Poems I Journey With 24

Sir Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh) was a most amazing man – a wonderfully alive, creative and swashbuckling Elizabethan who was a soldier, a sailor, a land-owner, a courtier, an explorer as well as being a poet, a writer and a historian. Again, when he was writing his The Historie of the World in the Tower of London he used sources written in some six different languages. It was maintained by some historians that Raleigh was responsible for the introduction of the potato or spud into Ireland. However, this is disputed by other historians. However, he is widely regarded as the one who introduced tobacco and pipe smoking into England. To add to all these accomplishments the fact that he was also a good family man is actually quite astonishing. In short, he was a courageous and ambitious Elizabethan who was truly a Renaissance man, though he rejected the high-flowing style (loaded with classical allusions) of the Italian Renaissance poets in favour of a more direct unornamented fashion of writing known simply as “plain style.”  This was why the critic C.S. Lewis called Sir Walter one of the foremost “Silver Poets” of the seventeenth century.

The poem from Raleigh that I’d like to offer to the reader this evening is one called “The Lie” which, I should imagine, he composed in the Tower of London some time before his execution. That his execution was unjust is the verdict of history. One of the judges at his trial later said: "The justice of England has never been so degraded and injured as by the condemnation of the honourable Sir Walter Raleigh." Raleigh was beheaded in the Old Palace Yard at the Palace of Westminster on 29 October 1618. The accounts of his last comments before his death are indeed very brave and noble: "Let us dispatch", he said to his executioner. "At this hour my ague comes upon me. I would not have my enemies think I quaked from fear."  It is also reported that after he was allowed to see the axe that would be used to behead him, he mused: "This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physician for all diseases and miseries." Further, according to biographers, Raleigh's last words (as he lay ready for the axe to fall) were: "Strike, man, strike!"

Ralegh the Soldier

I shall let the poem “The Lie” speak for itself below. One gets a sense of the poet’s nobility, integrity and authenticity in its stanzas. He has little concern, he tells us, for the hypocrisies of either Church or State. We learn that what Raleigh prizes are the virtues of honesty and sincerity.  He also appreciates that we are only pilgrims here on the earth and that our little lives are transient indeed. Like any Elizabethan or Renaissance man he sees the life of the soul as being immortal and imperishable and that of the flesh as mortal and perishable.   This poem will demand that you read it reflectively several times and then perhaps aloud, and then finally you will feel the passion and conviction of a man weighing truthfully and honestly the significance of his life before the axe of execution cuts off his head:

The Lie

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552 –1618)

GO, Soul, the body’s guest,   Upon a thankless arrant: Fear not to touch the best;   The truth shall be thy warrant: Go, since I needs must die,         5 And give the world the lie. Say to the court, it glows   And shines like rotten wood; Say to the church, it shows   What’s good, and doth no good:         10 If church and court reply, Then give them both the lie. Tell potentates, they live   Acting by others’ action; Not loved unless they give,         15   Not strong, but by a faction: If potentates reply, Give potentates the lie. Tell men of high condition,   That manage the estate,         20 Their purpose is ambition,   Their practice only hate: And if they once reply, Then give them all the lie. Tell them that brave it most,         25   They beg for more by spending, Who, in their greatest cost,   Seek nothing but commending: And if they make reply, Then give them all the lie.         30 Tell zeal it wants devotion;   Tell love it is but lust; Tell time it is but motion;   Tell flesh it is but dust: And wish them not reply,         35 For thou must give the lie. Tell age it daily wasteth;   Tell honour how it alters; Tell beauty how she blasteth;   Tell favour how it falters:         40 And as they shall reply, Give every one the lie. Tell wit how much it wrangles   In tickle points of niceness; Tell wisdom she entangles         45   Herself in over-wiseness: And when they do reply, Straight give them both the lie. Tell physic of her boldness;   Tell skill it is pretension;         50 Tell charity of coldness;   Tell law it is contention: And as they do reply, So give them still the lie. Tell fortune of her blindness;         55   Tell nature of decay; Tell friendship of unkindness;   Tell justice of delay; And if they will reply, Then give them all the lie.         60 Tell arts they have no soundness,   But vary by esteeming; Tell schools they want profoundness,   And stand too much on seeming: If arts and schools reply,         65 Give arts and schools the lie. Tell faith it’s fled the city;   Tell how the country erreth; Tell, manhood shakes off pity;   Tell, virtue least preferreth:         70 And if they do reply, Spare not to give the lie. So when thou hast, as I   Commanded thee, done blabbing,— Although to give the lie         75   Deserves no less than stabbing,— Stab at thee he that will, No stab the soul can kill.

