Dancing With Angels On The Heads Of Pins: My Necessarily Incomplete Understanding of Consciousness

      Spoiler alert: This is way too long and far too boring for many people to read. For others, it may seem hopelessly misguided, ill-informed, and entirely lacking in critical thought. The experiences I've had discussing my perspectives regarding this topic have been frustrating because, with a few exceptions, I notice that people tend to get a very far away look in their eyes when I proceed to go down this particular rabbit hole. If you think you may be one such person, stop now and go do something else. But I, undaunted, will offer this to you as it emerges from my own thoughts, my own explorations, and in my own words. And while I am indebted to many teacher, thinkers, philosophers, and writers, I will not invoke them as cover nor as ratification for my own thoughts. Except for Rainer Maria Rilke. One must, I believe, always invoke Rilke.
      I do realize that in many practical ways, what I am arguing is perhaps irrelevant for the many who prefer to focus on practical, day to day living. And perhaps that is just as it should be. I can imagine that my argument might sound like the old "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" argument, but it seems of vital importance to me, not only in the study of myth, but also in the larger considerations of consciousness itself. I suppose the theologians who argued about angels and pins claimed a similar dispensation, too. And though I may seem to be excessively dense or ploddingly pedantic, I may still be of some service to those who can, with a generous heart and mind, bear with me until the end, for as Rilke noted, "by bearing the heavy we make it light."
      In talking with my long time friend, George, over breakfast Saturday morning, he presented some ideas that seemed to incite some insight into what I have long believed is the human inability to be aware of an objective reality. While there may indeed be an objective reality which exists, I do not believe human beings have the ability to experience it as such. We have instead the ability to experience altered consciousnesses, epiphanies, or hierophanies, but these are only representations or models of the objective phenomena. As soon as we ask ourselves, "What was that....???" we begin a rapid and inexorable move away from the phenomenon itself.
      At the same time, I do believe that experiences of altered or elevated consciousnesses are "real" and that there is an ungraspable, "beyond names and forms and apparitions" aspect of the immaterial world constantly influencing, impacting, and acting upon us, of which we are vaguely aware. However, I am currently inclined to think that we cannot be objectively aware of the phenomena qua phenomena that influences us in a given moment. Human consciousness seems to stand in the way and in between objective phenomena and the perception of them. The faculty of human consciousness itself seems constructed in such a way as to prevent one from knowing very much at all about the mysterium, and moreover it seems likely to me that that human consciousness is not very interested in knowing objective facts, but is instead almost entirely devoted to the act of creating stories and narratives in the forms of beliefs, opinions, probabilities, rules, and actuarial tables. And in the performance of these tasks, consciousness irreconcilably separates itself from the phenomenon it is trying to understand. 
      To me, subjectivity is nearly synonymous with illusion, and subjectivity seems to be all we have. The subjective experience takes place solely within one's own mind and not in the objective world, even though the subjective representation may easily be imagined to be about the objective world. But individual consciousness appears to separate one from what is perhaps the objective, external world. I say perhaps because what is typically described as external may not be nearly as external as we think, and we may fundamentally misunderstand transrational experience: the experience of an expanded, altered, enhanced consciousness. Instead, what if transrational consciousness is common to, or a natural process fostered by, the objective world (like water vapor cycles, entropy or photosynthesis) and one's existence in it--that is to say the very phenomenon we are attempting to describe and achieve (enlightened or non-ordinary consciousness) is a regular, ordinary part of the world and our faculty of conscious perception is the very thing which obscures it and separates us from it. The very attempt to experience heightened awareness prevents one from experiencing it regularly and constantly, in the same way as we experience color, say, because the focus of human consciousness seems only or mostly oriented to an idea of "inner" and the concomitant expanse of individual subjectivity.
      But what if we don't possess only one consciousness which may be, from time to time different, altered, enhanced, or diminished? What if instead, we are different consciousnesses. Somehow, I think this might be the more plausible answer. Human consciousness appears only to know something through story or metaphor, but what if we have, in addition, access to an entirely different kind of consciousness, a consciousness as unlike familiar human consciousness as a blastocyst is unlike a fully developed human? Perhaps the real problem that we can't figure out is how to reliably toggle between the two or more consciousnesses that constitute our being. Perhaps this is why, at times, we have the notion that we are not only human, but that we are at once human and divine (for example, Jesus quoted Psalms and said, "Ye are gods"). Perhaps this dual nature, this sense that there is more to us than what we are consistently told or experiencing, is why one might say such a thing; we are not just human, we are human and...something not human or more than human all at once. The idea that there may be another system of consciousness available to us that is entirely differentiated in form and function and yet is so subtly integrated that it is barely perceptible and it, from time to time, assumes a place of primacy and exerts an overwhelming influence, greatly intrigues me. I imagine these consciousnesses to have formed in an evolutionary process in which this more primitive (Primitive only in terms of evolution. I am really suggesting that this type of consciousness came first), more fundamental, consciousness functions to connect us to immaterial realms, and perhaps even connects us to immaterial realms at all times, while the more novel (in terms of evolutionary time) human consciousness tends to override our awareness of the fundamental consciousness and connects us to the material world.
      Maybe a good analogy would be the ancient limbic system of the human brain--the reptilian brain, the seat of emotion--and its relationship to the much more modern neocortex, the location of "higher" intellectual and rational functioning. The limbic system and the neocortex seem to operate in such a way that they seem mostly unaware of each other, yet from time to time the limbic system overrides the neocortex and we behave completely "out of character," becoming irrationally emotional, inconsolably terrified, or seething with rage. These systems in one brain are most certainly connected but the connection is a subtle one, and from a broad functional perspective they seem not to be aware of one another. Maybe an even better analogy would be with the cerebellum, which controls all autonomic functions in the body. We usually don't even pay attention to those life sustaining, essential activities until something goes wrong. In a similar manner, these functionally distinct, yet subtly connected types of consciousnesses exist in us at the same time, but each understands and perceives the world in a way that is totally alien to the other. Perhaps it is also true that individuals possess different degrees of "loading" or dominance, or differently influenced by these functions so that some are more "naturally" spiritual and others more "naturally" oriented to the material. Spiritual practices, educational curricula, even physical conditioning exercises, are targeting one consciousness or the other in order to make that particular targeted realm more available, more "real," or perhaps, more lived into.

