CLIVE JAMES—NATURAL SELECTION

EXPLAINING SUFFERING

Natural Selection

The gradual but inexorable magic

That turned the dinosaurs into the birds

Had no overt, only a hidden, logic.

To start the squadrons climbing from the herds

No wand was ever waved, but afterwards

Those who believed there must have been a wizard

Said the whole show looked too well-planned for hazard.

And so it does, in retrospect. Such clever

Transitions, intricate beyond belief!

The little lobsters, in their mating fever,

Assaulted from the sea, stormed up the cliff,

And swept inland as scorpions. But if

Some weapons freak equipped their tails for murder

He must have thought sheer anguish all in order.

Source of all good and hence of evil, pleasure

And hence of pain, he is, or else they are,

Without a moral sense that we can measure,

And thus without a mind. Better by far

To stand in awe of blind chance than to fear

A conscious mechanism of mutation

Bringing its fine intentions to fruition

Without a qualm about collateral horror.

The peacock and the tapeworm both make sense.

Nobody calls the ugly one an error.

But when a child is born to pain intense

Enough to drive its family all at once

To weep blood, an intelligent designer

Looks like a torture garden's beaming owner.

What struck me about this poem was the poet's ambivalence about what human suffering looks like. I make the distinction between pain and suffering, just as the Zen Buddhists do. They teach that all of us humans will experience pain. They call that the first arrow, one we can't control and one that often surprises us. Then there is a second arrow, one we inflict upon ourselves. It is the second arrow that causes suffering. The challenge humans have is to avoid the second arrow or, at least, make an attempt to remove it. The distinction between pain and suffering has been a good teacher for me over the years but especially in my later years when pains show up more often and second arrows are more difficult to remove. I don't make the distinction between physical and mental pains, believing that they are equally uncomfortable and relate to the entire body in which all systems are connected.

This poem raised many questions for me, ones I have for the poet. In the first stanza, he is entertained by what he calls “magic” and this refers to what cannot be discerned by human observation but which occurs over millennial time spans, what Darwin described in his provocative work on the evolution of species changes. The poet is unsure that such “magic” of change is a result of some “hidden logic” but, altogether, too steady and determined to be attributed to chance. This establishes one point of ambivalence.

In the second stanza, he introduces the idea that the “delicate transitions,” while clever and beautiful in their intricacy, also include what might be seen as malevolent intentions resulting in what we might interpret as murderous effort, all part of the hidden order of change. This stanza relates to what is observed in the natural world as part of the evolution that changes lobsters of the sea into scorpions of the land.

In the third stanza, the poet introduces what might be the force behind all the intricate details of evolutionary change. An ambivalence here is whether or not to refer to this force as a “he” or “they,” not an unusual question for us who are observing the miracles of natural changes. Because the changes include all good as well as evil, he can't assign to the changes any force with a “moral sense.” Now, with it settled for him that good and evil are all part of the picture of evolution, he rejects any planning or intent that he considered at the beginning. Now, he is willing to invest in chance as the moving force behind the changes, for who would consciously design a system that involves pain and suffering? This is another instance of the poet's ambivalence. Good and evil rendered by design or chance? An additional ambivalence in this stanza is to wonder how such a powerful force in nature can't be “measured.” Our lives are shaped by the technology we experience and by the mindset that technology can deliver to us explanations for all phenomena—and solve all problems we encounter. The poet is ambivalent about the possibility that such a force as powerful as evolution might be the result of some unseen and immeasurable force.

What happens in the fourth stanza is to equate what happens in nature to peacocks and tapeworms are the same things we as humans experience as pain. The ambivalence here is that the poet is able to understand the good and evil among nature's creatures but he is unable to explain human suffering. He ends his thoughtful poem with the idea that if the force governing all things can inflict pain and suffering on its creatures then surely it must smugly exult in such power.

But we humans don't have much evidence that the prevailing force actually wishes us pain and suffering. If we conjure up a Prime Mover, then how do we define its powers? Another valuable question is to ask: What do humans believe they deserve from this life? Are we looking for ways to escape the human fates of disease, disability, depression, depravity, addictions, and death even though most of us would admit that those are common conditions of our individual lives. We are to expect such conditions just as a matter of being human and I doubt anyone would argue their occurrence. It is very common for those afflicted to look for some reason, some meaning, to the pains to which we are subjected at one time or another. The poet's example of a child born with pain is especially poignant, in that we understand that conditions will appear as we age, but we can't imagine pains of such magnitude being delivered to a child. This is another ambivalence that equates pain with age but can't include the pains and suffering of children.

In some ways this poem addresses the idea that we can attribute good things and a steady and happy life to a Prime Mover when all is well but we answer the question about what we deserve when we blame that Mover with what we see as unwarranted pains and suffering. The natural selection of organic changes implies that species will evolve over time subject to the vectors and forces operative in the life we and other species share. If a Prime Mover is involved, then it seems reasonable (logical?) that everything a living creature might experience can happen, whether perceived as desirable or abominable. If a Prime Mover is not imagined, then human pains and suffering are borne free of intention and, perhaps, malevolence or indifference.

It is my impression that this poem is asking us readers to consider what ambivalences we entertain when we think of human pain and suffering (do we even imagine such things for other sentient beings?). I can speak for myself when I say that I have had pains and their attendant suffering. It is remarkable to me that often the pains (the first arrow) can be healed, leaving suffering (the second arrow) behind to linger and fester and debilitate. I now trust my physical/mental body to heal according to the mysteries and miracles of all the organ systems contained in my skin bag. I am now more aware of the presence of the second arrows of suffering and I am getting better at avoiding them but, short of avoidance, better at removing them as soon as I know they are there. I am not always successful at this.

Interestingly, thinking in this way about pain and suffering does not challenge me to posit a Prime Mover or, in contrast, to eliminate one from my thoughts. I do believe in one but I don't expect such a force to coddle or rescue me in my life and I trust such a force to encourage me and give me strength to work with the conditions that are essential and inevitable just because I am human and subject to the same conditions that have visited hundreds and hundreds of generations preceding me. The poet seems to accept an “intelligent designer” but places blame and experiences anger and frustration as each of these different arrows pierces his heart. He is willing to view his Mover as conniving, lacking in morals, punitive, petty and capricious, perhaps a plotting and indifferent force (is this payback for our “original sin” in the garden by the Mover?). Perhaps the “selection” of the poem's title refers to what agency humans can exercise in choosing how to manage both first and subsequent arrows. I believe we do have a choice to select what we will do with the second arrow that comes at us as an accompaniment of our pains. This is not to say such effective action is easy. It is to say that we must in some fashion be awake and accountable to our own conditions, to see them as part and parcel of the miracle of our species and not as catastrophes delivered upon us by some unseen and incomprehensible force. We do not need to assign blame anywhere. I believe this perspective allows for bearing witness and for greater compassion for self and other. And, if we have such compassion, who is to say it does not come from the Prime Mover itself? Do we manifest the conditions we perceive in the Mover?

