Falstaff Was My Tutor

Form And Formlessness: Becoming By Becoming Nothing

2012-01-31T10:08:00.001-07:00

Blue Chaos by Mark Marrara

Thich Nhat Hahn wrote a poem that begins thusly:

Please call me by my true name

So I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,

So I can hear that my joys and pain are one.

Please call me by my true name

So that I can wake up

And the doors of my heart

May be left open.

We are, ourselves, metaphors wandering through this world, introducing ourselves to each other using aliases while our true names and our true natures remain secret. Sometimes our true names remain secret because they frighten us; they demand things from us that we think we are unable or unwilling to give. Our authentic selves are threatening, so we repress them; we don't want to intimidate others or ourselves. It would be in such bad form.

And in those six words--it would be in bad form--lurks the stuff of tragedy. One can only speculate as to what we have lost because of the terror and intimidation surrounding those six words. For fear of bad form there is less daring courage, less love, less creativity and invention, superficial connections to one another, derivative novels, and unhappy families. I am painfully aware of what I've lost to that notion. But, our secret name frightens us because of the fear of bad form; the deep self frightens us because it has no form. No form is the worst form of all; no form is to the linear, ordered, rational mind, bad form. No science, no theology, in fact, no ology of any sort can exist without a form. Form takes the shape of data, texts, subjects, dependent variables, independent variables, nation-states, dependent husbands, and independent children, mass movements of people, goods, and even bowels.

What do we really have, for all our efforts at forming? Ironically enough, we give to ourselves a deformed and broken world, a wrecked notion of reality, which only serves to deepen our sense of alienation and tear asunder the metaphysical fabric that binds the universe together. Now let me be clear: I am not advocating an abandonment of education or rational thinking; one can simply look about and see all too clearly the folly of half-formed, irrational policies that are let loose upon the world. No, what I am arguing for is to rationally and speculatively, with all intellectual rigor and passion, deconstruct our affaire de fou with Form, a love affair that prevents us from seeing through life deeply, a beguiling dream of duality that continues to perpetuate and insure a fatal split between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, between right and wrong.

This duality arises, not out of laziness, nor from an innate badness; nor do I believe it is malicious intent that motivates the human, all too human desire to organize and soften the hard edges of the world through the construction of forms. In fact, this impulse to form is driven by an instinct to preserve one’s ego. To look at the naked truth of existence, the unalloyed reality of existence is to put the idea of a self, one's ego, in mortal peril. As in the case of Semele with Zeus, a full, deep seeing of reality has the potential to incinerate the seer. Moses, too, when he went up the mountain to receive Yahweh's tablets, asked to see the true nature of the god. He was told that a full seeing would destroy him and was instead placed in the cleft of a rock and was allowed only to see Yahweh's backside as the god passed by him. Even this mere glimpse of the divine reality altered Moses' appearance so that when he returned to the Children of Israel they could hardly recognize him. David Mamet relates a story--and this may be as much an insight into the themes of Mamet's plays as it is an insight into the nature of reality--which was told to him as a child by his rabbi:

The Bible tells us the most secret name of God, the Shem Ha Meforesh, could be uttered only by the high priest in the afternoon of Yom Kippur. He would alone enter the Holy of Holies, and there would say the name. He would have a rope tied around his ankle, so that, should he die while in the Holy of Holies, he could be gotten out. No one else, of course, being permitted to enter there.
Why could they not enter? The Spirit of God dwelt therein, and anyone else entering would be slain by that power. Why were they afraid the high priest would die? He might die if he were insufficiently cleansed, if he uttered the name with insufficient sanctity. He would be consumed.
My rabbi told this story in the synagogue, and added: you may find this story simplistic, or picayune. But, say I had a booth up here, and you in the congregation knew the Sacred Name. How many of you would want to put to the test both your sanctity and the operation of the ban, with its penalty? That's right. No takers (Secret Names).

The formless nature of reality seems to be so amorphous that there is no good or bad, no right or wrong, and, when it comes right down to it, neither is there life or death. This truth offends one's sense of justice and fair play, it offends one's aesthetic sensibilities, it offends one's sense of order and simplicity, and it offends one's sense of agency in the world. Sri Ramakrishna, the 19th Century Bengali mystic whom his followers described as an Avatar or "a reincarnation of God," had a vision of The Real, and in his vision he saw the ultimate truth as a pregnant woman rising out of the Ganges River, giving birth to her child on the shore and then proceeding to devour it. After tearing her child to pieces, she smiled a blood soaked smile and serenely walked back into the waves of that most sacred river and once again merged with the unity, the infinite. Ramakrishna's willingness to see the "naked truth" led him to the highest non-dualistic realization: that the Divine inhabits all events and all things, that the Divine is all form and no form at the same time.

This, it seems to me, has always been the troubling, oppressive, naked truth of human existence and such deep awarenesses often shatter us, but just as often they may liberate us. How can there be justice in the midst of injustice? How can one see the sublime surrounded by horror? How can we ever see through murder, rape, war, the suffering of children, or genocide well enough and far enough to behold ultimate truth? I can't do it. I don't know how to do it. But I have a strong sense that this is a powerful truth, because when I think about existence from this perspective, form--or the lack of it--is simply not an issue. Everything seems to come together in a paradoxically unordered-yet-sublimely-ordered fashion. Complicated? Oh, yes; terribly. But let that not be an obstacle, its complexity is in fact a great attribute; as Jacob Burckhardt said, “Beware the terrible simplifiers.” Nowhere is that caveat more necessary to observe than where the human-all-too-human urge to simplify and form-ulate is greatest: exploring the realms of psyche, whether in its theological, psychological, philosophical, scientific, or in its relational manifestations.

Without a willingness to engage the wrenching, mortifying process of seeing through, without the unshakeable curiosity that may lead one to be incinerated by truth, all accompanying claims to enlightenment are nothing more than puerile escapism masquerading as illumination. All special knowledge of the Mystery which lives us is acquired as the result of a transgression against existing order or form; a trespass of boundaries; a felix culpa, a fortunate crime that when undertaken with conviction pardons the criminal and bequeaths the boon of ultimate freedom.

Metaphor, Diaphor, and Mystery: Or, Why I Believe Shakespeare Authored His Own Works

2012-01-20T09:40:00.001-07:00

There is a belief, dating to the mid 19th century and which is held by a surprising number of people, that Shakespeare the Stratfordian did not write his own plays. Instead the plays and poetry are attributed to Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or Edward de Vere, among others. Walt Whitman himself was a firm believer in the inauthenticity of Shakespeare's authorship and even, alas, Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson had doubts. There is, for instance, a Facebook page with over 7,000 subscribers devoted to championing de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, as the real author of the body of work published with Shakespeare's name, and the participants have very lively discussions in which they often and aggressively disdain any attempts to claim Shakespeare is the author of his own work. Additionally, I am curious to see a recently released major Hollywood movie, Anonymous, arguing the same idea.

So what in the world does any of this have to do with metaphor, diaphor (the concept that has occupied me over the past few posts on this blog), and the tremendous mystery of existence? Metaphor and its deepening, logical extension, diaphor, exist at the junction of inner experience and outer reality. Metaphor and diaphor transcend both of the antagonistically opposed ways we human beings traditionally encounter the world: one, idiosyncratic, personal and the other, material and rational, the two primary methods of reasoning we use to try to understand and organize the world. The way in which metaphor and diaphor transcends these common habits of perception is through the mechanism of perichoresis. Perichoresis is a fabulous Greek word that means literally to move or dance around (peri = around, choreio = move or dance), and I would like to free that muse-ical and meaningful word from the livid, mortised grip of Christian theologians who apply the word only to the rather benumbing task of describing the nature of the Trinity. Metaphor and diaphor dance around and in and through the existential seam at which inner and outer reality are joined. The perichoreiotic movement seems to me to be inherently joyful, playful, and vivacious; it is a fun-filled, joyful exploration of the nature and experience of human existence.

Why perichoresis, the idea of which in Byzantine theology by the way, is called "The Great Dance," is relegated to fusty, sober graduate classrooms of the seminary, and why a surprising number of people cannot accept that Shakespeare actually did write the plays which are attributed to him, point to their mistaken convictions that causation may be determined from a basis in fact. The problem is that causal thinking, despite the often astonishingly gymnastic applications of rhetoric and logic, is thinking that is overly simplistic and spurious. There is, in fact, a significant divergence between the way the world works and how human beings think the world works. We can measure facts, that is true, but causation cannot be measured nor can it be derived from facts; quite to the contrary, causation is a convenient heuristic, a narrative that derives its value and persistence from its ability to comfort us with notions of predictability and order. But causation is merely a narrative used to link facts and provide the illusion of certainty. Causation is a story. Causation is a myth.

I hear people often speak of myth or story as being a narrative that is untrue, and from a strictly literal interpretation, that is so. Story and myth operate in symbolic ways, but so does the faculty of human perception itself. Even the alphabet is symbolic; the letters of the alphabet are symbols, in fact the original letters were pictures. The letter A was originally a representation of an ox head (Read David Sacks' brilliantly entertaining book, Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet From A to Z). Each of the letters of the alphabet symbolizes a concept. Letters are formed into a language, a language which is then spoken, and as such everything we say (or think if we think linguistically), the structure and meaning of every utterance is symbolic. Another word one might use in place of symbolic is metaphorical. Metaphor is used to facilitate understanding by stating that A is B. Literally speaking, one might say that's a lie; A cannot be B, get your facts straight. But herein lies the problem, for understanding facts does not allow one to understand cause. Phenomena may be boiled down to their constituent facts and such a collection of factual data may yet still fail to explain the phenomena. The whole is often greater than the sum of its parts, and while an understanding of biological processes has been analyzed and parsed to astonishing degrees of complexity and detail, life itself--like Shakespeare--cannot be explained. The sum of the constituent components--both of life and of Shakespeare's life--presents us with a result that simply does not add up.

Those who argue against Shakespeare's authorship fail to understand the lack of relationship between facts and causality. They reason that a relatively uneducated son of a rural glove maker of modest means could not possibly have understood the intricacies of the great royal courts of England, France, Denmark or Italy. How could a penurious, mean, and common actor understand staggering aristocratic wealth, military and political treasons, or have a subtle, nuanced grasp of the law? This is the problem with reductionisms, they never add up; they always seem to leave us scratching our heads and wondering why the very reality we are living should be so. Yet it is so, and that is the marvelously vexing mystery of existence. But it is often true that people do not wish to be vexed by a mystery and instead frequently demand answers. Since the things we can know are deeply influenced by the things we cannot know, there is a powerful attraction to the idea of knowing something unambiguously and once known, use to predict future events. A habit which has the net result of allaying the presence of, if it is ever allowed to enter one's consciousness, a stultifying fear of the unknown.

But there is another way, besides that of reducing every human experience to its constituent facts, to deal with the existential dread one may feel imposed upon oneself by life, and that is to undertake the project of living harmoniously with and in the tremendous mystery which gives birth to all creation, to accept that ultimate causality is a chimera and can never be known, and choose to live instead with an awareness and appreciation for each experience of life one may have. Such an acceptance of the "thusness" of one's life releases creativity, playfulness, and even joy. If one can be aware that one's life (even oneself!) is a metaphor and therefore not literally true, one may then become a participant in the creation of one's experiences. One may rewrite one's own story for it is simply that, a story which describes relationships--a felicitous narrative, a coherent explanation of the relationship of apparently unrelated experiences--and it seems to me, experience is itself the meaning of life. After all, what does a flower mean? In and of itself, it means nothing; its meaning is found in the experiencing of it. Experience is what metaphor promotes more than any other single thing, and when we live metaphorically--when we live mythically, continually trying to see through what is presented to us--and know we are living thusly, we inhabit that space, the existential seam that I previously referred to, where inner experience meets outer reality. One begins to move perichoretically, one dances around, in, and through that boundary between inner and outer realities and distinctions between inner and outer dissolve, inner reality becomes outer while outer becomes inner reality. The world and the individual are interfused, we find our soul in the world and the world finds itself in ourselves. Viewed through this lens, being and experience are then reconciled and one feels at home, comfortable in the world as well as within one's own skin, and the world, even though we may suffer in it, becomes a playground of experience, overflowing with meaning, enchantment, and mystery.

At 3 O'Clock in the Morning, Metaphor Wanted My Help

2011-12-30T12:50:00.001-07:00

I had an idea in the middle of the night, an idea that startled me; it bothered my sleep, gave me an uneasy conscience. I thought, "Metaphor and metaphoric thinking have become outrageously distracting processes." What an odd thought for a mythologist, psychotherapist, hypnotherapist and poet, whose stock in trade has always been, or so I imagined, metaphor: religious and spiritual metaphor, therapeutic metaphor, and literary metaphor.

Strictly speaking, metaphor is language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects. In the simplest case, this takes the form: "The [first subject] is a [second subject]." More generally, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope that describes a first subject as being or equal to a second subject in some way. Thus, the first subject can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes from the second subject are used to enhance the description of the first (The Free Dictionary.com). The example that constantly comes to mind is an old, venerable, and often used poem to point to the differences between simile and metaphor. The poet, Robert Burns, famously wrote: "My love is like a red, red, rose." This is simile; for it to be metaphor, the poet would have had to write instead, "My love is a red, red, rose." Each is valuable, but claiming that love is a red, red rose removes any distance or dissimilarity the reader might feel between love and rose. It creates in us discomfort, it makes us wrestle with the impossible sameness of love and roses. If one says that love is like a red, red rose, there is not the same immersion, the same wrestling, in and with either the love or the rose. A comfortable emotional distance may be maintained.

But here is the problem. Metaphor is useful for the precise reason for which I am now considering its rejection. It conflates the seemingly unrelated, and the shock of seeing a relationship where one might never before even imagined (imagining is in fact, metaphoring) one, can radically alter one's perceptions and beliefs. But we now live in an increasingly histrionic society that seems to have an increasingly insatiable need to "create" conflicts and drama where there really aren't any, and conversely, to ignore issues and problems that are in dire need of attention, and have reached crisis levels. (It is tempting to engage a critique of our current political season, but that should be a tragic farce all too obvious to anyone not in a coma to point out here.) Metaphor seems to have worn itself out.

Our culture is drowning in ennui, and we don't have the will to look deeply into anything, let alone metaphor. (Dostoyevsky wrote, "…and it was all from ennui, gentlemen, all from ennui; inertia overcame me.") We live in a post-modern culture that does not want to do the kind of thinking that post-modernity requires and the unadulterated meaning of the word metaphor is lost through an indiscriminate, lazy, and hysterical mingling of one thing or idea with everything else. I often have the feeling these days that we simply must, we just have to, say certain things--such as meaningless, insincere apologies for public misdeeds--in certain situations whether we mean them or not--all too often we do not. All that is being required of us is an effort at form, and any real substance is avoided. This phenomenon has never been articulated better than by W.B. Yeats in his poem, The Second Coming:

…everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

We need, all of us, to make a different kind of effort; to be a different kind of activist. The kind of activist who looks deeply into things. We need to see through things. We simply must stop worrying about needing to know things, as if true knowing is possible. Looking deeply into them is enough, seeing through them, more than enough. Moreover, it is just then, in the deep looking, that the world reveals itself to us. Wallace Stevens wrote, "It was when I said/"There is no such thing as the truth,”/That the grapes seemed fatter./The fox ran out of his hole." A little, tiny piece of the Mysterium reveals itself to us.

My most influential teacher, David Miller, put his finger on it when, in discussing the work of the marvelous Stanley Romain Hopper, he called such a view as I'm trying to articulate in this post, not metaphoric, but “…diaphoric. It is not a 'carrying across' of one thing onto another, but is a seeing through—diaphorically, diaphanously, diagnostically, diacritically. It not only means reading poetry. It means, especially, reading everything in life and work poetically. It does not mean stepping out of the depths through to anything else. Rather, it means walking through everything deeply, seeing through life deeply." Walking through everything deeply, seeing through life deeply--seeing through ones own life; why, this is the mystic's path, the mystic's way of moving and seeing, is it not? I cannot think of a better form of activism, a better way of changing the world than by seeing through it. Coincidentally, this is exactly what a post-modern world and a post-modern sensibility demands of us: to look deeply off the beaten path, to see through the apparent "hard, cold, reality" and into the soft edged margins of the world to behold her treasures. Seeing through allows one to turn one's life into art--to make a poem of one's life--and bear witness to the eternal philosophy so beautifully articulated by Sri Aurobindo in one of his last letters: "In the way that one treads with the greater Light above, even every difficulty gives its help and Night itself carries in it the burden of the Light that has to be." Existence is not like that, it is that.

Strange Shadows

2011-12-06T10:38:00.000-07:00

What is your substance, whereof are you made,

That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

Since every one hath, every one, one shade,

And you, but one, can every shadow lend.

Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit

Is poorly imitated after you;

Shakespeare, excerpted from Sonnet 53

Shakespeare wrote these words around 1609, just over 400 years ago. And this is, I think, the remarkable thing about Shakespeare: he becomes ever more relevant with the passage of time, and proves himself, over and over again, to be the ultimate psychologist and metaphysician. I don't think I have ever read a single thing in a psychology text that I did not first read in Shakespeare. Contained In these six lines totaling 42 words, is a virtual library of psychological and philosophical, even theological speculation, which amply illustrates the unconscious realites influencing each one of us, the reality of "millions of strange shadows."

Nothing is ever what it appears to be. To that end we need a new psychology, not a psychology based on what we perceive as “reality,” but a psychology of seeing through the illusion of reality so that even greater truths having tremendous impacts on daily living may be glimpsed. One of the first steps in the praxis of what I want to call a diaphoric psychology, a psychology of seeing through, is developing the ability to see into the shadows. Both Shakespeare and Jung owe a debt to Plato in developing their respective notions of shadow. In Platonic thought, the only thing that truly exists is an ideal, an ideal existence or an ideal form, which in turn casts its shadow in the material world. So, for instance, in the case of a sphere, every spherical, round thing or image that we encounter in our physical, material world is a shadow of the ideal spherical form that our ordinary consciousness cannot know or grasp.

Moreover, the shadow of the ideal form that we encounter is a diminished, weakened, vitiated, or lessened aspect of the ideal. In this particular sonnet, Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that the bewildering beloved is the ideal and that the "millions of strange shadows" are pale imitations of the beloved ideal. But I tend to favor an interpretation that most literary critics would reject because of its clumsy inelegance. When the Poet writes, "Since every one hath, every one, one shade…" I wonder if he isn't speaking to the persistently frustrating sense that each one of us has, a sense that intimates that there is an ideal or perfect self that we intuit but cannot firmly grasp or live materially. But through the beloved, one may see into the divine reality that informs and shapes the material world, the ideal form that all other forms--including myself as lover--is but a shadow of. We cannot, as mere shades, perceive our ideal form. Thus even Allah, who in the tradition of the Hadith says to Mohammed, "I was a secret treasure, and I wanted to be known, so I made all of creation." Aspects of the divine were not available to its own conscious awareness, so it created shadows of itself and projected them into the physical world. Now, this is not so tenuous a connection as it may first appear because of that word, "substance," and the manner in which Shakespeare chooses to employ it.

So, permit me a brief digression: In 1609, religion was a very big deal in England, the country itself being torn apart by the political manipulations of religion, and individuals were regularly executed for professing the "wrong" beliefs, beliefs that were at odds with, and therefore a threat to the State. The rites of the Catholic Church could not be openly expressed but Shakespeare, as recent scholarship has shown, threw in his lot with the Catholic Church and often made subtle allusions to Catholic dogma. And in this instance, as he writes, "What is your substance, whereof are you made….And you, but one, can every shadow lend,” there is, to my ear, an unmistakable, ringing resonance to the words of the sacrament (as it was written in 1609):

The…sonne of GOD, begotten of his father before al worldes, god of God, lyghte of lyghte, verye God of verye God, gotten, not made, beynge of one substance wyth the father, by whome all thinges were made,

Once again returning to Plato, it was his assertion that the ideal forms that one's ordinary consciousness cannot perceive may be perceived by an elevated or awakened spiritual consciousness, a consciousness that sees through the material world and its physical limitations. This kind of seeing through is not tied to any particular tradition or frame. This kind of seeing through is a seeing that results from breaking the mirror, a mirror in which we only see reflected and framed our own exclusive and auto-erotic, solipsistic thinking. We are breaking the mirror in which we see only what we want or expect to see, breaking the mirror in order to see through it and discover the other essential and hitherto unknown elements contained within the frame.

This is exactly the sort of psychic vandalism that Jung tried to perpetrate all throughout his long life. It is important to understand that Jung was fluent in the ancient Greek language and read Plato without the often problematic filter of a translator, and there can be no doubt that Plato was a profound influence upon Jung's thought; the concept of archetype seems to arise directly out of Jung's understanding of Plato, and so it seems, does Jung's concept of the shadow. But one of the great gifts Jung possessed was the ability to take an extraordinarily big, complex idea and bring it into a sort of personal relevance, and this is exactly what he does with Platonic notions such as shadow.

Jung writes:

In its personal aspect the shadow stands for the 'personal dark,' as the personification of the contents of our psyche that have not been lived, have been excluded, rejected or repressed during our life, in its collective aspect for the generally human dark side of us, for the tendency to the inferior and the dark immanent in the make-up of every[one]…The shadow stands, so to speak, on the threshold of the…collective unconscious, it is the…not sufficiently lived side of our psyche. It bars the way to the creative depths of the unconscious with the dark mass of that stuff of experience we have never admitted into our life. For this reason we see those persons gradually or suddenly afflicted with sterility who try convulsively, with an awful exertion of will far beyond their power, to hold themselves 'on top,' and who can confess their own weaknesses neither to themselves nor to others. Their spiritual and moral plane is nothing that has been attained naturally, but rather an artificially erected scaffold held up by force and therefore always in danger of breaking down under the slightest burden (Psychology and Religion).

We all carry a shadow and the less conscious we are able to be of it, the darker and denser it becomes. We cannot simply suppress or repress the shadow; Jung suggests that is as little use as "beheading [is] against a headache." Seeing into one's shadow means becoming unflinchingly aware and conscious of what and who one really is. Just like a mirror, we always project ourselves onto everything of which we are unconscious, but recognizing and seeing into this and being willing to bear the painful, narcissistic wound to one's ego is the equivalent of shattering the mirror. One who can do this, as Jung writes, is"…[one] who knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in [oneself], and if [one] only learns to deal with [one's] own shadow then [one] has done something real for the world."

By seeing into our own shadow and taking responsibility for "seeing through," we literally become the kind of agents of change in the world we often fantasize about becoming. Additionally, and for many this is the icing on the cake, we then have it close at hand to awake to a deeper spiritual understanding of our world, an understanding of what we really are, and just how magnificent and powerful we, ourselves, really are. A willingness to explore the "millions of strange shadows" embedded within our individual experiences of Psyche brings us closer to the Platonic ideal of what we are as human beings, closer to a dynamic, unmistakable, felt experience of the divine within us, and the sacred realization that indeed, Thou art That.

Moby Dick Is My "Good Book"

2011-11-29T17:51:00.000-07:00

Characteristics that put one in tune with the desires and movements of the soul are attitudes that cultivate the attributes of the open heart: kindness, gentleness, fairness, honesty, an appreciation for the nature of things, and a sense of timing—awareness that the time for a particular action or non-action is the right time or the wrong time. Embodying these characteristics require a new and perhaps unusual kind of heroism.

The protagonist of Melville’s Moby Dick is a very different protagonist than the usual heroic type whose business it is to accomplish great things. Ishmael is quiet, introspective, and in awe of the wide world around him, as well as the deep, unfathomable world within every human being. He is an educated man, himself an educator, and his humor is ironic and as sharp as the tip of a harpoon. He understands that his task is to live, as best he can, the life he is faced with, to try to accept and understand rather than escape life’s struggles; feel rather than deflect its unpleasant emotions; attempt to open his heart to, rather than reject, whatever he finds unfamiliar and strange.

Ishmael goes to sea to immerse himself in his problems so that he may see them more clearly, not to escape from them:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for cap and ball. I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

How does Ishmael take to ship? Not as a paying passenger on a cruise line, nor does he sneak aboard and stow himself away. He goes aboard to work, and to work hard. Ishmael’s lot as a sailor is not a pleasant one, and he’s paid a fraction of what the other, more experienced tars are paid, but what he gains in terms of self awareness and in the restoration of psychic balance is priceless. Ishmael goes to sea and works the way one would enter into analysis and approach therapeutic work—intensely, fully immersed in, and at the mercy of, the unconscious currents and depths of psyche.

The sea is, as a symbol, synonymous with the unconscious; as I mentioned before, it is a part of the watercourse way of the Tao. That the ocean is the place from which all life arises just as psyche is the place from which all consciousness arises is a parallel that can’t be denied. In its unfathomable and uncharted depths are creatures and forces about which one may only speculate, but without them, life on terra firma would not be possible. Ishmael himself says, …we see ourselves in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. And, most importantly, Ishmael encounters this mysterium with humility, awe, and respect. It is only the attitude of modesty--complete vulnerability--that can protect one; it is only by becoming smaller than small that one may survive the terrible onslaught that the dark energies of the soul impresses upon us.

Armed only with the virtues of humility and faith, Ishmael consents to choose the ship he and his newfound friend, Queequeg will ship on. Queequeg tells Ishmael that Yojo, Queequeg’s “little black god,” has already chosen the proper ship for them, and now Ishmael must go to the docks and find it, seeming for all outward appearances, by chance. And so he does; Ishmael signs on to crew for the Pequod, and is given the 300^th lay, a mere pittance of the total profit the voyage is expected to make, which is divided into lays and assigned in accordance to one’s rank and importance aboard the ship.

One may think that Captain Ahab, that “Anaconda of an old man,” the same Ahab who was brave (or foolish) enough to spit into a sacred church chalice, the fearsome captain who commands the hearts and souls of his crew even against their better judgements, would be the great, heroic figure of the novel. But Ahab lacks Ishmael’s qualities of flexibility and self-reflection, and this psychic lacunae proves to be his tragic, as well as his fatal, flaw: The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run, he says. Doubt and uncertainty do not often possess Ahab, and even on the rare occasions when they do, he quickly dismisses such thoughts, for he hates what he cannot understand. What Ahab hates, he wants to destroy. And what he hates above all is the white whale:

He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principle, I will wreak that hat upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

Ishmael, however, models the precise attitude that best serves a soulful, soul-filled exploration of self. He knows that he knows nothing for certain, he takes nothing for granted, and he, unlike Ahab, humbles himself before the terrible awe that emanates from the core of the mysterium. He is no longer Ishmael the man, he has become one whose ego has merged with the All; he has become a part of the very mystery he now contemplates; he is now no one, going nowhere:

…by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, [one] at last…loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of the at deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly –discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.