      At the risk of sounding pedantic (but truly, that ship has sailed by now, hasn't it?) I want to be clear that I have never been asserting, nor meant to imply that there is nothing beyond the material, nor have I been claiming that there is no such thing as materiality. I have simply been suggesting that human consciousness cannot be directly aware of the immaterial or the material, and that human consciousness makes metaphor as a way to establish contact with the real. What's more, human consciousness seems to be (to me) inherently oriented to the mythological, which is to say that consciousness is metaphorical and narrative in nature. This idea seems to me to be of singular importance in response to the question, "why do we need myth?" Story, explanation, the creation of narrative in every way imaginable is an attempt at understanding the ineffable experience, it is an attempt at employing language to say what is in some fundamental way, unthinkable while at the same time being a way to employ imagery to think the unsayable. But no narrative offers objective truth; narrative can only and always be metaphor. Metaphor, metaphoring, metaphorizing. The meta in metaphor means over or across, while the phor in metaphor means to carry or bear (the Gk. word for a large, two handled vase-like jar, for instance, is amphora), and what is being carried over or across, what is being relocated, displaced, or shifted, are the perceptions of our human status or state which can now, by the virtue of changing one's vantage point, be seen differently and with a greater understanding because one's context has been enlarged. A particular human state may be seen through by framing it in symbolic terms which may also be a wordless knowing, a physical sensation, or some combination of the two; in other words, a metaphor. We cannot grasp what's behind us, what lay before us, or what transcends us--we cannot even grasp that there is more in us, or that there is more to us--without metaphor of some kind. The translation of ungraspable, unspeakable, unknowable phenomenon is, I believe, the main function (but certainly not the only function) of myth specifically, and of narrative generally. We certainly feel moved by something which is indisputably real, if only to ourselves, and not knowing why or how it functions or even exists, compels us to create a story about what has so moved us.
     I am quite conscious of the wildly speculative tale--the narrative, the myth--that I've spun here. Irony is a delicious and satisfying thing, no? But I want to explore these kinds of questions first-hand, without merely taking the word of one teacher or another, one enlightened master or another, the way a toddler takes pureed peas from a parent--the peas are unrecognizable as peas in that form, are they not? Also, this myth which I am spinning accounts for why gurus and experts of every variety so often disagree on issues that seem to me to be of the greatest consequence, and on which there should, theoretically, be no such disagreement. There is and always will be disagreement because there is and always will be a lack of objectivity.
       I think the looking deeply into the phenomenon of consciousness for oneself is necessary if one is to establish a more reliable channel to experiences like those referred to as mystical, or even the experience of living a more fulfilling life. The deep looking transforms the mundane into the magical. In a letter, Rilke wrote to his wife that "Art is always the outcome of one's having been in danger, of having gone right to the end of an experience to where no human being can go further. And the further one goes, the more peculiarly personal and unique does an experience become, and the art-object is but the necessary, irrepressible and most conclusive utterance of this uniqueness." This sums up what I'm really after; this wrestling is not mere sport or an intellectual diversion, nor is it an attempt to dismiss phenomena by some intellectual or materialistic reduction. It is an attempt to turn even the most mundane constituents of my life into art.
      When I can take an experience to the point where I can go no further with it, and in so doing , activate the psychic alchemy which turns the mere act of living my life into art, into beauty apprehended, I experience a kind of transcendent ecstasy. It is not simply a matter of me working on a particular thing or idea, but more that the particular thing or idea is also working on me at the very same time, and I cannot even know that it is working on me or how it is working on me, until I take the thing to the very limits of which I am capable. Epiphanies always seem to be apprehended at times of crisis, or perhaps a better way of phrasing it is that epiphanies are discovered when one finds oneself in a threshold experience. For me, this is what it means to live mythically: to consciously place myself in that threshold, to become as fully conscious as I am capable of being, as much a part of what I observe as I can possibly be, and to open to a mysterious kinship with the world, a world that so often feels too massive and too impenetrable. Instead one often settles for mistaking the model for the objective reality; we store up and savor all of our experiences of the ineffable in our memories and in the end, like photos in an old album, neglect them because we can't or won't understand them as living, evolving, shaping forces. We become over-awed by our powerlessness to understand them. But if one is willing to wrestle with them, the ineffable experiences will most assuredly make themselves known and seek us out. Though ineffable, the ineffable still desires to be known.
      Anyway, I think I'll stop now; I've exceeded by far both the word count and the patience allotted to me by readers if I am to have a readable blog. I have tried, with debatable success perhaps, to illustrate why myth and why living mythically is so important. I don't insist that it must be as I say it is for everyone else, but it is difficult to refrain from suggesting that the discovery of meaning in one's life lay just beyond the cherished beliefs, unarguable facts, and the traditional paradigms for living that we have operated with (consciously or not) for so long. With each passing second, we expand the narrative that constitutes the myth of our own lives, and at the same time our opportunities for finding meaning in the living of our own, individual lives are similarly expanded.

Before The Before: The Magic of the Magic Mountain

In the forward to his marvelous novel, The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann discusses "pastness," and the necessity of stories, if they are to be good stories, to be grounded in the past. But not merely in the apprehendable past; rather, the narrative should be set so far in the past that the story takes place before the before: "But is not the pastness of a story that much more profound, more complete, more like a fairy tale, the tighter it fits up against the 'before?'" Grounding his story in this way, in the deepest past, Mann is putting his readers in that place of timeless time, and such an experience of timelessness affords one a relationship of the greatest sympathy and joy with life.

I find Mann to be in possession of a profoundly important  insight when he speaks of this pastness:

...for stories, as histories, must be past, and the further past, one might say, the better for them as stories and for the storyteller, that conjurer who murmurs in past tenses. But the problem with our story, as also with many people nowadays and, indeed, not the least with those who tell stories, is this: it is much older than its years, its datedness is not to be measured in days, nor the burden of age weighing upon it to be counted by orbits around the sun; in a word, it does not actually owe its pastness to time--an assertion that is itself intended as a passing reference, an allusion, to the problematic and uniquely double nature of that mysterious element (This quote, and all previous quotes, is taken from his very brief forward to The Magic Mountain).