Poems I Journey With 17

A young Adrienne Rich

I like reading new and unusual poems from as many different cultural backgrounds as the English language will allow me. The poem I wish to offer for the reader’s perusal and reflection is one by the American Jewish poet Adrienne Rich (1929 – 2012). The following poem I loved for its clarity of expression and for a new, if unusually realistic, insight into love that I had never actually considered before. Poems, like all good literature, should break new ground both in language and form, in content and ideas. This, Rich does with an ease that almost camouflages her consummate skill as an author. The poem I have chosen here is called “Translations.”

Translations
December 25, 1972

You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she's a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call
from a phonebooth

The phone rings endlessly
in a man's bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy
and will in her own way
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political.

The Briefest of Commentaries

An older Adrienne Rich

I love people who push against convention, not in an anarchic sense, I hasten to add, but in a well thought-out and considered fashion. They are, of course, correct in their presuppositions, intuition and consequent reasoning, because, after all, nothing in the world is either “black or white,” or “cut and dried.” Rich belongs to this marvellous group of questioning authors who push against convention, not to bring the state of things to a crisis or to a state of collapse, but to advance a broader more inclusive agenda. Rich was married, and with her husband, who ended his life at a tragically young age of 45, parented three sons. In her late forties she began a lesbian relationship with Jamaican-born novelist and editor, Michelle Cliff, a relationship which lasted until her death. So her experiences of life were broad and unconventional.

What I like above this poem is that there are many renditions that could be given of poems from one language to another. Such renditions will depend upon the understanding of the text by the particular translator. Let us be aware of how we translate or interpret things, Rich seems to be saying to me. Let me not look on life solely from my own perspective. Let me try and see it through another optic if I can at all. I also like the conversational tone of the poem. Rich draws us into the conversation as she addresses the reader (her lover, her companion, her friend or whoever) in the second person singular.  The following four lines leap off the page for me:

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she's a woman of my time

obsessed

Ah yes, I recognise such a woman myself in my mother and in many of the women whom I have met in my time: women who baked for and in love; who fought for and in love; women who were sorrowful because they suffered much in loving. Then, the single word “obsessed” that has its own line, indeed, its own stanza all to itself is most apt indeed. Women are obsessed, and then she tells us with what in the first word of the next stanza, should we ever be in doubt.  Of course, that obsession is with Love. That very stanza is worth reproducing here again for our timely reflection:

with Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

There is a marvellous mix of observation of all womanly occupations and preoccupations with her personal experience in this poem. As well as the usual occupations like ironing and household tasks we have the image of a woman typing a manuscript till dawn – a definite experience personal to a poet. Then, like the scene from a film, we are presented with the image of a woman trying to communicate with her ex-lover by phone. Again this scene is cinematic in quality:

The phone rings endlessly
in a man's bedroom

she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

Here we have an account of the man’s disloyalty, and indeed his betrayal of her to her sister to add salt to the wound of love. And yet all this grief, or indeed much of it, is caused by the narrow ageements accepted by more conservative society, by a politics of narrow conventions. There is much freedom pointed to in this poem. We, as readers, are invited to ponder these social conventions critically and to question our own prejudices and presuppositions. Such is the task of all good literature and certainly that of all good poetry:

Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy

and will in her own way
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief

is shared, unnecessary
and political.

Poems I Journey With 14

Emily Dickinson

After Gerard Manley Hopkins, I turn most often to the wonderful and wondrous rhythms of the poems of Emily Dickinson, another spiritual and mystical poet who also loved her periods of isolation and aloneness and even ascetic living like the Victorian Jesuit priest and convert. Dickinson was born in 1830 (fourteen years before Hopkins was born) and died at the age of 56 in 1886 when Hopkins was 42.  While their lives overlapped then for some 42 years in terms of linear time neither would obviously have been aware of the writings of the other given their personal and indeed the social circumstances of the day and indeed the fact that neither sought publication of their work.  But, I personally get a lot of spiritual sustenance from the poems of both great poets. Both were also most unusual is that they both broke away from the then conservative conventions of what poetry was deemed to be. While both are spiritual and mystical poets their work is correspondingly completely "sui generis," unique and authentic to the very syllable of their output.  As her poems are so short I will offer three short favourite poems from Dickinson's pen here below:

1. Hope is a thing with feathers

Hope is a thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet, never, in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of Me.