Ahab meditates upon the “inscrutable” mystery and finds a hot, insuppressible, raging hate; Ishmael reflects upon the very same“inscrutable” nature of existence and apprehends a god. Ishmael has become a part of everyone and everything by willingly inhabiting an emotional space which allowed his ego to join the “deep, blue, bottomless soul,” a space in which he belongs to no one and to nothing, not even himself.

Developing the ability to submit to the archetypal forces at work on one’s life is one of the most difficult of tasks that can be undertaken. It seems utterly reasonable, admirable even, to fight to assert and preserve one’s individuality—one’s ego—in the face of such overwhelming forces of nature as are the archetypes. That is what Ahab does after all, and he’s held in awe for it, regarded as an “ungodly, godly man.” Oedipus does it and is made a King. Odysseus is bestowed the honor of Achilles’ armor and defeats the Trojans. Moses leads the exodus of Israelites from captivity and slavery in Egypt. Heracles’ feats of strength and courage become the stuff of legend, and his father Zeus adores him all the more for them.

But all these great heroes suffer terribly as the result of their hubris: Ahab, lashed to his whale, drowns; blind Oedipus lives in exile and shame; Moses is prevented from crossing into the promised land; Heracles goes mad. Of these few examples mentioned, only Odysseus learns—he learns from his pummeling by Poseidon (softened up and made tender the way a butcher tenderizes a flank steak) and his instruction from Athena—to live more humbly, more in tune with the archetypal forces, no longer invested in outwitting them or anyone else. One must find a way, a more heartful way, to reject the external trappings of individual power in favor of acknowledging something deeper, a deeper, ubiquitous Something that binds all life together.

If one’s leave-taking one is to truly be of service to the soul, one must seek to become and remain the most humble of creatures. To put it simply, one must remain unattached (yet fully engaged in a given moment) to any one thing or idea, being receptive to whatever promptings and urgings arise from the depths of the deep, blue, bottomless soul. The trick is to find a way to live beyond the reach of the ego, the ego being that thing within us that shouts, “This is I, and this “I” is the only “I” I can be!” at every opportunity; we must clear the decks and prepare ourselves as one would prepare a new canvass so the soul may paint us into our lives.

One may even enlist the Ego in a willingness to face death in order for the heroic leave-taking to commence. In fact the path one trods is often composed of, and supported by, the eerie awareness that an image of all one’s dead selves--all one's unchosen lives or paths--lay underfoot. That these conceptual corpses--these might-have-been-me’s--give the dimly lit way a firmness it would otherwise lack. The dead selves are empty, they haven’t been inhabited, their choices haven’t been carried through, or courage and stamina have waned and their promise decomposes; their notions, ideas, impulses, and emotions haven’t been sufficiently lived in or committed to. These dead lives pile up like cord wood and form clear, solid paths upon which to tread, much like the wooden paths winding through the soft ground of geysers and hot springs in Yellowstone Park.

To paraphrase Rilke, that is how one grows: by being defeated, decisively, and by constantly greater forces than one is capable of marshaling one's self . This is the kind of heroism needed now, at this present moment; the kind of heroism that surrenders to the primacy of the Soul and opens the heart. It is not a heroism of conquest or a heroism that pushes against people and things but rather, through the opening of the heart we push against the very ideas that constitute ourselves.

Radical Revisions of Belief

2011-11-22T08:35:00.000-07:00

I first posted this two years ago for Thanksgiving. I have a few more readers now, and I thought I'd make it available once more. Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and thanks for reading!

As Thanksgiving approaches, I'm reminded of Bertrand Russell's explication of what he called The Problem of Inductive Knowledge. We humans, Sherlock Holmes-like, tend to pride ourselves on our deductive abilities. We tend to think that we acquire most of our knowledge through deductive reasoning, i.e. pursuing knowledge from general circumstances to specific instances. But in reality, we think about ourselves and the world in exactly the opposite way, generalizing from our specific experiences to making sweeping assumptions about the world.

So, Russell's example was of a chicken, but since it's nearly Thanksgiving day, I'll use a turkey. Let's say that every day a turkey is fed. Every single instance of feeding tends to reinforce the turkey's belief that it will continue to be fed every day of its life by kindly members of the human race, and that its world is predictable, comfortable, and safe. Moreover, the turkey believes that the situation in the future will always remain the way it is right now. But one day, on a Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, something unexpected--something unimaginable--will happen to the turkey. It will, Russell says, incur a radical revision of belief.
Here endeth the lesson...

Not the glittering Weapon Fights the Fight, But Rather the Hero's Heart

2011-11-14T22:32:00.003-07:00

In my last post, I wrote about Tristram, that lover of beauty, that troubadour, that most courageous and intrepid of souls. I like the Arthurian heroes because they symbolize such an essential aspect of one's self-development, they perfectly reflect the development of the most propitious attitude regarding the confrontation with the Unknown, the mystery which constitutes the larger part of one's being. Arthur’s knights rushed headlong into adventures because nothing else in life was as important to them as exploring the unknown. Intrepid souls of any given historical epoch have always valued this, the inner adventure, above all others. Likewise, in the creation of a meaning filled life, nothing else matters the way encountering the hidden, stark terrors, within and without us, matters. It is the hero's heart that is most necessary Ovid instructs us, more so even than the glittering weapons that fight the fight; a sentiment that rings true precisely because the fight is within oneself and weapons, like externalized foes, play no part in a holy war. Victory in the battle with oneself is found in becoming, not tempered steel, but water.

Lao Tzu likens the Tao to water: The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao (Tao Te Ching, Eight). The Tao in turn corresponds to the “Ultimate,” the unknowable source out of which everything arises; it is comparable to the Platonic notion of soul, God, or the Jungian idea of the self. Lao Tzu’s observation that the Tao flows in places that human beings forsake or refuse to follow, exposes one of the factors that most contributes to the difficulty one has identifying and executing the leave-taking impulse. Tremendous waterfalls, mile-deep canyons gouged out of the earth, unnavigable white-water and obscure, powerful currents and undertows; dense thickets of vegetation, foliage, and trees; the stage upon which frightening and brutal predator-prey dramas are enacted; are all inescapable aspects of waterways around the world. Taking care to avoid dangers such as these would simply be acting upon good common sense. Indeed, not only would it be, it mostly is the common, sensible, thing to do from the ego's perspective. But there is more going on in Lao Tzu's metaphor than beauty, force, and danger. Water, water-ways, and the sea, are all metaphorically related to psyche, because as water creates and sustains all life, so too does Psyche.

The ego-based notion of what or whom one is, or should be, urges one to live sanely, cautiously, prophylacticly, and to preserve one’s self from any possible harm. To follow the watercourse way—the path of psyche, with its attendant remoteness and risk, or to venture like Arthur's knights alone into the forest at its thickest and most intimidating spot, is tantamount to defying the sheer, insurmountable weight of common sense. Of course, common sense arises from the collective sentiments of a society or culture and, as such, knows nothing of individuation, nor does it know of the demands laid at an individual’s doorstep by psyche. Something the novelist, Virginia Woolf understood when she wrote,

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say (The Common Reader, “Montaingne”).

To find one’s self in the position of defying the odds, “swimming against the current,” or often in the position of disregarding what all the ubiquitous “others” are saying, requires a great deal of courage, and not a little faith in the notion that psyche’s wisdom is greater than our own. One must be willing to believe that failure or even death is not the worst of possible outcomes. There are many victories won, many safe harbors sought, and many lives lived that are far worse than failure, discomfort, or death.

It is quite possible, and not at all surprising, that one intellectually recognizes that great risks are required to find deep meaning in a life. It is possible to give lip service to Thoreau’s aphorism that a life lived in “quiet desperation” is not really living at all. Nevertheless, to willingly expose one’s self to life in an undefended, undisguised, and undistorted manner runs counter to just about every instinct of self-preservation human beings posses. Exposure of this type, the willingness to consciously allow one’s self to remain open to the vicissitudes of fate, induces the birth of the psyche's heroic contents, which have heretofore lain dormant. These heroic constituents of psyche are energies that are able to deal ingeniously with the difficulties of living the exposed, unprotected, and purposeful existence.

Nearly all the mythic narratives of heroes— stories that I understand to describe the migration of the heroic constituents of psyche from unconsciousness into consciousness—begin with the story of an infant birth in the midst of extraordinary circumstances. A child who is most likely to be descended from royalty--a fact that, in such stories, has often been obscured or hidden from the child--is immediately abandoned and exposed in a river, open plain, or left alone on the side of a mountain. Sargon, Moses, Karna, Perseus, the twins, Remus and Romulus, Siegfried, were one and all, placed in a vessel of some kind and set afloat in a river or upon the sea. Oedipus, Paris, Gilgamesh (his mother was imprisoned and threw him out a window, at which time he was caught by an eagle who gently laid him in a garden), Cyrus, and Hercules were left defenseless on Terra-firma, expected to die from their exposure to the elements.

But at this point, the stories always seem to take an unexpected turn. These perinatal protagonists of myth posses traits of character that invite animals or kindly humans from humble means to adopt them and raise them to adulthood as if the foundling was a biological child. What I find to be a most fascinating aspect of these myths is the equanimity with which the infant hero accepts the perilous circumstances of his initiation into the world. There are no reports of crying, frightened, or hungry babies; indeed some are even fed by the animals who attend them, just as Lohengrin, even in adulthood, is fed by a swan or Romulus and Remus, who are fed by a she-wolf. The babes do not fight against their circumstances by trying to direct their vessels upstream, unhinge their hobbles, or roll down the mountainside. They are at ease in their bonds and seem to be in perfect harmony with the particular moment in time in which they find themselves occupying.

As they pass through childhood and adolescence, they are not embarrassed, nor do they resent, their lowly circumstances. In fact, without exception, they love their adopted parents thoroughly and whole-heartedly. They live harmoniously with the natural world, a talent that allows them to find a way to live in accord with the natural forces of their own nature as well. Indeed, in most cases they find great joy and contentment in their daily lives. If they are especially well grounded and emotionally centered, some of these mythic figures are able to preserve this characteristic of personality and grow into wise, humble, compassionate and singularly indomitable examples of human nature, with whom entire cultures (or, as in the case of such figures as Buddha or Jesus, even the entire world) must reckon.

The courage to kill kings, to slay dragons, or to lift sieges is not the kind of courage demanded of one harnessed to a soul off on its travels. The sort of courage that feeds the soul is quiet, accepting, and steadfast. In his correspondence, Rilke writes to a young poet that one must find the courage to face …the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. True courage is not found in the desire to destroy, it is found in the ability to face--and most of all to love--the singular, frightening, strange, and challenging event with courage and heartfulness.

Transforming the Unbearable

2011-10-26T09:04:00.003-07:00

I was speaking to a group last night about the adventures of Sir Gawain with the Green Knight and I was reminded once again how much I, like countless others over the vast expanse of centuries, am enchanted by the various tales of King Arthur. The ideals of chivalry, honesty, bravery, and mercy fired my childhood imagination, and I fantasized about my own Arthurian errantry in my basement bedroom, valorously battling fantastic creatures, like the Green Knight, in order to secure a knighthood of my own. At the time, I was oblivious to the phenomena of archetypes, and I had no idea that my fantasies were an unconscious enactment of the psychological facts—the archetypal images themselves—embedded in these legends.

For instance in Mallory’s tale of Tristram, he has been wounded in battle by an envenomed spear and faces death despite ministrations from the best surgeons (and presumably the finest leaches, too) in Cornwall, and a risky journey to an unknown, hostile country is required for healing. Tristram is told by a nameless, “right wise lady” that he “should never be whole but if Sir Tristram went into the same country that the venom came from, and in that country should he be holpen or else never” (Tales Of King Arthur 92-3). The problem is that the inhabitants of the country in which the venom originated are nursing a powerful hatred for Tristram because he killed the best knight they had, and if any of them knew that Tristram was near at hand, they would surely try to kill him in return.

Tristram’s dilemma is this: stay where everything is familiar and he is well cared for, but by staying put, he will most certainly die; or, venture into a completely foreign and hostile land where it is feared, if Tristram’s true identity is revealed, he may probably be killed. Tristam’s dilemma is the psychic dilemma each one of us faces painted in archetypal images: the only viable choice, when life amasses a critical degree of gravity, is to venture into dangerous psychic territory, where it seems one’s very sanity is at risk, in order to seek an alchemical, holistic, cure for what ails one. In other words, one has to plunge deeper and more consciously into the psycho-emotional wound, follow the path of its wounding back to its source, leaving conventional wisdom, fears of survival, and material comforts behind. It is only then that one may find healing; it is only then that one may, at long last, live! My most encouraging and reliable friend, Frederich Nietzsche writes:

For believe me! — the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon be past when you could be content to live concealed in the woods like timid deer! (The Gay Science aph. 283).

Psyche eventually foments a revolt directed against living timidly in the forests of the unconscious. Psyche will not let one live a life of unconsciousness without exacting a corresponding cost, payable in some form of suffering. Psyche is always moving us into situations of psychological meaning and significance, the constituents of a happy, contented life. Achieving such significance or meaning is only a question of one's commitment to accepting one's life on the terms life itself imposes, and to do so lovingly and with a full heart of gratitude--Amor Fati.

Arthur’s knights rushed into unknown adventures because there was nothing else in life as important to them as facing the unknown. Intrepid souls of any given historical epoch have always valued this, the inner adventure, above all others and nothing is more foreign to us than our own inner worlds. In the creation of a meaning filled life, nothing else matters the way encountering the hidden, stark terrors, within us as well without, matters.

Jung wrote, “The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego” (CW 14 §788).
Becoming aware of what was previously unconscious, and because of that unconsciousness frightening, causes the ego to suffer a wound, and one’s effort must be applied to the task of somehow finding a way to live with, and distill meaning from, the wounding of the ego. To do so does not require the destruction of the ego, but rather it requires an expansion of the ego so that it may hold conflicting, paradoxical, puzzling, unexpected thoughts and feelings with relative comfort.

I believe that the dilation of ego is, nolens volens, related to what is commonly referred to as enlightenment. The more ego can expand, facilitating the movement from unconsciousness to consciousness, the more the light penetrates shadows, the clearer it becomes that in the one is concealed the all and vice-versa, ego accommodates and becomes one with everything it encounters. And what, after all, is enlightenment if not freedom from desire and suffering; the knowledge that each thing also contains everything else; that suffering, longing, happiness and safety are not really different from one another?

Edward Edinger provides an outline of what such a process of transformation might look like:

First there is an agone or contest in which the [ego]…is in contest with darkness or evil. Secondly, there is a pathos or passion in which the [ego] undergoes suffering and defeat. Third is a threnos or lamentation for the defeated…And fourthly, there is a theophany, a rebirth of life on another level with a reversal of emotion from sorrow to joy. (The Tragic Hero )

This formula is really a description of the ego offering itself as a sacrifice to itself, in much the same way as do the dying and resurrected gods of mythology, Christ, Odin, Innana and Dionysus, to name just a few. What is important to understand is that in this experience, terrifying though it may be, death is not a literal death but is instead a metaphorical and psychological death. The god sacrificing itself to itself reflects the contents of consciousness as conveyed to the unconscious and of the unconscious to consciousness.

Attending to one’s suffering in this fashion is fraught with difficulty, for one must face deep, dark and potent fears. The actual, “real time” suffering must be endured as consciously as possible, with attention given to nursing the suffering of an immense wounding. Yet, at the same time, one must find a safe distance from where one is able to bear witness to the self same suffering, see it as objectively as one can, and understand that such anguish is a normal concomitant of being a fully sentient, and human, being. Finally, one must execute this impressive feat of forbearance with the calm acceptance of one who finds solace in the certainty that while what is yet to come may not be known or even conceived of, the mystery that enfolds the universe is penetrated a little more deeply. Those things that once seemed unbearable, terrifying, and evil are now made into, as Henry Miller has said, a source of beauty.

My Peculiar (Pre) Occupations

2011-10-14T02:52:00.000-07:00

I prithee, speak; we will not trust our eyes
Without our ears; thou art not what thou seem'st.
--King Henry IV, Scene IV

I admit (perhaps to the chagrin of some of my friends) to being deeply conflicted about the Occupy Wall Street movement that is gaining more and more traction around the country. So I am going to use this space to think out loud about what's happening, not just here at home but around the world, and try to find some clarity for myself. The cultural critic in me is excited by the awakened anger in our society over what I understand as an institutionalized program of dehumanization that has increasingly dominated American life over the past thirty years. The historian in me knows that this movement, if followed to its logical conclusion, will be drenched in the blood of innocents and its outcome far from certain. I would, perhaps naively, like to find a way to create some sort of synthesis out of this antithetical pair of thoughts.

The greedy decadence typified by the very, very rich who are collectively referred to by this movement as "Wall Street" has poisoned the well of American Democracy and has practically nullified the extraordinary--and in terms of both history and psychology, extraordinarily novel--ideas at the heart of our "Great Experiment;" freedom, equality, the rule of law or constitutionalism, and the well-being of ordinary people seem now to be the idealistic flotsam and jetsam of a devastating failure of will--a failure of the will to enoble and value human existence itself regardless of the costs it exacts in terms of personal or communal security, comfort, and immediate gratification.

This is where, I believe, it starts to get complicated. I, myself--all of us, really--are culpable when it comes to assuming responsibility for turning the American Dream into a nightmare for so many. A self-congratulatory individual exceptionalism has murdered American Exceptionalism. What made America unique in the world was the prevailing ethos among its citizenry that members of the society had a duty to, when necessary, act against their own self-interests to safeguard the larger interests of the country. The opposite impulse now seems to preside over most contemporary aspects of American life and it has regrettably become commonplace for Americans to act against the interests of their country in order to safeguard their own.

Corporations have become powerful in this country precisely because we have surrendered individual responsibility for our lives and we want them to be easily manageable, predictable and satisfied. For example, most of us don't grow or kill our own food, we continue to drive automobiles promiscuously even though workable oil deposits will likely be exhausted in forty years or so, television offers 150 channels obsessed with the trivial or the voyeuristic or the sedating in astonishingly evolving clarity and immediacy, and our dysfunctionally narcissistic political constituencies want our politicians to repeatedly reassure us that we are the greatest, most unique, and most praise-worthy nation on earth despite increasingly disturbing evidence to the contrary. As Americans, we steroidally tout our fearlessness while being simultaneously crippled by fears of terrorism, homosexuality, immigrants, non-Christian religions, and any introspection at all lest we might be forced to honestly confront our shortcomings. As Aeschylus wrote in The Eumenides, "You wish to be called righteous rather than act right." And with that short yet plangent sentence written in 458 B.C.E., Aeschylus clairvoyantly captured the essence of American life in the fall of the year 2011 C.E.

Rising up, pointing out, and resisting the exsanguinating arc of life in America today is a good start and a necessary prelude to meaningful change in our culture. But all of us, not just the wealthiest 1%, should try to see ourselves more objectively, more realistically, and more humanely. It's a very complicated world and as such it produces very complicated problems, and the only viable answer to these problems that I can find is to more radically occupy one's own inner space and become more conscious of the way in which one is living into the world. Each of us must be willing to wrestle with questions such as, how much money is enough? What can I, what should I, and what do I contribute to the world? How is my refusal to be aware of my own fear harming my fellows as well as the planet? Fear is, I think, the biggest problem we face in this country, and ironically, the willingness to be aware of one's fear is a powerful form of fearlessness that instantly removes the necessity of having an individual (or even a national) boogeyman--some other one can point to and yolk to the responsibility for creating all our problems. The willingness to become conscious of the fear that drives us clears the way for creating not just community, but communitas--a sacred web of interconnectedness among apparently separate individuals. I think the desire for such a communal experience is what's really at the heart of the "Occupy" movement.

In The Eumenides, Athena instructs the Athenians in how to create a viable democracy, one that is responsive to the needs of its people as well as to its own imperative:

Neither anarchy nor tyranny, my people.

Worship the Mean, I urge you,
shore it up with reverence and never
banish terror from the gates, not outright.
Where is the righteous man who knows no fear?
The stronger your fear, [the stronger] your reverence for the just,
the stronger your country's wall and city's safety,
[....]
Untouched by lust for spoil, this court of law
majestic, swift to fury, rising above you
as you sleep, our night watch always wakeful,
guardian of our land--I found it [i.e. begin it] here and now.

So I advise you, Athens. I have drawn this out
to rouse you to your future. You must rise,
each man must cast his lot and judge the case,
reverent to his oath. Now I have finished.

Being willing to be aware of and admit to fear is a tremendous strength that awakens the responsibility to attend to one's needs--to one's country's needs--rationally and sensibly, with justice and equality anchoring the response. By worshiping the mean, as Athena enjoins, harmony is created and imbalance is remedied creating strength with flexibility, confidence tempered by humility, wealth and generosity. Such balance, this Golden Mean, already exists everywhere around us and we need only shift perspectives a bit--open our hearts and minds--in order to inhabit it.

A little while later, the leader of the Athenian people approaches the Goddess:

Queen Athena,
where is the home you say is mine to hold?

The Goddess responds with nearly unutterably beautiful words:

Where all the pain and anguish end. Accept it.

The Flagstaff Lava Tube: The Slow River of Dark Night

2011-10-08T16:05:00.002-07:00

Famous last words of every spelunker everywhere: "It's not as narrow as it looks." In this case happily, it's true. This is the entrance into the the largest cave of its kind in Arizona. It formed some 700,000 years ago and is approximately a mile long. The entrance into the tube looks like a mouth and the mile long tunnel is a geologic alimentary canal that swallows one into an ancient past. I have never been in a place that is so dark and so quiet and so obviously ancient as this. I imagine this to be the site of our local, Northern Arizona Ploutonion--the entrance to the Underworld. No Kerboros guarded the entry way, and no ferryman awaited me, yet the hardened molten rock cave floor consists of wave-like surges and ripples that lets one know little has changed inside this tube for the better part of a million years, and one of the compelling experiences of this cave is how one may feel psychologically at sea because of its capacity for disorientation. Time seems to slow down so that one feels submerged much longer than one actually is and one's apparently normal gait and pace, comfortable in the daylight world, is imperceptibly yet significantly slower below ground in the cave.

It seemed not only natural but obligatory, once well into the cave, so I extinguished my light and sat in the soundless darkness. As I sat, I was initially nervous knowing that I only brought one light source and no extra batteries; "note to myself...," I thought. But in a little while, I began to wonder about the vaguely intrauterine experience I was having as the result of knowing that I was literally in the womb of the Great Mother, and eventually I began to "see," as it were, what appeared to me to be energetic etchings of the physical features of my surroundings so that if I had to, I may have been able to move around safely without artificial light. Optical trickery, I suppose, but it made me wonder why, that in place so clearly optimal to a vision quest or other initiatory experience, there wasn't ancient evidence of this place being sacred to human beings; why were there no petroglyphs or prehistoric indications attesting to the mystery of this place?

So I called a National Forest Service Archaeologist to ask about some of the questions I had, and according to him there are no petroglyphs (although he did note that there are historic charcoal graffiti near the back of the tube which were left by more modern humans) because this part of the Flagstaff area was not generally inhabited--it was probably located at too high an elevation to be comfortably occupied, a theory supported by the fact that there are no other known prehistoric archaeological sites in the general area of the lava tube, although the area was most likely well known by hunting parties throughout prehistory. But such hunters would not be likely to have at the ready supplies needed for both light and art, they would not have the time nor the inclination to produce sacred art and risk the cost of time lost to the hunt or the caprices of weather. The archaeologist also speculated that the nature of the rock itself is not conducive to holding painted images (I can't seem to remember why, exactly).

So there you have the objective facts of the underground cave as I understand them. As interesting as all of this is, I am much more fascinated with the subjective facts of the deep darkness as I experienced it. In this "slow river of dark night," to borrow a phrase from Pindar, a darkness darker than any darkness in the upper world, darkness seems to saturate every pore. As without so within, the alchemists said, and I feel the truth of that equation as I sense the darkness within me expand endlessly as well. But the darkness within isn't evil it's just unknown and usually impenetrable, but it unavoidably evokes a kind of existential anxiety so that one is almost reflexively put into a religious (not the same as spiritual) position and hopes to be protected or saved, or to somehow be allowed outside of ourselves. But if this rather useless impulse can be resisted, the communion with the darkness draws us ever more deeply into the innermost core--the soul--of ourselves and we find in the darkness the lost half of ourselves. The light of consciousness and self awareness begins to illuminate the shadows and the dawning of this inner light heralds a new birth, a novel understanding that the beginning of a new way of life is at hand. This feeling-awareness is similar to what Goethe described in one of his Maxims as "erotomorphism," which "[...] transforms all happening into ethical-sensuous feeling." Erotomorphism transcends the tendency to give shape to experience (for instance the habit of attributing to the idea of god a distinctly human form called anthropomorphism) and allows one to be completely dissolved into the sensation-awareness itself which is from a rational perspective a paradox, a deep experience of knowing without comprehension. But, as I've written elsewhere, colliding with a paradox is an indication that one has entered into the realm of the Divine.

A conscious sojourn in the dark depths of one's being invites a tremendous opportunity for reconcilliation with one's self and a powerful healing. At the beginning of the celebration of the Mysteries at Eleusis, a procession was held in honor of Asklepios, the god of healing and medical arts. On this day, September 18th, the ruler of the underworld (Hades or Pluto) assumes the form of the god of healing and shows those present a kindly, gentle, and radiant face! The fearsome, terrifying ruler of the underworld lets us see his gentle aspect; this is certainly one of the hidden treasures one discovers in the underworld (Hades means "hidden" or "invisible;" Pluto means "riches" or "wealth"). The next night--for it was the darkness which was considered holy--on the 19th, the really important gathering (the agyrmos), the Mysteria, was to begin; all else that came before was simply preparation for this all important evening.

When one is immersed in darkness, form is in constant conflict with formlessness and it is out of this internalized war that beauty may be realized. W.B. Yeats once said, "We make out of a quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of a quarrel with ourselves, poetry." In the Dark, we confront a mysterious force within us, a force that startles us, a force that initially we resist. But if we stay with the struggle, if we are willing to quarrel with ourselves, we find conflict's resolution in beauty. One may find this same idea, if not the same language, in Jung's writing. Jung describes the tensions between opposites as the energy of life itself; life literally arises from this conflict. Perhaps that is to what Heraclitus referred when he famously wrote that "War is the father of us all." The rational mind, the daylight mind, cannot grasp what we are or why we are. The answers to those questions are supplied by the midnight mind, the dark mind that always, and in all ways, already knows but knows without attaching its knowing to form or symbol or referent. The midnight mind is not rational, it is a-rational or perhaps non-rational, even irrational; to people bound to the daylight, rational world it appears to be madness. But as Hamlet said, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't."