Clive James's ambivalences are good for us as readers. They are good because they cause us to consider how we see the world and how we see our roles as an interdependent species. It might cause us to wonder what unseen and immeasurable Force might be operative in our lives and the lives of all sentient creatures with whom we share a planet. Ultimately, such considerations might make us more aware of how time passes and we are subject to a state, death, in which all pains and suffering cease here in our earthly realm. In some way, we as humans have been naturally “selected” to experience birth and death and everything in between, everything that defines us as one species among thousands, a species with profound capacities and deficiencies, the whole catastrophe of living as we do. 

7-3-24,  A. R. AMMONS--GRAVELLY RUN AND HYMN

A RIFF ON MYSTICISM

GRAVELLY RUN

I don't know somehow it seems sufficient

to see and hear whatever coming and going is,

losing the self to the victory

of stones and trees,

of bending sandpit lakes, crescent

round groves of dwarf pine:

for it is not so much to know the self

as to know it as it is known

by galaxy and cedar cone,

as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it:

the swamp's slow water comes

down Gravelly Run fanning the long

stone-held algal

hair and narrowing roils between

the shoulders of the highway bridge:

holly grows on the banks in the woods there,

and the cedars' gothic-clustered

spires could make

green religion in winter bones:

so I look and reflect, but the air's glass

jail seals each thing in its entity:

no use to make any philosophies here:

I see no

god in the holly, hear no song from

the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter

yellow of trees: surrendered self among

unwelcoming forms: stranger,

hoist your burdens, get on down the road.

HYMN

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go out

over the sea marshes and the brant in bays

and over the hills of tall hickory

and over the crater lakes and canyons

and on up through the spheres of diminishing air

past the blackset noctilucent clouds

where one wants to stop and look

way past all the light diffusions and bombardments

up farther than the loss of sight

into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes

trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest

coelenterates

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions

and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum

has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut

and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

and if I find you I must go out deep into your

far resolutions

and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

I am never sure when I am ready to tackle a poem, as it is never clear to me when I have collected my thoughts about what the poet has presented. That is the case with both of these poems by A. R. Ammons. I get a certain feeling about the poems from the beginning but then further considerations make me want to know more about what might be said in them. I am tempted to know more about the poet and how he might have created some slice of autobiography in the poems. But there is something to be said for letting the poems engage the imagination just as they appear.

To engage my imagination is to see where the poems reflect back at me something I have experienced in my own life. I suppose this is an act of affirmation, something that seems to be very human but also something that allows even the most esoteric or opaque work of art an opportunity to breathe as we breathe. I think this is true for all works of art that attract my attention, be they poems or paintings, art installations, dance, or music.

Both of these poems are grounded. By that I mean that both contain references to nature and to a more specific biological state of living things. Ammons seems ensconced in nature and that might reflect his own background as one who majored in biology in his formal education. But it is not necessary to know that. What is important for me to notice is that he observes nature in its macro- as well as its micro- manifestations. His interactions with natural phenomena in “Gravelly Run” and “Hymn” make them the object with him as the observer. I think of this stance as having one foot in the realm of nature/worldly life and the other foot placed in whatever stands against that as a place where spiritual ideas and feelings are present and alive and may even be the destination for a journey through nature's abundance.

I think Ammons wants us to see that observations of nature's beauty and mystery are more than an escape from worldly experiences but are a source with which one in a world of calamity and noise can merge as a participant or even a receptacle of whatever might be considered divine grace. He says in “Hymn”: “You are everywhere partial and entire/ Your are on the inside of everything and on the outside.” “You” in this poem is God to my way of thinking. He reaches this point of insight having observed lakes and clouds and even single-celled organisms (coelenterates—jellyfish and corals). But this is more than just describing them. It is about finding their existence as portals to the realm in which mystery and human destiny cast shadows. The poet finds these connections, not despite the natural phenomena set apart from spiritual matters, but because of them. And it is the mystery and beauty of them that stir something in his soul. Still, he returns to his worldly state among the phenomena:

“no use to make any philosophies here:

I see no

god in the holly, hear no song from

the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter

yellow of trees: surrendered self among

unwelcoming forms: stranger,

hoist your burdens, get on down the road.” [“Gravelly Run”]

No, what he observes are only evidence of things not seen, those things being what interpenetrates the life we lead (yes, he calls himself a “stranger”, a stranger to what can be experienced only from quickenings of the heart), the burdens we bear, the emotions and feelings that emerge within us on a daily basis, based on what the world offers in distractions and desires. Time and temporal existence are part of our existence but timelessness is also an imagined state of knowing. He puts it this way in “Gravelly Run”:

“for it is not so much to know the self

as to know it as it is known

by galaxy and cedar cone,

as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it:”

This is not a solipsistic poem. It is not really about the observer but only as the observer is another of the phenomena of nature. And the reality of being human sets one apart from whatever one can imagine as the Creator, the spirit that interpenetrates all things and beings. In “Hymn,” he uses the phrase “I know if I find you I will have to ...”, using it three times as follows:

“I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go out

over the sea marshes and the brant in bays”

“And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes”

“and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves”

The journey the poet is describing is a progression from what might be a desire to escape the earthly beauty to a final stanza realization that he “must” remain on earth, perhaps to continue what amounts to worship of the mystery and beauty ingrained in natural phenomena (and, as in “Gravelly Run,” to “hoist your burdens, get on down the road”). It is these phenomena that are the only visible evidence of what lies behind the veil of the spiritual life. But the poet seems comfortable with this arrangement: “and praying for a nerve cell/ with all the soul of my chemical reactions/ and going right on down where the eye sees only traces” [“Hymn”].

In her own way, Mary Oliver, another poet exploring heaven and earth, once said about how to approach one's life:

“Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.”

