all their lives. He referred to Darwin's thesis of “survival of the fittest” (a long-standing cudgel used by proslavery adherents) but in a most generous and open-hearted way:

“... in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty.”

He was well aware of the economics and demographics of slavery that kept Blacks enslaved, of how voting rights were always denied, of how police systems were designed to control unruly slaves, all inhumanities that are still a part of contemporary political life.

“Within and without the sombre veil of color vast social forces have been at work—efforts for human betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies and comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting and sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of mingled sorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest.”

Further chapters discuss the role of the Black preacher and Black churches and their roots in Black history from nature worship to voodoo and Christianity. In another chapter of memoir he relates the heartbreaking story of the death of his infant son but turns the tragedy into a story of the baby having been freed, escaping the bonds of slavery:

“Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.”

And then there are several stories about abolitionist intentions and an unrequited love leading to a clutch of losses. The final chapter takes on the topic of Black folk songs, “the sorrow songs.” Here he celebrates the “voice of exile” that emerged from nature, songs that incorporated hope and faith in the “justice of things.” All of the chapters are a quilt of Black experiences, both individually personal and societally significant. Du Bois intended to make the Black enslavement a real experience that could only come alive in a vital way with both the individual and the communal included in the quilt. In a very poignant way, he was able to show that if emancipation and liberation had not become a reality for most Black people, then there were degrees of freedom that brought them hope—through their songs and stories. That, of course, is not enough freedom and should not be the cover for continued racism. Du Bois did not intend to feed into the racist myth that Blacks were happy with their circumstances but only to show that the spirit of human freedom was a real hope and one to which Blacks were entitled as much as whites.

This was an important book for me to read at the beginning for several reasons. I got to sample Du Bois's poetic writing style and his articulations of aspects of slavery and its manifestations from someone who could document his personal experiences as well as the socioeconomic repercussions of Black bondage. I could hear the later voices of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. and how they made references to Du Bois in their writings and speeches. Sadly, racism persists in some of its most primitive forms and in more sophisticated ones, too. Knowing about the history of Black experiences makes it easier to see how slavery and racism still permeate our culture. This is the beginning of understanding and, perhaps, change.

Now, as I look back at the beginning of this piece, I am more aware of how white noise permeates my own outlook. And I wonder if I am still subject to how the noise obliterates my curiosity and knowledge about this most important subject that affects the lives of all Black people, people of color, and whites, too, as they are no less potential prisoners in someone else's jail or gulag or other system of enslavement. In denying freedom to Blacks, we deny our own freedom from oppressions of the body, mind, and spirit as fellow human beings. We do not notice how we are equally bound because we hear only white noise.

I wondered at the beginning of this piece if I suffer from the effects of white noise in relation to racism and I haven't resolved that question. Relating my own experiences and reading Du Bois have made it easy for me to congratulate myself on my own liberated state. It isn't that I think it necessary to suffer some self-flagellation in order to come to terms with what is a pervasive stream in American life. But I am not sure how to understand what elements of racism might lurk in my unconscious and how to know them for what they are. This piece has been the beginning of an exploration of racism but I think white noise also obliterates sensitivity to other social ills and even some inborn tendency for xenophobia, suspecting anyone who doesn't look or think like me. So, hopefully this year of reading will heighten my awareness of all aspects of assigning others to a lesser status than mine and to understand the degree to which I am subject to the trends in society that contribute to white noise. How does one cultivate a true intention to accept others (of a race, political party, gender, sexual preference, economic status) for who and what they are? And how does one separate out a determination to pursue Truth, Beauty, and Goodness from those who disparage or counter such pursuits? Do I have to be “right” in some things and does that erode universal acceptance?

It is useful to continue digging into what I call “white noise.” I have read most of Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. It is comprehensive and tackles a very complicated historical/socioeconomic/political/ethical/moral issue. He traces the mindset of racism through all of American history and doesn't let anyone anywhere along the line off the hook. He fractionates racism a number of ways (“uplift suasion,” “assimilationist,” etc.) and categorizes personalities and historical events into these fractions. I can see how this might be a useful teaching tool, but I still wonder if the categories aren't his own way of expressing a personal racial mindset. There is a great deal of historical context but he often dismisses it in many instances and assigns racist behavior and political maneuvering to intentional desires. But, I wonder if the history of racism hasn't always been (and still is) a matter of acting within the fog of white noise. I question whether those assigned to the category of assimilationist, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, were consciously attempting to pander to white supremacists in order to advance Black fortunes. Or, perhaps, he, too, was wandering in the fog and was advocating on the basis of what he was able to perceive about social evolution in his own times.

I find myself pushing back at Kendi's assertions of rampant and intentional racism and I suppose that puts me in the category of being a racist. But I think back over my own experiences and I don't feel like a racist. I support any efforts that free any individual from the various prisons society imposes on them or racial groups or groups marked by category. I read Du Bois's work with the idea that he was advocating for Black folks in the only way he was able at the time. Later social contexts turned to more militant actions and even violence, but that was not the context of Black advocacy in 1903. I think the same case can be made for women's suffrage or the civil rights of other minority groups.