Falstaff, Freud, and Nietzsche: Plus de Vie

2011-09-27T00:15:00.014-07:00

In this blog I make much of Falstaff; if you read my first post on this blog you understand that Falstaff is the raison d'etre of the whole thing, even though the things I write about have evolved of their own accord well beyond my original vision. And then there is my most favorite of philosophers, one whose presence was implicit even then in the title of the first post, the utterly unique Frederick Nietzsche, 1844-1900. I don't know why, really, but I always remember that his death came in the same year that Freud published his magnum opus, The Interpretation of Dreams. Perhaps I link the two of them in my memory not only because they are both so singularly misunderstood by popular culture, a culture that has not read either of them very closely or deeply yet stubbornly insists on their vilification and their lunacy, but also because they were so remarkably similar in their concepts about human beings--particularly of the unconscious. Yet Freud insisted, disingenuously I believe, that he never read Nietzsche. This from a man who devoured the written word as though he were starving and literature was manna from heaven.

Yet it is not an exaggeration on my part to say that it was Freud who saved my life and Nietzsche who gave it meaning. I began reading Freud when I was still a cop and I kept a carefully concealed volume from James Strachey's translation of Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, in my work briefcase. I would read Freud by the dim interior lights of the patrol car in remote spots on quiet evenings when the entire city seemed to sleep. I often wonder what my brothers in blue would have thought--what one of them did think, the one who discovered me reading in a parking garage early one Sunday morning (and would he read this blog with some sense of dismay). But I was so unhappy in those days, and so lost to myself I knew of no other place to turn than the Father of Psychology himself, Sigmund Freud. In my readings Freud, so poignantly conflicted in relationship to his own father, became a sort of intellectual and emotional father to me, and yes, my relationship to Freud was no less conflicted nor was it any less poignant. Because of Freud I began to understand myself as a psychological being replete with unfathomed intellectual, emotional, and soulful concerns.

Nietzsche brought meaning into my life through his unshakeable faith in himself and in the power of language, the power of the word. St. John wrote: And the Word was made flesh, and dwelled among us, [...] full of grace and truth; and like the Jesus he admired, much to the outrage of the Christians he despised, he was in my estimation an incarnation of exactly that Logos. For Nietzsche, as well as Falstaff, words were not simply the means of communication, they were sentient, living beings of tremendous power, influence, and skill. Nietzsche and Falstaff both used language to transcend average, mundane human existence and occupy--to really live into--the realm of the sublime. Both Nietzsche and Falstaff were warriors who turned against the very systems that produced them and exposed hypocrisy and fusty, hidebound tradition for the illusions they were. Certainly Falstaff was more overtly a clown than the deliciously ironic Nietzsche, but neither lacked a fulsome sense of humor and, most impressively to me, they each possessed an exquisite sense of the utterly absurd and unlikely--indeed, improbable--nature of life. But each is too much of a teacher and a warrior to submit to an irrecoverably nihilistic philosophy; rather it was a more poignant, moving, and loving embrace of life as conveyed in the French phrase, La vie est dure, mais elle est belle (Life is hard, but it is also beautiful). Neither Falstaff nor Nietzsche would ever surrender to a suicidal impulse but, in the ironic transposition of values at which they each excelled, would unabashedly find comfort in the thought of it.

Nietzsche hates the idea of any sort of system almost as much as the systematizers who construct them and Falstaff tries any way he possibly can to get out of "missions." They both look to developing the self as their great work, even though in Falstaff's case his ideal self is larcenous, lazy, gluttonous, drunk, and lusty while Nietzsche's ideal is to overcome his own weaknesses. Along with Freud, they each see themselves as an ubermensch, the ideal human being, so much so that each in his own way can say of himself without a hint of blasphemy, Ecce Homo. But these self images are also illusions; Nietzsche once wrote that we need "comforting illusions" because without them, he says, we would die of the truth. Freud defiantly decreed, "where Id was, there Ego shall be," and Falstaff said, perhaps with more self awareness than either of the other two, "I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass." But in death Freud parts company with the philologist and the knight. Freud died a satisfied man who was able to have a life of meaningful work and a great capacity for love. Falstaff, and perhaps Nietzsche, too, died for the want of love. Shakespeare tells us that Falstaff dies of a "fracted and corroborate" heart--a confirmed and irreparably broken heart, which Shakespeare foreshadowed earlier in the play:

No, my good lord; banish Peto,
banish Bardolph, banish Poins: but for sweet Jack
Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff,
valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant,
being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him
thy Harry's company, banish not him thy Harry's
company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.

And as for Nietzsche, was there ever another mortal who was so unsuccessful in relationships of love? His mother and sister were astonishingly manipulative and cunning, and the brilliant, beautiful Lou, the enigmatic, indecipherable Lou, would belong to no one, single man (although she was most fond of Freud), and his need to instruct her as a disciple doomed whatever romance he may have desired. Whether it was his splendid isolation, his in-his-selfness that contributed to his madness or simply piss poor protoplasm, one can't be entirely sure.

What I can be sure of is that all three of these men saved me. All three of them have been called immoral, mad, charlatans, dishonest and worse. And all three of them have taught me more trenchantly what it means to be a human than the most popularly regarded of moral or spiritual men and regardless of the capricious fortunes of the academy or the inconstant valuations of Western Cultural opinions, they will always have and hold from me the highest of blessings and offices that they in their courage and generosity first bestowed upon me: life, more life.

Celebration

2011-09-22T21:38:00.001-07:00

What a nice surprise I received in my email today. My pal Stephanie honored me by nominating a piece I contributed to her marvelous on line journal: "Your [...] nonfiction piece in Mythopoetry Scholar, volume two was nominated by mythopoetry.com for consideration in the 'Best of the Net' awards determined each year by Sundress Publications." So to celebrate I will recycle it here, and please check out Stephanie's e-zine.

Should Not in Greatest Arts Some Scars Be Found?
A Meditation On Deformed Beauty
-Bradley Olson

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal.
A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. –Leonard Cohen

Scars are curious things given an even more curious name: the word scar is derived from the Greek word eschara, meaning place of fire. The word does not mean caused by fire nor that scars are the result of exposing one’s skin to fire, although there is a connection to the Latin word for scab. No, scar means quite literally the place of fire: the fire is found within the scar and the scar is already present in the fire. Perhaps its derivation has to do with the sensation of intense, searing pain, the kind of pain borne by the body at the receipt of a wound, a wound on fire with pain, and deep enough to create scarring. There are other connections to fire to be found in scars: wounds that result in scarring tend to bleed heavily, and blood has long been symbolically associated with fire. Phrases like, “he makes my blood boil” find their roots in the relationship between the physiological arousal of increased blood flow and fire as the symbol of intense passion. Purification is another ancient relationship between fire and blood; together they form the basis of ritual sacrifice and, in fact, bleeding is the body’s way of purifying a wound.

The most familiar English usage defines a scar as a mark left on the skin after a surface injury or wound has healed. Scars commemorate and memorialize, they freeze time, space, and emotion in pale, sometimes jagged and awkwardly knitted lines on the skin, and not infrequently, they leave a jagged signature upon the heart as well. And even though there is no apparent etymological relationship between them, one can’t resist adding an “e” to scar, to create the word scare. A scary encounter leaves scars, even children know that. Psychic trauma is referred to as emotional scarring, and it gets its very own medically approved diagnosis: Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. One can hardly deny that it makes intuitive sense to relate scar and scare. After all, intense fear–being scared to death for instance–leaves its deeply etched mark upon the mind even though the frightening event has long since passed. In fact, it is often the scar no one else can see that is the hardest to bear.

Chatting with a friend the other day, we began talking about scars–major scars, deep scars, vivisecting surgical scars–and how hard it is to adjust to living with them. Regarding the outside of the body, worry about what others see when they look at one’s wounds, and concern over the kind of narratives others will apply to explain the wound occupy one’s thoughts, erode one’s self-confidence, and force one to harshly revise or re-imagine one’s body image. On the inside, in the mind’s eye, the scar is an immutable reminder of one’s own vulnerability, one’s mortality, and one’s ultimate fragility in the face of fortune’s vicissitudes. All one’s fears, everything that scares, are made conscious in unaccustomed and disturbing clarity; wraiths materialize through unfamiliar fault-lines spanning the topography of previously unmarked flesh.

Scars also serve as a means of identification: if one ever has the misfortune of being booked into jail, one of the questions that will be asked of you is whether you have any birthmarks, tattoos, or scars. Scars are an ancient way of tendering or proffering one’s identity. One of the most poignant accounts of recognition and identification may be found in Book XIX of The Odyssey, when the disguised Odysseus (transfigured to look like an old, decrepit beggar by Athena) is given a bath by his old nursemaid, Euryclea: as she begins to bath him, she recognizes the scar on his thigh, received as a small boy when he was gored by a boar, and through her recognition of the scar, identifies Odysseus himself. Her eyes fill with tears of mixed grief and joy as she clutches him by his beard and calls him her “dear boy.” For he who was dead is alive again and he, who was lost, is found.

For the lover longing for the beloved, the beloved’s scar is a welcome affirmation of her presence. The scar is an inseparable part of the beloved herself, and any sight of it ipso facto incarnates the beloved; so much so, in fact, that the scar may become as much an object of love as the loved one herself. Writing of the Christ’s scars in his book, The City of God, St. Augustine expresses a similar sentiment when he says that they (Christ’s scars) will not “be a deformity, but [have] a dignity in them; and a certain kind of beauty will shine in them, in the body, though not of the body.” This is an essential idea to take note of, and it bears repeating that the body does not manufacture the beauty shining in and through the scars, in fact the body is not, in and of itself, beautiful; the body is a most imperfect vessel. If the body does not produce the beauty, then what does? Beauty is, in fact, created by a powerful alchemy involving a scarring wound, a loving gaze, and a precious foundling, all culminating in a moment of poetry and illumination. It is the result of, as Leonard Cohen sang, the word becoming flesh. Love is transformed from an abstract, vaguely meaningful word into a living, breathing, and human experience promising answers to all life’s insoluble riddles (It is worth pointing out that wounds, particularly lacerations, to the body often assume the shape of a mouth. Perhaps the word cannot become flesh without inflicting a wound; in other words, creating a mouth which has something to say.)

According to Greek Stoic philosophers the word, or logos, embodied the creative principle; it was literally the singular, creative force. Imagine the blinding light that would pour out of every pore of the body if one managed to install the universal creative force within a single human being. And yet, that is the way in which the beloved is usually encountered: she is met as one who has fashioned the entire universe solely for the pleasure of the fortunate lover upon whom she smiles, she becomes conflated with the creatrix belle-mère, the beautiful mother-goddess who creates the world. Unfortunately, it is too often a commonplace that the logos lives just outside one’s own experience, remains embodied in another, and the desire to lose oneself in the beloved arises quickly. An appealing idea begins to dawn that loosing oneself may, in fact, be the answer to escaping one’s own inner struggles and unmanageable, painful emotions. The beloved is perfect, or so the fugitive consciousness reasons, and oneself is irredeemably flawed; her scars radiate the light of creation while one’s own simply accentuate one’s brokenness; and so convinced, the flight from the self into the other is complete.

The scar and its shadow are made deeper and darker by attempts to recoil from and hide them, and one’s anguish is compounded as the attempts to conceal one’s scars inevitably fail, until finally, one wears one’s scars as a symbol of everything corrupted, debauched, perverted, and subverted within. Nothing emanating from such an internal state can help but be grotesquely and tragically flawed. In a poem called, My Father’s Wedding, Robert Bly describes the state of affairs resulting from such an inversion:

If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
Somebody has to limp it! Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

Everyone is familiar with such a character who, whether in real life or in fiction, spreads poison and corruption throughout the world to compensate his inability to apprehend beauty; Richard III sneers that since he was not made “to court an amorous looking glass” he will choose to be a villain, “and hate the idle pleasures of these days.” Al Capone’s scar imbued him with a profound quality of menace and invincibility throughout much of his career. But once he was brought down and shown to be a simple thug, a cruel, syphilitic bully bolstered by swagger and braggadocio, his scar appeared, in the eyes of the public, altered to reflect his decay; his scar became a symbol of everything torn apart, of everything shattered, and of everything ruined within him. Even in traditional presentations, witches, demons, trolls and monsters are frequently described as having ugly, terrifying scars.

One of the most memorable of literary scars is that of Captain Ahab’s in Moby Dick. His scar threaded its way out from under his grey hair and ran down the side of his face and neck, disappearing beneath his shirt collar. Speculation among the crew of the Pequod was that the scar ran the length of his body and culminated on the sole of his foot, the way a lightning strike will sometimes run down and scar the length of a great tree from crown to root. Experiences that leave such long and deep scars are life altering, and afterward one will no longer be what one was before the scar was received. In these brief examples, each one refused the call of change that always attends such a wound and instead reacted with infantile rage at having been subjected to the sometimes crippling nature of life; a nature that may, according to some indiscriminate whim, core one like an apple. Each, in his unwillingness to see in his wound the brilliant light of creation, saw everyone and everything as an acceptable target for his rage. Ultimately, that is the undoing of individuals such as these, for they eventually target themselves with the same pitiless violence previously reserved for everyone else. Now these are extreme examples to be sure, but these very same dynamics are present in the psychologies of untold numbers of people; the difference being that whatever else has been lacerated in them, the connection–however tenuous it may be–to others and to humane values has not been entirely severed.

While one may feel as though exposure to apocalyptic conflagration has reduced one to ashes, it is important to remember that the fire that burns and scars is not the fire of annihilation, but rather it is the fire stoked within the alchemical furnace, and a new life is fashioned in these flames. Whenever two previously unrelated things are joined together a scar, or a seam if you will, is always the result; and when individuals are joined to previously unknown and unconscious aspects of themselves, scarring is the painful and inescapable result. Bringing together the disparate aspects of oneself is not at all easy and in doing so one often feels oneself to be at the edge of personal extinction. It can only be ever thus: only when one is faced with something overwhelming can the archetype of wholeness be constellated. So do not be ashamed to look at scars. Valorize them; caress them; trace their course in your skin and in your mind’s eye. Scars are roadways drawn onto maps of flesh, leading always to the beautiful truths buried deep within oneself.

Boethius and the Underworld: The Consolations of Philosophy

2011-09-13T22:49:00.004-07:00

There is a remarkable work written, one might say, from the bowels of the Underworld with grace, peace and with a remarkable equanimity. The work is titled, The Consolations of Philosophy and its author is named Boethius. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, to be exact. Quite a mouthful, but like Milton, or perhaps even Cher, this man needs no further appellation. Boethius wrote this work while in prison, awaiting execution on charges which he asserts were false and seemed to result mostly from the antipathy generated by the schism between the Eastern and Roman Churches. He was tortured and beaten to death in 524 or 525 C.E. when he was 44 or 45 years of age. This was a remarkable man--in any time and by any standard, and the manner in which he met his death was even more remarkable than one could imagine.

Boethius was, as he says, in his cell "...giving vent to my sorrow with the help of my pen, [and] I became aware of a woman standing over me." This woman was the Great Goddess herself, the Goddess of Philosophy, come to reassure, comfort, and even teach Boethius in his final days how to remember who, and what, he really was. She reminded him to see through the material world and to know that real power resided within him and not in the cruelty of his captors, and that this was the "time for healing, not lamenting."

The way, in fact, which we turn lamentations into healing is to realize within ourselves an awareness of the opportunities for psychic meaning which arises in times of difficulty, misfortune, and even victimization. As the Goddess of Philosophy tells Boethius:

"What I want to say is a paradox, and so I am hardly able to put it into words. For bad fortune, I think, is more use to a man than good fortune. Good fortune always seems to bring happiness, but deceives you with her smiles, whereas bad fortune is always truthful because by changing she shows her true fickleness. Good fortune deceives, but bad fortune enlightens. With her display of specious riches good fortune enslaves the minds of those who enjoy her, while bad fortune gives men release through the recognition of how fragile a thing happiness is. And so you can see Fortuna [the goddess] in one way capricious, wayward and ever inconstant, and in another way sober, prepared and made wise by the experience of her own adversity. And lastly, by her flattery good fortune lures men away from the path of true good, but adverse fortune frequently draws men back to their true good like a shepherdess with her crook [...] Had you remained untouched and, as you thought, blessed by Fortuna, you would have been unable to get such knowledge at any price. So you are weeping over lost riches when you have really found the most precious of all riches..."

The Goddess reminds Boethius that others may destroy our bodies but our strength is hidden deep within our souls and the only poisons that can kill us are are own thoughts--doubts, fears, and the failure to recognize our true selves. Once again, as it always seems to do, the presence of a paradox announces divine reality, and in this case the paradox surrounds notions of unity/separateness of body and soul, and traditional understandings of power/weakness. The Goddess explains that what wounds the soul doesn't necessarily affect the body, and real power is the power found when one maintains an open heart. The power that evil men appear to have is, she instructs, power that stems from weakness, weakness because they didn't have the power to maintain an open heart or the strength to love; the good are always strong, she says, and the wicked are always plagued by misfortune and victim hood. Love is the ultimate force and power in the world. As She, Herself says, "But who to love can give a law? Love unto itself is law." Open-hearted love is the summum vitae solamen, the greatest comfort in life.

Wonder

2011-09-13T11:36:00.003-07:00

The still point of the turning world
shakes with your profundity;

On the other side of the planet
night is illumined by your brilliance;

In valleys a thousand miles away
flowers weep at your sweet scent;

Do you know how miraculous,
do you know what a marvel you are, my dear?

I think, perhaps, not.
--FWMT (Props to Hafiz)

The Cauldron of Transformation

2011-09-07T09:40:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I wrote about the transformation of difficult emotions by an open-hearted willingness to drink the bitterness of one's life. This time I want to explore the mythic vessel which contains the bitterness. After talking with my friend, George, one morning not too long ago about the ideas I was working on in that piece, he sent me an e-mail including the following quote:

“But there is also the Cauldron of Ceridwen, which was full of melodious song, and is, moreover, a source of mystical lore. It happened that Gwion the Little, having been set to guard the Vessel, found three drops of is water alighting on one of his fingers, when he put it hurriedly into his mouth, as one scalded. It is said that ‘every event of futurity was opened to his view.’ The cauldron itself was divided into two parts, but the whole of its water was poisonous, the drops in question excepted.” –A.E. Waite, The Holy Grail, 316-317

In this quote Waite is referring to the marvelous Celtic myth that describes the birth of Taliesin. In characteristically scholarly fashion, Waite understates things a bit. It was not only the future that opened to Gwion's view, but the past as well, indeed every combination and permutation of possible realities opened up to his understanding. The vastness and the richness of infinity made itself known in Gwion's mind. In other words, the three little drops he drank made Gwion a god. Gwion's unsanctioned apotheosis enraged Ceridwen and she began to pursue Gwion with a murderous intent, and as Gwion ran he imagined himself to be as agile as a hare and he, in fact, became a hare but Ceridwen became an even faster hound! Gwion jumped into a lake and became a salmon and Ceridwen followed in the form of an even swifter otter. Gwion leaped out of the water into the air and became a crow while Ceridwen became a hawk in her hot pursuit, and just as the hawk's talons were about to crush her prey, Gwion became a grain of wheat and fell onto a grainery floor below, among millions of other grains of wheat. Ceridwen became a hen, scratched and pecked among the grains until she found Gwion and swallowed him. The tiny grain began to grow and grow in Ceridwen's belly and after nine months she gave birth to a most beautiful and gifted baby boy--Taliesin. Taliesin grew up to be the greatest of poets and prophets; some insist that he was Merlin, himself.

In a not too tangential association, Dionysus was to have been the successor to Zeus, himself, but the Titans, their faces painted a death-like white, fell upon the child god, tore him into seven pieces and threw his remains in a cauldron. Zeus, drawn near by the smell of roasting flesh, discovered the Titanic forces at their work, and hurled the Titans into Tartarus while at the same time preserving the heart of the young god. Dionysus’ heart was then made into what I imagine to be a kind of heart-stock, pomegranate soup that was then given to Persephone. After drinking this strange brew, she she became pregnant and gave birth to Dionysus Chthonios, the “subterranean.” He was also called Dionysus Trigonus, the "Thrice Born."

The correspondence between Taliesin and Dionysus is fascinating to me, especially their shared birth circumstances: both of them experience a prenatal existence that can fairly be described as the Underworld, both of them have epithets which mean "thrice born," and both their births are initiated by events involving cauldrons, the cauldron being the image that most intrigues me for the purposes of this essay. Drinking a strange substance from a cauldron or a cup, oh heck, let's call it a grail, is the seminal moment in Taliesin's, or Merlin's, birth. And the grail becomes one of the central stories in the mythopoetic cycle of Merlin's protege, King Arthur. Some powerful, unique and quite special understanding, in the guise of a grail, is being sought after.

In the Arthurian grail legends we know the knights who attain the grail after undergoing bitter challenges and ordeals as Sir Percival, Sir Galahad, and Sir Bors. After a long and difficult, to say nothing of miraculous, search the the three knights (along with Galahad's father, Sir Lancelot, who because of his deeply human flaws, was not allowed to apprehend the grail) finally achieve the grail. Once the quest is completed, Percival replaces his uncle on the throne in the Grail Castle and becomes the Grail King much akin to the executive nature of God the Father; Galahad, in De Imatatione Christi, ascends to heaven; and Sir Bors returns to the world and back to court, working among men much like the Holy Spirit is said to operate. The Christian elements of the Arthur legends are not coincidence, they are a conscious co-optation by early Christians of even earlier beloved and very powerful pagan myths.

But there is a remarkable archetypal symmetry between the traditions of the Arthur legend and the gospels. For instance, according to all four Gospels immediately after the Last Supper, Jesus took a walk to pray (Matthew and Mark identify this place of prayer as Gethsemene). Jesus was accompanied three others, thereby making a group of four just as in the Grail legend: Peter, John and James the Greater, whom he asked to stay awake and pray. He moved "a stone's throw away" from them, where he felt an overwhelming sadness, dread and bitterness while praying, "My father if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Nevertheless, let it be as you, not I, would have it." Then, a little while later, He said, "If this cup cannot pass by, but I must drink it, your will be done!" (Matthew 26:42). The cauldron or cup filled with bitterness--emotional poison--is a most difficult cup to imbibe. During Christ's passion, his suffering, the text says, "...was as it were great drops of blood falling down upon the ground" (Luke 22:44). What a bitter cup this must have been. But he drinks of it anyway, even unto the dregs. In my way of thinking, this is the big moment of the narrative, much bigger even than the crucifixion, which is at this point a fait accomplie simply because it is a tremendous act of courage to effectively say, all right, I surrender to my own fate. Thy will be done. Such a surrender is the very image of drinking one's bitterness.

The metaphorical cup that Christ would wish to avoid drinking from is the the same cauldron of Ceridwen's that contained poison, the same Titanic cauldron that contained the roasted flesh of the young Dionysus, the same vessel that, in my imagination at least, the knights of Camelot went in search of calling it the "Holy Grail." The cup, grail or cauldron is drunk from whenever we submit to the higher exigences of life, the great moments of our lives that require us to disregard the needs and desires of the ego and surrender to the reality and fate of our lives, not with regret, rancor, or ressentiment, but with courage, resolve, and faith in the idea that one's life unfolds exactly as it should. Lancelot's inability to control his own ego and live in this way prevented him from attaining the Grail and his own transcendence, the demands of the ego caused Peter and the others to fall asleep at the crucial moment, the godling Dionysus was made vulnerable by his attraction to toys, the playthings of the very young ego.

Drinking the bitter contents of the grail requires of one an intentional surrender of the ego and a period of incubation in the Underworld. Unfortunately, there seems to be no other way to discover what one truly is and such a quest is not for the faint of heart, but as Cervantes writes in Don Quixote, Faint heart never won fair lady. The most important of existential or ontological truths may only be able to be glimpsed after much bitter experience, but it is also a reality of our lives that we seek to avoid the bitter and taste as much of the sweetness of life that we possibly can, in fact, we would like life to be sweet all the time and bitterness is generally regarded as harmful and destructive. Eradicating bitterness seems to me unwise; how can one know what is sweet if one has never tasted that which is bitter? Understanding that bitterness may pave the way to sweetness is wisdom indeed. Perhaps that is more than wisdom, perhaps that is the way, in concert with an open heart, that bitterness transforms us into divinities.

A Bitter Draught

2011-08-30T16:44:00.000-07:00

More and more I realize that my peculiar talent is to experience life from the perspective of the Underworld. This is not an expertise I sought out but rather, the Underworld chose me, and for better or worse, there are very few others that I know of currently extolling the surprising anodynia it offers. I use a variation of the word anodyne (from the Greek anodunos which literally means without pain) quite on purpose, because this word, anodyne, is used to refer to something that eliminates or soothes pain; an anodyne is a source of soothing comfort which is exactly what the Underworld experience is if one is able to inhabit the particular kind of consciousness with which it might be apprehended.

I have a confession to make, but first, a meta-confession; I used to believe that a confession such as I'm about to make was really an admission of my own inadequacy, my own inability to grasp something that was universally true and fundamentally human, a failure to understand the true meaning of happiness, or what it is to be living a spiritual life. Here now, is my confession: I am driven nearly mad--homocidally mad--by supercilious gurus and their disciples, philosophies, and spiritual practices, by anyone or anything that insists life is only perfect, good, and light, and if you don't experience it that way, you poor, lost soul, you aren't doing it right. There are days that, subjectively speaking, suck. Days when work feels unrewarding or worse, there are days when I see the meanest, most atavistic and destructive qualities of humanity rewarded (I'm lookin' at you, Sara Palin), days when my wife and daughter and me are at constant loggerheads, days when the little girls who live across the street get attacked and sent to the Emergency Room by an uncontrolled Jacobin pit bull, days when my own internal state, despite my best efforts to the contrary, is one of disappointment, pain, fear, and anger. I'm sorry, but turning it over to god, or visualizing a golden or violet light enveloping me, or quoting to me the Buddha or some other spiritual masters that you haven't read deeply for yourself or even really allowed yourself to wrestle with the principles and inner states they're referring to, well, this simply doesn't cut the mustard anymore. I am tired of discipleship; I want you to meet me in the Underworld and have a genuine and honest, heartfelt, unaffected, candid, interaction in which you tell me what you know to be true of you in that very moment rather than the pretty sentiments of someone writing in reflection from lessons they've already learned and moved on from. Discipleship breeds orthodoxy; I don't want orthodoxy, I want bitterness (But, as I hope I can make clear, I'm using the word bitter in an unorthodox way). On days such as these, it is a laudable act of will to not surrender to the notion that ideals such as love and compassion are bullshit and life is really a Hobbesian nightmare: "...solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, Chapter VIII). Life isn't easy and it's often frightening, so people tend to create comforting illusions without which, Nietzsche says, we would die of the truth.