2.  Heaven

"Heaven"—is what I cannot reach!

The Apple on the Tree—

Provided it do hopeless—hang—

That—"Heaven" is—to Me!

The Color, on the Cruising Cloud—

The interdicted Land—

Behind the Hill—the House behind—

There—Paradise—is found!

Her teasing Purples—Afternoons—

The credulous—decoy—

Enamored—of the Conjuror—

That spurned us—Yesterday! 

A somewhat younger Emily Dickinson

3. My cocoon tightens, colors tease

MY cocoon tightens, colors tease, 

I 'm feeling for the air; 

A dim capacity for wings 

Degrades the dress I wear. 

A power of butterfly must be 

The aptitude to fly, 

Meadows of majesty concedes 

And easy sweeps of sky. 

So I must baffle at the hint 

And cipher at the sign, 

And make much blunder, if at last 

I take the clew divine. 

The Briefest of Commentaries:

I love Emily Dickinson's poems because they invariably give me a spiritual lift and a deep insight into the depths that simple things can have. I also like her unique writing style with dashes, which is completely unique to her and revolutionary, indeed, at the time she was writing.  She is simply unique, "sui generis" and so authentic. Who could not be moved by the image of a little bird?  It is at once so fragile and yet can fly to such heights and gain an overall view of things we humans are not privy to. Then the equating of hope - a complete abstraction - with that little physical image of a bird is simply mindblowingly powerful.  That equation or juxtaposition of two utterly different "objects" is so wonderful and wondrous that it strikes us immediately as being insightful. Hope, which we all need to keep going, is often as fragile as a little bird which we often doubt will be able to weather the storms of life. Where does that little bird of hope perch? Yes, in the very cage of our souls!  It sings a tune without words, the delicate and fragile tune of hope.  And that strange little fragile creature, that brittle bird of hope, never asked a single crumb of sustenance from its jailer, that is, ME and YOU and US!!

The second poem is about Heaven. However, no mystic will ever offer a cheap or cheapened image of that place or state or whatever we call Heaven.  Dickinson presents that reality as somewhat unattainable like the apple on the highest bough while we are mere children playing about the trunk of that great tree. There are hints also of Moses not being granted his wish to the Promised Land which has traditionally also been linked with whatever Heaven is, may be or could be. In fact, I like this poem also, and have placed it under the poem on Hope as Dickinson talks about the reaching of the apple being absolutely hopeless.  In that regard let me repeat its opening stanza for our contemplation here:

"Heaven"—is what I cannot reach!

The Apple on the Tree—

Provided it do hopeless—hang—

That—"Heaven" is—to Me!

The third poem reminds me of the sage advice, or at least the wise comment of Anais Nin (1903 - 1977) that the day will come for all of us "when the risk to remain tight in the bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom."  These words resonate with those of the entire poem and especially those of the first stanza. The growth of the little seed in the bud to full flower and blossom parallels the formation of the butterfly from egg to larva (caterpillar) to pupa (chrysalis) to adult butterfly:

MY cocoon tightens, colors tease, 

I 'm feeling for the air; 

A dim capacity for wings 

Degrades the dress I wear. 

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 23

Stanza 23

Express yourself completely,
then keep quiet.
Be like the forces of nature:
when it blows, there is only wind;
when it rains, there is only rain;
when the clouds pass, the sun shines through.

If you open yourself to the Tao,
you are at one with the Tao
and you can embody it completely.
If you open yourself to insight,
you are at one with insight
and you can use it completely.
If you open yourself to loss,
you are at one with loss
and you can accept it completely.

Open yourself to the Tao,
then trust your natural responses;
and everything will fall into place.

The good old worker bee,  I took this photograph in 2010

Commentary

The above poem is essentially about the twin skills of openness and listening.  Both these skills lie at the heart of the practice of meditation.  When we sit to meditate we firstly relax our bodies and de-stress it bit by bit.  Then we concentrate on the rhythm of our breath as it oxygenates our body and expels carbon dioxide through our nostrils - that basic process physiologists and biologists call respiration.  In meditation circles we call the attention to our respiratory apparatus simply "the act of returning to or paying close attention to the breath." This simple act is one of sheer receptivity to the breath that keeps our very body alive in this moment in time.  In holistic practices like that of Focusing, invented by Dr. Eugene Gendlin the person engaged in the process focuses on the "felt sense" of some problem,  Essentially focusing like mindfulness uses those skills used for thousands of years by the different masters and practitioners of meditation in the various religious traditions.  