I know that is a lot to bite into at once, but what Mann points to is, I think, nothing short of astounding. It is astounding not simply because it reveals the powers of a master storyteller at the zenith of his novelistic talent but more, it is astounding because it points to a unique condition of the human being, a being who is an animal with a double nature, an animal alive in the present moment, aware of its past, yet possessed of a will to extend itself into its own future; an animal who, for all its attention to time yet to come, tells stories grounded in the past. Stories that are necessary, stories that, if they are to be really effective, must be grounded in a timeless past. Timeless narratives are the narratives that live on and on, and similarly those human beings who, if only even for a few seconds transcend time, feel most alive. A story can let one become lost in the before the before, in timelessness; this is why human animals tell and have always told stories: we tell them not merely to entertain or amuse, we tell stories in order to live. I'm not talking about that rather quotidian, axiomatic understanding that identifies humans beings as natural story tellers; while as much as that is one of the main defining qualities of homo sapiens, it's more than that. I think we tell stories so that we may literally have life--the experience of life itself. Within narrative we find a place to come alive, we virtually coalesce within the stories that we tell. Perhaps this is the very thing John was illustrating by writing, "And the word was made flesh..." The stories we tell become our terrariums, and as the whole of our world they contain us, they shelter and nurture us, providing us with psychological and environmental structures from which we then go about the business of building our lives.

For the most part, all of one's living seems to be predicated upon possessing one's own, singularly unique and uninterrupted (or so we believe) narrative thread of personal history. When the condition of temporal availability regarding one's narrative is disrupted or eliminated, one experiences a feeling like nostalgia--a pain because that which once was a living presence, that being or thing whose solace could be sought out and encountered in time and space, is no longer. My parents are both still alive and reasonably healthy, but even so, the parents I had as a child no longer exist; buildings that were once the familiar landmarks of my youth have now been torn down or so transformed as to be nearly unrecognizable; in fact, even the perdurable idea of my own youth is now endangered, despite being a belief so stubborn that even now, when I look in the mirror and see a middle aged man looking back at me I'm taken aback.

All this nostalgia exists because we are unwilling to ground our own individual stories in the deep past, in the before the before, in what Shakespeare called the "dark backwards and abysm of time" (The Tempest). If one is unwilling to locate one's personal story in the impersonal past--the dark backwards--one's story assumes the trappings of supreme importance, of unarguable, indisputable, historical fact which reduces the narrative to a collection of personal victories, defeats, wounds, cruelties delivered and received, fleeting happiness, and existential doubts. Grounded in a personal past, one's story is often driven by pathology: it depicts merely personal problems to be overcome by an isolated individual that one apparently is, and who is handicapped by the absence of structures or circumstances that the narrative insists should still be in the story. As a result, one is no longer in harmony with all that is most deeply human: impermanence, life emerging from death, loving and loss, and the humbling exposure to a sacred mystery. One feels existentially isolated and alone because one has mistaken a narrative, a story, for life itself; one has mistaken a map for the territory--what philosophy calls a category mistake--and it is an old, outdated map at that.

If, however, I am able, like Mann, to ground my life's narrative in the timeless past--before the before--my story, and more importantly I myself, have become eminently more humane and human. I find that I have developed an attitude which places me in, and is of, the greatest sympathy with life; I discover a rich company attending me and celebrating my all too human experiences. I may even discover that I have surrendered any need for a map at all, because everything I encounter is familiarly unfamiliar and I have never felt more at home while simultaneously being on the voyage--the very essence of the experience of an archetypal encounter. C.G. Jung writes,

Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are yet in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years are counted in the centuries [...] There are factors which, although we do not know them, nevertheless influence our lives, the more so if they are unconscious. Thus at least part of our being lives in the centuries... (MDR, 91).

Perhaps Jung is being conservative; a large part of being, I would say, lives in the centuries. And this, it seems to me, is a deeply beautiful and transcendent thought uniting me not only to ancestors, but to human beings of great vision, heartfulness, and courage who have lived throughout the whole of human history. How then, can I lament my aloneness and my alienation if I tell my whole story? The complete narrative of my life reaches into the dark backwards, yes, but it also stretches into the unforeseen future as well, connecting me to all the humanity that has been and will yet be.

Mann ends his novel with a benediction of sorts for his protagonist, Hans Castorp: 

Farewell Hans [...] Adventures in the flesh and spirit, which enhanced and heightened your ordinariness allowed you to survive in spirit what you will probably not survive in the flesh. There were moments when, as you "played King," you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all around--will love someday rise up out of this, too?

Love will indeed someday rise up out of this, too, I think, for love seems to me to be the fundamental constituent of the universe. Present sorrows are soothed by the healing balm of living and by exercising the choice to embed our own stories in the remotest depths of time. Nestled in the before the before we enhance and heighten our spirits; even, as Mann says, our own ordinariness. What is most important, what makes each of us ordinary or extraordinary, is where we choose to ground the narratives of our lives, and what offers us the most meaning, what may make us feel most alive is finally understanding this notion of pastness and resolving to ground our personal narratives not in personal historical time, but rather in deep, distant time, before the before.

If All The Year Were Playing Holidays, To Sport Would Be As Tedious As To Work: The Curious Gifts Of Not Fitting In

Well. It's been a long time since I've posted anything on this blog, and I think Falstaff was getting nervous. He'd already been grievously injured by his boon companion's rejection of him. It killed him that Hal--now King Henry, I should properly say, forbade his company and he was beginning to wonder if I, too, would show him the door. He values most dearly loyalty; loyalty and love. And as strange as it may seem, I know Falstaff is conflicted about matters of honor. He would like to be honorable and recognized for his courage, but the concept of honor and living (more to the point, dying) honorably simply doesn't make sense to him:

Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism (V.i.129–139).