Well, that was pretty dark, wasn't it? And that's exactly how you know you are inhabiting the Underworld. All you see is darkness. But darkness is not the defining characteristic of the Underworld; in fact, once one's eyes adjust to the apparent darkness, the Underworld reveals itself to be iridescent. Jung supposedly said (I've been unable to track it down in the Collected Works) that something cannot be psychologically true unless its opposite is also true and if this is indeed the case, then the Underworld cannot be only black. It glitters with an infinite variety of color, and these colors are always transforming themselves into other colors. The Underworld is the anodyne to life--it's life's analgesic, which is why mythologies say that everyone must go there after one's material life is over (Even Christian mythology states in the Apostle's Creed that Jesus descended to Hell for three days after his crucifixion: descendit ad inferos). I've spoken in previous posts about the anodynia of the Underworld when I've written about having a draught from the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Oblivion is the ultimate anodyne, after all. But there are other Underworld rivers, too. The Acheron: The river of pain. The Styx: Formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld; it circled the realm of Hades nine times and the gods were bound by, and swore oaths to, the Styx. The Cocytus (Kokytos): The river of lamentation, of wailing. The Phlegethon: The river of fire whose course runs parallel to the Styx. Can you imagine how bitter would be the taste of a draught made of all these waters combined? Yet that is exactly what I am proposing one need drink when one finds oneself in the Underworld!

Drinking the bitterness means to open oneself and one's heart in order to fully feel the binding power of strong emotions such as fear, pain and despair, the fire of anger and hatred, and to raise a lament over them. Lamenting helps us express and incorporate and accept the "is-ness" of these difficult experiences. We must open our hearts, swallow the bitterness, and feel our grief. Powerful emotions and thoughts have the power to change us, and make no mistake, they will irrevocably transform us and the only question that remains is, in what way? Will we grow and become more heartful, more compassionate, more soulful, or will we close our hearts, forcing our souls to recoil and shrivel as we become more and more angry and resentful of life. If we refuse to accept, or if we resist drinking deeply the draught (originally, this word meant something like an inhalation) of bitterness we become psychicallly disfigured and increasingly suffer from a loss of soul. But if one can soften, if one can drink the bitter draught one becomes more loving and open to the world, the world tends to yield up some of her secrets, and life becomes less hard, less impersonal, and much, much more significant.

Softening, opening one's heart and drinking in the bitterness is so bitterly hard to do. It's as if one is given the assignment of drinking a poison. In fact, it's not as if, it is just like that. Remember that marvelous little movie, The Princess Bride? In it, The Man in Black (Wesley) proposes a battle of wits in which the object is to avoid the chalice carrying the fictional poison, Iocane powder. Unbeknownst to his opponent, Wesley has been building up a tolerance or immunity to the Iocane by ingesting small ammounts of it over the course of several years. Thus, he puts the poison in both chalices and he and his adversary then drink. Wesley survives because he's been practicing, if you will, drinking the poison, drinking the bitterness. How bitter must that first drink have been, when Wesley initially decided to build his immunity to Iocane, not knowing if he would live or die? (By the way, it is the figurative sense of the word bitter that came first. Its usage in relation to taste followed its usage as an emotional descriptor.) I suspect that this is exactly the principle Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger." Psyche seems to operate on a homeopathic principle: that which can kill me may also heal me. With an open heart, one drinks the bitter poison regularly--whenever and as it arises--and builds up a tolerance to it, one then becomes much stronger thereby. What a daunting challenge it is! But that's just the sort of life and death dilemma one would expect to encounter in the Underworld, isn't it? It is Death--Death the archetype, Death the god, the death of the ego one encounters, but it is not death in the sense of the end of living, or of knowing, nor is it the death of consciousness which occurs in the Underworld even though the fear of death as a general concept is intense there. No, it is not death which is found in the Underworld, it is life. Life more abundantly.

It Is Only With The Heart That One Can See Rightly...

2011-08-18T06:27:00.004-07:00

Looking back over some old posts, I find that I have written a great deal about matters of the heart--about love; not so much romantic love as the kind of love that includes and transcends it, a divine love one may perceive flowing through the heart. I started to write about the heart as a way to understand what was happening to my own. A few years ago I was told that I was heading for some potentially serious heart problems: I had far too many calcium deposits in coronary arteries and very high levels of cholesterol and triglycerides. That surprised me; I have been an avid road cyclist for years and felt fit and strong and I haven't been smoking or overweight for a very long time. My doc wanted me to start taking statins to control my cholesterol levels and change my diet. Well, I did change my diet--I changed it radically and for an entire year followed Dean Ornish's Heart Disease Reversal Diet--but I couldn't physically tolerate statin drugs (and I tried my share); they made me feel terrible. I still eat, for the most part, a largely plant based diet but I find that I feel better with an occasional portion of chicken or fish added to my mostly vegetarian diet. But throughout all of this, what really began to intrigue me was the relationship between the health of my heart and the state of my emotions and thoughts.I began to understand that my heart's health depended to a great degree upon how open-hearted, how heartful I was in my interactions with myself, with others, and with the world, and in particular how much I could be mindful of, and consciously hold, the emotion of gratitude.

You see, I think that the heart is more than a remarkable electro-magnetic energy generator or a pump style machine. I find that the heart is--and this always leaves me in awe and wonder--a remarkably sensitive organ of perception. And what we perceive through the heart depends on its relative state of openness. An open heart allows one access to life's mysteries in such a way that one ultimately concludes that life isn't so mysterious after all. Life is really quite simple, and one needn't know the answers to every question, or be the smartest, toughest, richest, or most powerful guy in the room. One needs only to love well. With an open heart one can love questions and relish curiosities far more than answers, answers which after all, can so often be unsatisfying and simplistically reductionistic.

Yet, I understand that human beings insist upon finding out the answers to things; we find solace in knowing and predictability, and we congratulate ourselves for avoiding conjecture and subjectivity, but a prerequisite of knowing is narrowness. Certainty requires a kind of smallness and places itself in opposition to novelty. For example, many people I see in psychotherapy don't want to know something new--especially about themselves--and in fact, they tend to cherry pick information and incorporate that data which seems to support a belief they already hold and seek to absolve themselves of the responsibility to psychologically evolve. As with so many things regarding psychology, William James said it first and best, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." A strange paradox begins to occur when one is finally successful in activating the perceptual capacities of the heart: one begins to become aware of paradigm altering realities and truths, but they are incontestable truths that will not subject themselves to rational or objective inspection or analysis, nor will they offer up data as testament for their incontrovertibility. As much as one plots to be open-hearted, one cannot plan it; it must be surrendered to. One cannot become open-hearted as the result of a careful, rational analysis. One must be called, seduced even, into compassion and gratitude by the experience of a superior power, the superior power of overflowing life that, in its superfluity, draws into an intimate experience of Mystery and wonder.

There aren't any plans to follow in the pursuit of a heartful way of living; no guru can instill it, no magic incantations can be pointed enough nor can any visions be clear enough. Such things take one only halfway at best, and we must go alone the rest of the way. No maps can direct you there because openheartedness doesn't live "out there" in time and space, unlike the image I've included with this post. It isn't easy to find openheartedness, it isn't an island paradise located somewhere, because as Melville writes in Moby Dick, "It is not down on any map; true places never are." Heartfulness is the dense presence of something immaterial, which is problematic for those who are attached to material realities and programmatic ways of living because the more attached to the material one is, the more terrifying are the realities of the immaterial.

Speaking of the terrifying realities of the immaterial, I should point out that living heartfully doesn't mean that one is always happy. In fact if one is always happy, open-heartedness is, in all likelihood, not one's primary state. Nothing vexes, nettles, or chafes me more than the fatuous equation that equates happiness and heartfulness. No doubt happiness is often a byproduct of heartfulness--an epiphenomenon, if you will. But so is pain, so is anxiety, so is darkness, and in equally strong, often stronger, doses. These experiences don't mean one is doing something wrong, in fact the willingness to deeply know and lovingly accept difficult emotions and experiences is what eventually brings us into happiness. But, interestingly enough, existential dread is not one of the difficult experiences ensuant to heartfulness, because living open-heartedly, while often challenging, is never meaningless even though it may be frightening, and one has a sense that this is the nature of my life, it is right for me, and I should live it unhesitatingly. The epiphanic moment is always accompanied by a threshold experience, by a crisis, and in spite of (perhaps because of) this, a sense of significance and meaning, and frequently revealed understanding as well, accompanies one on a heartful path. Theodore Roethke wrote, "Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries."

Oftentimes the opening of the heart is an opening to the Underworld as well. One falls through an opening into darkness; it is as if light turned itself inside out and became black. People will not know that I inhabit the underworld and they think that I'm a therapist or a father, or a this or a that, but in my head is a single thought: mavro, niger, noir: black. To be in the underworld--and this is essential to remember--is not the same as being miserable, depressed, wrong, unhappy or a punishment for moral turpitude. To be in the underworld is simply to be in darkness, a darkness within which one's life assumes a quality of the unreal, of a phantasm, of a shade. From the point of view of an underworld experience I have become invisible, I am literally a shade and unable to interact with the living while daily life continues to unfold, but it unfolds as though it were a dream and life's mundane actions take on a surreal character. While it may indeed evoke a crisis, falling into the underworld is a katabasis (the hero's descent), not a catastrophe. The hallmark of the underworld is separation and this is a necessary experience one must bear, and it must be accepted, for a separation from others is a prerequisite for an encounter with oneself. Besides, the separation never lasts. There is always another who, out of love or necessity, summons us up from the underworld--much like Odysseus summons the shade of Tiresias, or Orpheus retrieves Euridice--and into relationship. One needn't wait to be summoned either; one may reach out from this deadened land and touch the living, moving them to respond to us with compassion; one need only cry out and rescue operations are mounted and salvation is roused (De profundis clamo ad te domine). One should not move too quickly out of the underworld, however. There is a powerful alchemy at work and transformation does not always proceed rapidly. Producing a masterpiece takes some time.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye, writes de Saint-Exupery. When I was a small boy I dreamed of having a pair of X-ray glasses; these were the glasses that I regularly saw advertised next to Sea Monkeys and Charles Atlas's crusade against 98 lb. weaklings in the back of the comic books I read. But I never had enough money to buy them and I always wondered what revelations, what pleasures, what mysteries would have been revealed to me had I been fortunate enough to look at the world through such penetratingly powerful lenses. Such are life's ironies that now, in middle age, I realize I already had in my possession lenses that would let me gaze into the mysteries of existence and see into the heart of things.

Heart Conditions: I'm Not Getting Older....

2011-07-07T22:45:00.000-07:00

Falstaff. Thou dost give me flattering busses.

Doll Tearsheet. By my troth, I kiss thee with a most constant heart.

Falstaff. I am old, I am old.

Doll Tearsheet. I love thee better than I love e'er a scurvy young boy of them all.

When Falstaff is your tutor, life gets better and better...
(I love this picture; it's Orson Welles as Falstaff)

Heart Conditions: Independence and the Art of Graciousness

2011-07-02T14:52:00.006-07:00

A reader of this blog, Pseko, asked me this question in response to a previous essay I had posted: "P.S. Could you write something about graciousness from a masculine point of view?" I have some thoughts about graciousness from a masculine perspective, but it is my particular and perhaps peculiar perspective and as such, probably not typically--or at least not stereotypically--male, and furthermore it seems to me these thoughts are vaguely related to our American celebration of Independence Day and Lincoln's efforts to preserve the Union. But as usual, it may take me a while to wind my way around to the correspondence between the two.

Abraham Lincoln was, in my estimation, the epitome of masculine grace and graciousness; he became a great man because he was a good man and a gracious man and perhaps we need look no farther for evidence of gracious masculinity than that which was exhibited by this, simply tremendous, human being. Not only was Lincoln open minded enough to, as Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote in a recent book, make a team of his rivals but he was also humane enough to offer a gracious and compassionate invitation to the secessionist southern states to rejoin the Union after an unprecedentedly bloody and horrific war:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations (Lincoln's second inaugural address. Emphasis is mine).

John Hay, Lincoln's secretary, noted that Lincoln's clement disposition and his often urgent search to find reasons to pardon the condemned--that these behaviors, behaviors which so often angered supporters and foes alike, arose from his "abiding passion for mercy." Such a humane feeling, such a forgiving, forbearing, benevolent nature seems to be just as absent from American cultural life at this particular moment in history as it was in 1860--especially those arenas of cultural life still dominated by the masculine. And I think the disappearance of those qualities are a markedly problematic loss for our society since we, as a nation, haven't seemed so angry at one another and so culturally divided, so emotionally separated one from the other, since the Civil War. Our house is deeply divided.

It's natural to want to separate oneself from those with whom we disagree or dislike. The natural desire to be independent becomes especially intense when we feel another tries to establish unreasonable limits to our behavior or tries excessively to control aspects of our lives we have traditionally thought of as being of no concern to anyone else. The danger in our personal rebellions and in an individual struggle for independence arises when we confuse independence with one of the most persistent (and perduringly unhelpful) of American myths, the myth of the rugged individual. In the grip of this particular mythology we insist that John Donne was wrong, that I can be an island, goddammit, and I don't need anyone else. As soon as we insist that we do not need another we have entered into what I can only describe as a hell of our own creation. Hell is not a place of physical torment, for the idea of physical torment is a silly and theologically juvenile notion designed to frighten or coerce individuals into belief as a way to avoid suffering, and its representation as such, its representation as a valid and acceptable evasion, is a mean and psychologically insincere ruse. It is more accurate, I think, to say that hell is a place of separation from the beloved, separation from God; hell is the opposite of what Sartre imagined ("Hell is other people"), it is utter isolation. In fact, the ancient Greek underworld is a place of unrelatedness and unrealizable love, even more critically it is a place of forgotten human experience in general, a separation from all those human-all-too-human experiences that make a life intrinsically meaningful. As soon as we comfort ourselves with, and promote the idea of, our own separateness from others we simultaneously and unconsciously enter the realm of the underworld, we enter the realm of death.

Contrary to the unconscious avoidance of death a relationship with, and a conscious awareness of one's mortality engenders gentle hearts and a graciousness of thought; Lincoln's experiences with death are a case in point. Abraham Lincoln seems to have always been aware of the ultimate power death held over the living; death seems never to have been far from his thoughts, and even as a young man his poetry referenced existential mysteries and terrors. Not really surprising, since death made its presence felt early on in Lincoln's life--the death of his newborn younger brother (Lincoln was only three years old at the time); the death of his mother, aunt, and uncle when he was only nine years old; and the passing away of his sister in childbirth when he was eighteen years of age. When he was in his early 30's a young woman he loved, Anne Rutledge, died of Typhoid. And while he was no Shakespearean scholar, Lincoln loved Macbeth, an Elizabethan civil war saga dripping in blood and uncomfortably high body counts:

Some of Shakespeare's plays I have never read, whilst others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful (Letter from A. Lincoln dated August 17th, 1863).

I do not find it a stretch to think that Lincoln loved Macbeth because of its themes of civil war and, especially, death. Once the war came he eventually would be forced to bear the burden of at least six hundred thousand deaths and, if the truth were known, I would wager that in his soul he felt every single one of them. Every martial death etched deeper and deeper the lines on his face and made permanent the pain in his heart.

Death serves a much greater perspective than simply one's own annihilation and offers one, through the awareness of mortality, a larger world view. The essence of the word gracious means "to be filled with God's grace," or so states my old etymological dictionary, and where if not in death does one routinely come into contact with the gods or better, perhaps, with what that word--god--is a shorthand for, the mysterious and elemental forces of nature that give rise to our own existence. In fact, this was the basis for the mystery religions practiced in places like Eleusis in Ancient Greece. The initiate participating in the ritual was certain she would die as a result of the initiation rites and when, to her great surprise she did not die, she experienced a theophanic vision of the gods and all existential fears of death were alleviated. The ancient Greeks had a couple of words to explain the life forces so clearly presented in the mysteries and were called Bios and Zoe. Bios is much like the who, what, where and the how of life, while Zoe is the mysterious, inexhaustible, inextinguishable essence of life itself; Zoe is in fact most affirmed in the unfathomable yet ubiquitous observation that life always emerges from death and vice-versa.

Graciousness results from a familiarity with death because very quickly in one's relationship to death one realizes that death is not what it appears to be, death is not an ending at all but rather, it is a beginning. Perhaps our society has coarsened because we have become, at least in our private thoughts, wishes and self-observed actions, immortal. Death has been functionally banished from our culture, it now has the visage of the enemy and death has been removed from our communal experience, relegated to lonely wards of hospitals and medical examiner's offices to such a degree that now all death is felt to be unnatural and somehow wrong, a violation of the conditions and sanctity of life. But the real truth is that when death is a part of one's consciousness fear diminishes and one has a tendency to hold all life sacred; civility in the midst of disagreement is a salient characteristic of such valuing of life, so is compassion, curiosity, passion, love, and all the countless other experiences that make human existence meaningful.

Independence is not living alone on an island, building taller and taller walls to keep one's fears at bay; it is not to be found by isolating oneself from everything strange and threatening, independence is not produced by creating a sterile life of predictability and safety. Real independence comes from recognizing our mutual interconnectedness, it comes from refusing to participate in belittling or bullying or blaming which can only isolate us from one another further and further until all human contact of any sort is felt to be a threat. Real independence makes us realize how much we are informed by and supported by grace. Real independence fosters joy and a sense of significance, even in the midst of sorrow. Real independence lets us live, even when living is hard. Macbeth asked:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red (William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 2.2).

Ultimately, he couldn't live with the incalculable amount of blood he had shed, so much blood that he thought it would turn the green oceans to red, so he ended his life in a suicidal charge. Unfortunately, Lincoln couldn't (or wasn't allowed to) live with it either, though it seems that, unlike Macbeth, he might have liked the opportunity to do so. It's instructive to me that, conversely, Lincoln likely ended his life in the spirit of laughter and gratitude, with a sense of fondness for the wife on his arm in the chair next to him. This Independence Day I will try to celebrate the interconnectedness of life and my need of you, not because it makes my life any easier, but because it makes my life so much the richer.

The Mouse That Roared

2011-06-27T22:41:00.002-07:00

The city of Minot, N.D. is being brought to its knees by a mouse. The mouse, of course is the Souris River (in French, Souris means mouse) and the Souris River winds its way through the heart of this city. One of the things I remember about Minot is the beauty of this river and the beauty the river brings to this city. My first job as an adult was in Minot as a city police officer, and I was so young and lacking in wisdom then that I don't think I was a particularly good one; I had all the bravado and certainty of youth, and I thought I was bullet proof. I lacked seasoning, compassion, and an understanding of the human condition, a condition that sooner or later brings us all, in one way or another, to our knees. When I look back on my life there I feel foolish, at least a little bit, for my lack of appreciation, my lack of self-awareness, and my general lack of understanding--mostly of myself, but certainly of others and the community, too. But on one dark night, the Souris River made me re-evaluate that for a little while, or at least for as long as someone that young can re-evaluate anything, and made me struggle with forces flowing through me that were much larger than myself.

I liked working the night shift in Minot; I thought it was more exciting at night because it seemed to me that the more serious (and therefore more exciting) crime happened in the evening. The kind of crime that occurred in the darkness seemed to require action and reflex more than logical thought, and the story I'm about to tell is of exactly that sort. One late night or early morning I was called to an accident in which a car had driven off the 4th Avenue bridge, plunged into the Souris River, and sank like a stone. As I recall it, it was in the spring, and the river was much deeper than usual and flowing with a very swift current. As I pulled up I was amazed at the number of people at the scene shouting and pointing, some in horror, some laughing and drunk, and all of them expecting me to do something. Almost immediately someone (a male, I don't remember how old, or how drunk he was) planted himself in front of me and insisted I jump in after the car that had by then sunk from sight in case anyone was left inside it and unable to get out. This guy kept following me and haranguing me until I finally shoved him aside and threatened to arrest him for interfering with me. What seemed like an eternity later (though in reality it was probably only a few minutes), I finally found the soaking wet and very cold driver of the car who told me that he was, in fact, alone in it and there was no one left in the river to save. I have felt powerfully relieved (perhaps the word is reprieved) like that a few other times in my life, but not often. I was relieved because even though I was a strong swimmer, I don't think I could've managed that current; I was relieved that in what initially was a situation that seemed to cry out for some sort of heroic act, heroism wasn't needed; in fact, jumping into the river would have been stupid. But I still couldn't, or can't, escape my own sense that in a critical moment, in a moment that counted for something, I had been afraid. In terms of my own sense of courage, the Mouse River had made a mouse of me, too. I was flooded with self doubt and inundated with existential questions.

As I write this, the Souris has crested but the danger is not remotely past. Volunteers and emergency services personnel have been working around the clock for better than a week now to save the homes of others while all the while many of the workers have known that their own are lost. This is what a flood does. Floods, whether literal and made by nature's water or our own metaphoric floods created by overwhelmingly uncomfortable and seemingly untenable emotions, call us out of ourselves and into a thousand forms of action. Sometimes the action is literally saving oneself or others, sometimes the action called for is work: filling and stacking bags of sand, sometimes it's a hug or a word of encouragement, it's an offer of a place to stay, or a gift of clothing or money to relief agencies. Always, and in all ways, the most important action is an action that moves us inward and hopefully harmonizes us with nature--our own nature within as well as the natural world without--and asks us what is it exactly, that the soul requires. Not only what my own soul needs, but what does the soul of the world need? What do I need to do and know to become more aware and better understand the sometimes frightening, burdensome, and taxing demands to which Psyche subjects each one of us individuals who are in relationship to one another and our relationship to the world at the same time?

Frequently, these become the most difficult of questions to ponder. Brutus, for example, wrestles not with that action which is most expedient personally, but rather with what is his, and his country's, highest good:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat.
And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
(Shakespeare; Julius Ceasar, IV.ii.269–276)

When we meet the tide of our own affairs in a flood there is always the element of fear present that must be somehow negated, somehow we must not let the fear paralyze us; we must "take the current when it serves" without being able to anticipate whether or not there will be an outcome which we desire or consider positive. It requires us to move from an external and materially oriented way of evaluating experience to an inner, immaterial valuation. Though much is lost, as the poet says, much remains and the value of what remains does not subject itself to a material yardstick or external measure, but can only be known by the heart, and only understood by the soul.

I'm sorry that Minot is suffering; it is a fine place filled with good people. But I find it important to remember that each act of destruction is also an act of creation; to create art a canvass must be destroyed, to create a zygote the egg is annihilated. The difficult balancing act facing Minot, like New Orleans before it, and drowning cities all through history back to Atlantis, is to attend to the destruction while at the same time keeping one eye on the alert for the something new which is trying to be born out of the devastation. As Martin Luther King once said, "We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear." If we can do that, we can witness the birth of something truly magical.

Heart Conditions: The Strangling Vapors of Nostalgia

2011-06-21T16:01:00.002-07:00

The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old? --Stewart O'Nan (Songs for the Missing)

I don't know if it's a sin, but the great error, the Midwestern mistake, is an unspoken acceptance of freezing to death and never saying one single thing that one really thinks. No, probably not; I'm being too harsh. In a passage in The Great Gatsby, Nick Carroway recalls the Midwest fondly (Fitzgerald lived in a Summit Avenue house in St. Paul) and remembers the solemnity bestowed by the frozen evenings. Midwesterners, because of their stoic and often unquestioning acceptance of what is, are often quite adaptable. I had an acquaintance in graduate school who grew up in Kansas, he was a film maker living in Manhattan, and he told me once, "Midwesterners make good New Yorkers; but New Yorkers make lousy Midwesterners." Probably not universally true from either end of the equation, but at least in my admittedly limited and anecdotal experience it certainly has proven to be so. To flourish in the Midwest one must, above all else, be a practical person, a person who can make things or adapt things to practical purposes. Over and over again the rewards and praise for how well one masters one's material environment rise with one's apparent success in doing so while the intellectual, soulful, thoughtful individual is seen as a sort of an anomalous and alien curiosity, a person more to be pitied than admired for his intellectual and emotional introversion and his lack of ability to master the material world.

If you haven't guessed by now, I recently returned to Flagstaff from a visit to see family in Minnesota, and despite my best efforts to keep an open and non-judgmental mind, I kept running into all sorts of prejudice and even racism--particularly toward Latinos and Muslims, but toward anyone, really, who didn't fit into or accept the predominant notions of the familiar. We have borrowed a word from the Greeks, nostalgia, that perfectly describes my recent katabasis, or visit to the underworld (which I really find is a kind of encounter with my own shadow--the parts of my own psyche that I've disowned). Nostos is a word that roughly means returning home or homecoming, and algia means pain. So when we speak of nostalgia then, we speak of the pain of returning home. A large part of that pain is found in the double-edged knowledge that, as Robert Frost writes, "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in," but they don't have to like who you've become; especially if who you have become threatens to undermine the sense of the familiar and the illusion of safety that penetrates everyone--even institutions--like a moldy, oppressive humidity. It is nearly impossible to remain who one now is and resist the heavy gravity of assimilation, the devolution to becoming dreamless and thoughtless, staring blankly out car windows at acres of corn and all the other painful things that once may have constituted the known world because no one told you life could be another way. But this experience isn't limited to Scandinavian boys growing up on the Minnesota prairie; Plantagenet princes felt it, too:

Hal: Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him ...
(Henry IV, Act 1 Scene III)

One can only hide oneself for so long; one's true nature will eventually emerge, and when it does it is like the sun breaking through dark, smothering clouds, shining its full warmth, its awe inspiring beauty, and its power on an astonished world. Home will still take one in but now, because one has found one's true center--one's authentic self, it no longer needs to because home is now wherever one chooses to be. Prince Hal knows that this must be a conscious decision, it must be a willful act of the soul to see that one is oneself and that as such, one's authentic self is exactly what is wanted in the world. The strangling vapors of nostalgia are burned away by the emerging sun of the soul--a new optimism, which is based upon a deeper understanding of who one is and one's place in the universe.

Concomitant with this new optimism is the shift in one's locus of attention and importance from the material world to the immaterial world. One of the incongruities of where I grew up is that if you tell someone in rural Minnesota that you believe in angels, they most likely won't bat an eye. But it really is an astonishing thing, to believe in angels, I mean. Astonishing not because its silly or superstitious, but because it places a supreme value on the immaterial in the midst of a very materially grounded world view. After all, angels look just like us except for that enormous pair of wings attached at their shoulder blades (or so I remember from religious education days), but they are invisible to nearly everyone else except the seer. Usually people who are so stubbornly attached to the material experience the immaterial with terror, but angels have been accepted in their conceptualization of the familiar. When one begins to be familiar with and even consciously pursue immaterial realities, life changes radically and the miraculous becomes the familiar; one is no longer a spiritual vagrant having no invisible means of support. There is no more nostalgia, because there is no where--no material place--to return to.