The sand on Donabate Beach, 2013

In focusing one is literally listening to how we hold certain feelings in our bodies.  I would argue that meditators actually do that very naturally anyway.  It is also my contention that mindfulness is secular meditation and that modern authors who peddle their wares in the form of books, CDs and DVDs on mindfulness stole the clothes of the traditional meditators, but that is a story for a different post than this one.

Another major theme in the above poem is that of self-expression.  Such expression can be done in many creative ways: in art of all kinds, in literature, in poems, in music, in dance, in mime and in sculpture and architecture and so on.  Then, once one has expressed how one feels, the author recommends that we learn to keep quiet.  This is good wisdom as we must for sure express all our emotions, especially negative ones as unexpressed feelings will eat and gnaw away at us forever until they are given expression through one medium or another,  However, there is nothing worst than someone who continually repeats the same old moan and never has the courage to do anything about it.  Such is not what our Taoist writer has in mind.  He (or she) sees the expression of feelings as being therapeutic once expressed.  In this way, the person gets whatever is weighing them down or even lifting them up off their minds.

The second stanza sings the praises of openness which it also sees as essentially healing and therapeutic.  Such openness allows us to feel empathy with our inner self, with others and indeed with the source of all life which some of us dare call God.  Interestingly, the poet recommends that we be open both to negative and positive experiences: On the one hand we can be open to the positive experience of insight and by being so open we become one with it.  On the other hand, we can be open to the negative experience of loss and in so doing becoming one with loss.  Such an openness paradoxically helps us accept that loss and learn to live with it from day to day.  In short, such openness allows the human spirit to heal.

The author invites us in essence to open ourselves to the Tao and in so doing we open ourselves to the healing powers of the universe.  The final stanza works like a chorus and is worth repeating as it is really a summary of the whole poem:

Open yourself to the Tao,
then trust your natural responses;
and everything will fall into place.

In conclusion, some word or phrase or line may suggest itself as a matra for meditation or as a thought to inspire a short period of contemplation.  I wish the reader of these few words peace and happiness in the now of experience.  Namaste, friends!

Journal of a Soul 70

The Human Web

Our school debating team meets the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Mr Christy Burke.

Identity is never something one constructs alone.  We are so much social creatures that our identity is moulded, shaped and formed within the context of community.  We reach out from our shell of individuality and, too often from a carapace of loneliness, for the supports of relatives, friends, team mates or other groupings to save us the frightening experience of being alone in the universe.  We were simply never made to be alone.  The wise words of the great philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) come readily to mind: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."  It is a quotation that has been etched on my heart or soul since I first heard it.  When one looks out into the infinity of space in the outer cosmos or into the equally mysterious space in the inner cosmos of the atomic world or even contemplates the seeming eternity of time versus the short duration of our little lives one can surely feel that frightening loneliness and brittleness of spirit that Pascal wrote so memorably about in those quoted words above.

Everywhere one goes one can see this thrust in humankind to reach out its fractal fingers over and over again and network its communications into a community - into a veritable human web.  We experience ourselves being moulded, shaped and formed in relationship with so many others whom we touch and who in turn touch us.  Most especially do we experience this sense of being a human community at Christmastide.  The tunes that emanate from the various shops, the songs that are played on the radio, the seasonal music associated with the Festive Season, the colourful lights sparkling in the frosty air, the buzz of busy shoppers buying gifts for loved ones all conspire to convince us even more that we truly were made to embrace and be embraced, that the first person plural is always so much more important than its singular number.  But then, most of us probably do not need too much reminding of this incontrovertible fact.

The Brittleness of Life

Ardgillan Park, Skerries, June, 2014

And yet we are all equally convinced of the sheer loneliness of certain brittle souls.  Only some few months ago I wrote about the final moments of a former student of mine who decided to end his life at twenty short years of age.  He left no note.  There was no indication, as far as I know that he had been suffering pain of such proportions that the only solution that presented itself to him was shutting off the pain by hanging himself from the branch of a lonely tree not far from our school. Further, the experts tell us that once a suicide has definitively decided on the exit plan that a sense of peace descends upon their lonely soul.  Indeed all this young man's closest friends and family attest to his being in fine form on the evening of his demise.  