I am troubled by the idea that, even now, I am wandering in yet another version of white noise and not noticing my own biases correctly or clearly. What should someone do to tease out these biases in order to support human rights? Kendi's next book, How To Be An Antiracist, might help me answer this question but it presumes that the reader is a racist and wants to change things. If James Baldwin was correct and the answer to racism is self-examination of one's biases and an opening to the love of another, then knowing about the role of racism in our collective history is very helpful. I am not sure how individuals who have an intention to work with personal white noise can impact how racism is expressed in society, in a grander and vaster landscape that includes all the factors that affect the lives of all citizens (police racial profiling; economic gaps; partisan political expressions of racism; such as gerrymandering and elimination of voting rights; public health discrimination; discrimination in housing opportunities, etc.).

For now, I will stick by my impressions of Du Bois's work and attempt a closer and deeper look at my own biases when it comes to racial prejudice. My admiration for Du Bois and what he attempted to do for Black folks is still admirable in my eyes. His personal history is complex and his actions often contradictory but that just reinforces my impression that all of us are wandering through the white noise fog. I think the same thing can be said for all those who have addressed the issue of racial prejudice and its manifestations. Racial prejudice in its intentional and oppressive forms must always be condemned but those usually make themselves obvious and are subject to change. It is the subtle lapses in racial references that add to the overall difficulty, impregnated in rigid ways in our social discourse.

My ongoing study of race is still a useful pursuit and I am not put off by my own possible stubborn biases, but use them to carry me on in the study. Both the works of Du Bois and Kendi are very thought provoking sources. I will continue to seek an answer to the question: How do I go about seeing more clearly through the fog of white noise? And what actions are suggested by those insights?

 

AUTONOMIC PATIENCE AND WALTER CANNON

Neuroscience and especially psychophysiology have many reasons to thank Walter Cannon (1871-1945), a renowned physiologist in his day and a popularizer of scientific concepts stemming from his research into the autonomic nervous system that keeps all of us alive. His book, The Wisdom of the Body (1932), paved the way for the ongoing interest in the mechanisms by which the body self-regulates. His initial studies involved the regulation of digestion but later spilled over into other aspects of homeostasis and the processes of which we are not usually aware but which have their own autonomous functions.

The autonomic nervous system has two main components: the sympathetic branch and the parasympathetic branch. Each is a counterpoint to the other in the back and forth that characterizes our normal daily metabolism. The parasympathetic system is composed of four branches: the vagus nerve, the facial, oculomotor, and glossopharyngeal nerves. Cannon recognized early on that there were many layers to the functioning of these two branches, processes of which occurred in response to stimuli external to and within the body. He initially researched the mechanisms of digestion from chewing and swallowing to elimination. And he also determined that psychological states could impact the functioning of the autonomic system as a whole, thus implicating the mind and the body as a holistic system. We now take much of this for granted because of all the work that has been done by those scientists standing on Cannon's shoulders.

What fascinates me is how autonomous the intricate systems are but also how our knowledge of them now allows us to have some conscious effect on how they operate in certain situations. Cannon characterized the sympathetic response as “fight or flight” (“freeze” was added later) and the parasympathetic response as “rest and digest.” Most people don't recognize the connections present day techniques involving the body have with our basic physiology. But how could they not? What we experience as input from our senses is relayed to sites in our bodies, sites that are intimately connected with one another. These connections are the subjects of contemporary research. For instance, the functioning of the parasympathetic branches other than the vagus moderate responses we have to other sentient beings by way of facial expressions (facial nerve), tone of voice (glossopharyngeal nerve), and eye contact (oculomotor nerve). In these times of persistent social isolation, our need for physical contact in some form (actual or virtual) becomes a forceful impetus in the calming and restoring process of emotional stability. When face-to-face contact and communication is absent then we experience an increase in stress leading to frustration and sadness as well as depression.

What we recognize now, too, in relation to the vagus nerve is that the flight/fight/freeze response is an instinctual response to threat or trauma. We are hardwired to respond to danger as a way to avoid death and a way to promote survival. Of course, we are no longer confronted with the dangers faced by our primitive ancestors, but the primitive neural response is physiologically intact as far as can be determined. So, we might not be in any danger from marauding saber toothed tigers, but we do confront traumatic situations nearly every day in one form or another. It is now known that repeated or persistent stressful situations can have deleterious effects on the heart and vascular systems. Blood vessels constrict sympathetically in order to divert blood flow to the organs that will extract us from danger; the muscles, the liver, the lungs, and the heart. Over time, with exposure to stressful environments and situations, we layer on a more permanent and disabling functioning of our bodies. There is even evidence now that this underlying adaptation to stress can be an inherited tendency in our offspring without actually changing the underlying genetic code, work done on Holocaust survivors and their children, for instance, and called epigenetics.