In Praise of Good Men: Victor Laszlo

2011-06-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

I grew up in rural Minnesota, in the heart of what Garrison Keillor metaphorically calls Lake Wobegon. Believe me,this part of the world is exactly as he represents it, and maybe it's his visit to Flagstaff this weekend where he will perform his radio show, that stirs these thoughts in me. Growing up in rural Minnesota was a very provincial--a very self-referential--experience and I learned, or so I thought at the time, about the wider world from watching old movies on television very late at night. I can't overstate how influential these movies were in educating me about the world that wasn't bound by cornfields, rivers, and prairie grass. I wanted to believe that the rest of the world spoke with this vague, rather indistinct continental accent, an accent that doesn't exist anywhere in the world except on the studio lots of 1930's or 40's Hollywood and was typified by actors like Claude Raines or William Powell. And anyone who knows me knows that the way these actors moved and dressed continues to influence me to this very day.

One of my most favorite movies from this era of Hollywood is the 1942 Warner Brother's movie, Casablanca. Now, this doesn't make me unique; in fact, it's a rather quotidian preference because this movie has become such an iconic film, it has become such an enduring standard of story telling and style in American culture that it's hard to find anyone who doesn't have at least some cursory awareness of this film's exalted place in the cinematic cannon. None the less, I think it deserves it reputation as one of the greatest films in movie history. I think that Casablanca is a more organic, less calculated expression of the archetypal hero's journey than say, Star Wars; it is a movie that stakes its import and significance upon its unshakable values of courage, honor, and moral rectitude and that those values are more important to cling to than anything else, even victory. And no character in this film, not even Rick or Chief Inspector Renault, played by Humphrey Bogart and Claude Raines respectively, exhibits these qualities as fully and as well as Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), the courageous and long-suffering husband of the beautiful Ilsa, played by the achingly luminous Ingrid Bergman. Victor knows that Ilsa loves Rick, or at least thinks she does, yet he never becomes angry or petulant. He simply loves her with all his heart and soul in a manner so innocent, so pure, that even cynical, selfish Rick ("I stick my neck out for nobody.") is raised to new levels of self sacrifice and heroism simply by bearing witness to such an extraordinary act of love.

But Victor is not the identified hero of the movie, and the Victor's of the world seldom ever are the robust heroes of their own lives; they lack a quality of narcissism or the charismatic magnetism which allows them to be too easily overlooked. But don't mistake his quiescence for foolishness; Victor doesn't miss anything, he knows very well everything that is happening around him:

I know a good deal more about you than you suspect. I know, for instance, that you're in love with a woman. It is perhaps a strange circumstance that we both should be in love with the same woman...
Victor Laszlo is able to see through the world of appearance; he knows that nothing is ever what it appears to be:
Victor Laszlo: If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.
Rick: Well, what of it? It'll be out of its misery.
Victor Laszlo: You know how you sound, Mr. Blaine? Like a man who's trying to convince himself of something he doesn't believe in his heart."

My favorite character in the movie is the Prefect of Police, Louis Renault, played by Claude Raines. He is marvelously self-aware while being at the same time, hopelessly corrupt, irretrievably dissolute, and magnificently debauched. When I was a young man I wanted to be him; I wanted to be able to bend the world to my will for the purposes of cultivating my pleasure and power, I wanted to be hedonistically unfeeling and wittily garrulous. Thanks in all probability to my guardian angels, I always failed spectacularly at that goal. There is a marvelous moment in the film when Bogart points a gun at his chest and says, "...This gun is pointed right at your heart." Louis blithely responds, "My least vulnerable spot!" Oh, I would think, if it only it could be so.

Louis has the great lines in the movie, and Bogart is without a doubt the over-determined hero, but it is Victor Laszlo who is the soul of the movie and the only man who is strong enough and loving enough to be the enduring counterpoise to the ethereally beautiful and equally resourceful, gritty, determined, and formidable, Ilsa. Laszlo is the epitome of the Lunar Male, the moon men I wrote of several weeks ago. In the movie there is a great anticipation regarding the arrival of the great Victor Laszlo in Casablance, but true to moon man form he arrives in the evening, Ilsa on his arm, basking in her beauty and her light. But Victor is no panty waist; if any man had the right to trumpet his masculinity and fearlessness it is him, but he is always reservedly mild, always polite, always rock solid. We, the viewers, only see him once in the daylight during a scene in which he is trying to buy his and Ilsa's way out of Casablanca. In this scene he has a sort of lurking, quiet fugitiveness in his demeanor, much as the moon has when it finds itself visible and aloft in the daylight sky. But it is in the darkness that Victor quietly goes about his business with great resolve, courage,and a willingness to risk almost everything,a willingness to risk even his life, but not his Ilsa.

Together, Rick and Ilsa generated a lot of heat but not much light, while Victor, in his patient, wise, and loving way offered an indispensable moral center not only to Ilsa, but to the movie as well, and perhaps even more importantly, to a world engulfed in war and consumed by chaos and fear. Whatever it was between Rick and Ilsa that drew them together, it couldn't hold a candle to the deep love Victor felt for Ilsa--and for Rick, too. For Victor was not only an embodiment of Eros, but even more so, he was the embodiment of Agape, the unconditional love that sustains and evolves human beings as well as the world.

I have been fortunate enough to know such a man for a long time now, a man recently reunited with his Ilsa, a man who has, hilariously and with effortless mimicry, uttered Victor Laszlo's exact words to me in an unforgettable afternoon on the terrace restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the Four Seasons Hotel in Santa Barbara. It was an afternoon I will always cherish as the most funny, enjoyable, vivid, and lovely of my entire life. Welcome home, my friend.

Thoughts That Prevent Sleep

2011-06-01T23:12:00.003-07:00

Questions the heart holds, the body dismisses
and desperately clings to reason instead
like a child's sacred, comforting toy.
I want to slip past these sensible bounds and move into chaos:
disarray, anarchy, and love.
I no longer want to troll the periphery of reason
relying on science and conventional thought
to find acceptable ways to justify my existence
becoming one of the comfortable
people who would rather not think at all.
I want to drown in truth;
be carried, nearly lifeless out to sea
on the rip tide of revelation
fighting to find the shore.
I want this to be my life and nothing more.
--FWMT

Mysterium

2011-05-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

The Earth whispers her secrets to the living,
Some are terrible, dreadful
Some puzzle, entrance and
Charm
With intention to enchant;
They hurt not.

Squeezed through time
As though history has ended
While that lovely voice
Falling away
Breathes in my ear,
"Now.. always."
--FWMT

Heart Conditions: The Fortunes of Us That Are The Moon's Men

2011-05-16T11:13:00.007-07:00

I went to market this past Sunday alone, as is my wont, to stock our larders and cupboards with victuals and stores. I pulled into a space in the parking lot next to a beat up 30 year old Ford, parked slightly askew, and as I was exiting my car, a slurred, throaty voice from the back seat of the Ford challenged me: "Jeshus Christ, why don't ya park a little closher, asshole? You trying to s-show me your assh or sompin'?" Being a good Midwesterner by upbringing, I immediately thought to check to see how I was parked (I did not, in fact, want to show him my ass). Having been well trained in the discipline of what I like to call "Solar Masculinity," and once I had determined I was properly parked, my next impulse was to in the face of such impudent aggression, go to war. But for some reason instead of issuing my own challenge in kind, what came out of my mouth (in my best impression of Olivier) was this: "What god is this, who takes such joy in strife? Stand now here! Show thyself for what thou art: a blackguard and a coward!" I stared at him and waited for a response; no retort came in reply except for a rather incredulous stare and a barely audible, mumbled expletive of surprise. I spun around and strolled into the store a happy, rather than angry and vengeful, man.

What I called "solar masculinity" in the above paragraph is a rather habitual way of being in which many men, and increasingly some women, have of meeting the world with a controlling and aggressive manner. It is a way of being in which one must always be bright, must always be right, and must always be on top and above, never clouded by distracting or conflicted thought, or experience the darkness of unknowing. Solar masculinity always makes its presence known and felt; it brooks no disagreement, reproach, or insult, and yet like solar flares on the sun's surface, it creates disruptions in communication and encounters with it can inspire a primal kind of fear. An instructive example of the solar masculine is Melville's Captain Ahab, who is often described in apposition to the sun and in this instance, rages at Starbuck:

That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines.

No one can be allowed control over the solar male. Ahab will not submit to anyone or anything; not principle nor agent, not even to commonly held ideals such as those of fair play. Ahab must be over everything.

Contrast Ahab's solar masculinity with the moon, or lunar, masculinity of Falstaff and Prince Hal:
Falstaff:

[....] and let men say we be men of good government,
being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and
chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal .

Prince Hal: Thou sayest well, and it holds well too; for the
fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and
flow like the sea, being governed, as the sea is,
by the moon.

As always, Falstaff who is doubtless a marvelous example of a lunar male, uses language in a most clever and complex way. Ostensibly Falstaff says that he and Hal move about--steal--under the moon's gaze, but he is also referring to the fact that he and Prince Hal commit their thefts under the cloak of night; they literally commit their thefts in the moonlight hours. Moon men are not quick to be the center of attention, nor do they seek out confrontation. They would rather talk and use language to explore confusing or obscure issues, and they are almost always witty and funny people--not infrequently at their own expense. Their intentions are only dimly perceived, like unidentifiable figures in the moonlight, and they almost never physically intimidate or engage in violence (in this same play, Falstaff pretends to be dead on the battle field to avoid hand to hand combat). Moon men are often charming and fun to be around and when, unlike Falstaff, there is no tendency towards anti-social behavior, they are loving, kind, considerate, and gentle (in the true sense of the word) men. Who would you rather spend the evening with, Falstaff or Ahab? It's not even a close call, is it. Falstaff might get you into trouble, but Ahab will get you dead.

That powerful, terraforming solar masculinity is difficult to transform into something more cooperative and gentle because it generates more light than heat, but such a transformation is a necessary task for men in these times to undertake, for if we don't we will kill that which we most love. Prince Hal is quite literally transformed into a solar male when he is crowned king; the word coronation pointedly includes corona--the luminous ring often seen around the sun, and Hal's investiture makes Falstaff a prophet of his own death: "By the Lord, I'll be a traitor then, when thou art king." But I hope that the time of sober, solar men is passing and that Moon Men will eventually become the preferred way of articulating masculinity and perhaps in the not too distant future we will choose to be governed by poets rather than by warriors and the individual will to power will be replaced by a quest for beauty, and our lives will then be lived as art rather than as a struggle.

Heart Conditions: The Fog of War

2011-05-03T16:18:00.009-07:00

Yesterday my dear friend, Leigh expressed her sense of--at the risk of putting words in her mouth--inner conflict and confusion over the events surrounding the killing of Osama Bin Laden thoughtfully and poignantly in these words:

I guess I just feel sadness...about the people who died in the US several years ago, at a world that builds the kind of hate bin Laden fed upon, about a country who can't understand what we've done to fuel this kind of hatred, about the woman who died, anonymously as his human shield this weekend, and even about the partisan crap that has people questioning whether this even happened this weekend. Our myths of progress as a global society are self-delusions, I fear. My hope? That somehow we each find a way to become more kind, more graceful, more generous, more generative.

Confusion and inner conflict are, I think, the quintessential archetypal human experiences attached to war (I wonder if James Hillman would say that rather, it's love, a dark, shadowy love ala his book entitled, ATerrible Love of War. But I think it is our nature to love most what we understand least, and to love what, perhaps, we even fear most.) Feeling some measure of relief at the death of bin Laden is as understandable as the feeling of horror over the circumstances that made it necessary. After ten years it is hard to understand why and who we still fight. It is not an accident of language that the phrase, "the fog of war," is often used to describe the confusing, terrifying and sometimes exhilarating experience of battle. Our sadness, confusion, and conflicted emotions arise from the deeply misunderstood relationship we bear, and it seems to me it is the relationship we have always borne, to the god of war and his bellicose product.

According to Homer's Illiad, Ares is confusing and repugnant even to his own father (Zeus) because he takes his only pleasure in strife, war, and battles (which, I am sure, in no small measure accounts for his relationship with Aphrodite). Ares was said to know no themis; in other words he answered to no law, disregarded the ideal and the ideas of justice, and knew no way of, nor did he care about, equitably arbitrating disputes. Perhaps most repellingly to his father, he lacked dignity: Homer writes in the Illiad that when "brazen Ares" was wounded he screamed like ten thousand men. In other words he was childish and unpredictable, hedonistic, ruled only by his own desires and passions; the worst kind of divine narcissist. From Homer's unflattering description of Ares, it is easy to guess how much he must have hated war.

Ares is a god we know very little about, in fact we know almost nothing; while Homer drenches his readers in the blood, viscera, and gore of battles, the god of war is himself shrouded in confusion and mostly silent mystery. Karl Keryeni noted that Ares' name "sounded like ara, 'curse'--although, indeed, this word also means 'prayer'--and was almost another word for war." In these initially paradoxical correlations, the archetypally confusing nature of the human relationship to this deity begins to make itself felt. This god is an ever present reality in our lives; we pray to it, we pray against it, we fear it, and we desire it, yet we never have had, nor do we now have the vaguest notion of the god's essence or scope. In other words, we do not know how to worship or pay tribute to this particularly unpredictable and frightening Deity. We don't know what we're praying for when we invoke the god, and we don't know what we will receive as the result of such prayers.

Aside from the Illiad, the only other place (that I know of) where Homer writes about Ares is in a poem called, The Hymn To Ares. This hymn tells us of the sacred contract between Ares and humankind, and like everything else about the god, at first blush this hymn is confusing, too, particularly because it implies that Ares is a boon to humankind:

Hear me,
helper of mankind,
dispenser of youth's sweet courage,
beam down from up there
your gentle light
on our lives,
and your martial power,
so that I can shake off
cruel cowardice
from my head,
and diminish that deceptive rush
of my spirit, and restrain
that shrill voice in my heart
that provokes me
to enter the chilling din of battle.
You, happy god,
give me courage,
let me linger
in the safe laws of peace,
and thus escape
from battles with enemies
and the fate of a violent death ( The Homeric Hyms, Charles Boer translation).

Surprisingly, Homer refers to Ares as the helper of mankind. Perhaps Heraclitus was working the same thread of thought when he wrote that war is the father of us all. But how can the god of war help human beings? One of the gifts Ares offers us, according to Homer's hymn, is to "infuse us with a gentle light," and "martial power" that gives us courage. What's more, he writes, a proper relationship to the god "diminish[es] that deceptive rush of my spirit [...] that provokes me to enter the chilling din of battle." In other words the, one might say, patriotic frenzy to go to war is in reality a failure of courage and in an unreflected, unexamined, act of retaliation (what the Romans called lex talionis--the law of retaliation) is really an act of cowardice, an attempt to put the frightening confrontation behind one as soon as possible and quickly reconstitute the delusion that everything is alright.

A proper relationship to the god allows one to, as Homer suggests, "linger in the safe laws of peace, and thus escape from battles with enemies and the fate of a violent death." The purpose of martial power is to be able to avoid war, to enable one to fearlessly explore one's inner world and to "shake off cruel cowardice from my head," in other words, to develop a different way of thinking about the world and live a life dramatically less cloaked in existential terror and dread. As any well trained martial artist will attest, the primary objective of martial knowledge is to avoid conflict in the first place. War as an expression of political will, or military might, or imperial power is as unseemly an expression of that knowledge as that of a parent who enrolls her child in the Martial Arts for the express purpose of beating up other kids. A sacred relationship to the god of war allows one to live safely within the laws of peace, exploring one's own human nature, living and dying naturally without fear of a violent end. A sacred relationship to Ares helps to make one genuinely good and kind (I know soldiers who embody these characteristics), and it inspires soulful living instead of the thin and fragile veneer of normalcy W.H. Auden brilliantly describes:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

Heart Conditions: May Our Senses Be Steeped in Forgetfulness

2011-04-22T12:50:00.002-07:00

In the Classical Greek underworld, there are six rivers--a surprisingly damp place, apparently--and one of the most famous is the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Etymologically speaking, the word itself is a marvel of associations. From Lethe is derived lethargy, lethal, latent (hidden), and a most interesting Greek word, alethea which means truth, and that truth is the opposite of forgetting. As the dead enter Hades they must first drink from the Lethes in order to forget their earthly life.

Those who possess esoteric knowledge say there is another river in the underworld, the Mnemosyne, a river from which initiates into the mystery schools were told to drink from when given the choice, once they had arrived in the Underworld. Drinking from the Mnemosyne, meaning memory, would grant one omniscience. Why, then, is the Greek word for truth not derived from Mnemosyne? Doesn't it make more sense that one can more easily know the truth if one has the ability to know everything? How can one derive truth from forgetting?

While it is without a doubt that Mnemosyne is a great goddess (the daughter of Gaea, herself) she is also a Titan, and as such she necessarily carries some heavy baggage buried deep within her nature--something Titanic that, given her greatness and her sweetness, is not often expressed or glimpsed. The Titanic sensibility latent in Mnemosyne (she does not, as far as I can tell, express it yet must still possesses it simply by virtue of the fact that she is a Titan) is a tendency towards a tremendous blustering, blundering inflation that seems to be a quality of all the Titans. And given the human propensity for narcissistic compensations of perceived inadequacies, the power of omniscience would most certainly turn a human being into a monster. Unless of course, one were already dead and separated from the daylight ego that has all sorts of desires for, and ideas--delusions, really--of control, power, and predictability. This was in fact the point of initiation into the mysteries. And make no mistake, death was the experience of the initiate; she was placed in a situation in which she thought death was certain, which she--to her surprise--ultimately survived. The result was not a physical death, but a psychic one, a separation of the soul from the ego so that there was the knowledge and the experience that a distinct "I" no longer directed one's actions and thoughts and what was formerly thought to be an individual was reunited with its source, forgetting one's material life.

No, forgetting is better for human beings. There is less possibility for messing it up. Forgetting relieves one of history, of pain, of suffering, of impossibility, it relieves one of the conflicts that relentlessly attend human flesh.

Juliet: ... I have forgot, why I did call thee back.
Romeo: Let me stand here till thou remember it.
Juliet: I shall forget, to have thee still stand there,
remembering how I love thy company.
Romeo: And I'll still stay, to have thee still forget,
Forgetting any other home but this.

Forgetting, as Romeo understands, allows one to live in the present moment; everything else drops away, such as the constraints of time for instance, and that which I hold in my hands or see before my eyes is eternal and in that eternal "moment," I understand the truth of my own existence. Forgetting moves us into a relationship with the Divine. No wonder then, that we have devised so many ways to forget: drugs, sex, alcohol, television, gluttony; the list goes on and on, for humans are infinitely creative when it comes to trying to escape the nature of our own humanity and render ourselves more unconscious. But these kinds of neurotic, desperate, broken attempts at forgetting do nothing but make whatever it is one tries to forget return to haunt us even more relentlessly.

The forgetting I am writing of results, paradoxically it might seem, from an expanded consciousness which places us in relationship to the gods, and this sort of forgetting must be carefully prepared for and consciously entered into. It is not an escape nor a despairing flight from the self, but rather a move into deeper interiority, into the Underworld and its offerings of richness and beauty, while leaving behind the daytime ego that refuses to see such a katabasis, or descent into the underworld, as anything but catastrophic. Nothing less than life's joys are discovered when we forget.

Where Shall Magic Be Found?

2011-04-13T11:47:00.002-07:00

Where shall magic be found? 51 rue de Montmorency to be exact. That is the site of an old stone house, said to be the oldest of its kind in Paris, owned by Nicolas Flamel. Flamel was a bookseller who, legend has it, was also an alchemist who unlocked the secrets of the Philosopher's Stone and achieved immortality. Legend also says that one might have rented a room at Flamel's house merely for the daily offering of a prayer. In fact, there is an old inscription on a wall of this old house that reads: We, ploughmen and women living at the porch of this house, built in 1407, are requested to say every day an "Our Father" and an "Ave Maria" praying God that His grace forgive poor and dead sinners. So, can magic be found at Flamel's old house? Not literally. Of course not. Nothing of priceless value and rarity is so easily obtained as by just walking into a particular address and sitting down.... is it?

Unlike many of his contemporary thinkers, C.G. Jung thought that alchemy was not a proto-chemistry but rather was a metaphorical way of looking at and understanding the nature of Psyche; the alchemical dicta referred to inner processes rather than physical ones. For a long time this made total sense to me, and I still find it a reliable, serviceable metaphor, but I'm beginning to believe that something else--real magic--is at work in the largely impenetrable language and methods of alchemy. But the way to a magical reality is not black and white, either-or, discreet thinking; it is not solely through the faculty of imagination, nor is it only through physical manipulations of matter that one unlocks magical potential.

Now, you may begin to think me crazy, but I think, more and more frequently, that all the myths, legends, and stories one may hear about magicians and wizards have some basis in fact. But in order to understand what I am suggesting, one has to let go of the typical images we rely on when we think about magic. The stage conjurer dressed in formal evening wear pulling rabbits out of hats and using mirrors and slight of hand techniques to baffle and confound audiences is a useless referent. Nor is it helpful to think of magic as the easy product of a morally compromised, vindictive person, or of a demonically possessed or Satanically inspired minion. I think that one is not much able to control the products of magic as much as one simply opens up to the possibilities magic creates. So I think in some real sense, the Mage has no idea of what specifically will be produced from his efforts.

What I think happens is that an interaction between (and within) imagination and physical matter occurs that is neither wholly imaginal nor material, but has profound effects on both matter and imagination resulting in the creation of the lapis philosophorum, the philosophers stone which is neither philosophy (imagination) or matter (stone) and yet consists of both. And shouldn't such a union of imagination and matter be the way we live all the time, anyway? To bring imagination to our lives while at the same time fully experiencing the physical nature of life should be the goal of living, should it not? Surely that, instead of as is so often the case, wishing we had some other kind of existence, or thinking that our life is a cosmic mistake and we long for some immaterial paradise to compensate it.

Perhaps we are all magicians and don't yet know or understand that being magical means to take some sort of action in or on the material plane of existence, and not just wishing and waiting for things to be different. Goethe said that "Action has magic, grace, and power in it." We can't sit idly by and wait to be saved, rescued, or even enlightened--which for my money, is the same thing (at least in the way the idea of enlightenment is generally thought of)--we must act.

So even if all the action you ever take is to walk into 51 rue de Montmorenc and sit down, you might still experience magic. Especially if you order the tatin de foie gras au caramel aux épices. You see, Nicolas Flamel's house is now known as Auberge Nicolas Flamel, a very fine restaurant, indeed.

Falling Up; Redux

2011-04-05T17:03:00.001-07:00

I published this article elsewhere and since I'm not yet able to sit long at the keyboard, I thought I'd repost it here since many of you may not have previously read it. It's one of my favorites--FWMT

Many things have fallen only to rise higher.
                                       –Seneca
There is an old saying in the American South: “If you find a turtle on a fence post, it didn’t get there by itself.” This is to say one should look more deeply, one should see through the apparent phenomenon the world presents, question why things are as they appear to be, and from such an encounter–the starting point, so to speak–seek deeper truths. Such deep looking, rather tangentially, I admit, links turtles to falling–specifically, to falling up. That is, after all, one possible explanation for how the turtle found itself atop a fence post: it fell up there. But first, consider a few other things, through which I hope to make the relationship between turtles and falling up more distinct. There is a very old joke, and as to its origins I am unsure, but I will present it here as I have heard it told so many times:
A disciple asks his guru what it is that supports the earth, and the guru replies that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what supports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies “Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down.”