My tutor wants not to care for honor, yet he cannot seem to abandon the notion so easily and indeed, he even seeks it out on the Shrewsbury battlefield in his own inimitable way, even though he would much prefer to live for the easy pleasure, the infinite entertainments, and life lived well outside conventional parameters. Falstaff recognizes that the idea of honor is a little crazy; it's a chimera of sorts, yet it "pricks me on" as unpredictably as it might "prick me off when I come on." In other words, honor might just as easily kill him as glorify him once he steps on the battlefield. And why would one risk everything for honor when it has no real practical value? It can't set broken bones or heal wounds, it has no skills to speak of and only attaches itself to the dead, and the dead aren't even aware of it: they can't hear or feel it, they can't savor it; it is, as Falstaff says, "air" (in other words it is only worth the breath it requires to utter the word), yet one often longs for it so.

But a tutor's job is not to give one answers; a tutor's job is to make one think and Falstaff never fails in this regard. Why does one want the honor of others, to receive other's good opinions or admiration while at the very same time revel in not being a part of the herd? Is it possible that isolation, solitude, and aloneness offer something unique? Something important that cannot be found in affiliation and relationship and conventional notions of social living? Just as a life of relationships and group experience may provide one with a cozy feeling of belonging, a feeling which comforts the ego and affirms one's own worth, real and prolonged solitude disturbs. Feeling that one fits nowhere very well, that a deep understanding for one's own being is rare, such a feeling of aloneness forces one to see one's world--indeed, oneself--very differently. In solitude one can see into the depths of things in ways not possible while engaged with others or with the concerns of the day: think Ishmael in Moby Dick; his solitude and solitary nature have the effect of revealing to him what seems to be the very foundation of the universe.

The trick is to not mistake one's solitariness and solitude for being evidence of something having gone wrong with one's self, that one is a misfit or an anomaly of some sort. Even in one's aloneness one need not necessarily be an outcast or remain unpeopled. In a late poem, Stanley Kunitz writes, "I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections..." (The Layers), and in solitude one begins to discover, as C.G. Jung archly put it, all the little people that populate the self. Solitude is not synonymous with loneliness. Solitude is not synonymous with abandonment. Rather, solitude is offering a deeply satisfying, plangent awareness of the world as it is, a world filled with terrifying beauty and astonishing meaning.

'Tis A Fearful Thing To Love What Death May Touch

'Tis a fearful thing
To love
What death can touch.
To love, to hope, to dream,

And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
Love,
But a holy thing,
To love what death can touch.

For your life has lived in me;
Your laugh once lifted me;
Your word was a gift to me;

To remember this brings painful joy.

'Tis a human thing, love,
A holy thing,
To love
What death can touch.
--Judah Halevi or Emanuel of Rome; 12th Cent.
(Thanks to Andrew Kent Hagel for drawing my attention to this poem)

In the past several weeks there have been thousands of words, hundreds of thousands even, spent trying to answer questions that have no answers. At least no iron clad, comprehensive answers that I can find. So I will not attempt to do that in this space. People will continue to argue and search for solutions, and without acknowledging their own deeply rooted fears, they will--right and left alike--intensify their desire to control every unruly and unpredictable aspect of life they possibly can. Instead I would like to spend a few of my words trying to understand and praise the courage it takes to love another human being; to love what death can touch.

What is it in us that compels us to love? The search for love seems to be one of the main organizing principles of life, even though loving seems to be inherently paradoxical in any number of ways; for instance, if the aim of biological life is to propagate one's DNA as far and as wide as possible, loving seems to unreasonably delimit one's propagating. Loving binds us to kin and a relative few rather than, say, moving libertinistically through the clover, producing children at the drop of...well, the point is, loving seems to drastically reduce one's own genetic contribution to life's rich pageant.

Rather, I think one might approach a bit closer to the reality of love through the lens of the sacred, to see love as something made holy by its relationship to pathos--by pushing one to one's limits and risking emotional calamity.  When love is seen through such a sacred lens, loving often looks foolish to the objective onlooker. After all, the sacred requires sacrifice--a willingness to suffer is the essence of sacrifice, and it is a word derived from a set of Latin words called binding words, words that include both oaths and curses, words that bind us to one another in every conceivable way. Perhaps it is the act of sacrifice in which we unconsciously find a relationship to foolishness: only a fool would willingly enter into the realm of suffering and the accursed. Yet those who dare to love regularly tread upon a precarious, spectral terrain that which, by its very essence, is impermanent. No wonder then, that Plato called love "divine madness."

Everyone recognizes that loving can be a particularly risky business, that loving is often filled with heart break, pain, and existential fear--when you enter into a relationship of love, death becomes ever so much more a menacing presence in one's consciousness. Loving, even just the intention of loving, shifts us firmly into the realm of an instinctual, animal nature and we become aware of the deeply embedded need to satisfy inexplicable and dimly perceived drives and impulses that Sigmund Freud called "erotic" instincts. But when Eros is constellated, its antagonistic twin, Thanatos, or what Freud called the "death drive," is likewise activated. The sole purpose of Thanatos is found in its desire to fulfill an urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things (Beyond The Pleasure Principle, 308), to return to the beginning, that state of inanimate existence, a state not unlike death perhaps, out of which life itself arises. We realize, as soon as love happens, that we will one day, in one way or another, suffer a nearly unbearable loss, and we desperately wish to go back in time, back to an existence before we found ourselves in such peril; and we dream that somehow we will be the ones who prove the rule of loving and loss by being the exceptions.

Nietzsche once wrote, and I can't remember where at the moment, that "There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth." Loving is life, and living is also at the same time dying. We are dying every minute of our lives, a fact easy to grasp without too much intellectual effort; but somehow it seems only right that children should be exempted from this rather bleak biological calculus if only by the sheer weight of the number of years one naturally assumes to be ahead of them and by the purity of their hearts. The deaths of children lay couched in the terrible depths of life and mar its beautiful surface. The deaths of children seem unnatural and reveal the frightening dis-ease at the heart of our culture, an unsettling discomfort we simply deny, an unwillingness to give death its due and instead we go about our business carelessly, as if we're immortal. Or, when the disturbing awareness of mortality can no longer be denied, we periodically create apocalyptic fantasies that are really nothing more than the projected existential fears of each individual, individuals who know that when they die the world, for them anyway, effectively ends, too.