That is the poet's charge, one poet to another and one person's formula for engagement with earthly life. I expand this admonition to include all beings and things that we might encounter in our own personal journeys through life. It is no mystery in these days that there are forms and forces in earthly life that present great challenges at a time when many of us feel unprepared to manage the waves of change and the threats we might perceive from those changes. I do not think poetry, or any art form, can offer an escape from what arrives at our doorsteps on a daily basis. But I do believe in what the Zen Buddhists propose and that is to use art forms as a way to confront and live through what seems most threatening and fearful. It is no challenge to enjoy the joys, beauty, and the moments of happiness and successes. The challenge that poetry, for instance, can answer is the encroaching unknown of a world built on consumerism, on pleasure as an end it itself, on extraction, on technology designed to blur and manipulate our personal and communal lives. Poetry as one art form can be a portal for reestablishing right balance in a world that seems out of control. It is also a portal for right action in our personal lives, reigniting personal connections and communications over time that feed kindness and compassion. I think imagining a better life for everyone is realistic if we can imagine our own inner lives as active and engaging and the source of spiritual health. “Telling about it” beckons others to share in what we have noticed and what we think about those things. Art forms can do this. Art in the form of deeper listening, considered speech, shaping a life of ethics and morals, and supporting the less fortunate are all examples of artful action. One can be an artist within the constraints of this earthly life, just as Ammons is suggesting to us in his two poems. It is what we notice (what we pay attention to) and what meaning we make of them that makes everyone a potential artist.

Several more ideas come to mind as I think more deeply about these two poems. One is to wonder about the vocabulary we use all the time with some words falling out as obsolete and others being added or even invented to get closer to something whose expression seems inadequate. Here is Ammons with his background in biology using nomenclature for describing natural phenomena, a vocabulary that makes communication universal among the interested. Because he mixes into his poems references to natural phenomena using universal nomenclature that is understandable by those interested as well as references to the more mysterious realm of spiritual life, I wonder if words we no longer use to refer to what might be heavenwardly oriented could be revived and help more of us understand what that realm and those words mean in the context of our worldly lives today. I am not sure that inventing new words for what previous generations could name in their orientation to the spiritual life would be helpful. This brings those experiences and the words used to describe them back into the light of our curiosity. Perhaps this would depend on a greater degree of reflection on what shape the spiritual realm actually takes for us. So many citizens are leaving formal church/synagogue/temple affiliations that it is no wonder that the words that sustained the faithful in the past have fallen out of daily use. I am thinking of words like: sin, forgiveness, redemption, devotion, sacrifice, penitence, atonement, heaven and hell—all solid words with meanings that might or might not challenge us in our lives today. But they might also open up more nuances of meaning that deepen our relationship with nature as well as one another.

Another idea that strikes me about these two poems is that Nature (as in Mother Nature) has no pretenses. The truth in nature, while incompletely explored and described (thus, its mysteries), is its basic formulation, open to us to observe and relate to. Nature is also neutral when it comes to knowing or acting on behalf of human beings. Our efforts to control nature have met with mixed results, not all of which are successes by any measure. But my sense is that nature will manage her own processes in spite of what humans do to them. This is humbling and valuable in that regard for us humans, as we have begun to believe we humans are the controlling agents in all things when, in fact, what we have hoped to control with our technology is beginning to control us. We could use more humility.

All of these ideas have been spurred by how Ammons has shaped these poems. He presents dichotomies with the option of interpreting them as unities. He suggests this as much in his relationship with both nature and the spiritual realm. He invites the reader to form whatever meaning those relationships generate, as all poets attempt to do, I think. It is all about thinking—and paying attention, as Mary Oliver shouts to us.

5-25-24--THOM GUNN--IN SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO

PALPABLE MYSTERY

IN SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO

Waiting for when the sun an hour or less

Conveniently oblique makes visible

The painting on one wall of this recess

By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,

I see how shadow in the painting brims

With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out

But a dim horse's haunch and various limbs,

Until the very subject is in doubt.

But evening gives the act, beneath the horse

And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,

Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.

O wily painter, limiting the scene

From a cacophony of dusty forms

To the one convulsion, what is it you mean

In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?

No Ananias croons a mystery yet,

Casting the pain out under name of sin.

The painter saw what was, an alternate

Candour and secrecy in side the skin.

He painted, elsewhere, that firm insolent

Young whore in Venus's clothes, those pudgy cheats,

Those sharpers; and was strangled, as things went,

For money, by one such picked off the streets.

I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel

To the dim interior of the church instead,

In which there kneel already several people,

Mostly old women: each head closeted

In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.

Their poor arms are too tired for more than this

--For the large gesture of solitary man,

Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.

Reading and parsing poems is an exercise in reflection, a way to embed them in one's wandering life. For me, this is how poems come “alive.” This is how they add to my life and work on whatever powers I have to make sense of this roiling and unsettled world. When I read a poem, I see what is on the page and from then on it makes its way into my thoughts and my thoughts tend to shift according to what the leadings of the poem suggest. Individual words take on new meanings and I also encounter new words that are not part of my vocabulary. I find references to things and beings that are unfamiliar to me but meaningful to the poet and, thus, important for my understanding. The marvelous part of all of this is that the poem shifts and changes as I do. Or, perhaps, I change as the poet and poem uncover for me the layers of understanding. I begin to see what the poet has seen and I feel what might have been the poet's experience. It is an act of embodiment. There is no gaining or goal in any poem beyond how the poet gets the work on paper. From then on it is available to become part of a curious life. I do not think of reading poetry as a hobby, that something that one does when one doesn't know what else to do with idle time. It is a spacious and capacious working out of an intention in the moment. It is a passing look into something that might contain the infinite or the infinitesimal, or both. The leadings of poetry are vast and not easily contained. They are portals through which the reader can enter into the space of the interior life from the world of toil and distractions and fleeting meanings. The poet and reader can enter together.

What is the mindset of this reader that makes poetry so important?

As I live longer with each passing day, I seem to become more sensitive to the state of having one foot in the secular world and the other foot in the spiritual realm. I look for or make connections in everything I read and this makes the effort a fruitful one of personal edification as well as one of continual discovery. Reading and parsing poems highlight these distinctions. Reading this poem by Thom Gunn (1929-2004) is no exception. This has been a complex poem for me, as I flipped from one stanza to another to discern what attracted me to it in the first instance. There are many references in this poem and connections made by the poet. I was fascinated by the Caravaggio (1571-1610) painting the poet tries to understand and wondered how much of the poem that followed was in some measure a biography of the painter and maybe some shared autobiography with the poet. I don't think either one of them was a confessed religious person but everything about this poem is about having one foot in the spiritual realm and the other one in the mundane life all of us experience, a life of sensory experiences that shape what we can ever know of the mysterious spiritual life.