As I write my mind is enlivened by other interweaving thoughts and feelings.  A colleague of many years passed away barely 24 hours ago.  He was a larger than life character who was a happy soul who had time for all the young men he had taught over his thirty-five year career. He was also generous and kind to a fault.  Sadly, a son of his had predeceased him in an  act of suicide. Then there are other feelings and thoughts which vie for their attention in my mind: another close friend whose mother is dying from cancer, yet another who is herself recovering from an operation occasioned by the excision of a cancerous tumour. These thoughts and feelings trigger other, if older, sad memories of our fragility.  And yet that fragility is a hallmark of our humanity, a quality that somehow mysteriously magnifies the meaning of every little work of our creative if mortal being.  Shakespeare's genius - indeed his very soul -lives on in his wonderful writings.  Mozart's spirit endures in his wonderful music. And so on.  Humankind reaches out its cultural embrace down the timeless generations and on out into future possibilities beyond the finite and limited individual lifespan.

The web is always ever greater than its individual strands and in a Gestalt or holistic way far greater than the sum of its strands. And so I return inevitably to our starting point above that we are very much part of a human network greater than us, in a real sense a human web.  There is a famous seanfhocal or proverb in our native language - Gaeilge - which runs: Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine and which translates "We live in each other's shadow" and to which the following English proverb approximates: "No man is an island." Further, the words of the sermon of the famous Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, the wonderful poet and divine, John Donne (1572-1631) come to mind here: 

No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.  As well as if a promontory were.  As well as if a manor of thy friend or of thine own were.  Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.  And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. [Meditation XVII from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and Several Steps in my Sickness, published in 1624.]

The Temptations of the Ego

Moon reflected in water, Donabate Beach

In a sense here is where Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha got things so right. In the second noble truth he tells us that suffering is caused by our clinging to things and craving them.  In fact we can also cling to and crave other people by becoming too dependent on them.  This essentially is the weakness of the human Ego.  The Ego in modern English has many meanings. It could mean one’s self-esteem; an inflated sense of self-worth; the conscious-thinking self or in philosophical terms, one’s self. Here, I am using it in a general way as that sense of one's control over one's own life, a sense that could view the self as the centre-point of control of all things that fall within that person's ambit.  Such a person might be arrogant, egocentric and narcissistic. Such indeed are the temptations of the Ego.  In extreme cases egocentrism and narcissism can and do lead to egomania or megalomania that were the hallmarks of dictators like Hitler and Stalin and so on. However, with sound soul-work or good therapy or indeed with mature self-development the Ego can find a balanced place where it can function in harmony with both Superego and Id in the Freudian structural model of the psyche. The Buddhists and Hindus do also use the word Ego as meaning a grandiose sense of one's own importance, a self-importance that must be tamed or even destroyed.  Indeed, the Buddhists have a teaching called Anatta which is a strict one that teaches the doctrine of neither accepting nor denying  the existence of the Ego or Self.  

In all of this we in the West have succumbed to the myth of the grandiose self (Ego) who can control all within its path.  It is also a vain self (Ego) that thinks it can know everything and achieve everything.  It is a power-hungry self (Ego) too that thinks it can control, dominate and subjugate others.  It is a greedy self (Ego) that thinks it can amass wealth after wealth even if this means exploiting others.  It is a lustful self (Ego) that desires the satisfactions of the flesh in all its incarnations.  It is also often a foolish self (Ego) that thinks it can avoid ageing, dying and death.  It is, moreover, a stupid self (Ego) that avoids facing up to painful truths about life.  The reader can add his or her own descriptions of the self (Ego) to this list.

In all of the above the temptations of the Ego-Self are to separation, that the "I" can control, that the "I" can possess, that the "I" can triumph, that the "I" will suffice.  The teachings of all religions and mysticism in general are that the "I" will not suffice, that the "we" of union and unity and oneness only will endure. The path of the Real Self, then,  is to integration not separation.  And so the way out of this separation is through engaging in practices that promote integration, unity, community and communion with one another, even with all of creation, with Mother Earth or Gaia herself. The way out of all the deceptions that the Ego-Self offers us is by engaging in meditation or in any other soul-making activities that recognize the shallowness of the above listed myths of the modern self. In short, no matter who we are, we simply do not get out of life alive. We were made to die and that is the truth of it.  To live is to die.  To live well is to learn to die. To live is to realize that we are a little part of a greater whole.