To love what death can touch is foolish, but as the poet notes it is holy, too, and foolishness and holiness are a plighted pair. It is only because the holy so thinly veils the starkly unadorned demand for death that we treat it so solemnly. If one behaves foolishly in the presence of the holy, one will be quickly accused of sacrilege or blasphemy, of tempting fate, or be judged deserving of death. But is it foolish to have such a rash, reckless disregard for death? Or do the fools know something that more serious-minded folk cannot? Fools know that death ends nothing, that death is an illusion: because your life once lived in me, you can never be too far away; because your laugh once lifted me, it rings still in my ears, and loudly; because your word was a gift to me, the echoes of its wisdom resonate in the depths of my heart as long as I live. No, death doesn't nullify love, it ratifies it instead; death doesn't sever the connection between lovers, it seasons and sweetens it.

"To remember this brings painful joy," the poet says. We can't protect life from death and we can't protect ourselves from suffering in love. But pathos is different by far than pathology; pathology arises when life (and therefore death, as well) is denied. Pathos is the poignancy which arises from the experience of being engaged and mindful of one's life; it is found to be a surprising and soothing balm, a comforting voice that sings to us in the tenor of grief--sometimes devastating and overpowering grief--a song that moves one into a new relationship to life and, because it is such an important part of life, a new relationship to death. And in such a new relationship, we find we are able to praise a scarred and mutilated world; we find we are able to more deeply love our own, sometimes terribly flawed, lives; and to our amazement, we discover lives of meaning and fulfillment simply because we are willing to commit the holy act of loving what death can touch.