Poems aren't meant to make meanings for the readers as much as they exist to open up those possibilities and to draw into some form what plays in the mind of the poet. In this poem, Gunn has to wait for the sun to rise high enough to illuminate the painting (often titled “Conversion on the Way to Damascus”) and it is clear that he has come to see this painting in a church, an unlikely venue for a painting masterpiece hung within the shadows. Still, the play of light and shadow obscure the painting enough to make him wonder what he is seeing. He returns later in the day to be sure of what he was seeing. There is then light and shadow, the dim light early on making it difficult to see what Caravaggio has presented. Is this the foot in the secular world hidden within the church setting? Is this a preface to what we might make of the painting's subject and, maybe, an early suggestion of what we are to make of the play of illumination and darkness later on in the poem?

Once the poet has been able to examine the painting in better light, he picks apart the elements of the painting that support the biblical story of Ananias curing Saul's blindness and thus converting him to the discipleship of Jesus. In this process, one of transformation for Saul become Paul, Saul is given a new name. This made me think about what it is to have a name and how we identify one another by our names. We identify with our own for many reasons and we know others (if only superficially) by their names. The “other” is named and seen and, thus, belongs. The symbol pictured in the painting is that of Saul flat on his back with both arms uplifted. Is this a gesture of belonging, of acceptance, or of dubious wonder, a skeptical refusal of all that has befallen him (including receiving a new name that marginalizes who he thought he was) in the hands of Ananias? Is it a gesture of unchosen fate, of helplessness in the presence of God's power, of some version of refusal, or of gratitude?

The third stanza of the poem tells another story, one of the poet reflecting on what Ananias intended; a spiritual revival, or was it just a mission to exorcise sin? Cure of Saul's blindness brought back the sensory world to him but there was something converting “in side the skin.” At this point in the poem the poet recalls another Caravaggio painting in which a “young whore” is clothed in resplendent dress (“Venus's clothes”) but destined to be victimized in what is a very graphic turn for the poem. But this seems to illustrate, once again, the foot that stands in the secular world, apart from the pull of a more spiritual nature that seems to course through the entire poem.

It is interesting, in the fourth stanza, that none of these reflections on the potential for “enlightenment” and spiritual conversion are convincing enough for the poet. But here are old women, in the same church in which conversion is the theme, not with open hands and uplifting arms, but praying in the secret (“closet”) of their hearts, too tired to make the same dramatic gesture that so dramatically expressed Saul's all-encompassing conversion, if it was a conversion after all. Is it possible that Saul was already a man of the spirit (he was Jewish before his conversion to Christianity) and that his gesture was one of refusal? The old women are not so dramatically inclined nor able in their tired state to lift arms. Yet, the foot each has placed in the spiritual realm brings them to a place of “resisting, by embracing, nothingness.” The balance, then, is perhaps equal weight on the secular foot as well as the spiritual foot. What is to be seen is the gesture, or lack of one, but still an expression of what the poet feels is the mystery of conversion or transformation, something ephemeral and available to all of us regardless of our state of fatigue or blindness or state of sin. The “nothingness” recalls what Zen Buddhists refer to as the space of enlightenment, a space either populated by all possibilities or an infinite void to which no words can attach or describe, a vast space unimaginable and incomprehensible but still present for all of us in our daily toil, unsuspecting of conversion.

The dictionary terms for what has happened to Saul/Paul are shades of conversion. “Conversion” is 1) adopting a new religion (this is the formal intent of the story and painting about Saul), 2) change from one belief, opinion, or practice to another—or to a deeper loyalty to faith. “Transformation” is 1) to change markedly the form or appearance (the whore, for instance) and 2) to change a nature or function or condition. On the other side of conversion and perhaps what Caravaggio wanted to imply are “revelation,” a manifestation of divine will or truth, and “epiphany,” a spiritual event in which the essence of a given object or manifestation appears to the subject, as in a sudden flash of recognition.

None of these nuanced words seems to describe the experience of the old women, whose daily lives, despite the drudgery of them, are still able to access the same divine condition of acceptance, mercy, and grace. In some way, it seems to me that poet Gunn has found a way to imagine his own life in a way that was a rebuke to being a gay man at a time when sin and mystery were mixed together and “an alternate/ Candour and secrecy in side the skin” were possible. Perhaps the same was true for Caravaggio whose life was punctuated by excessive sensory and sensual experiences. Perhaps the same is true for all of us at any age and in all times.

The poem is one of deep contrasts and impressions. It is at least an exploration of how one might live on the streets and still have one foot deeply planted in the spiritual realm. If nothing else, the poem offers us a glimpse of our own lives with their failures and redemptions. Should a poem do more than this?

 

 

LOUISE GLUCK—CELESTIAL MUSIC

THE FULLNESS OF LIFE

CELESTIAL MUSIC

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.

Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.

She thinks someone listens in heaven.

Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.

I'm always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality

But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.

Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out

According to nature. For my sake she intervened

Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down

Across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains

My aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who

Buries her head in the pillow

So as not to see, the child who tells herself

That light causes sadness--

My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me

To wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person--

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking

On the same road, except it's winter now;

She's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:

Look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.

Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees

Like brides leaping to a great height--

Then I'm afraid for her; I see her

Caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth--

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;

From time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.

It's this moment we're trying to explain, the fact

That we're at ease with death, with solitude.

My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.

She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image

Capable of life apart from her.

We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking. The composition

Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air

Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering--

It's this stillness we both love.

The love of form is a love of endings.

It is telling that the title of this poem comes from a stanza in which the poet has a dream. Her thoughts are reflected in her relationship with a “friend” who is the counterpoint to herself. It is apparent at the beginning that the poet is somewhat skeptical of her friend's belief in heaven but the friend is also “brave too, able to face unpleasantness” which is perhaps how the poet confesses in their discussion about faith, cowardly and timid. This is a poem about faith and what a leap into it might look like—or feel like.