Another familiar version of the story is this:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called a galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
     The notion of turtles or tortoises supporting the earth is an ancient one (the turtle itself is an ancient animal, existing in some form on the earth for the past 150 million years), and figures prominently in a remarkable, and remarkably diverse, assortment of mythologies from around the world. In many Native American myths, the earth is supported on the back of giant turtle who in turn swims the cosmic sea, and for the Sioux particularly, the earth is itself a huge tortoise floating on the celestial waters; in Hindu mythology the god, Vishnu, assumes the form of a turtle and carries the world on his back; when attacking fortified redoubts, Roman centurions fashioned a protective formation they called the tortoise by holding overlapping shields above their heads; in ancient China it was said that the turtle’s shell formed the vault of heaven while its four legs signified the four cardinal directions or the four corners of the earth.
     Interestingly, the Chinese also equated the turtle with the yin principle and the element of water. Why it might be related to water is easily deduced, but a somewhat more puzzling question is, what is the turtle’s relationship to yin energy? Yin has traditionally been defined as the energy of the feminine as opposed to Yang, the energy of the masculine. Yin is a softer, more yielding, a more supple energy; the word itself variously translates to shady place, North Slope, cloudy, overcast, and south bank of the river. Yin is frequently described in watery terms: slow moving, fluid, tranquil, streaming. It has qualities of preservation and darkness (interestingly, turtles have notoriously bad eyesight and find their way primarily by feeling their way around land or through currents). Finally, if you separate the turtle’s shell from its owner and turn it over one may easily imagine a vessel–a dish, a bowl, or a container–and from there, it is not at all difficult to imagine the turtle’s shell as a biological container, a womb.
     From this point on when speaking of turtles, one is no longer able to only discuss literal turtles; now conversations about turtles necessarily include one’s awareness of all the unconscious and archetypal elements of turtles as well. Turtles have become metaphor and symbol, a way of seeing more deeply into the world of phenomena and material presence, and thusly seen, “turtleness” is no longer a hidden element of an encounter with an actual turtle, sauntering about and barely contained under the surface of its own literality, and our’s. Meaning beyond a literal turtle is produced, and the “meaning” of turtles may now be found everywhere. Meaning, or meaningfulness, is a funny thing; there is no meaning to be found in a single thing or set-of-things. But if multiplicities of “thingness,” or sets of non-literal meanings arise, an inner significance or inner substance may be sensed or intuited–but probably not articulated–which may radically alter one’s world.
     In this spirit of thought experiment, I began to wonder how turtles fall after I encountered a poem by Kay Ryan, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, entitled, simply, Turtle (please note that Ryan’s turtle is a female):
Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way
To something edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts the ditch which would convert
Her shell into a serving dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
The sport of truly chastened things.
Turtles it seems, are unable to fall down, if only by virtue of already existing so close to the surface of the earth. Even if they do freefall the one or two millimeters of space that exists between themselves and the ground, it is most probably of no great consequence to them. If, barring a fall into a well or off the edge of an abyss, they are to end up in “serving dish” posture there must be some element of falling up, a necessary direction if a turtle is to end up on its back.
     Ryan tells her readers that the turtle “exists below luck-level” and has little capacity for imagining beyond the literal life she daily experiences. But this is where the archetypal and metaphorical qualities of turtles fundamentally alter the turtle’s (and alters anyone who sees beyond the turtle’s literality) mundane existence. The hitherto hidden antediluvian history and mind-numbing significance of “turtleness” raise it up far beyond its humble, individual domesticity and point by the example of its archetypal nature to esoteric forces that are quite capable of “turning her load of pottery to wings.” The levitating force, the inverted gravity that makes one fall up, is equanimity, or patience as Ryan calls it–an intensely mindful awareness and acceptance of things as they are–combined with chastening.
     Chastening is a marvelous word for the poet to have used as it means to correct, restrain, or to purify; and judging from the way the word reverberates in this poem, she most likely intends all three meanings at the same time. Most, if not all, individuals eventually reach a point at which chastened is the most poignantly descriptive word one has with which to describe the wisdom that accumulates, often painfully, along and through the course of a life. Always attached to such hard-won wisdom is an untold abundance of images also accumulated over years of living and now have become fixed in the individual. The totality of consciousness (consciousness + unconsciousness) is like an eye that is able to see into the most distant, dark spaces and espy the images comprising the totality of human experience. And these images are not simply dreams, memories, or reflections, but are instead tremendously powerful psychic factors that impinge upon and inform one’s life in the same manner “reality” does.
     In one of his letters, C. G. Jung pointed out that all things are “as if” they were real, and that even those things that people and cultures routinely consider to be real are, in truth, the effects of some thing or things that cannot be known. Why, then, dismiss and force out of one’s mind the notion of falling upwards as something physically impossible and irrational, even though the thought of it may persist and even seem to draw one into some deeper experience of oneself and the world? Instead, one should look more deeply into such a compelling image and find what the world, indeed what one’s life, might be trying to communicate. The feared danger of losing touch with reality is diminished by cultivating patience and by the chastening quality intrinsic to life, which paradoxically concentrates and leavens consciousness at the same time bringing cosmos, good order, to inner chaos. Without allowing the light of consciousness to fall on the inner world, a full understanding of the outer is not possible, regardless of the technological sophistication brought to bear upon it.
     However, submitting to such inner work is generally thought of as a liability: phrases such as navel gazing, wool gathering, and far worse are used to describe it. Our collective culture seems unable to tolerate falling down; the inner work, equated to an intolerable vulnerability, threatens the hyper-valued phallocentric structures of thinking, problem solving, and planning. Falling down is synonymous with a demonstrated lack of stamina, a lack of skill, and (horrors!!!) impotence. If one watched even a few moments of either national political party’s recent conventions with an even mildly incredulous eye, this sad fact was shockingly apparent: the conventioneer’s insistence upon splitting themselves off from the myriad problems this country faces was consistently reinforced by a fragile, self-satisfied superiority framed in self-congratulatory rhetoric specifically designed to discourage any sort of introspection whatever. Because to focus on anything but the positive, to move in any direction other than straight ahead, is to shatter the Edenic unconsciousness this culture insists upon at this peculiar moment in history. Individuals are no less prone to this kind of psychic inflation than the collective. It is no different, and no less delusional, than Tantalus insisting he spends his days in retirement, lounging in his summer home in the Hamptons. This virulent variety of willful unconsciousness denies anything is wrong even while one is plummeting, falling farther and farther, into the abyss.
     Eventually, in spite of all efforts, conscious or not, to avoid it, everyone arrives at a moment in life when the appearance of truth draws well nigh; when, to follow the thread of this essay, there begins to form, in the dimmest glimmer of a notion, the realization that if one can become more conscious of falling, one stops falling down and begins to fall up. But this invites, if one is honest, a distinctly discomfiting feeling of the uncanny, as if to ask, “What is this, and how can this be?” But that uncanny sensation is an unavoidable presence when encountering something unexpected, say, a turtle atop a fence post, precisely because the uncanny is what always accompanies a move outside a domestic, predictable experience of life. The uncanny is not a threat, but rather it is a calling, perhaps even a seduction; it invites one to fall into its mysteries, and while falling, to rise up and explore it; most of all it is an invitation to discover transformation, the transformation of the sort that changes pottery into wings.

Heart Conditions: War, What Is It Good For?

2011-03-21T01:09:00.005-07:00

Well. Now we're launching Tomahawk missiles at Libya. Shit. And the idiocy of it all is that we think that will strike a blow for what's good, for what's moral. What is wrong with us human beings? Why do we make things so difficult for ourselves? Libya is like that apartment complex neighbor who, in utter disregard of any other human being's concerns or welfare, has loud parties that go on late into the night and when you knock on Libya's door and ask it to be a little more quiet, it says, "Fuck you. I can do whatever I want to do." Of course one would want to go to war in the face of a belligerent, stupid, inconsiderate response such as that. Doesn't Libya deserve to have the cops called on it? Of course. Even better, doesn't Libya deserve to be punched right in it's fat, stupid, drunken, smirking, face? Yes. Yes, it does. I can't deny that I want to walk across the hall and do just that to the first empty-headed Gaddafi that sticks his jowly, defiant face out the door. So why shouldn't I? Doesn't my lack of an aggressive response to such provocation make me a coward?

And therein lies the first reason which argues against a violent response; as soon as one engages violence, one becomes morally degraded. Oh, I know the evolutionary and biological elements of this argument, that humans are wired to respond to stressful situations with one of the behaviors a biological psychology professor of mine called "the four f's: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and...mating," but just the mere internal wrestling with the issue of cowardice is an indication of the beginning of moral degradation; one no longer feels a regard for oneself nor does one feel a connection to a larger human family rather, life is immediately narrowed to a small area of intense personal concern related to one's own perceptions of adequacy. The use of violence shocks and degrades the more humane instincts: violence creates hatred, and hatred, as Bertrand Russell notes, perpetuates the very evils from which it springs. Especially the spiritually evils such as hatred, injustice, lying, and an atavistic instinct for self preservation. What I became acutely aware of during the time I spent as a police officer is this habit human beings have when caught up in violence, to lie about how it began; everyone involved in the violence has some self-righteous reason for his or her own participation; and finally, there is an intense "othering" of one's opponent, as if somehow that "other" is less than human. The dehumanization and recrimination of one results in the loss of humanity for everyone involved: "...but still the silence of the garden is heavy with unalterable fate, brooding over besiegers and besieged, in such haste to destroy each other and permit only the vile to survive." George Trevelyan wrote these lines in 1913 about the American Civil War, but his point applies to all violence, even the fantasized violence against my inconsiderate neighbor, and the point is this: discourse and individual freedom die as the result of violence; violence does not allow for two or more competing ideas to exist at the same time, and in a land in which only one idea can be "true" or right, there can be no freedom of any kind.

But what about committing acts of violence in the cause of self-defense? Surely this must be a universally justifiable act, condemned, as Russell said, "...by no one but Tolstoy and Christ" who, after all, we can dismiss as impractical idealists. But again, my experience as a cop suggests that there is never any other kind of assertion in a violent confrontation; violence is always justified by someone as self-defense. But here is the dirty little secret, known to men like Gandhi or Martin Luther King who advocated non-violence even in self defense: if violence is used to repel hostile aggression, the use of violence in the cause of self defense generates a fear-based conclusion in the aggressively inclined that aggression is in fact justified. Resisting aggression with aggression justifies the aggressor's use of aggression! The solution (soul-ution)? Don't resist. But individuals, for the most part, lack the courage and the faith in human nature to implement a program of non-resistance, and a reluctance to meet aggression with non-resistance is rooted in fear and deeply ingrained pride that overlooks the resiliency and indestructibility of the human spirit. It is as if humiliation is the worst fate one can suffer, and all sorts of destruction is wrought upon one's self, one's family, one's community, and even one's country because the feeling of shame seems utterly intolerable and individuals (and government officials) in our society refuse to be governed by anything other than their own will.

In War And Peace, Tolstoy wrote that the sole aim of war is murder, that war is, under all imaginable circumstances, a crime. We need to stop sleeping through literature classes.

Aging: The Thousand Natural Shocks That Flesh Is Heir To

2011-03-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are writtendown old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye? a dry hand? a yellow cheek? a white beard? a decreasing leg? an increasing belly? is not your voice broken? your wind short? your chin double? your wit single? and every part about you blasted with antiquity? and will you yet call yourself young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John! [II, Henry IV, Act I, Scene II, 201-210]

Falstaff is a good tutor, a very good one indeed. He gives old age even less than it's due. He ignores it and, as you can read in the above passage spoken by the Chief Justice, conventional wisdom cannot wrap itself around the truth that aging need not have any effect whatsoever upon one's heart. For example, the chronologically young Hamlet, whom I quote in the title of this post, is preternaturally old and embraces death (or at least the idea of it) while Falstaff, who is moving into old age is always the youngest spirit in the room. Falstaff embraces--no, that is too mildly put--rather, he is deeply in love with life.

But (and here is the point of this post's musings) how does one live with a body that is "blasted with antiquity?" When pain becomes chronic how does one retain a youthful heart? My own experiences with sub-chronic physical pain show me how poorly I have learned my tutor's lessons; against my own wishes and efforts, I become cranky and depressive, I push people away and want to be alone in my misery as if I am intuitively aware of my unsuitability for public consumption. But in spite of his physical issues (some of which seem to be significant), Falstaff never looses his youthful spirit as his reply to the Chief Justice makes clear:
My lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head and something a round belly. For my voice, I have lost it with halloing and singing of anthems. To approve my youth further, I will not: the truth is, I am only old in judgement and understanding[. . . . .]
When Falstaff speaks of being born at three in the afternoon, he is probably referring to the time of day when he arose after a night of drinking sack and carousing, but there is something deeper going on beneath the humor.

Falstaff is aware of the necessity to constantly be reborn,the necessity to avoid the ossification of beliefs or habits, and to be always, and in all ways, in search of the novel. And, believe it or not, I think Falstaff is constantly reflecting upon his experience and is deeply engaged to psychic realities--the largest of which is the realization that this material reality is a world of illusion. As he, himself, admits: "I am only old in judgement and understanding." Falstaff is an adept; he is the archetypal fool that knows the esoteric truths the Universe imparts to fools alone. When our physis gets to be too much for, or gets the better of us, he teaches us to go about "halloing" and singing at the top of our lungs. Do the opposite of what it feels like the body compels. Be a fool. Be social and rejoice...loudly.

Heart Conditions: William Butler Yeats

2011-03-08T04:42:00.001-07:00

Wallace Stevens once said, “After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.” The poetry of W. B. Yeats is, more often than not, an elegant example of poetry's essential, redemptive grace.

These Are The Clouds

These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye:
The weak lay hand on what the strong has done,
Till that be tumbled that was lifted high
And discord follow upon unison,
And all things at one common level lie.
And therefore, friend, if your great race were run
And these things came, so much the more thereby
Have you made greatness your companion,
Although it be for children that you sigh:
These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye.

Reflections on Myth: Making Sense of Injustice

2011-02-26T18:34:00.000-07:00

And yet he weeps for him, and sorrows for him, and then it is over, for the Destinies put in mortal men the heart of endurance. — Homer, The Iliad

One of the most difficult things to face in life is injustice, and the world gives one plenty of it; injustice gnaws at the marrow of one’s being even though the ideals of Western culture, indeed much of the world, have been committed to the eradication of injustice for hundreds of years (Thousands, if one wishes to include ancient Greece). Yet, in spite of all these efforts, countless individuals are victims of injustice every single day, our cultural values and political institutions are awash in corruption; individuals seek political office not to pacify a brutish world, but rather the selfish acquisition of wealth and power. Local and federal governments promote mindless conformity while civil rights are gleefully, self-righteously, trammeled. All too frequently it seems as if America has been transformed into a nation of Kafkaesque bureaucrats who consistently punish incredulity and refuse to initiate any independent thought or action.
     In the midst of bleak circumstances it is difficult, if not impossible, to find answers, hope, or meaning. It is tempting to think that never before have things been so bad nor fallen so far, but that would not only be wrong, it would be naive. Violence and the suppression of civil rights is not new, nor should it be surprising, for humanity has always possessed a great talent for expressing its worst impulses and finding novel ways of imposing its dissipated will upon the masses. Not only are the circumstances in which we live historically familiar, their dynamics have existed in social systems from time immemorial. In his book, Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner writes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In a sense, Faulkner is echoing James Joyce who, some thirty years earlier in his masterpiece, Ulysses, utters, “History is nightmare from which I’m still trying to awake.” It seems that the desire for power–an irresistible, rapacious, imperial power–which subsequently crushes the human desire for relationship and love under the heel of a boot, is one of the most enduring and compelling instincts the human animal has.
     The Iliad describes an uncannily contemporary situation: a superpower ventures across an expanse of sea to destroy a city-state–a diverse, sophisticated city-state rich in natural and cultural resources, located along ancient routes of trade–all because of an inflamed, and therefore unbearable, wound to a pugnacious, arrogant, uncurious, and ill-natured leader’s ego. Easily recognizable to modern readers, the rulers of the Greek state of Argos were Agamemnon and his younger brother Menelaus, two descendents of--even by ancient standards--despicable, treacherous, and barbarous ancestors. Their great-grandfather was the infamous Tantalus who, wanting to test the god’s omniscience, killed, chopped up and served his own son, Pelops, to the gods as a ritual dinner (The gods weren’t fooled and devised a special torture for Tantalus in Hades). Until Orestes (Agamemnon’s son) fulfills his destiny, psychopathic ruthlessness is the most notable characteristic floating in the gene pool of those born into the House of Atreus. Agamemnon, inexorably influenced by his ancestral nature, seems destined to always choose the worst of any two alternatives presented to him; he is filled with murderous Atê, his peculiar frenzy and his eventual ruin, his recklessness and dissolute violence (he murders his own daughter as a sacrifice to the gods); he capitalizes on an event, which is at worst personally humiliating for his brother, and fabricates a pretext by which he, self-satisfied and self-righteously, obliterates a society.
     Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, is not a particularly large presence in The Iliad, but in it he seems to be something of a weasel: a braggart and a histrionic, a bully who presses his advantage over those who are weaker. In his Poetics, Aristotle described his character as “indecorous and inappropriate,” strong disapprobation from Aristotle. Helen, the semi-divine beauty, seems rather empty-headed and somewhat uncomprehending, even indifferent, of her role in the atrocities playing out before her. But, perhaps that judgment is too harsh; perhaps one never understands the role of fate or destiny in one’s own life during the moment of its unfolding. Nevertheless, her name hints at her destiny: hela means “to destroy,” and na refers to ships, although she proves far more fatal to the relatively land loving Trojans than she does to the Greek navy. After her lover, Paris, is killed Euripides suggests she secretly aids the besieging Greeks in a number of ways, hastening Troy’s fall. Eventually, and with no apparent thought to the tragic events they set in motion, Menelaus and Helen are reconciled and legend has it that they live happily together thereafter in the Elysian Fields. One can almost see them, blithely sauntering off into retirement, content to busy themselves with plans for building the Argive equivalent of Menelaus’ presidential library.
     One may easily be made to wonder just how this is fair; how is this even remotely just? How can these two, causes of so much death and destruction, simply live out their lives free from any negative consequence whatsoever? Homer instructs his readers that “Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in unhappiness,” but surely this cannot suffice for an explanation; and indeed, it does not. There is an explanation, but the explanation is imprisoned beneath the lines of the text, it is a non-literal, elusive meaning that defies authoritative articulation and singular definition; it is an explanation that may only be imagined. As a brief aside, imagination is very real; it is a powerful, transformational, and potentially unlimited creative endeavor. As the poet John Keats wrote, “I am certain of only two things: the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the power of imagination.”
     Once imagination is engaged to the unwritten implications of the text, a multiplicity of meanings may be discovered, exponentially proliferating sets of meanings, meanings that are barely contained beneath the plot driven, logically and chronologically cohering text. One of the meanings emerging from the margins of the text is that the simple, single-minded, desire for love and relatedness is so transcendently redemptive that even grotesques such as Menelaus and Helen are atoned for. Survival, for Homer, seems to be related to the burning desire for relationship and love: Agamemnon is interested only in the accouterments of wealth and the esteem power provides him; everyone and everything else–even his daughter’s life–is a distant second to achieving his own aims, and as a result, once he returns home he is ignominiously dispatched by his wife, slaughtered like a market-bred steer. A desire other than relationship also consumed Achilles; he is filled with his hatred of Agamemnon, and wants revenge for the petty and arbitrary way he has been treated. Soon enough, an even more burning hatred and vengeance is born within Achilles when his soul mate, Patroklos, is killed, and as invincible as Achilles appears to be, even he cannot escape the fatal consequence of harboring dark and ugly motives. There are others, those like Ajax, pursuing the glory of battle, which are eventually, and inevitably, dispatched from Homer’s narrative.
     But others, like Diomedes, recognize and honor relationships with opponents, and in so doing, appear to live through the brutal and overlong war. Not the least of these is Odysseus, who from the very beginning was reluctant to leave his loved ones and, once he left, ached to be reunited with them. His thoughts never leave his family for long, and all his efforts in battle are directed toward reunification rather than victory for victory’s sake. Perhaps the elderly Nestor survives because of relational longings as well, but in his case rather than longing for another, his relationship is to the past, linked through a sacrament of proper remembering, nurturing the past’s proper place in the present.
     That meaningful relationships enhance one’s life is a long established fact: married people tend to have longer lives, children retard the physical and mental effects of aging in their parents, and having a pet of some kind lowers blood pressure and ameliorates depression. Relationships demonstrably improve the quality of one’s life. In fact, relationship may be the fundamental goal of life. After the fall of Troy it is relationship, in all its variations, which commands the attention of the ancient poets: Odysseus’ efforts to return to Penelope; Clytemnestra’s murderous marriage to Agamemnon, Orestes’ devotion to his sister and, ultimately, to the ideals of the city-state and the rule of law; Andromache and Hekabe’s life in Greek slavery; Menelaus and Helen’s happiness.
    It may well be that relationship is the entire point of falling and failing. Not until Adam and Eve are evicted from Paradise is a deeper, more conscious relationship to the divine possible. When people fall in love, the fog of romance and the nature of unconscious projections prevent genuine relationship; couples must fall out of romantic love in order to move into relationship. Through neuroses and addictions, one often falls into the depths of oneself, hits bottom if you will, and it is only in the depths of one’s own being that one may glimpse who, or what, one most authentically is. Any structure too imbalanced or one sided is bound to fall, and as reconstruction evolves, a more balanced way of existing is found; a fact no less true for psychic structures than for concrete and steel ones. Falling, in quite literal ways, creates deeper relationships to the material world: learning about gravity, understanding the fragility of the body and the resiliency of skin, finding the limits of kinetic energy and physical ability, mastering self-care and healing; all such essential knowledge is inspired by falling.
     Understanding the apparent injustice of Menelaus and Helen’s happiness is to understand the Fall of Troy as the beginning, rather than the end of the story. Falling is never the end of anything; in fact, falling always, and in all ways, reorients one to beginnings, beginnings filled with unlimited potential and the call to deeper relationship. If Troy had never been sacked, Athens could not have emerged as one of the noblest experiments in human dignity and self-determination the ancient world had yet known: there is a direct line of cause and effect beginning with Agamemnon’s involvement in the sacking of Troy, to Orestes’, his son, central role in the establishment of a democratic Athens. When the injustice of falling is immense one tends to become disoriented, focused on the blinding injustice while one’s desire for cosmos, for order, is subverted and the world no longer makes intuitive sense.

Standing in the rubble of fallen things, it is quintessentially human to want to see only that which has been lost. Grief, fear and pain limit one’s vision and direct one’s focus to a former unity, a unity that was an illusion of prelapsarian wholeness. Great courage, and a heroic act of will, is required to see through past illusions which one is yet inclined to mistake for present realities. Menelaus and Helen didn’t “get away” with anything, people like them never do. For, in the most fundamental sense, they must live with themselves and each other as they are; they will not be magically transformed into compassionate, loving, or caring people. They will always be, as F. Scott Fitzgerald characterized Tom and Daisy, “careless people” who, regardless of the gleaming exteriors they cultivate, are filled with a moral cancer and crippled by an incurable soul sickness. What’s more, the story was never about them, but rather the story is about what their extraordinary lack of consciousness helped to create. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter what kind of people they were, they were merely instruments or tools anyway (perhaps we all are), subplots within the much greater, perpetually unfolding narrative Psyche commandeers to create consciousness in human beings, particularly the awareness of the necessity of deep, loving relationships, not only to each other, but to Matter itself.
If one can learn to see through the injustice and unfairness that often attends falling, one may achieve a glimpse of the source from which deep relationships and love springs, and with this vision drawing one on, new ways of living emerge and vast reservoirs of consciousness are filled so that life without endings becomes a reality; living without infantile needs for closure--that ubiquitous cultural chimera, which so often results in emotional violence if not actual physical violence--is achieved; desires for love and relationship to be satisfied are surrendered, and in surrender a deeper truth is made clear, a truth that teaches that the aim of such desires–the aim of love and relationship–is not for them to be satisfied, but rather to be somehow sustained.

De Profundis Clamo ad te Domine: That Which Moves Us In And Out of The Depths of Our Being is not Science, But Rather It Is Poetry

2011-02-17T08:49:00.002-07:00

Calculate what man knows and it cannot compare to what he does not know. Calculate the time he is alive and it cannot compare to the time before he was born. Yet man takes something so small and tries to exhaust the dimensions of something so large!

– Chuang Tzu

     What you are currently reading is an act of psychological heresy. In the last post, I alluded to the lure of heresy; its tantalizing novelty and interiority; its insistence on subjective revelation; its privileging of personal truth. It’s important to speak one’s truth, and in doing so I don’t wish to simply bash psychology; I love it too much to do that, but I am arguing that psychology, as it is most commonly taught and practiced, has lost its way; it has sold its soul so that it might be regarded as clear-eyed, hard science. While I am the last practitioner to argue that psychology should abandon its empiricism–it cannot be debated that in its empirical origins is to be found its value–I am arguing that psychology, as a discipline, must strip itself of the misleading, seductive garments of scientism–the belief that science or the scientific method can alone explain psychological phenomena. Psychology is not a field ideally suited for the application of scientific methodology; in the application of research conducted upon large groups important individual differences are lost, and in deviations from the norm, pathology is declared without turning a skeptical eye to the norm itself. Such prima-facie assumptions are often found to be in direct conflict with the everyday experience of living that most people have, and creates a nearly unspannable gulf of misunderstanding and misattribution between therapists and their clients.
     All of this is not to say that psychology is meaningless; it’s not, it may yet be of great value to individuals and to culture. Psychology is a legitimate field of study, a bonafide area of inquiry, and an important, even necessary, subject of human investigation. Understanding the human condition and its constituent elements is often the precursor to ameliorating human suffering. But the field of psychology has become possessed by its own shadow, a shadow that emerges in the discipline’s fears of inadequacy (which are quite legitimate, for finally and fully understanding the human condition is impossible), its superstitions, and in its egregious, passive-aggressive treatment of narrative.
     The field of psychology comes by its inferiority complex honestly; Sigmund Freud himself was often wracked with insecurities, and his invention carries within itself the legacy of its progenitor’s feared inadequacies. While I am not a Freud scholar (but I am a Freud enthusiast and have read most of his work), my impression is that he was first and foremost a biologist; he made revolutionary and lasting contributions to that field and established an enviable reputation as the result of some of his researches. He was secondarily I believe, a physician–his real love was the laboratory, and finally, almost as if by accident, a psychologist. Freud's psychology seems to arise directly from his biological inquiries. Physical scientists and physicians, especially those who were university professors, never really gave him the respect he hungrily (and sometimes, judging from his letters, pathetically) sought, and if they did, they gave it grudgingly. I don't mean to disparage Freud, for he was bold and daring in his thought and was the original psychological heretic. But successful heresies become orthodoxies eventually and call for new heresies to discomfit their slumber.
     In its aspirations and pretensions to Science, psychology is an astonishing failure. Questions of causality regarding psychopathology are left begging for answers, or at least some sort of plausible response, and all that may be heard in return is an amalgam of confusing, solipsistic doublespeak and deafening silences. Because of this inability to find clear answers, we psychologists resort to reliance upon a kind of superstition: we give clinical syndromes, various sorts of mental illnesses, bizarre thoughts and behaviors…names. The collection of nomenclatura we call the DSM is, in many psychological circles, taken to be the final word in defining mental health, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Yet, among psychotherapists, the qualities of reliability and internal consistency in the application of the definitions contained in the book are so severely limited as to make the diagnostic categories nearly irrelevant. Even so, as is the case with all the fundamentalist religions of the world, there is still great–almost exclusive–authority invested in the book. Psychologists and psychotherapists are also "people of the book." Psychology’s compulsion to name (it cannot fairly be termed “diagnose” since a relationship between symptom eruption and causality is hardly ever apparent) is a neurotic expression of superstition and magic linking back (religio--and from the word religio, perhaps we get the word religion) to ancient magical superstitions suggesting that if one can figure out the phenomenon’s name, one may control the phenomenon. It is exactly the sort of thinking at the heart of the fairy tale about Rumplestiltskin. If you guess his name, you get rid of this problem guest. Naming is the original magic that allows one to have dominion over the named. In the Judeo-Christian creation myth one of the first things Adam does is name everything in the garden; naming becomes a symbolic act of control and domination.
Finally, in its state of shadow possession, psychology as it is often practiced, does tremendous violence to narrative. As I mentioned earlier psychologists, like other fundamentalists are people of the book, and have grown used to certain symptoms having assigned narratives. Almost without exception, the therapist will ask the client for narrative context, and if they don’t hear the orthodox narrative which traditionally accompanies a given symptom, they simply proceed as if the orthodox narrative is implied, ignoring the presenting narrative with the assumption that the patient is not sufficiently self-aware to be cognizant of the “true” narrative, a narrative the therapist alone, it seems, is privileged to know.
     I want once more to emphasize that this is a critique of psychology’s shadow, not of the entire organism itself. I would no more condemn the entire field of psychology for the neurotic expression of its anxieties than I would condemn a human being whom I love for the same fault. Psychology is necessary; it matters deeply. My point is that psychology has lost it own soul, just as human beings so often do, in its search for legitimacy and its subsequent worship at the alter of scientism. But it is not too late to reclaim psychology for the humanities, for the arts, reclaim it for culture, and most importantly, reclaim it for the individual. But in order to do so we must, paradoxically, no longer believe that psychology is a panacea to be imposed upon every individual who is homeless, criminally inclined, addicted, depressed or simply unhappy; rather, it may only transform those people who meet Psyche (and by logical extension themselves) with an open heart, an open mind, and with a resolute desire to seek out and receive beauty. When individuals encounter the elements of psychological study in the exact same way a work of art is received–a poem for instance–only in this fashion can individuation truly commence, for individuation requires an appreciation for the beauty, sometimes for the horrible beauty, of all that is human.
    C. G. Jung once noted that “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.” We outgrow by consenting to live into, live through, and live past our symptoms rather than indulge a childish wish to have them excised from us, as easily as a dentist would remove an abscessed tooth. The roots of psychic sufferings are seldom found adjacent to the symptom and while one might for the time being eliminate the symptom, the root remains and continues to rankle. Jung once wryly commented that religion is a defense against a religious experience, and I think it may well be said of psychology that psychology is itself a defense against a psychic experience. In other words, the experience that confronts one, whether psychic or spiritual (I’m less and less sure there is a difference), is so vast, so overwhelming, and in the face of it one is so small as to be insignificant, that one retreats to a system of definitions and rules to protect oneself from the enormity of the experience. This is why the science of living--our psychology--needs to be understood as an art. We would not spend much time with art that was only designed to entertain us or make us happy, and neither should we spend time on a psychology created for the same purpose. A sense of meaning and significance transcends happiness just as beauty in art transcends pleasant images. Happiness is fleeting and mostly a matter of luck (the hap in happiness is the same hap as in mishap, happenstance, happening, happen on, haphazard, etc.) and that is why we must make our lives, as Nietzsche wrote, a poem; this is the only way to live a vital, meaning-filled life of significance, and in addition living artfully is the beginning of living mythically.
     In his book, Opus Posthumous, the poet Wallace Stevens writes, “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” Dominick McLoughlin is a psychoanalyst who uses poetry as therapy for terminally ill patients, and he asserts that, “The act of writing poetry does not involve a flight from reality. It is something much more substantial that sets us squarely within the human condition and allows for the possibility of change.” That “something more substantial” to which McLoughlin refers is a universal quality found in poetry: a particular life is but a small part of a scarcely conceivable whole, each life participates in something greater than itself, something that promises to eradicate existential loneliness and fear, and serves to attune one to inescapable life changes, changes that are inevitable and cause one to search for contentment while carried away by the changes the soul demands.
     Aristotle notes that the function of the poet and of poetry is to describe:
not the thing that has happened [that is what Aristotle calls history], but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary […] it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history [or individual experience] are singulars.
Poetry inspires the reader to reconsider the realms, not only of the possible, but as Aristotle shrewdly noted, the necessary. Aristotle wants his readers to understand that what may possibly come to pass is not simply a haphazard future or a random confluence of events. He allows the reader to realize that the products of poesis may well be necessary–a fitting progression of an ongoing life, or a specific answer to a specific question, an answer that arrives on the scene with such a plangency that it cannot be ignored. However, it is often the case–especially in the process of psychotherapy–that what one may envision as necessary seems impossible to capture, and what one believes is possible to achieve does not always appear to be a necessity.
     Poetry subtly alludes to that which might be–the life that waits if only one can let go of the need for control and predictability, and leave one’s present condition behind. Literary art provides an indistinct, often vague, notion that one feels more readily than one may articulate, and I believe the difference between poetry and prose is found in this indistinct intuition of feeling. Helen Vendler suggests that in prose writing narrative voice is distinct, descriptive, and informative; it gives us an abundance of detail and character development and history. But in poetry “voice is made abstract,” which is to say that the reader can know far less about a poetic voice than a narrative voice. It is as if the natural home of the ego-identified self is the novel, while the home of the soul is found in poetry where, Vendler says, “the human being becomes a set of warring passions independent of time and space.” These warring passions serve to construct a bridge that connects the abstract, soulful aspects of human life with its equally important embodied realities, thereby resulting in a more fully conscious individual, one who feels more piquant and vitally alive.
     For the careful reader poetry and literature draw attention to the rhythms and cycles of life, and to the individual reader’s journey through them. Literary art supplies one with a gazetteer, a map of the soul and its passions, an atlas that represents the reader’s path and what one might encounter on and off that path. Found in its pages are practical advice as to how best conduct oneself in the face of psychic danger and emotional obstacles. Literature gives the reader a Virgil-like escort who teaches lessons that aid one in developing a greater understanding and a more skillful expression of one’s values and goals.
     Epic poetry, specifically, is full to bursting with images of being lost, of journeying, and of being tested. In fact, epic tales capture the essence–the beauty, the horror, and the struggle–of the reader’s individual experience of life. I do not find it to be in the least coincidental that Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, possesses the fairest voice, nor is it a coincidence that she is considered the oldest of the muse-ical sisters. For one who is engaged in the poesis of life, it is important to be able to listen to her voice often and long (and for such extended listening only a fair voice will do) for in her voice is contained the wisdom of all the ages. Calliope’s concerns are of the greatest importance to human beings: the concerns of navigating life’s trials, of integrating the agonistic forces of life, and finding a way to live peacefully with one’s own disjoint nature.
     I am arguing that poetry and literature serve as mirrors in which readers see themselves and their own human nature reflected. Hamlet says that the purpose of the dramatic literary arts, “both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as’t were, the mirror up to nature.” Readers become conscious of themselves–of their own natures–and conscious of the archetypes flowing through them by gazing into their own reflections as they appear on the written page. (Harold Bloom makes the point in several of his published works that in all probability, Shakespeare fully intended his plays to be read, and not only performed on the stage by players. Bloom notes that there are subtleties and asides that occur too quickly on the stage for the audience to absorb, and may only be fully encountered on the written page.) But, and this is a crucial point, such an awareness does not come from careless, light reading; one must read archetypally in order to apprehend the archetypes. One must read psychologically in order to understand one’s psychology. And one must read mythically in order for the myth to emerge and be apprehended in one’s life. When one commits to a work of literary art in this manner, the eye that is in the art simultaneously reads the reader. In such a symbiosis of art and observer, knowledge of oneself is received which has heretofore been kept secret from him. The disclosure of such secrets serves to soulfully unite the psychically split individual and create a significant sense of wholeness. Seeing oneself thus reflected fills in the blanks. Only then is psychology meaningful; only then is it a worthwhile endeavor.