One Must Forget Much To Live Here

	I am pleased that this piece, published in Stephanie Pope's wonderful e-zine, was nominated for a best of the web prize in experimental nonfiction. You may check it out at: Mythopoetry Scholar
	or read it here. Thanks Stephanie!
	It strikes me as odd, even startling, when I realize that every piece of earth, each plot of land, a rock outcropping, or a grassy knoll, has a history. Sometimes the history of a given place is a secret lost to the ravages and amnemonia of time, the earth’s arcane arts buried and interred beneath the developer’s promiscuous blade. But in some instances,  the history of a particular place is so powerfully compelling, so majestic or horrific, that the place forever after becomes a memorial and its events are preserved in the collective human memory. Such a memorialization is often, it seems, not through human agency alone but rather through the insistence of the earth itself whose purpose is to manifest images within us human beings that link us to the earth’s intelligence and make us remember. We have forgotten that the great body of the Earth is as alive as you or I. And like us, the earth is just as sleepily awash in memory, reverie, and dreams alternating with exhausting intervals of emotional, intellectual, and physical activity. The world thinks and feels and imagines. It is alive with its own desires and experiences which interfuse with our own and influence us the way children are influenced by the way their parents feel and think and live. This is among the first things we forget in order to go about our living. We forget that a most remarkable thing about this planet is that it literally hums with energy, a magical energy which inexplicably creates and sustains all life on it. Because it is largely inexplicable it may be regarded as magical, yet through this energy the different aspects and emanations of the world are united. Giordano Bruno insisted that the force of all magic is constituted of love, and as I will hope to ultimately illustrate, it is love that is essential to healing ourselves and the earth: The work of magic is a certain drawing of one thing to another by natural similitude. The parts of this world […] depend on one Love […]. From this community of relationship is born the communal Love: from which Love is born the common drawing together: and this is the true Magic. I grew up along the Minnesota River, a beautiful river valley teeming with wildlife, densely wooded by hardwood forests, and deeply aesthetically satisfying vistas that can be apprehended from any number of spectacular rocky cliffs and promontories along its entire length. This river valley was formed relatively recently--recent in terms of geologic time--13,000 years ago when Glacial Lake Agassiz burst through a natural earth dam creating an incredibly massive tsunami which carved the river valley into the flat and relatively featureless grassland plain.  The river which previously ran over the plain in a much smaller, inoffensive form is known to geologists as the ancient Warren River so as to distinguish it from the modern Minnesota River. There were almost certainly people, though perhaps not particularly great in number, living along the peaceful, bounteous river when the earthen dam broke. To them, such a natural disaster would have been catastrophic.  People and animals died, ecosystems were destroyed; life and ways of life were obliterated. If such an event happened today, there would almost certainly be plaques placed, memorials erected, and the geographic area—the earth as well as the river--would be regarded as sacred.  But 13,000 years ago no such memorialization would be undertaken. However, it would be a silly, even grotesque, misunderstanding of human nature to think that in regional narratives of place (which is to say, mythologies) this event was not recalled with solemnity, trembling, and awe. In fact, there are memorials placed alongside the Minnesota River to the event that heralded its inception. And it was the Earth, herself, who placed them there. Periodically along the banks of the river one finds outcroppings of a particular kind of Granite rock called Gniess.  This type of granite is over three billion years old; three billion-year-old rocks on a planet that is perhaps 4.5 billion years old itself, and these rocks were first exposed by the same hydraulic forces that formed the valley some 13,000 years ago. Since it is so unfathomable, so unimaginable and utterly inconceivable, we forget the vast, unknowable expanses of geologic time. We tend to think that memory cannot see into nor see past “the dark and backward abysm of time.” But such thinking is merely a convenient forgetting because the past infuses everything present. Everything from the three billion year old ancient granite rocks and their troves of antediluvian memories, perched like sentinels along the banks of the Minnesota River, to evidence of a growing human presence like the spearheads, knives and other Neolithic stone tools found there from around 6,400 years ago, to a vastly diminished yet still visible 19th Century agrarian way of life dependent upon the river’s fertile deposits, to modern farmhouses supplemented by solar panels and wind turbines. The ancient memory of place leeches into the contemporary psyche and without much effort one may imagine ancient inhabitants of the river valley preparing for the buffalo hunt while at the same time half way around the world, Sumerians were measuring the foundations of the first great civilizations; a great flood formed what is now called the Black Sea; and religious practices centered upon the powerful creative energies of ample, fertile goddesses took hold around central Europe.  Image and imagination, feeling and sensation, and intuitive knowing may well have been the most common and the most effective ways in which our ancestors communicated with each other and with the Earth as well. Writing would not be invented until three millennia after these events. It is a conceit of human nature to assume that it is only the human mind and its relationship to the collective unconscious that accesses and stores memories of distant pasts. However, I believe that the land itself, the very land that sustains and nurtures us, the land that challenges and tests us, and ultimately reabsorbs us, also holds memory and emotion. And we, the current residents of a given place, are influenced by the landscape’s memories and emotions. At some level of consciousness we are made aware of the trauma, the resilience, the hope, and—I mean this quite literally--the dreams of the earth. One usually doesn’t take the time to consider why one feels certain emotions in particular places. Why do some places feel receptive, safe, and comfortable while others feel forbidding or threatening, or even still more places seem filled with a sense of despair or grief that pervades one’s own consciousness and brings to mind an uncomfortable sense of a lack of domesticity, a disturbing, even frightening sense of the uncanny? One often finds that the history of a place accords with the feelings one has of it because the earth whispers her story to human ears that are open and attuned. It shouldn’t be a surprising or whimsical notion but it is, and such intuitions are dismissed as fantasy or wild speculation. But in fact, the soul of things wants to be seen, the soul of things wants to be known, and the soul of the world seeks out the often murky and barely conscious depths of the human experience to communicate her story. When I was eleven or twelve years old I spent much of my summers roaming freely through the woods near the river, often alone. In doing so, I escaped the mundane demands of childhood, and yet oddly, perhaps, I didn’t feel free. I was alone (as far as I knew), far from any house or road, in a pathless wood. Yet I could never escape the disturbing sensations I had, the eerie feeling that I was being watched by something or someone. I often had the premonition that over the next hill or around the next bend of the river I would meet with some stranger who in challenging my right to be in this place, would simultaneously challenge my existential right simply to be.  What I now believe to be true about that childhood time of wandering the river is that the feelings of dread weren’t generated solely by my own experience or consciousness. I was being watched; watched by the earth herself and unconsciously absorbing her memories and emotions as they related to the history of the Minnesota River valley; I was connected to the landscape by the suffusing properties of the earth’s intellectual activity and her own processing, her own attempts to understand her experiences. Just as it is a principle of human psychological life that we attempt to heal ourselves through remembering and making others aware of our experiences to which they (hopefully) respond with empathy, the Mundi Intellectus, or the mind of the world, works in exactly the same way, just more subtly. For communion with the earth is simultaneously effortless and mundane and yet it is, at the same time, also true that it is a deeply sacred act requiring conscious intention. Prior to my ancestors arriving in the Minnesota River valley from northern Europe it was home to the Dakota Indians, but by the early 19th Century the Dakota were no longer home alone. People who must have been utterly strange to them and who seemed to dress impractically or practice odd customs and a convoluted religion, were making claims to ancestral lands. These settlers broke promises and treaties; they lied, and cheated the Dakota.  They seemed to treat everything, even themselves, with disrespect, and the Dakota became strangers in their own land. Their right to exist as they had traditionally existed for centuries was challenged at every turn. By the middle of the 19th Century, a dehumanizing and cruel self-interest was as abundant in the river valley as sources of food were scarce. For the very first time the river was arrested by human-built dams; land was partitioned and fenced off with barbed wire; swamps and marshes were drained. It must have been shocking for the Dakota to see their Great Mother—their benefactrix—so enslaved. Traditional Dakota life was turned upside down and a catastrophe of unimaginable scope unfolded in an intense and bloody conflict.  I married my first wife while standing upon the Minnesota River. It was one of those Minnesota winter days when the sunshine is so bright that it’s too bright and it hurts one’s eyes. Moreover, the air temperature was so cold that the first breath drawn out of doors painfully seared the lungs.  The river was frozen solid, a silver and white ribbon winding through a dense welter of barren Ash, Oak, and Cottonwood trees. I failed that day to grasp the metaphor the earth was conveying to me for my impending marriage. Eighteen months later my marriage was in total disarray, we were living apart and my wife was involved with someone else.  In another eighteen months we were divorced amid the thick, acrid air of recrimination, rancor, and deep enmity—feelings that often arise from desperation.  Between two people these kinds of feelings cause a divorce; between two cultures, they start a war. And as wars always do, this war, the Dakota War of 1862, produced unspeakable atrocities and ultimately a program of genocide undertaken by the Federal Government and heartily supported by the white settlers. Each individual (as well as his or her descendants) exposed to the horror of a war and its inhumane cruelty is forever altered. Life in the valley will never be the same again.   We have forgotten that trauma such as that which is evoked by the ghastliness  of war is not only held in human memory, but is remembered in pain by the earth, too, and much like those mythic countries or worlds that suffer from a miasma (a Greek idea denoting a spiritual pollution that degrades not only a people and a community or state but the very land itself), the land becomes barren and inhospitable; the earth recoils from interaction with its human children and her indulgent benevolence is withdrawn: businesses fail and main streets are shuttered, a spirit of meanness lives in its residents—a stingy penuriousness, shamefulness, and sordidness— and strangers sense an insular or vaguely besieged energy suffusing the community. One of the most salient lessons of the 20th Century has been the growing awareness that where atrocity has happened, acknowledgment of the terrible events through an act of contrition must be undertaken in order to facilitate healing among people. Less salient is the awareness that just such atonement must occur in relationship to the land as well.  I have come to believe that if events are not properly memorialized, if they are repressed or suppressed or dismissed, the sufferings of all those involved (especially the wounded landscape which has literally absorbed the blood, and spiritually taken in the trauma) continue to live on in that geographical space—in the earth, herself—and subtly, unconsciously, influence those who currently occupy that land. The wounded landscape itself reaches out to those of us who occupy it by making its own memories, emotions, and traumas seem to be our own. It whispers to us its story, a story we notice first in the form of vague feelings, disturbing dreams, uncanny sensations, and dimly perceived shadows; feelings, sensations, and shadows we are obliged to recognize and honor if we are to understand and heal ourselves and our land. Forgiveness is the only real healing move available to either us or the planet; it is the material implement of the soul, it is love in action, the tool of loving awareness which is free to be used to astonishing effect in the world. It is not, however, nearly effective enough to think about forgiveness only in terms of the other since forgiveness requires much more than a mere acknowledgment of, and dispensation for, the actions of others; one must become deeply aware of one’s own guilt as well, and realize that there is nothing else to do with it but acknowledge and experience it. The purpose of difficult and often painfully intense feelings is to simply bear them; one needn’t and shouldn’t find a way to avoid them, or try to unload or project them onto others; instead one recognizes them as belonging to oneself and once they are so understood, they may begin to heal. To do so is a very difficult thing, so difficult as to be nearly impossible because, as Macbeth bitterly observes, “To know my deed, ‘Twere best not know myself.” Yet the willingness to know oneself puts oneself in proximity to a deep, very deep truth that at first blush appears to be dichotomous or at best, paradoxical.  But as Niels Bohr once remarked, “It is a hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.” For instance, the reality of human existence is mortality. And yet, while humans are indeed mortal, there is something about human nature that is immortal, indomitable and inexhaustible. Deep truths invite a paradox, and paradox is a singular quality of divine reality. When we find ourselves in such a paradoxical position, we may be sure that the gods are not far away. The concept of deep truth is also useful in regarding the nature of the earth, too. Yes, the earth is a solid celestial phenomenon created from the constellation of space dust and gasses possessing a molten mineral core, and yet its deep truth is that it also thinks and feels and imagines. Similarly, what we call history is not merely a dialogue between the present and the past; it is a conversation between ourselves and the earth, an intentional creation of a more accepting, loving relationship between humankind and the landscape upon and within which the human drama unfolds.  There is no single, eternal, unalterable, or immutable truth that reveals what “the past” means.  One’s relationship to the past, like one’s relationship to self or to the world, is constantly evolving, it is a relationship relentlessly renewing itself in a state of continual becoming. We typically forget who we really are and what our connection to the world really is; we forget in order that we may continue to live our lives the way in which we have always done.  But there are constantly opportunities for awareness presented to us that force us to re-evaluate and redefine ourselves and the world. For instance: isn’t it stunning to know that our planet is hurtling through space at one thousand miles per hour?  If a small detail like that can materially change how we think of ourselves and the world, imagine how being in a vital, creative, nurturing relationship to the earth would change one’s experience of reality. The strangeness and complexities of reality consistently outstrips not only our own experiences and expectations of reality, but those of science as well.  Shakespeare enjoins us to “Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” The heart knows the earth is alive, the heart knows that the supreme adventure is the road that unfolds before us when we begin to acknowledge that deep truth which tells us that we are indeed children of the earth and the umbilical of the human mind connects us to her in all ways and for always.  Glaukos tells Diomedes on the plain of Troy that he “[…] always hears my father’s voice in my head: ‘Be the best, my boy. Be the brightest, and hold your head high above the rest’.” Like Glaukos, our parent’s voice is always in our heads, and the voice of our mother, the Earth, should no longer be dismissed or silenced, for it is that voice which instructs us in how to heal ourselves as well as our planet.