Not only is this about faith but it is also about what exists on this side of faith. It is about a caterpillar and its fate given over to “greedy ants.” In the second stanza the poet describes herself as “moved by disaster/always eager to oppose vitality/but timid also.” I stumbled over the vitality part, as I read into this at first some opposition to life as vitality. But the dictionary offered as a possible definition the “capacity to live, grow, or develop.” Perhaps the poet sees in herself enough timidity not to be open to the force or energy needed to experience personal growth. Sometimes we humans favor what holds us back because it is what is comfortable. Diving into the unknown and the uncertain and unfamiliar is a leap too far. Yet, aren't all of us drawn to “disaster” because it is dramatic and novel? This is one of the juxtapositions that this poem develops. Our need for control over our environment keeps us stuck in our emotional responses and we can't “let events play out/according to nature.” The poet's friend is more open about what is possible to control and what must happen according to urges and compulsions that lie beyond our conscious understanding. The poet's friend contrasts what it is to be a child in the world, a child that hides from aspects of reality because they are too fearful and the child is too timid to face them. To be an adult is to be a “courageous person.” To be courageous is to wake up to what life offers even when (or especially when) reality is unpleasant or threatening.

Then, in stanza four, there is the dream sequence. It is here that we are introduced to what “celestial music” might be. The friend tells her “that when you love the world you hear celestial music.” Love binds what we know of the world and the realm in which celestial music can be experienced (heaven). The phrase bridges the gap between our material lives and a realm in which something as insubstantial and profound as music can coexist. It is this latter realm that is the “heaven” the friend believes in. But it is love that crosses the bridge. When urged to look up, the poet still grips her reality and can't see anything, just the details of the winter's day and she fears for her friend's delusional state of mind. What will change the poet's mind?

Stanza five returns this friendly couple to the reality of their hike together. Together they experience details of the landscape, the forms of reality, and we see that they are a mixture of what were earlier details specific to the dream as well as ones specific to the waking sequence with the dying caterpillar. Silence and peace fall over them and there is a turning to an easy acceptance of death, perhaps as the caterpillar has died free of the ants. The friend's courage encompasses not only making of something seemingly brutal a beautiful “image,” but also an image “capable of life apart from her,” a realm in which there is celestial music to behold. There is a return to the familiarity of the landscape but now perhaps burnished in ways that highlight their beauty. And, lastly, “It's this stillness we both love/The love of form is a form of endings.” Love, remember, is the medium that carries the weight of this world into the realm of faith over the bridge that connects the two realms in the fullness of life.

I would like to reflect on some of the elements of this poem which I think make it a brilliant and forceful illustration of how one can come to a faithful life. In part, the message of the poem is embedded in how juxtapositions of forms can illuminate the story being told. This poem, after all, is about a pilgrimage, a hike if you will, with action and musings complimenting and emphasizing one another. It seems to me that one of the responsibilities of a poem is to challenge the dimensions of the whole person; body, mind, and spirit. This can happen in bits and pieces but with all of them pointing to what a life experience might be in granular detail as well as the celestial. There might also be intimations of immortality in the images of a sunset or a birdcall or a “caterpillar dying in the dirt.” No experience is off limits in a full life and we know our courage as “adults” when we are able to admit into our consciousness what we might hide from. The philosopher C. G. Jung offers just this orientation to life when he explores dream archetypes (most often inhabiting the unconscious realm) and how they define how we see and live in the world.

There are also in this poem references to metaphors of space: heaven in the first stanza; “look up”; height; a net over the earth; celestial. All of these are located at some point on a vertical axis, sometimes contrasted with what occurs at ground level, perhaps in a more horizontal axis. One cultural critic (Glenn Slater in Jung vs. Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age) enlists the notion of verticality (“higher planes of existence”) and contrasts that with our mundane lives lived on the ground, in a horizontal plane. He makes this distinction throughout his book:

“Alongside the temporal dimension of remembering there is a spatial one too, recalling the dimensionality of experience and the breadth of being.”

“Whereas for most living in the industrialized world at least, reversion to such practices [rites and rituals] has become unthinkable, we are in a desperate need of the kind of vertical awareness that alerts us to the psychic realities and archetypal patterns these practices tend to preserve.”

“By the deeply human I am thus referring to the base upon which the vertical axis of reality stands. This axis reaches up into the ineffable experiences of life, which poet and mystic attempt to witness and express through word and image; and it reaches down into the enduring patterns of nature—to the place where animality meets psychology.”

Slater develops the idea of how important it becomes for individuals to explore the interior life, by going “in and down.” The interior life is presented as an antidote to the current overwhelming emphasis on technologies and the possible menace of AI as we become more and more dissociated from the forces and energies that not only make us thoroughly human on good days but also those energies (Jung's archetypes) that we suppress but which continue to shape our emotional lives. Slater makes more of the vertical and the horizontal but Gluck introduces those metaphors in her poem with accompanying space surrounding them to allow us as readers to make some of the same associations Slater postulates. What Slater also points out in his book, and what is true in this poem, is the necessity of having the form of a dying caterpillar (for instance) to contemplate as the beginning of an awareness of where celestial music can be heard.

The caterpillar (on the continuum of life on the horizontal axis) is an archetype of death, feared and avoided early in this poem, returns as an accommodation to death, made more bearable by the poet's friend's attempt to “make something whole, something beautiful, an image/Capable of life apart from her” (perhaps a life somewhere on the vertical axis). It is a “form” with an ending and, in the last phrase, this form and the love of it that echoes love of stillness in the line just above it. Stillness and endings are linked together here as a beckoning toward where love can lead. And love of the caterpillar (a form) is a “love of endings” (where endings, death and its possible “beyond”) create the ground from which ascent on the vertical axis can be experienced. In this poem, the stillness of present reality and celestial music are made one by love in the fullness of life.

 4-22-24 

THE BEGINNING OF FAITH

 PHILIP LARKIN—AUBADE

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

--The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And so; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is not a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape,

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

THE INNER LIFE AS A WINDOW

The title of Larkin's poem is a bit misleading. Aubade in dictionary terms is: a piece sung or played outdoors at dawn usually as a compliment to someone. The tone of this poem is more like a dirge. Larkin awakens to “soundless dark” and there isn't any other musical reference in this poem. This is the third Larkin poem in a short sequence I am parsing and all three are windows into his inner life and his relationship with formal religion as well as how he is drawn to reckon with his mortality. Religion has a way of doing this for the appropriately sensitive individual. And, in some ways, religion begs questions about this tumultuous life we live every day and what happens when all of that life ends. What do we imagine? What about this life prepares us for what happens after it?

