Poems I Journey With 11

Clarity versus Unclarity

This contrast is one that has always confounded me. On the one hand each of us desires clarity and yet there is pretty little of it to be found in this world - at least, of the logical variety. At college we had to read Albert Camus' short book The Myth of Sisyphus for our philosophy class. For Camus, the philosopher of the absurd, or the absurd person, demands clarity or certainty above all, but again there is little or none to be found in the world around him. The sense of the absurd, then, results from the the conflict that is created between human reason that demands clarity and the unreasonable universe that is very unclear indeed.  

I remember many years ago when I was a green young teacher walking into a staff room early one winter's morning to find a colleague named Gerard Smith, one very smart young gentleman, asking me the following question, "Well, Tim, what is it all about?"  What a huge question that was, and I was taken aback to be asked it so early in the morning.  I don't remember what I replied, but I certainly would have said little of worth as I was quite a shy young man then with little confidence. A few years later we were all to learn that poor Gerard had died in America, having taken a career break from school. It as only then that we found out that the poor man had a congenital and fatal heart defect from his youth and that there remained little time on earth for him when he asked his question.  In hindsight, I then understood why he had asked that weighty question.  Again, he would have known that I had a background in theology and philosophy, and he perhaps believed that I could furnish him with some sort of answer to his deep question.

Most religious or spiritual gurus and writers acknowledge the unclarity of the world and the sheer lack of any logical answers. They simply have a different take on things, a much different perspective. Often they even seem to delight in the sheer unclarity of things, and speak about mysticism, wonder and mystery, especially that mystery which the divine is, that mystery that simply cannot be caught in a net of words or in dogmatic phrases no matter how intricate or sublime. There are other ways, apparently of encountering the world, outside the logical. Those who have this perspective are often fond of quoting the words of Blaise Pascal: "Le coeur as ses raisons que la raison ne connait point" - "The heart has its reasons which reason itself cannot understand." It is with this background in mind that I now invite the reader to read Louis Macneice's very fine poem called "Entirely:"

Louis Macneice 1907 - 1963

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely 

   It would take too long; 

All we know is the splash of words in passing   

   And falling twigs of song, 

And when we try to eavesdrop on the great   

   Presences it is rarely 

That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate   

   Even a phrase entirely. 

If we could find our happiness entirely 

   In somebody else’s arms 

We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s 

   Yammering fire alarms 

But, as it is, the spears each year go through 

   Our flesh and almost hourly   

Bell or siren banishes the blue   

   Eyes of Love entirely. 

And if the world were black or white entirely 

   And all the charts were plain 

Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters, 

   A prism of delight and pain, 

We might be surer where we wished to go   

   Or again we might be merely 

Bored but in brute reality there is no 

     Road that is right entirely.

I love this poem because of its complete honesty and total authenticity.  The poet does not trot out old pieties or standard traditional phrases that simplify life. Rather, he honestly presents a perspective on life which is all too common and all too realistic - that is, that life is exceedingly complex and often beyond our understanding of it.  In short, the poet admits to being somewhat stumped about the mystery that life faces us with. The theme is clear, and that theme is that there is no ultimate clarity. Camus drove himself wild looking for such clarity.  

In stanza one the poet recounts how we simply cannot "get the hang of it entirely," and even if we could, we simply would not live long enough to figure it out.  When we listen we often only pick up a fraction of what is said.  Indeed, we readers can add in our minds to this that we often do not see the full picture as we are only granted a certain perspective on events, often from an awkward angle. MacNeice hints at religious and spiritual themes when he says that when sometimes we try to "eavesdrop on the great Presences" we scarcely succeed in that endeavour at all.  

"[S]plash of words" and "falling twigs of song" are two powerful images with the second one blending two totally opposite realities - twigs (physical) and song (immaterial). Love is fleeting, not just the romantic idea of it, but its physical reality, as we are not entirely satisfied in our physical experience of it.  The imagery of "spears" reminds us of Shakespeare's line "to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and the intended meaning of both is the same, namely a battle image to sum up the misfortunes we encounter in our lives. The "yammering fire alarms" are those that are constantly calling out to warm the citizens of London about the fires consequent on enemy attack.  Those bells "banish the Blue Eyes of Love entirely."

The last stanza is as succinct as the other two and points out that it is ludicrous to approach life in a "black and white" manner as there are too many other colours in between the two that manifest themselves through "a prism of delight and pain." Indeed, even the maps we get are not one hundred per cent clear and logical. They are, rather, more than somewhat unclear as they often manifest themselves in actuality as "a mad weir of tigerish waters."  Then there are times that we merely grow bored of trying to find our way through the maze of unclarity that much of life can be. Whatever our reaction to our situation in life is, we can be fully sure that there is "no road that is right entirely."

Finally, the title is a most apt and succinct summary of the poem, that is, that we can never be totally sure entirely. I find this a comforting poem in the down periods of my life as I begin to be less hard on myself as a result of the wisdom garnered here. After all, we will never get everything right entirely. Not even the commentary on this poem.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 67

Poem 67

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.

Others call it lofty but impractical.