The Tempest of Living Inside Out: 'Tis New to Thee'

Christopher Plummer as Prospero

What is the point of one's life, really? Is it to achieve, to acquire wealth and influence, is it to be a powerful person in one's community, state, or country? Is it to wear the mantle of authority, whether as a scholar, a general, a law maker, or a geopolitical figure of import? Is the point to leave behind a name chiseled into the marble lintel or edifice of the local sports stadium or university library? To wield power, justly or unjustly; to control the lives of others so one might better to do one's own bidding? Perhaps the point is to become a figure of consequence in the world of religion, the arts, law or commerce? Or better still, to lose oneself in drunkenness, mind altering substances, or sex? After all, the answer must be out there somewhere. Why not? And if I'm unable to find it, well, then I'll simply have one of everything, I suppose, as a confused friend said to me in the process of bollixing the Buddha and the hot dog vendor joke (What did the Buddha say to the hot dog vendor? Make me one with everything). How easily we confuse being one with everything with having one of everything.

Are any of these things, or indeed the external world at all, ultimately important as we lay dying? I have a family member who entered hospice a few days ago and who, I think it's fair to say, has been a "good" person; she's never intentionally hurt anyone and has tried to be a good mother while living a life of which the conventional wisdom would approve. And yet, as far as I can tell, she has never had a single thought to spend investigating the inner world, the realities of her own psyche, or the immaterial realm in general. Her focus has always been the world around her, her own material well being and that of her family. That is, after all, how most people live, why should she be any different? The irony is that now she is dying, and like numberless others have and will, she spends much of her waking hours seeing and talking to things and beings that other people don't see, while failing to notice the flesh and blood family sitting at her bedside. The focus of her attention is increasingly caught up with her inner experience and the immaterial realm, while her attention to the external world recedes more and more each hour. So why, then, does the material realm hold so much sway throughout our lives when at the end, it seems to matter not all?

Now I must, because in some not-small respects I am his creation (more accurately, his grand-creation since his creation, Falstaff, was my tutor), submit to Shakespeare; and to particularly what is generally regarded to be his last play, The Tempest. The conventionally understood history is that the play's protagonist, Prospero, is analogous to Shakespeare himself: both are giving up their enchanting arts, their respective renunciations coming at the height of their powers. Prospero has become a powerful, even fearsome mage whose magical powers seem to know no bounds, just as Shakespeare's creative and artistic powers seemed equally unlimited. In fact in the early 17th century, because of their great powers of enchantment and illusion, the word art applied to magic as well as to theater. Even so, Shakespeare still takes pains to portray Prospero as a rationalist and a "good magician" whose aims are not in conflict with those of God or the church. After all, it was only a little more than a decade earlier that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for promulgating his magic-al theories because he grew careless (or tired) of making a distinction between magic that was not a threat to the church and magic that was. The irony is that Bruno believed that the root power in magic was love, and that memory was a key element in realizing magic in the material world. Two elements the church makes much of a fuss about: the love of Christ and memory in the form of ritual.