I am coupling this poem with a short book by Mark Doty, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon. It is a memoir, a look at a still life painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem in the 1650s. His reflections, as with Larkin's, are seen through a window into his inner life. In both cases, however, there is a visit to memories and an effort to find some meaning in the granularity of daily toil. Larkin struggles with the idea of death, especially when “we are caught without people or drink.” His poem does begin in the early hours of the day, what seems to be the only connection with what an aubade is said to be. I do not find in it anyone whom he might be complimenting. In fact, the whole poem is a darkened landscape of mortal fears. There are references to: “unresting death,” “arid interrogation,” “dread of dying,” “being dead,” for instance.

Larkin imagines a place of “emptiness for ever,” “extinction,” and of being lost in this place “always.” He disparages the efforts of religion to assuage these feelings of horror and dread by pretending that people don't actually die. At different places in the poem he bumps up against what he feels is the finality of his physical life with nowhere else to go. It is the end of a sense-filled life where there is “nothing to love or link with/ the anesthetic from which none come round.”

And how does he respond to this dreadful situation? He relegates the “blur” of it to the margins of his consciousness. It is a realisation for him that no amount of courage or bravery or whining will save him from the final end. In the first stanza he awakens to the darkness of the day and later as it begins to get light “I see what's always there.” In the last stanza he returns to the room in which he is awakening to see the objects he expects to see and feels he has to make the decision to accept this mundane life with all its familiar objects and the work that “has to be done,” the very granular existence that we experience from day to day. He makes this choice to sound like a begrudging one, perhaps the most convenient default so as not to slip into the nothingness he imagines the next life to be. He doesn't entertain the idea that perhaps one can be transformed from one life venue into another of a very different nature. He does not seek any comfort from his bleak existence. Is he suggesting to us that in rejecting the darkness of death we are choosing life? Or is he preparing us, the readers, for just such a possibility by letting us see into his inner life? We, too, have choices to make about what our inner lives will tolerate when it comes to the unimaginable, the infinite possibilities that poets of all stripes have explored when they have considered mortality and death.

It is all too easy enough for me to read through this poem once and then discard it, thinking that its dark message that sits on the top of the poem leaves me with little to work with as far as enlightenment is concerned. But why should I expect a poet or anyone else to provide me with enlightenment? I try to reconcile with what I know and believe about this life and anything after it with what Larkin puts before me. After all, the title is about a musical form and there are references in the poem to light and the reality of every day life. Every day life is where all of us must begin, no matter how the monk, mystic, CEO, or UPS driver manages the day after arising. It is where new beginnings can also find us—or where we find them. To this point, I think Larkin's poem is his beginning and he leaves it unfinished to allow us to imagine what follows. In some way it introduces us to the exploration of Mark Doty and what he discovers looking and reflecting on a still life. I would like to think that Larkin's discordance is a prelude to experiencing some of the illuminations that capture Doty. Larkin's (the poet) life is a very still life, a dark one, but one with the potential for transcendence, as I feel everyone's life can be, always beginning with wardrobes, telephones, and “the uncaring/intricate rented world.”

It is at this point that I bring in the short memoir of Mark Doty, also a poet. His work explores ideas about time and its passing; the fragility of life, mortality, and death; the sensual life at its fullest; the functions of memory; and the meaning of objects we collect and carry. I found this book in some ways to be a completion of Larkin's poem (and the preceding two: “Church Going” and “Faith Healing”), an extension of an exploration and also a celebration of what living this life can mean when reflecting on the finality of it. It is a different view on an inner life that seems more vivid and hopeful, if only to find meaning in what we encounter by our senses. Larkin's “unfocused blur” turns into Doty's still life with delicious objects and color and light.

Here are some short passages from Doty's book that help illustrate what his inner life is witnessing. I include many short references because Doty's poetic identity brings to light and attention what is life-giving in daily life and in art.

“That there can never be too much of reality; that the attempt to draw nearer to it—which will fail—will not fail entirely, as it will give us not the fact of lemons and oysters but this, which is its own fact, its own brave assay toward what is.

“That description is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.”

“And something else, of course; there's always more, deep in art's pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest: everything here has been transformed into feeling, as if by looking very hard at an object it suddenly comes that much closer to some realm where it isn't a thing at all but something just on the edge of dissolving.”

This seems like a poetic way to describe how we reveal our inner lives and our personal substance, opening a window to the morning allowing more light to enter.

“To think through things, that is the still life painter's work—and the poet's. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon. A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations.”

“Therein lies a large portion of the painting's poetry; these things form not a single whole but a concert, a community of separate presences; we are intended to compare their degrees of roundness, solidity, transparency, and opacity. They are each a separate city, a separate child in a field of silent children. They speak back and forth—do they?--across the distance between them.”

“The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time.”

“At first still life seems so entirely of this world—a clarification and celebration of what is—that it can have little to do with mortality. But in truth, the secret subject of these paintings is what they resist.

… Everything in the field of our vision is passing. ...Here intimacy seems to confront its opposite, which is the immensity of time.”

“[And then there is]...the adult recognition that the things of the world go on without us, that the meaning with which we invest them may not persist, may be visible to no one else, that even that which seems to us most profoundly saturated in passion and feeling may be swept away.”

“The most beautiful still lifes are never pristine, and herein lies one of their secrets.”

“I am learning to accept the flux and revision time and experience in variably make, but I am also learning to love what I wish to keep the same, something that nothing in my life has taught me until now; learning, that is, not to let go but to hold on. I hold on to the mended, exactly right old platter, fixed in its place, cherished, singular, at rest.”

“What is it that such a clear-eyed vision of the particular wishes to convey? A way to live, perhaps; a point of view, a stance toward things.”

“A still life is more like a poem than it is like a portrait.”

“Maybe [Garcia] Lorca has it right—we want thing to wash us clean, we crave the plainness of the unmediated, the directness of apples. If we could live with their solidity, with the apple's clear distinction between inner and outer, how the firm shine and protective color of the peel wraps seamlessly around that fragrant, nourishing core, so that it remains unbruised by air, ready to feed...Fit to carry the dark central star of the seeds into the world. In this sense, still life is refuge, consolation, place of quiet. The world becomes bearable, apprehensible because so many elements have been subtracted from it.”

“But these paintings fill me with the pleasure of being bound to the material, implicated, part of a community of attention-giving. That is what we do with sight, give it out, give it and give it away, in order to be filled.”