Cannon's research was on the cutting edge of physiology at the time but many of his experiments and insights are still the basis for our understanding of how complicated the mechanisms of our bodies are in their totality. The physiological systems that maintain their own homeostasis within the complex of interrelated systems and of which we are usually unaware are integrated to provide the body with the means of normal functioning. As they go about their work, they support not only the body but also what we call the mind, not a surprise, as all systems are interrelated and interdependent. Normal physical health manifests as normal mental health. The distant effects of the gut microbiome, for instance, are the subject of contemporary research into how physical systems impact brain function in both the waking and sleeping states. Enzyme systems and protein metabolism in the bowel are significant contributors to brain blood flow and this effect has implications for conscious thought, including instinctual emotions. Cannon's research focused on the effects of epinephrine and other obvious chemicals on fight and flight. The fight/flight response occurs, it seems, on an instinctual, hardwired, platform of cascading effects throughout the body when one is challenged with danger or any other fearful circumstance. This effect occurs prior to any conscious recognition of the threat and exists to avoid extermination and to support survival. Survival means that reproduction and persistence of DNA can be preserved in the population. So it is with the survival instinct of most animals.

The countering effects of the sympathetic response (fight/flight) are those of the parasympathetic nervous system. Whereas the gut clamps down during a survival challenge, it opens up to “rest and digest” when the threat passes and the parasympathetic nervous system is predominant. This functioning is also at a subconscious level and trades off with the sympathetic nervous system response. We could not survive if all we had operative was a constantly turned on sympathetic response. We could not tolerate the constricted gut, the constricted heart with its rapid heart beat, blood vessels constricted producing hypertension, the steal of blood flow to the muscles at the expense of the brain. We would be in a constant state of high alert without any way to calm ourselves.

What recent neuroscience has revealed is that there are emotional states and physical states associated with our present lifestyles that exhibit this chronically turned on sympathetic response. Not only soldiers from war zones, but also anyone subjected to chronic stress are now known to have what is described as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). The triggers for this response are often obvious, such as those related to combat in war, or repeated sexual abuse, but many are now believed to result in very subtle versions of PTSD. It is much too early to tell, but it is suspected that the chronic political, economic, and social disruptions manifested over the recent years (poverty, food insecurity, coercive and oppressive political regimes resulting in large scale migrations) have created situations of chronic sympathetic overload. The high alert activity of the nervous system has translated into emotional fragility with a loss of dependable sources of stability, a loss of meaning, and a subsequent loss of hope.

What is true for the functioning of the sympathetic nervous system as a silent engine is also true for the parasympathetic branch. However, unlike with the sympathetic branch, it is possible to consciously engage the parasympathetic system and to use its calming effects to short-circuit the effects of the fight/flight response and return to a more stable emotional state. We are not necessarily at the mercy of the survival instinct because what challenges our survival now as a species is no longer represented by the saber tooth tiger or the marauding lion. We have more complicated threats like climate change, economic collapse, a viral pandemic—all of which are so complex as to be almost incomprehensible and inchoate. Fight and flight don't make sense in the face of these threats but our nervous systems don't make the distinction between the threats we see before us and those that we perceive “out there” somewhere in the surrounding universe. As a result, we are on high alert more often than is good for our physical/mental health.

The interventions we can enlist to bring us back to a state of calm and emotional stability are now known to include various practices that include body movement (tai chi, qigong, yoga, or other forms of exercise) and a focus on the breath which also engages the parasympathetic system and has been used as an entry point to contemplation, meditation, and prayer—all ancient methods of conserving focusing attention (mindfulness), and calming. In these ways we are making way for a mindset that promotes greater expansiveness and openness of perception. This is how we open our hearts and minds to our own miraculous metabolism and that of others. By starting with our own bodies and minds we are able to bring into our awareness the bodies and minds of all other beings and things.

One of the remarkable aspects of this greater openness and acceptance is how this can lead to the virtues we now find so elusive in our culture imprinted with the signs of instinctual survival. We have the ability to trade the primitive fight/flight response for one of intentional care, patience, love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. In this way we can control how we respond emotionally by staying in contact with our bodies, cultivating those practices that assist us in calming and in seeing what life offers less as a threat and more of an opportunity to share. We begin to see that what we share as humans in all cultures and groups is greater than what separates us by ideology or dogma.

We have Walter Cannon to thank for the wisdom of the body he was able to define by research. His experiments provide the background even today for the knowledge and simple techniques that support our best selves in our daily endeavors because we can approach them with greater calm and perspective. We don't have to decipher the scientific data in order to benefit from what Cannon discovered. And we have the ability and the capacity to make the most of the beneficial aspects of a body system devoted to our well-being, just as its counterpart sympathetic system supports us when we need it in different circumstances. We have some control over what the body provides us. It is a useful intention to live life as much on the parasympathetic path rather than on the sympathetic one to promote our individual health as well as to bring us into common cause with all others in all corners of the globe. What is universal about the adaptations of our species could become the universal response we need at this point in our evolution. The universal response would be to support the parasympathetic path for all of us as a path towards patience, peace, and prosperity.