Love and memory; lineaments that exist not in the external, material world, but in the inner, immaterial one. These are the qualities that Prospero most concerns himself with as the play proceeds; he gives up his magical practices, which can alter and control the external world, and instead focuses on his own inner world by engaging memory and it's soothing balm, forgiveness, and the source of the greatest magic of all, love.

Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimmed

The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,

And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault

Set roaring war—to th' dread rattling thunder

Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak

With his own bolt;

the strong-based promontory

Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up

The pine and cedar; graves at my command

Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth

By my so potent art. But this rough magic

I here abjure, and when I have required

Some heavenly music, which even now I do,

To work mine end upon their senses that

This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I’ll drown my book.

Even though they have made him startlingly powerful in the material world, and he might have used them to extract revenge upon his treacherous brother (whose political treason exiled Prospero on Bermuda) Prospero abandons the external, magical arts and breaks his staff and sinks his book in the unreachable depths of the ocean. From now on his focus will be on developing the inner resources for living a purpose filled life of true meaning, of bliss, and a genuine amore-propre, all of which come from an emergent, opening experience of the heart that, at the same time, propels one more fully and more consciously into the world, infusing joy and meaning into it, and not the other way around. It's a move from the inside out, and as such wealth, fame, and responsibilities of all kinds may be the result, but they are not the things sought after in the first place in order to bring one happiness. If they should then occur, they do so as the by-products of heartful living. Such a connection to life and its satisfactions cannot be constructed from the outside in, but grows organically from the inside out. It's a reality Prospero has known all along but has resisted, and when his daughter Miranda begins to see the world without the material magic her father imposed upon her, she is astonished:

Prospero and Miranda

Miranda: O' wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beautious mankind is! O, brave new world

That has such people in 't!

Prospero: 'Tis new to thee.

"'Tis new to thee;" Prospero has been long aware, at some level, of the wonderous regenerative and reshaping power of love. From a heartful, loving place he instructs all present in the proper and healing use of memory saying, Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that's gone. Anyone who pays attention to one's own life understands that what we give our attention to is what we create, and no one knows this better than Prospero, so he instructs us to forgo a focus on the past and its disappointments and wounds. But before we turn our attention entirely to the new, we must deal with our own shadow, our own imperfections, our own weaknesses of character, our own misdeeds. Again, Prospero is showing the way when he says (with some emotional difficulty, I imagine): This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. Forgiveness is not fully accomplished unless we also forgive ourselves, and in order to do that we must acknowledge, often in pain, what exactly it is that we must forgive ourselves for. Then we are free to create a beautiful life, no matter what it may materially appear to be, for the focus is not on the external but rather is on the inner. Prospero says he will retire when he arrives home in Milan where "Every third thought shall be my grave." Ever the teacher, he knows that a beautiful life cannot be rightly called such if one does not consider death. My relative never once thought of her own death, I suspect; at least not without the accompanying existential terror that made such thought experiments very brief indeed. But the contemplation of death, of one's mortality, lends perspective and focus to the task of living in the most satisfying, meaningful way possible. The ancient Greeks knew this; they developed a notion called kallos thanatos, a beautiful death; a thought that encompassed not only dying itself, but considered the manner of living life beautifully, meaningfully, consciously, and heartfully right up to the very moment of death to be one of the most important goals of life and therefore, the essential constituents of a beautiful death.

I suppose it is one of the griefs of conscious living that those whom we care about aren't always able to live life inside out. Simply calling it "inside out" properly gives the suggestion of something being not quite right, or uncomfortably twisted up. The truth is that life is often frightening and difficult, and requires living with pain and uncertainty; but the refusal of a heartful path means that one brings the pain and fear with them to the abyss and it makes one's death a pitiable and terrifying event, devoid of all meaning. Instead why not embrace the tempestuousness of life and create a life of meaning and purpose? It is after all a choice we may all make, it is within the power of each one of us and is a choice which, if made with intention and resolve, the world receives and conspires with us to bring about a life that will culminate in the kallos thanatos, and any individual kallos thanatos brings beauty to the entire world.

That is thy charge. Then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well.

A Sigh From the Depths

Thomas de Quincey

Banish the frailties of hope; wither the relenting of love; scorch the fountain of tears; curse him as only thou can curse. So shall he be accomplished in the furnace; so shall he see things that ought not to be seen, sights that are abominable, and secrets that are unutterable. So shall he read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise again before he dies. And so shall our commission be accomplished which from God we had,--to plague his heart until we had unfolded the capacities of his spirit.

   --Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis

De Quincey worked, often by candlelight, and had the unfortunate and (I think) amusing habit of accidentally setting things on fire: papers, clothing, even his hair. One may imagine the long suffering sigh which escaped his lips. Indeed, the title of the work from which I just quoted translates to "sighs from the depths." The passing today, of a friend of a friend, reminded me just how often we find ourselves in, and how much we owe to the accomplishment we find there in the furnace of life--the furnace that holds the transformative alchemical fire, and how it is that in the seeing of things that ought not to be seen, we see through the illusions we mistake for our reality. De Quincey works a notion in this paragraph (the full paragraph is much longer) that Sufi adepts have spoken of as "dying into one's life." It is a strenuously difficult precursor to a profound transformation and psychological rebirth.

If one is fortunate enough to be accomplished in that furnace or lucky enough to die into his life, one is then able to understand and bear the elder truths, the sad, grand, fearful truths of our existence, which are, at the same time, probably the truths of our non-existence, as well. Life and death become less puzzling or threatening and at the same time beauty, a soothing clarity, and a revelation (as well as an experience of revelling in the circumstances of our lives) begins to occupy one's awareness more and more.

Now is the time for grieving, Dear Soul, for understanding the frailties of hope, for giving yourself over to grief and allowing yourself to live for a time in the furnace of life for this, too, unfolds the capacities of your spirit and is the teacher of unutterable secrets.