“They [the paintings] cannot be generalized about without diminishing them, but I can report on their lesson, which is to remind us of the strangeness and singularity of things, and therefore of ourselves. Singularity, they wish us to know, resides in the physical, the particular, the seen; this knowledge can be looked at, can be held. Here you are, the painters say, a body in the city of bodies, in concert, in the astonishing republic of things, the world of light, which is the same gray world sliding past the boat, lapping and chilly, alive with detail as the boat pushes forward, slipping away.”

“Sometimes I think these paintings seem full of secrets, full of unvoiced presences. And surely one of their secrets—somewhere close to their essence—lies in a sense of space that is unique to them. These things exist up close, against a background of burnished darkness. No wide vistas open behind them, no far-flung landscapes, no airy vastness of heaven. This is the space of the body, the space of our arms' reach. There is nothing before us here we could not touch, were these things not made of paint. The essential quality of them is their nearness. “

“What is documented, at last, is not the thing itself but the way of seeing—the object infused with the subject. The eye moving over the world like a lover. And so the boundary between self and world is elided, a bit, softened.”

“It [still life] is an art that points to the human by leaving the human out; nowhere visible, we're everywhere. It is an art that points to meaning through wordlessness, that points to timelessness through things permanently caught in time. That points to immensity through intimacy. An art of modest claims that seems perennial, inexhaustible.”

“Someone and no one. That, I think, is the deepest secret of these paintings, finally, although it seems just barely in the realm of saying, this feeling that beneath the attachments and appurtenances, the furnishings of selfhood, what we are is attention, a quick physical presence in the world, a bright point of consciousness in a wide field from which we are not really separate. That, in a field of light, we are intensifications of that light.”

“Still life. The deep pun hidden in the term: life with death in it, life after the knowledge of death, is, after all, still life.”

“What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing....It's the same with painting.

Part of what that poetry is, I think, is the inner life of the dead, held in suspension. It is still visible to us; you can look at the paintings and you can feel it. This is evidence that a long act of seeing might translate into something permanent, both of ourselves and curiously impersonal, sturdy, useful.

Of what use, exactly? As advocates of intimacy, as embodiments of paradox, as witnesses to earth, here, this moment, now. Evidence thus, that tenderness and style are still the best gestures we can make in the face of death.”

This is a long way around the subject of Larkin's poem but the path is a way of illuminating what alternate meanings might be. There is no way for me to know if Larkin might have shared Doty's impressions of still lifes and poetry if he had extended his reflections about life and death—and maybe even faith. Certainly, his mood is dark and sad in its losses and the doleful acceptance of a life of daily toil without respite. He does not seem to share Doty's view of shared objects and what intimacy they might proffer. He doesn't see the dazzle of light in the same way. He does not perceive his own poetry as “the best gesture we can make in the face of death”--or does he? Is Larkin making the distinction, by subtle contrast, between the mundane practicalities of life and what beauty can be found in them if looked for, as Doty does in his wonderful little book?

At various points in my life I have become fretful of the details of the routines and habits of daily toil, thinking them needlessly tedious. I have thought: if only I could escape them, then I could experience the freedom I can only taste fleetingly when I am awake enough to sense their presence. But I see these points now as Larkin moments. I see now that they were an opening to Doty moments where being attentive to life and life-giving sustenance attested to the necessity of beginning with “what we know/ have always known, know that we can't escape/ yet can't quite accept” (Larkin). I have learned to begin with what I know of daily toil and its tedium in order to make a leap of faith to a place where “in a field of light/ we are intensifications of that light” (Doty).

Here we have two poets viewing still lifes in very different ways. Sitting side by side, each is a contrast to the other and each enriches the perceptions of the other. One is of melancholy and disappointment and the other is of illumination and transcendence. Human life holds all of this. When we look at our own lives what do we see?

Beginning with the Larkin and then visiting Doty's essay brings light into the darkness, as “slowly light strengthens” (Larkin). It seems to me that what Doty says about still life painting and poetry applies as well to faith, or maybe a prayerful life. It all begins with a recognition of what is present for us in just this moment and extends out into a wider world of impressions, perceptions, interior condensations, reflections, and countless opportunities to experience our world's objects and their intimate connections to memory and dreams. And this is the beginning of peering through or under the veil that shields our eyes from more light and new life, full of beauty as well as sorrows and joys. Philip Larkin has done us a favor, as has Mark Doty.

 A PARABLE OF GULLIBILITY

4-6-24

PHILIP LARKIN—FAITH HEALING

Slowly the women file to where he stands

Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,

Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly

Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,

Within whose warm spring rain of loving care

Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,

What's wrong, the deep American voice demands,

And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer

Directing God about this eye, that knee,

Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some

Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives

Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud

With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb

And idiot child within them still survives

To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice

At last calls them alone, that hands have come

To lift them and lighten; and such joy arrives

Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd

Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice--

What's wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:

By now, all's wrong. In everyone there sleeps

A sense of life lived according to love.

To some it means the difference they could make

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.

That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,

As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above

Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

This poem seemed so obvious to me at the outset but as I worked with it and its references and allusions it required more thought and even study. It didn't occur to me until much later that this poem is a parable for our times. I say this to remind myself what a poem can do and also my own sensitivities to how time changes perceptions and how time can sometimes stand still. This poem does both of those things: it comes to me as a piece of art from times past but its meaning also resonates in our own times. Let me explain by walking through what the poem seems to be saying and then reflect a bit on how I think it propels some important meanings for our own times. I think any good poem appeals to the reader for many reasons but also applies what is known about human behavior over the stretches of time.

“Faith Healing” is a tongue-in-cheek alert to what follows. If we know anything of Philip Larkin it is that he writes about religion and faith with a skeptic's eye and sensibility, never out of reach but never wholly into a zealous acceptance. In this case the sheepish candidates are women. I asked why Larkin would have made them the focus of this poem—and the healer a man. He is described as one slick authority with minions at his service. His voice is impatiently unctuous, giving each penitent just enough time to lay on hands and then dismiss them. The women move through as sheep in a herd with some straying to keen and gesticulate wildly with flailing arms, as we can imagine from the scene of healing.