In Praise of Ambivalence And The Lure of Heresy

2011-02-08T12:36:00.001-07:00

Sigmund Freud, a thoroughly modern man, made much of the study of ambivalence. Ambivalence, Freud suggested, is the existence of contradictory emotions held at the same time by an individual. Of course, one is generally not conscious of one of the conflicting emotions at a given time and projects the unconscious feeling into one's environment, usually upon some "other." Feelings of love and hate regarding a parent for instance, are often held simultaneously but one "allows" only feelings of love to inhabit one's conscious attitude toward the parent while the hateful feelings are projected onto other people or situations.

But it is not this thought, exactly, that makes Freud a Modernist; what makes him a modernist is that he makes the idea of contradictory ideas central to his understanding of the world, the hallmark of a modernist. To become aware of the inherent contradictions of life is to become aware of the interior and interiorized nature of life. That is to say that all of life's importance is to be found in the interior experience of the individual. What is important about life is how one interprets or feels about the external events of one's life. In c.1900 Vienna, and indeed all around the Western World, a self-censoring ethos ruled social discourse if not one's own personal experiences. Ideally, life was lived in a very black and white manner; one must have been possessed of a realistic world view; ambivalence was seen as weak indecisiveness and confusion about one's place in the world or the manner in which the world seemed to work was a taboo to be skirted around in any way possible.

Realism was the coin of the realm before modernists like Sigmund Freud began to subvert the order of things. An increase in the awareness of ambivalence as a universally experienced feeling led to bolder and more unconventional attempts at its resolution. Art and literature began to shock. Music strayed from predictable form and flirted with atonality and unusual rhythms. Heresies began to pop up all over in the form of Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and Spiritualism. Heresy did not just arise in the realm of religion, but in virtually every facet of life: Communism, Cubism, the enfranchisement of women, movements to unionize, and especially, sexuality.

Heresy is exhilarating, of that there can be no doubt. The sheer exhilaration of the successful insubordination against an authority (whether inner or outer) cannot be denied. Such a feeling of exhilaration seems to liberate and free one from outworn, staid, and oppressive rules. One senses that one needs, as the sculptor, Claes Oldenburg has noted, an "elevation of sensibility above bourgeois values," a sensibility that would "restore the magic inherent in the Universe." Such a restoration of "magic," a re-ensoulment of the Universe if you will, is the essence of mythic thinking. It is no accident that modernist artists, musicians, and writers begin to be recognized as the myth makers of a culture, because they are in fact retelling and recasting the old myths in radically ambivalent new ways, ambivalence that pushes the limits of comprehension, form, and taste to tell old truths in strange new ways that open up the world and put us in relationship to its mysteries rather than closing it down and cordoning off the world, making it inaccessible buried beneath dogma and orthodoxy.

Human nature being what it is, the effectiveness of Modernism (or anything new, really) can only last for a discreet period of time. Before long every heresy becomes an orthodoxy, everything new has become old, and the heresies become playthings of the very bourgeois class that they are meant to subvert. Again, Oldenburg:
The bourgeois scheme is that they wish to be disturbed from time to time, they like that, but then they envelope you, and that little bit was over, and they are ready for the next.
In other words, the products of ambivalence can be used to distract one from ambivalence itself, but this is the nature of ambivalence; it is supremely uncomfortable and we like to turn it into distracting little games that are devoid of interiority and inner searching. I think that in many ways, what we live in our culture today is not Modernism, but a modern-ishness that is constantly searching for the new, the startling, and the distracting to distance ourselves from the inner realities of our existence rather than move us more deeply into relationship with ourselves, relationships that harmonizes individuals with their world. And Freud--that protean, archetypal modern--weeps.

Heart Conditions: I Would It Were Otherwise

2011-01-25T13:43:00.000-07:00

Chief Justice: Well, the truth is, Sir John, that you live in great infamy.
Falstaff: He that buckles him in my belt cannot live in less.
Chief Justice: Your means are very slender, and your waist is great.
Falstaff: I would it were otherwise: I would my means were greater and my waist slenderer.
Henry IV, Act I, Scene II

To put this in more familiar language, Mrs. Wallace Simpson famously said, "One can never be too rich or too thin." It is tempting to believe that physical beauty and wealth provide the answers to all of life's questions; it's a very strong unconscious desire. In fact, for a glimpse into the unconscious of American culture, just watch television commercials. Boomers are bombarded with messages of accumulating wealth for retirement--What's your number? Sexy, curvaceous luxury cars are driven by even more sexy and curvaceous women. We live in a culture that is increasingly obsessed with physical appearance and money. Madison Avenue has our number alright, and it's the number of never having enough.

Falstaff himself was aware of the importance he placed upon money and beauty. He vainly and self-deceptively (at times he was quite conscious of his self deception) regarded his 300 plus pounds of weight as beguiling and attractive--attractive that is to a properly schooled and wise, one should read gullible, feminine eye. And he, in a play written in the 1590's, displays a modern sensibility when it comes to fantasizing about what makes one happy.

Today however, nearly everyone expects (consciously or not) to achieve the goal of a fatter purse and a slimmer body. It's only a matter of catching the right break, having one's genius at last recognized, or attaining notoriety somehow...anyhow, actually. In modern America living in infamy has become a perfectly acceptable way of reaching the goals of beauty and wealth whether it's achieved through reality TV, sexual scandal (it betrays my provincialism, I suppose, to even link the words sexual and scandal together as there seems to be little scandal attached to sex of any variety outside the profession of politics--and not always there) or crime. Falstaff reveled in his infamy; he loved being famous and, by association, immune from arrest while his beloved Hal was still a prince.

Once Prince Hal became King Henry V, Falstaff realized what meant the most to him: love. It was love that meant the most to Fat Jack as is clear when he's discussing what Hal owes him: A thousand pound, Hal! a million: thy love is worth a million; thou owest me thy love" (3.3). But as King, Hal withdraws his love from Falstaff and this brutal act kills him. Falstaff's fatness, as a metaphor, says much to readers but nothing so forcefully as this: his fatness is the symbol of his great error, it is the image of trying to take in or ingest the whole world of material things that, finally, can never satisfy; his fat gut is the image of privileging the world of the senses (stomach) over the world of feeling and reflection (heart) and it is only at death's door does he seem to recognize his error.

When we finally arrive at the end of life, it's not the material world that matters, but rather the immaterial world and specifically, love that matters most. The experience of love is a comfort just as its absence is a torment. The loss of a loved one is felt not in the loss of whatever material gifts were gained through that relationship, but in the loss of the relationship itself. As Bardolph says of his old crony, Well, the fuel is gone that maintained that fire. That’s all the riches I got in his service (Henry V, Act 2, Scene 3). All the riches we need are found in that warm bodied, fiery presence which we love. As Robert Browning says, take away love, and our earth is a tomb.

Heart Conditions: Make Gentle the Life of This World (Reflections on Violence)

2011-01-11T09:38:00.005-07:00

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...
--William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords this past Saturday immediately brought to my mind memories of that awful summer 43 years ago, a summer that found our nation deeply divided and seething with hateful rage and simultaneously reeling from violence. That summer of 1968 witnessed or gave birth to–I don’t know which–tremendously violent political convulsions and social transformations. I was ten years old, a child awash in violence and death that summer, death that seemed completely senseless and unsettling. For the first time, life seemed unpredictable and threatening to me. Things happened that summer that I never would have imagined and, after the death of Martin Luther King, I heard remarkable words that have, in light of recent events, returned with even more clarity and urgency.

Immediately after Robert Kennedy learned of it, he broke the news of King’s assassination in Memphis to a largely African American audience in Indianapolis to whom he was to make a campaign speech. He spoke in an unprepared, unrehearsed, and astonishingly unguarded, heart-felt, soulful manner:
“…we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”…. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” (To read the text of, or listen to this speech, go to http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/rfk-mlk.htm. Video of RFK delivering this speech may be found on YouTube.com)

Kennedy spoke with such deep sadness and compassion. And wisdom. Phenomenal wisdom for one so young. Wisdom born of the pain falling, as Aeschylus said, drop-by-drop upon his own heart. I believe that the assassination of his brother, four and a half years earlier, profoundly altered his world-view, and equally transformed his thoughts about purpose, meaning, and existence. He seems to have come around to viewing others and the world genuinely through the eyes of love, and this was never more evident than on this painful April night.

“We have to make an effort to understand…” but how do we comprehend the incomprehensible? How do we understand the losses and the death enforced upon us by violence? How are we able to calculate, how are we able to perform the emotional math and arrive at the sum total of that which we have lost and that which we have gained? Thomas Hardy said, “if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst." The way to the better, the way to healing, the way to redemption is to no longer allow oneself to avert one’s gaze. It is one's willingness to bear witness that “tames the savageness of man and makes gentle the life of this world.” The eyes are the perceptual organs of the soul, or as the Troubadours of the Middle Ages used to sing, the eyes are the scouts for the heart. Wherever, and upon whatever, we train our gaze, that image enters the soul, and its penetration may be felt as a deep wounding no matter the valence (relative goodness or badness) of the image. In fact, whenever we open our hearts indeed, whenever we open to knowledge or understanding, we invite a wound.

Why must this be so? Aeschylus teaches us “we must suffer, suffer our way into truth.” In this manner of suffering, we encounter the paradoxical relationship between pathos and mathos, suffering and its significance. The momentum of tragedy threatens to crush us as if it were some terrible engine of fate, yet it also summons up, if one only refuses to avert ones eyes, the human capacity for transcendence. C. G. Jung notes that it is only something that feels so overwhelming that it threatens to destroy us, which can make us conscious of, or put us in touch with our own wholeness. In such relationship is life itself discovered, pain is not only the essence of human existence, but is the very stuff of human transcendence. We die into our lives, as some Sufis say. This is what, in psychoanalysis, I often refer to as the death of the ego.

Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; like Gabby Giffords, they were ambushed. The Greek word for ambush is lochos, an ambush that cries out for revenge, but in another usage, lochos means a bed of childbirth, too. This is the question we must ask ourselves: what is being born out of these tragic ashes? The only way such a birth is brought to term is by the willingness to not avert ones gaze, to pay attention, to bear and bear witness to the tragic in life. Even when the savagely violent and vengeful Furies are awakened by the terrible wounding of a moral code as they are in Aeschylus’ brilliant trilogy we know as the Oresteia, the force that transforms them is the compassionate gaze of Athena, the willingness of the goddess to bear compassionate witness to their plight transforms them into the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. While they never stop being the Furies, the disparate parts of them are unified, and they are become whole. In this wholeness of being they become the Semnai Theai, the Awesome Goddesses who sanctify the law, a new creation with essences of each of the former ways of being. The Oresteia moves from violence and split off consciousness into wholeness, justice, and compassion; it is a story of creation, a story of “taming the savageness of man and making gentle the life of this world.”

When we human beings violently and blindly impose our individual will upon our world, upon those we love, even upon ourselves, we find ourselves most distant and removed from the Soul; we are unable to journey into the soul of compassion and bear witness to the physical and emotional events of our lives; we are not able to develop a humane existence, for violence and oppression, physical or emotional, eventually stops and then what remains? Only love and a compassionate gaze can create something that endures, something that continually reinvents itself. Only with love and compassion can one undertake the exploration and the re-ensoulment of the world.

The world opens itself to love and compassion, and while the opening may still feel remarkably like a wounding, it is bittersweet; it is a wound, yes, but it is also an opening, a chance for the soul, and ideally we might submit gracefully to it, understanding that, as T. S. Eliot writes, “In the end is my beginning.”

Merry Christmas! (Or whatever you may wish to call it...)

2010-12-23T06:08:00.002-07:00

I have always loved Christmas. I would like for those words to be true, but alas, I have a more ambivalent relationship to Christmas than that. When I was a child, I became almost unbearably excited for Christmas--mainly because of the presents I anticipated and the lavish foods that could only be savored (in my house at least) at that time of the year--and time seemed to stall and finally stand still during the preceding week. For a long time I couldn't understand why Christmas was ultimately disappointing to me; so disappointing in fact, that I reliably became more or less saturnine sometime after Thanksgiving and remained so on through December. I became something of a Scrooge by the time of my early adulthood and resented Christmas. I came to resent Christmas because I didn't understand it. As with all peculiar and confusing emotional experiences, the answers lay deep within me; I needed know what Christmas was really about.

It turns out that Christmas is about Darkness. Well, not just darkness; it's about the triumph of light over darkness. But one cannot understand Christmas if one moves too quickly out of the darkness. The darkness must be as celebrated as the light. Humanity has always been aware of this important element of existence and has likewise always celebrated it. The stories various cultures tell may be different, yet they are all pointing to the same thing: the move from an enveloping darkness into the light. The concordance of mythic narratives from around the world and through time is not accidental, and like so many before him, Christ is a solar deity and his birth signifies the triumph of the sun over the darkness. Just this past Tuesday morning, one had the opportunity to witness the darkest night in the past 600 or so years as a lunar eclipse occurred at the same time as the winter solstice. The symbolic significance of the birth of Christ is that light can, and always will, overcome seemingly impenetrable and insurmountable darkness. This is very similar to a much older Mithraic tradition called, familiarly enough, Yule. Mithras was another solar deity, and burning a yule log (Yule is a word that may mean sun, or the wheel of the sun) for a fortnight or so was the symbolic recognition of the inextinguishable burning sun upon which human culture, indeed human existence, depends.

December is a holy month for Buddhists, too. The 8th of December, the Day of Enlightenment, celebrates the day that the historical Buddha (Shakyamuni or Siddhartha Guatama) experienced enlightenment. Enlightenment, a curious word; in order to experience enlightenment, one has to know endarkenment. In the Hindu tradition from December 21–25, Pancha Ganapati is a five-day festival in honor of Lord Ganesha, who is commonly known as the remover of obstacles, and there may be no greater obstacle than the disorienting darkness that robs one of sight. Hanukkah is a well known celebration of light commemorating the miracle of the oil which allowed the candle light of the menorah to burn seven days longer than it logically should have. The Persian festival, Yalda is a winter solstice celebration of the victory of light and goodness over darkness and evil. Shabe yalda means 'birthday eve' and according to Persian mythology, Mithra, the sun god, was born at dawn on the 22nd of December to a virgin mother.

In early 3rd century Rome, after a bitter defeat at the hands of the Carthaginians, the festival of Saturnalia was introduced. During this week-long celebration, the ropes which normally bound Saturn in front of his temple were loosened and the normal order of things was overturned, much as it is in the traditional Boxing Day; slaves acted as master, drunken, orgiastic revelry reigned, and a general tomfoolery was the order of the day. In other words, a celebration of darkness and its frequent companion, chaos. Saturn is a complex deity. He is said to have established a "golden age" in Rome and is often, like his classical counterpart Kronos, possessed of creator-like characteristics. But Saturn is known mostly for destruction: he devours his offspring before they are brought to term--which is a way of saying mythically that he destroys his own futurity--and in our modern English language, to be saturnine means to be melancholy and depressively pessimistic about one's future. In alchemy, Saturn is associated with lead, which is heavy, dense and poisonous and in the 19th century, to be stricken with lead poisoning won one the diagnosis of saturnine.

So, to come full circle with this thought, my disappointment with Christmas was centered around a tradition that valued only materialism and light. The Saturnine aspect, the Dark Night of the Soul quality of the Christmas season was neglected and as a result a nagging, unconscious sense of something unfinished or unaccomplished within was mine. Recognizing the god implicit in one's symptoms is a useful project and even though the influence of Saturn has traditionally been thought to be destructive, bringing all sorts of bad luck and misfortune, a deeper understanding of Saturn reveals that he heralds the end of a cycle and initiates a movement into a more mature and patient way of living. This god is the god of time (Chronos) and under his influence things seem to slow down to a nearly unbearable, sluggish pace, but when time seems to stand still one's only choice is to inhabit the moment, and in this way Saturn becomes a teacher of mindfulness. Saturnine depressions turn one inward, offering the opportunity of examining what one has outgrown, what attitudes, beliefs, or habitual emotional responses to the world and others need to be let go of or surrendered. Under the influence of Saturn, our little candle flame can gutter and even die, and it is in those moments that we then receive the most poignant instruction in patience and faith for the light always returns, even after the darkest of nights, and we have the occasion to begin anew the human-all-too-human task of living life more authentically, more meaningfully, and to its fullest.

Inmensumne Noctis Aequor Confecimus?

2010-12-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

Anne Carson says she found the phrase I've borrowed for the title of this post in a Latin lexicon. It means, "Have we made it across the vast plain of night?"

I feel the beauty of this phrase deeply. The nominative word aequor is derived from aequus, which is to mean flat or horizontal, but is also related to the sea. Perhaps it is because I grew up in the Great Plains region of the country and know the feeling of looking out at that vast expanse of plains stretching into the gathering darkness and feeling just as small and as much at sea as Ishmael when he sat atop the Pequod's crow's nest and beheld nothing but ocean everywhere he looked. Living at the edge of the Great Plains is rather like living one's life at sea; a vast 360 degree expanse of flatness broken by rolling waves of wheat and nodding tassels of corn in the freshening late summer breeze. For Homer, the Mediterranean was the "wine-dark sea," for me it was the prairie land of Minnesota.

"Have we made it across the vast plain of night?" This is the question that comes to one in the middle of a difficult traverse, those situations that life always seems so ready to supply, that bring us hard up against our limitations and threaten us with annihilation. In mythology, these experiences are called "The Night Sea Journey." In spiritual terms this psychological situation is called the dark night of the soul. I have a dear friend who periodically tells me that he has been "reduced to ashes once again." My friend and I are inclined to a warrior mentality and such an incineration is initially hard to accept because it smells so much like defeat. Of course nothing is ever so black and white as victory or defeat, and I began to realize that my particular and rather obstinate personality was not always a boon to those I care for or an advantage to me, and it is a personality that is, happily, much more foreign to me now than it was some years ago. A personality that can accept an undifferentiated horizon is a great asset to a sailor on the dark crossing. It is a quality, however,that I find I still keenly lack and my crossings have been made more hazardous because of it. My temperament is more closely aligned to Ahab's, or Odysseus', or that of the Ancient Mariner and the belief that one might bend the natural world to one's own will. But such a belief also risks a kind of madness. The kind of madness that results from the refusal to accept limitations.

Between acceptance and madness lies, perhaps, negotiation. As I wrote in a previous post, I learned to negotiate with the night, I learned to press whatever small advantage I might have had to its fullest. Often this meant bending, maybe even on occasion breaking, rules and flouting conventions. Yet I have been lucky. I have made it across the vast plain of night and find myself, for the moment at least, safely in port. Others are not so fortunate fail to make the difficult crossing. I have an uncle who is hopelessly schizophrenic, another who died from the effects of alcoholism, a high school friend who died in a car accident on graduation night, and I myself was a fifteen-year-old passenger in a car involved in an accident that killed a thirteen-year-old boy. And these are only the highlights of adolescence. Most people have similar, if not more painful tales to tell. Not all of us make it, certainly not all of us in that car made it across the vast plain of night, and if we are lucky enough to make it across, it is in a condition that is often something less than whole. The voyage changes us; it gives us some things and it takes away others. And after, we are never the same again.

This is why, you see, that after a particularly long or treacherous journey, people often drop to their knees and kiss the earth. Because despite whatever acts of will one might be capable of exerting, whatever skill set one has that contributes to one's survival, it is ultimately true that making the crossing reasonably in tact is an act of grace. One has found favor with the god or the goddess, and kissing the earth (the great goddess herself, Gaia) is the acknowledgment--however unconscious it may be--of one's great good fortune that, this time at least, some divine faculty was interested in one's well being. Our survival is always ultimately out of our own hands, and I suspect this fact is probably to our great good fortune. Homer illustrates this idea in the Odyssey when he has Zeus, the master of human fate, decide in Odysseus' favor and say, For so it is fated that he shall see his people and come back to his house with the high roof and to the land of his fathers’ (5.31-42).

For many reasons--too many to go into here, and for a long time, I believed I had not made it across the the vast plain of night; I felt suspended in the darkness, a mere shade in the land of the living. But then I realized I had indeed completed the voyage, I was in fact safe on the far shore. It was just that I hadn't crossed in the manner I thought I should have. Perhaps I thought I should have arrived in a grander, more elegant style, or at a more prestigious harbor, or arrived in a more jauntily competent fashion. But the truth is that sometimes we can only afford to book steerage in a leaky boat on the sea of wisdom, and the great thing is, to gloss Oliver Wendell Holmes, some of the wisdom gets in anyhow.

Marching as to War

2010-12-10T21:52:00.002-07:00

An article in the news yesterday informed me that the members of the Westboro Baptist Church will stage a protest at the funeral of Elizabeth Edwards. It is interesting to think about how one might explain such intolerant bigotry and apparent hate arising out of a religion that identifies its god's most salient characteristic as love.

Of course this is nothing new; Christianity has a long and bloody history dating back to the 4th Century when Constantine, looking for any advantage he might exploit in a battle against Maxentius, instructed his troops to daub the sign of the cross on their shields. Most scholars will point to this event as the beginning of Constantine's conversion to Christianity. Even earlier in the history of this religion, as Jesus was being arrested, the disciple named Peter picked up a sword and cut off a servant's ear (John 18:10, 11). A servant. Why not a soldier, or the High Priest himself? The disenfranchised have always been the easier target, and apparently more than 2,000 years later, Christianity has yet to lay the sword down.

Civil discourse and intellectual curiosity has, it seems to me, been on the wane these past ten years or so and a strident bellicosity has replaced it as the de facto mode of expression in our culture. Bellicose is derived from the Latin word for war, bellum, and associated with the Roman goddess of war, Bellona. While she is not generally well known and often seems no more than a footnote to Greco-Roman mythology, she is not to be ignored or trifled with. The unconscious and stubbornly hubristic use of power often, maybe even inevitably, weds one to Bellona as Macbeth, to his horror, found out. Shakespeare describes the "Thane of Glamis" early in the play as "Bellona's bridegroom." Now, in early 21st century America, Bellona has fastened her seductive gaze on a group of people who, in the name of their god, have no tolerance for diversity--whether it be found in opinion or in race--and they in turn have fallen deeply, madly, gladly in love with her and apparently revel in tormenting wounded, grieving souls; the very souls the founder of their religion enjoined them to compassionately love (as he demonstrated by miraculously restoring the ear of the aforementioned unfortunate servant).

But these people of the Westboro church are not alone and not solely of themselves responsible for their obscene lack of basic human feeling. They are following the dictates of a playbook well known to the powerful that has appeared under various titles and authors over the past two millenia. Joseph Goebbels said, in words eerily reminiscent of what I imagine must be Roger Ailes' and FOX News's operational handbook:

But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country (emphasis is mine).

This element of radical right wing Christianity martials itself and responds enthusiastically to just such a tactic. They believe themselves to be engaged in a holy war, a war for the soul of America. They see themselves as the last, best hope against a world controlled by Satan and his evil, or at best deluded, followers (and the word follower is extrapolated to include anyone who thinks differently than they do). In such a world view peacemakers are not blessed, but anti-American bastards; those who mourn are mongrels who deserve no comfort; the poor in spirit and the meek inherit nothing from these groups but derision and scorn. Beatitudes are ground into dust beneath jack-booted feet while a siege mentality is adopted through which this culturally dominant, privileged and populous group claims victimization and imagines itself suppressed by a relatively small group of people in this country who hold different ideas and beliefs about the nature of the world and indeed, the nature of the universe itself.

The rhetoric of unabating fear and intolerance plunges a society into war with itself, it foments an increasingly uncivil war against difference, individual freedom and expression, and disorder--a disorder which is perhaps the defining characteristic of a free society. But as James Hillman might point out, the psychopathology of an insistence upon unity and order, which is inherent in any monotheistic religious tradition, is a brutal intolerance of disorder.

In Shakespeare's play, Macbeth refuses to listen to his own conscience, he refuses come to his senses and instead resolves to die rather than relent: Yet I will try to the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield [...] And damned be him that first cries "Hold! Enough!" This attitude, so inhumane, so inhuman! This attitude shatters civility and smashes the State, and perhaps all one can do is lament with its legatee, Macduff: Bleed, bleed, poor country!

Heart Conditions: The Truth of Imagination

2010-11-26T15:29:00.007-07:00

I am very excited lately because I received my long awaited copy of Mark Twain's autobiography a few days ago and have been drowning in the beautiful mind of Mr. Clemens. He was possessed of an imagination that, without a doubt, may be placed next to that of Homer, Dante, or Chaucer (Shakespeare inhabits a rarefied air and remains alone, constituting a cohort of one).
This book does not disappoint, either. I almost immediately find a gem:

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words: His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history.

Clemens points to an important reality: that history is not a collectivity of objective fact but rather, history is made up as we go along. Psyche historicizes. It is not so important, the what-have-you that happens to us, but it is of paramount importance what we believe happens to us. For better or worse, reality isn't an indisputable construct "out there," but rather a tremendously fluid notion within each one of us. Interestingly, even though we all have our idiosyncratic realities, there does seem to be some overlap or confluence among them so that we can try, to varying degrees of success through our ever dependent reliance upon metaphor, share and even affirm the dimmest of outlines and structure of what we call the real world.

So, even though we are reading "fiction" when we read Twain's work, it is the case as Hamlin Hill once wrote, that Twain's fiction was "...always as autobiographical as fiction could get and remain fiction." This is the essence of the mythopoeticising function of Psyche, a function which locates us as individuals in a realized world, and then goes on to explain that world to us in such a way that it provides a context for our own existence.

How Much of Falstaff's Character Did Lincoln Share?

2010-11-09T21:53:00.000-07:00

Does it approach sacrilege or heresy to suggest that Abraham Lincoln has much in common with Shakespeare's most lovable rogue, Sir John Falstaff? It probably does; Lincoln is rightly beloved for his wisdom and his courage, and his martyrdom has elevated him to the pantheon of the gods: Father Abraham, savior of the nation and liberator of the enslaved. It is proper that we honor him so.

But that mythopoeticized Lincoln is only one aspect of this most marvelous human being. I think, having read most of what Lincoln has written, that had he not chosen the professions of law and politics, he would have been the literary equal of Walt Whitman or Hermann Melville--two of his contemporaries. Like Whitman and Melville, Lincoln was possessed of a deeply poetic sensibility (the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address amount to prose poems) and he used a blend of biblical and Shakespearean language in an unprecedented act of binding a nation's wounds and healing the psyche of its inhabitants.

But an aspect of Lincoln that, for my taste, is far too infrequently discussed is that of his extraordinary sense of humor. It is in this respect, his taste for experiencing and illustrating the nature of life through the often surprising use of humor, that he resembles Falstaff.

Now, Lincoln loved Shakespeare and while he was familiar with the character of Falstaff, he much preferred the tragedies of Shakespeare to his comedies, especially loving Macbeth. To a well known Shakespearean actor of the day he wrote:

The first presentation of Falstaff I ever saw was yours here last winter or spring. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay is, to say, as I truly can, I am very anxious to see it again. Some of Shakespeare's plays I have never read, whilst others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful (Letter dated August 17th, 1863).

Like Falstaff and his fatness, Lincoln often and deliberately made fun of his homeliness. Once a political critic accused him of being two-faced and Lincoln replied, "If I had another face do you think I'd wear this one all the time?" Then there is the (apocryphal?) story that Lincoln was stopped one day by a man who stuck a revolver almost into his face. Under the circumstances Lincoln quickly realized that any resistance was unwise. Trying to remain calm, he inquired, "What seems to be the matter?"
"Well," replied the man, "A long time ago I swore that if I ever came across an uglier man than myself I'd shoot him on the spot."
"Well," supposedly said Lincoln. "Go ahead and shoot me then, because if I am an uglier man than you I don't want to live."

Once, while skewering a political opponent's military experience, Lincoln described his opponent's unit as it marched in a parade: "Flags, they had too, with devices and mottos, one of which latter was, 'We'll fight til we run, and we'll run til we die" (Lincoln's Humor: An Analysis, Benjamin Thomas). This anecdote calls to mind Falstaff's playing dead on the battlefield, ever understanding that discretion, while not always to his heroic credit, is the better part of valor.

Lincoln and Falstaff share four character traits that serve to make them funny:

1. They have unusually strong personalities and their chief characteristics are the apparently effortless wit and fearless frankness.
2.They are ridiculous in aspects of appearance and personality.
3. Their actions are often surprising and unanticipated, both for the circumstances they occupy and their public persona.
4. Their language is often based on springing the surprising and unexpected twist or retort.

These are also the qualities that make us love them. We love fools rather naively at first, I think, in a love that emanates originally out of a kind of pity and compassion. "Poor things," we think, "they need our wisdom." Of course we love anything or anyone that allows us to see ourselves as noble and wise. It is only after prolonged exposure, after living with the alleged fool for a period of time that his or her ridiculousness is recognized for what it is: a nearly unfathomable wisdom. And then we love them all the more for not having pointed that out to us and letting us discover it all on our own. Fools like Falstaff and Lincoln shock us into a greater consciousness, a deeper understanding of life and what is important in it, mainly because of their uncanny ability to hold both the genius of Tragedy and the spirit of Comedy.

These two muses, Tragedy and Comedy (Melpomene and Thalia), have the unique gifts of making life and therefore philosophy (the speculation about life), much more accessible and understandable to common experience. That is why one who is touched by these two muses comes to be so beloved by so many; that and because such a one re-ensouls and makes gentle an often savage world and having done so, always leaves life far too soon.

Why Poetry Matters

2010-10-19T17:48:00.000-07:00

I believe that poetry, more than any other form of the written word, is best suited to exploring the archetypal movements of the soul because of its ability to symbolize, just as in the same manner that the soul symbolizes. (I also believe that poetry can be found in all types and styles of writing, even the scientific, as Jung, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, and Steven Hawking have beautifully demonstrated, just to name a few.) Poesis deepens the awarenesses available in all aspects of life because of its ability to reveal fundamental, archetypal facts which are eternal and eternally beautiful, poignant, and yet terrifying and often horrifying, all at the same time.

James Hillman asserts that the mind is inherently poetic and that the poetic image “is the self generative activity of the soul (Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account 14).” William Blake anticipates Hillman by two hundred years or so and describes the “poetic genius” of humans, anticipating the very same construct Hillman describes as soul and archetype:

the Poetic Genius is the true Man. and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon [. . . .] As all men are alike in outward form, So (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius. (1)

Consciously intended or not, untold of numbers of poets, who in exercising their “poetic genius,” touch on the notion that leave-taking is the central action in life and is essential to the soul’s greater awareness of itself. Rainer Maria Rilke writes hauntingly about being drawn away, which he finds to be not only unavoidable, but what’s more, an ultimately life affirming action of human existence:

Who has turned us around like this, so that

whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude

of someone going away? Just as that person

on the last hill, which shows him his whole valley

one last time, turns, stops, lingers—

so we live, forever taking our leave. (The Essential Rilke 129 Italics added)

Poets know these truths, and through their poetry I can recognize my life and my suffering, my joy, my hope--as well as my despair--as the constituent material of poesis. Poesis brings me to a deeper understanding of my life and its vicissitudes. It illuminates the depressions and hollows the soul often inhabits--the deep, dark, damp places where it finds its nourishment. When the world is viewed through the lens of poetry, the interconnectedness of all things comes clearly into focus because the poetic image functions as the nexus where images and words find each other to create understanding and, in a word, consciousness.

Poetry is a powerful instrument, an instrument which allows the soul to be seen, and if only fleetingly, to have form and substance:

So fine are the threads that the moon

Uses to tug at the ocean that Galileo himself

Couldn’t imagine them. He tried to explain the tide

By the earth’s momentum as yesterday

I tried to explain my early waking

Three hours before dawn by street noise.

Now I’m ready to posit a tug

Or nudge from the soul. Some insight

Too important to be put off till morning

Might have been mine if I’d opened myself

To the occasion as I do now.

Here's a chance for the soul to fit its truth

                       To a world of yards, moons, poplars, and starlings,
                       To resist the fear that to talk my language
   Means to be shoehorned into my perspective
                       Till it thinks as I do, narrowly
                       "Be brave, Soul," I want to say to encourage it.
                       "Your student, however slow, is willing,
                       The only student you'll ever have." (Carl Dennis, Practical Gods)

In this lovely poem an insight is offered as to why soul is sometimes hard to “imagine.” It fears being forced into narrow perspectives, it fears becoming small and personalized, or worse, interiorized and imprisoned within an individual body or mind.

Perhaps that is why the poetic soul is always in motion; to be confined inclines the soul toward corruption, to be static is to invite sterility. Stay too long in one place and one gets taken for granted; or worse, a presumption of familiarity takes root and soul is not seen as it is but rather as we are. So, like a runaway, the soul packs its kerchief, ties it to a stick and hits the road.

Robert Frost takes “The Road Less Traveled,” William Butler Yeats is “Sailing to Byzantium,” W. H. Auden sings the “Funeral Blues.” William Wordsworth yearns, “Bid the mist break from thy brow, and thrice nod me a Farewell” (67). Jorie Graham sees this archetypal movement and finds healing in it, both for individuals and for the planet:

This must be perfect progress where

movement appears

to be a vanishing, a mending

of the visible

By the invisible--just as we

stitch the earth,

it seems to me, each time

                     we die, going back under, coming back up…
   It is the simplest
                     Stitch, this going where we must,
                     leaving a not unpretty
                     pattern by default. But going
                     out of hunger
                     for small things--flies, words--going
                     because one's body goes.
                     (The Dream of the Unified Field 36-7)

In Graham’s poem, the soul’s motion stitches together the visible and the invisible, lending to life a sense of wholeness. Contemplation of the newly whole image in turn gives way to another image, an image of life with all its hungers, afflictions, and its various deaths, an image and knowledge of life as “not unpretty,” but as something precious.

Depression and exaltation, death and birth, grief and joy--these pairs of opposites are framed within her notion of “going back under, coming back up,” and they furnish a special human significance to life, significance without which one would lack an appreciation for the deeper places of life: the depressions and hollows the soul inhabits, those dark, moist places where it finds its sustenance. By contemplating the stitch, one becomes aware of the interconnectedness of all things. The suture is exactly the place where images, and therefore the minds and souls of us, overlie, interconnect, and mend.

Poetry offers an avenue that can lead to self-discovery, and is in that way similar to the other do (do simply means “way”) found in Zen practices. Kado, the way of poetry, may ultimately lead to the realization that human form and perception are merely artifacts of peculiar and characteristically human space-time bondage. Kado sees through the material world and its physical limitations and discovers an awareness that the individual human beings populating the globe are drops of water, oscillating swells rising from and disappearing into the limitless sea of soul. The way of poetry offers an aisthesis--an excess of stimulation that nullifies sense organ specialization--capable, not just of penetrating extant boundaries, but of obliterating them entirely in order to reveal the nature of things.

Heart Conditions: The Flow of Life

2010-10-14T21:15:00.000-07:00

As a boy I used to sit on the edge of a railroad trestle, dangling my feet off the side for hours on end, mesmerized by the flow of the Minnesota River below me. I eavesdropped on the river from my perch above, enchanted by its nuances and gurgled intimacies, of which I was certain I alone could see and hear: the eddies and currents, the opalescent, delicate membranes of oil roiling on its surface, or perhaps a mud wasp, stowed away on the back of a brawny bubble, heading to points unknown down river. From a very early age, the river owned me. But what was that something inside of me that belonged to the river and its graceful undulations and melancholy gravity? I wondered that I could be so stirred by the motion of a river rolling itself out underneath me, seemingly oblivious or uncaring to my presence, yet hardly left a doubt it was calling me to join it--join with it--and espy the hitherto unimagined lives and undiscovered countries dwelling deeply and silently within my being.

The Minnesota River gave me my first taste of being called away. It gave me to know that my sole existence was no longer enough and moved me to search for a soul existence that could only be discovered by attending to the call--a call uttered by the soul itself--to be drawn away, and change the shape of my life.

Like that river, as Heraclitus said, all things flow; nothing remains the same or holds its shape forever. Change, the leavings and the losses, the growings and the groanings, the knowings and the no-ings, the visions of altered states of consciousness, the deaths, births, and new challenges are the very fabric of our brief, human lives. Separations and partings are the activities of life, and often seem to constitute the greater part of living. Yet something important is happening in those moments of migration, premeditated or not, regardless of whether they are geographically or mentally realized, consciously or unconsciously experienced. The soul seems as if it is expressing its deepest and most passionately prized activity; it is meandering, in its archetypal way, towards it’s own teleological fulfillment, towards knowing itself more fully as soul through the experience of being human.

Was Robert Greene Falstaff?

2010-09-29T16:04:00.000-07:00

Were not the law by contraries maintain'd,
How could the truth from falsehood be discern'd?
Did we not taste the bitterness of war,
How could we know the sweet effects of peace?
Did we not feel the nipping winter-frosts,
How should we know the sweetness of the spring?
Should all things still remain in one estate,
Should not in greatest arts some scars be found,
Were all upright nor chang'd, what world were this?

Robert Greene (1560-1592) is my favorite choice for the model of Falstaff simply because I find him to be so marvellously Falstaffian. Green was a noted for living a life of licentiousness, dissolution, and debauchery, as well as being a writer of "love pamphlets" and a few plays "so that I soone grew famous in that qualitie, that who for that trade growne so ordinary about London as Robin Greene?" Apparently, like Falstaff, Greene had a rather high opinion of himself. Was it deserved? In some regard it may have been; the passage above, for instance, from one of Greene's plays, King James IV, is really very beautiful. And like Falstaff, he certainly wasn't careful with his tongue. In fact Greene's is the earliest criticism of Shakespeare that we have in print: an vpstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygres heart wrapt in a player's hyde supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Iohannes-fac-totum, is in his owne conceyt the onely shake-scene in a countrey. Greene was apparently annoyed and threatened by an actor who dared to aspire to the station of playwright.

Greene was widely travelled in Europe, and indications are that he was quite bright: he had a M.A. degree in "phisicke" and apparently flirted with the priesthood. As a husband he was faithless (his wife's name was Doll), and he was a rogue who liked to hang out in slums and make war on muggers, thieves, and con artists. He died virtually unmourned and mostly unwatched in the house of a poor shoemaker, attended by a woman with whom he had an illegitimate child. A very similar and lonely death claimed a broken-hearted Falstaff, attended by Mistress Quickly. Shakespeare also lets us know that Falstaff's love interest--a complex relationship, not disdainful nor honorable either--was a prostitute named Doll, Doll Tearsheet.

Falstaff. Thou dost give me flattering busses.
Doll Tearsheet. By my troth, I kiss thee with a most constant heart.
Falstaff. I am old, I am old.
Doll Tearsheet. I love thee better than I love e'er a scurvy young boy of them all.

It seems to me that Greene was a complete combination of bombast, narcissism, and knavery and made a good model upon which to base, or at least contribute to the character of, Falstaff.

Certainly, Robert Greene seemed to be aware of his faults--his scars--and his struggling with them created if not great art, art that has endured.

Heart Conditions: Hafiz

2010-09-22T21:55:00.000-07:00

The rendering on the left is of the 14th Century ecstatic Persian poet called, Hafiz. Hafiz is a name often given by Muslims to people who have completely memorized the Qur'an (Hafiz may be another word for Qur'an).

There is only so long that one can remain in the Valley of Death and Hafiz will not let one stay a moment longer than necessary: God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing.

Thanks, Hafiz (and you, my dear friends, Leigh and George), for calling me back among the living, making me smile and laugh.

Heart Conditions: Breaking. With a 100% Chance of Tears

2010-09-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?[ ......]

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings [...]
--Richard II

One of my best and dearest friends, Jim Maclaren, died early in the morning of August 31st. Fair winds and following seas, my friend. I shall try to not be dismayed if the voyage apart should prove long.

From The Wrong Side: More Lying...

2010-08-27T22:48:00.000-07:00

"I know, brother, that you are a straightforward man, and that you pride yourself on it. But put one question to yourself: why in fact should one tell the truth? What obliges us to do it? And why do we consider telling the truth a virtue? Imagine that you meet a madman, who claims that he is a fish and that we are all fish. Are you going to argue with him? Are you going to undress in front of him and show him that you don't have fins? Are you going to say to his face what you think? Well, tell me!'

His brother was silent and Edward went on: 'If you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth, only what you really thought, you would enter into a serious conversation with a madman and you yourself would become mad. And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us. If I obstinately told a man the truth to his face, it would mean I was taking him seriously. And to take something so unimportant seriously means to become less than serious oneself. I, you see, must lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become one of them myself."
—Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera

Heart Conditions: Beautiful Untrue Things

2010-08-24T18:01:00.000-07:00

"The final revelation is that lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art." Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

I was awakened at 4 AM this morning by questions careering around inside my head; questions about the truth regarding the story of my life, both as I have (mis)represented it and, more troubling still, as I have (mis)understood it. I try not to deliberately lie, but I find that I have difficulty separating the "facts" of my life from the myth of my life. I usually don't allow myself to think too deeply about this disturbing tendency to alter, even if only a little, the circumstances of my life. We all do it, if for no other reason than to make painful memories or facts less painful. To make ugly elements of a life seem less jarringly so. When we do so, even if it's only a small deviation from literal fact, we enter into the realm of mythmaking, of mythopoesis, and we begin to weave a suitable story that can contain and give life to the person we hope to be.

Metaphor and myth, from ancient times, has always been the province primarily, of poets; they allow the poet to say one thing and yet mean another. This is why, in ancient times, poets were thought to be liars, and Plato would have them and their confusing, subversive rhetoric banned from his ideal Republic. This slippery subjectivity is, in part, what propelled Kant to valorize judgement and reason so effectively that today we mostly regard the world, and ourselves, in a radically materialistic and reductionistic way. We have come to believe that nothing is real unless we can describe and explain it.

Well, where does that vision of reality leave me and the convenient construct of my life? I can barely describe it, and I have never been able to explain it. Knowledge of one's life cannot simply be reduced to sense experience because there always seems to be an ineffable something that we bring with it. For instance, we never doubt a statement of fact like, "Books are at Barnes & Noble." But what are books? Much of what we think books are is derived from a culturally accepted idea of what a book is. I don't think I'd instantly recognize ancient papyrus scrolls or pieces of vellum tied together as a book, yet these are the type of "books" that filled the ancient library at Alexandria. And how do the contents of a book, and the organization of contents, contribute to the idea of "a book?" Even more problematic is that connectives such as "is at," "resides," or even, "lives at" cannot be reduced to sense experience or logic.

So if even the idea of a book residing or being stocked somewhere may be, if one chooses to go far enough down the rabbit hole, logically problematic, how much more so my own life? Far from being a sin or a morally wrong behavior, "lying," as long as we refuse to literalize or "believe in" the lie, is instead a way--perhaps even the way--of inviting aesthetic experience, beauty, into one's life; lying is a way of longing, it is a way of making one's own life a work of art. But to get to art, first one must be able to get past the stigma of the lie. Consider this statement:

1 x 0 = 0
2 x 0 = 0
Therefore 1 x 0 = 2 x 0
Then divide both sides by 0 and you get
1 = 2

These are really the lies of art, these are the kinds of lies I'm discussing in this post. They are not lies by which one gains profit, nor are they lies that slander or libel another. They are the kind of lies that draw one in ever more deeply to wrestle with this strange condition of existence. In telling such a lie I am trying to open up hidden places in psyche and search for the beautiful places within.

Similiter Atque Ipse Eram Noctuabunda

2010-08-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

The words in the title of this post mean, "Just like him I was a negotiator with night." When I think of this, the act of negotiating with the night, the first thing that comes to my mind is the time I spent as a cop. Negotiating with the night had a literal as well as a metaphorical reality: I preferred to work mostly at night. There were infinitely more interesting things going on in the dark than went on in the light, or at least I thought so at the time. Remember, Falstaff was my tutor (the tutor and feeder of my riots) and incarnate in my partner, so the opportunities for encountering knavery in just about all of its forms were legion, and these opportunities depended upon the darkness for their successes. My partner, the reincarnation of Falstaff himself, taught me that "Why, then the world's mine oyster, Which I with sword will open (The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II, Scene II)" and so much that happened in the dark disappeared in the daylight, and we felt as though we were not only untouchable, but that we were invincible.

So I negotiated with night, in a literal sense, for six years. In terms of my own psyche, I have negotiated with night ever since. I used to love to drive through the neighborhoods on my beat and look into the well lit houses, imagining what sort of lives were lived in them. What were their concerns, their cares, their loves and their longings; what were their secrets, their salvations, their shame? I loved working on stormy nights: even though it was one of the largest cities in the country, strong desert thunderstorms mostly kept everyone quiet and I delighted in the sheer power and beauty of the elements, part of my negotiation with the night. Now, the psychic storming I occasionally experience within dazzles me every bit as much as the lightening did as it danced across the coal dark skies.

I don't often win in these negotiations, and now that I am older I find that what happens in the dark is exponentially illuminated by the day, and the old Falstaffian bravura is no longer a present comfort--"How ill white hairs become a fool, and jester (Henry the IV, Scene V)!"--but the darkness still fascinates, it still seduces, but now it--the darkness, the night--dwells within my own being, and the negotiations are difficult...and endless.

Heart Conditions: Malgré Lui

2010-08-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

"Have you any levers to lift me up again, being down?" --Falstaff (Henry The IV, 2.2)
Once again Falstaff, even in this brief, plaintive question, throws open the doors to mysteries and intriguing psychic possibilities--something I find Falstaff always to be doing, malgré lui, in spite of himself. Archimedes suggested that if he had a large enough lever he could move the world. Certainly a large lever indeed, would be needed to lift up Fat Jack. Poins, another of Hal's and Falstaff's dystopic (and often distempered) band, has left Fat Jack without a horse and of course, his bulk is such an impediment to mobility that, as he says himself, "Eight yards of uneven ground is threescore and ten miles afoot with me; and the stony-hearted villains know it well enough: a plague upon it when thieves cannot be true one to another!" In this case Falstaff wants help in becoming once again horsed. But Falstaff's question seems to me to foreshadow a time when he will be so far down that no lever large enough could ever be found to lift him up again, and he will die, broken heartedly.

Hearts become remarkably heavy objects when they are broken. No lever large enough to lift them seems to exist. What breaks them, as Falstaff knew, is falling out of their orbits around the Beloved (in his case, Prince Hal). Our beloveds are like a sun that organizes ones trajectory and provides a sense of fixed place in a vast, largely unknown expanse of Psyche. We tend to locate the beloved outside of ourselves, in this person, or that desire. What we often fail to understand is that the thing that burns most brightly in the universe--the Great Beloved--is within us, and if we become separated from that, Archimedes himself could not imagine a lever large enough to lift us back up.

Now, here's the dirty little secret: we don't need levers and we don't need to be lifted. We need to allow ourselves to sink even farther down; down to the depths of our own being where we finally meet the Beloved in all of its divine splendor. Scary? You bet. Because everything changes, one's orbit is no longer regular or predictable, the system, and even the galaxy, which one always believed was real and enduring appears in its reality to be like a mist or a vapor, dissipated by the merest breath. And who is it that exhales so powerfully that universes dissolve? You guessed it; it is the Beloved; and it is you, my dears, who are the Beloved.

Flights of Fancy

2010-06-16T15:46:00.000-07:00

For some reason, I just had a thought that just struck me: wouldn't it be fascinating if there were someone--a long-lived someone--born in 1857, say, who at the age of five witnessed some aspects of the Dakota War and was still alive in 1957 to read the announcement of my birth in the local newspaper? This thought fascinates me in terms of continuity and in its real possibility. After all, living to 100 or more isn't so impossible. Hmmm.

Turning Toward Home

2010-06-09T11:20:00.000-07:00

A suspension of Passive Neglect and
Active Flight is all one needs to spend a
Moment in the Truth.

Let go of your determination to
not know; place your hands
at your sides; unclench
your fists; feel your fear.

Amid the swirling chaos, the ticking hand and
the sleepless nightmare,
lend your voice to that dry, inhuman cry
you've muffled so long.

Let it peal and crack as loud as thunder
loosening the rot in the soul's timbers
awakening the slumbering to their
watch.
--FWMT