By now we are into the second stanza of the poem and we now have some insight into the minds and expectations of the women. It seems their hope was to receive something from the healer that might restore them to a world of kindness and comfort, what Larkin refers to as the hopes of an “idiot child.” There is a moment when that seems possible, the remnants of their physical ecstasies clouding their minds or maybe just in a state of confusion. But here we hear the voice of the healer echoing from within them: What's wrong? Indeed, the earlier question seemed an invitation to release troubles as a preparation for the healing to come. The second time that question is posed it comes as an exclamation from the poet who observes something darker than an invitation for cure; a dissonance, an answer to the question the women might not have wanted to hear. The answer proposed is “all's wrong.”

I think there is always a mismatch between what we expect and what we can actually experience and that mismatch creates dissonance. This mismatch and the resulting dissonance often accompany loving and being loved. The poem says that loving others is only a source of dissonance for a minority. For the majority the expectation of being loved is the greater source of dissonance. Perhaps most of us feel we are not loved as much as we would expect. We imagine our lives as being different if only we were loved more. The poet feels this is the basis on which many of the women in the poem approach the healer. There is a search for more love and the comforts that will bring. They even imagine that their twenty second interactions with the healer, “within whose warm spring rain of loving care,” will bring them satisfaction. In some way, the healer's presence and presentiment are evidence of healing authority for the women. And they come to him as sheep might congregate as a scattered herd would to the calls of a shepherd.

The poet declares that there is nothing to cure the hollowed out loss of the love the women seek. In this final stanza “voice” returns but this time it isn't “the deep American voice” of the healer but one transcendent that only echoes the dear child of the healer but this time mocks the idea that the charlatan healer can provide what the women seek. Or, is this second voice, one from “above,” one that addresses the women with the mercy and understanding emanating from some spiritual whole, maybe from God? Perhaps the dear child of some pandering snake oil salesman becomes the Dear child (the capitalization here might be significant) of being held in a divinely focused gaze. The poet remains skeptical that even this might be the reality that lessens the dissonance the women experience. Who knows?

Many poems of past times are products of the world that surrounds them and from which they are produced. They also tend to mirror our own times and that makes them timeless. I think I am particularly sensitive to these extensions across time. I thought of the showman P. T. Barnum when I first read this and the declaration of his livelihood that “there is a sucker born every minute.” It is our tendency to become suckers in the face of our deficiencies to seek out charlatans, self-proclaimed saviors and healers, quacks, impostors, and frauds. It is not unusual for them to wrap themselves in the raiment and auras of religiosity, if only to maintain their hold on the vulnerable. And aren't we all sheep at one time or another? Our times now see the global sweep of authoritarianism and the rise of nationalism and mass paranoia and fear. We are living in times of turmoil and shifting social structures with economic and political pressures that are not unknown in human history. But our troubles are of the same kind but different in their own complex ways. The vague sense of entropic forces at work has created a vacuum, a gap created by the disparity between our certainties and assumptions and what reality has to show us. This is not unlike the dissonance the women of this poem experienced. It is “an immense slackening ache/ as when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps.” Our landscape is also thawing and weeping.

There are any number of charlatans in every age and era and ours is not exception. Politics seems to breed such animals. Our newest and most dangerous charlatan is Donald Trump. Most faith healers are benign to the extent that they don't cause harm to their sheep, save what damage is done to their wallets. But politics today is breeding charlatans with power to cause institutions and norms to fall into pieces and be swept away by the winds of time. Our charlatans are capable of these destructions because they consolidate power and untruthfully corrupt and falsify reality, thus promising to heal whatever it is that causes suffering among the faithful. It is astounding to think that so many people could fall for such chicanery but then it is not surprising given the density and tenaciousness of the dissonance that now afflicts the lives of those who do not feel they are being heard or understood. Trump the narcissist demands loyalty/love from his followers and promises to dole out the same to his supporters, but don't all faith healers promise such things?

Another difficult point to ponder is how it is that so many people gravitate to people like Trump when his most grievous character traits are so transparent. I think, once again, it is important to reflect on how many of us are discomfited when it comes to how much love we crave and how little we actually receive. This is a normal human trait that is permanently embedded in so many psyches. Reversing this dissonance is not easy by persuasion or logic. It is an intuitive need, instinctual almost, I think. It seems to reside in the lower levels of consciousness, isolated from any realizations available to the wakeful state.

What began for me as a satirical pastiche evolved into a parable about thwarted expectations for love or cure, about blind trust, about human gullibility. What was at first a caricature of human behavior turned into a very sad acknowledgment of how all of us suffer in different ways and attempt in almost any way possible to relieve that suffering. We are in some sense “idiot children” turned into sheep with profound wants and needs. If our love is unrequited by the likes of faith healers, is it possible to find requited love in true faith? How must we behave to be awake to this possibility?

The poet has opened for us readers this possibility and made us fully aware of our gullibility. We are only human, after all. I have parsed this poem from the perspective of the poet who was an observer of the action, adding in his descriptions and interpretations (and maybe his judgments, too). When I thought about my own reactions to the poem, it became clear to me that I, too, was a gullible one, dependent on my own need to be loved. If, in fact, “faith healing” can come in more than one form, then my gullibility is based on an innocence of what the source of my faith really is. The source is clearly not a person selling something to solve my problems or my needs. I am not vulnerable to cultish rhetoric. I am, however, innocent, trustful, and curious, willing to put my faith in a Creator Spirit that is immanent and transcendent at the same time. It permeates and is eternal and I am open to knowing about it in ways that are not consistent with the scientific method. I believe that there are ways in which humans are able to channel its manifestations in their behavior, especially as we are able to love in a divine way all those whose lives resemble my own. I have no longing to belong to a cult or even to a dogmatic religious tradition. I trust more and more my own experience in a way modeled by William James and as he described it in his prescient and insightful The Varieties of Religious Experience. He made no claim to be a “believer” but was open to the ways in which other people found meaning in transcendent belief. He was willing to listen, to be curious, and to be present for the beliefs and experiences of those he interviewed. I think my approach is the same in many respects. I am more open to how my own experiences reveal a realm beyond the temporal, beyond politics and beyond “faith healing” that sells something.

My gullibility is not unlike that of the women (and men if they were willing to admit to such vulnerability) in this poem and for the poet himself. I think the second stanza of this poem indicates to me that he knows what the women seek and he shares in their search. Finding the source of love affirmed, of love beyond the leveraged or coerced forms, is problematic for most of us. In this all of us share a want and a need, examined or repressed. The search is very human and a matter of what it is to search for meaning, a lifelong pursuit and exploration.