But to those who have looked inside themselves,

this nonsense makes perfect sense.

And to those who put it into practice,

this loftiness has roots that go deep.

I have just three things to teach:

simplicity, patience, compassion.

These three are your greatest treasures.

Simple in actions and in thoughts,

you return to the source of being.

Patient with both friends and enemies,

you accord with the way things are.

Compassionate toward yourself,

you reconcile all beings in the world.

Commentary

Like many other readers of these reflections, I have long loved reading biographies, autobiographies, memoirs and collections of letters by way of getting an insight into the meaning or purpose of life, or at least another angle on things anyway. Obviously, there are many other ways to make sense of human existence from forging relationships, designing and creating things, going on journeys and so on. Stanza 1 above puts these introductory thoughts wonderfully into perspective, especially in the two lines:

But to those who have looked inside themselves,

this nonsense makes perfect sense.

Indeed, the opening lines of my commentary could be dismissed as being nonsense from a certain practical, down-to-earth realism that sees no meaning at all in life outside surviving it.  However, if you have been reading these reflections, you don't belong to that grouping. There have been many great books throughout history that have explored the meaning of life, and perhaps one of the best early ones must surely be the Confessions of St Augustine of Hippo which were written between 397 - 400 A.D.  There have literally been hundreds of thousands if not millions of them written since.

The second stanza comes to the point swiftly by making three succinct points about what is important in the spiritual life:

(i) Even in the business world, experts recommend that complex issues must be turned into, or at least explained in, the simplest terms.  As a teacher, one must often attempt to break down complex stuff into as simple terms as one possibly can within reason.  Study methods recommend Spider diagrams and Mind Maps to give order or skeletons or bones to complex bodies of material. So simplicity makes sense.  In meditation, life is broken down or reduced to the very simplicity of sitting in the Now of things, of concentration on the simplicity of the very act of breathing.  In most religious traditions, the breath of life is its very essence.  The Old Testament speaks about the Lord of life or God himself breathing the breath of life into the mythical first human beings. Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama bear witness to a simplicity in their approach to living despite the official structures that could make them captives of the system.

(ii) Patience is a great virtue and one only learns it slowly by practice.  After all, as the great Aristotle put it, we become better persons through practice.  In other words, we become more virtuous through education and habit.  Patience is a virtue that lies between the two vices of (a) sloth (deficient vice) and (b) reckless impatience (excessive vice.)  As a parent, nurse or teacher, one must learn to be very patient in how we interact with our children, patients or students respectively.  However, from experience, patience does pay off, but again it is a virtue that can live with a certain level of incompletion, imperfection and disorder. A perfectionist will find it very hard to be patient with others.

(iii) The third virtue recommended by our Taoist poet is that of compassion.  Compassion is at the very heart of all religions and spiritualities worth their salt.  The Dalai Lama puts it succinctly thus: "Compassion is the wish for another being to be free from suffering; love is wanting them to be happy."  Again, one must have compassion for oneself as well as for others.

Journal of a Soul 34

Shocked

Grey clouds will come....

There is nothing quite so sobering as a shock, a deep existential shock.  Let me explain.  I was chatting with a fellow staff member over lunch one day during last week, which, as it turned out, was a rather enjoyable, though tiring, average working week as would occur in any busy school, when she told me the following story about a student I once taught.  Let us call him Luke so as not to identify him and also let me paint in just a little of the background. Luke worked part-time in a well-known retail outlet while he was at school and continued to work there full-time after he left school.  One day in November 2006 he doused himself in petrol and set himself alight in the toy department of that store.  His burns were so horrendous that he died practically immediately.  I'm sure the customers in the store that fateful morning must have been disturbed, deeply disturbed.  I had previously heard a rumour that Luke had ended his life, but had refused to believe it, writing it off as idle, if dreadful and disgusting, gossip as my experience of this boy in the classroom, on a school tour to France and in the retail outlet was always pleasant.  He could have been no more than early to mid- twenties at the time of his suicide.

Anyway, Luke was a good average student who seemed to get on relatively well with his fellow students and who did well enough in his Leaving Certificate to continue on in a "middle of the road" course in college, though to my knowledge he never pursued any academic route.  I taught him both the Irish language and Religious Education.  He had a brother in the school who was far more problematic insofar as this particular lad was almost totally lost in his own world and was almost completely uncommunicative.  This boy would now be diagnosed as belonging somewhere along the ASD spectrum.  In those days we had no ASD unit in our school (and knew very little about special education) - we do now, and I am a trained Resource teacher who specialises in that disorder among other educational disabilities.

As I shop quite regularly in the retail outlet where Luke worked I did miss him, but thought merely that he had moved on, got a better job, or gone to college.  Hence the above story shocked me to the core.  In short, I experienced a deep existential shock.  I have one memory of Luke and me playing basketball on the one team against another teacher with some other pupils somewhere in France on a school trip.  For some reason I can still see Luke visibly in my mind's eye on that basketball court.  He was a good gentle soul and a reasonably good looking smart young man.  What could have led him to such a lonely and excruciatingly painful end?

Beyond Debate

Compassion is needed

For those of you who are loyal readers of these posts you will have read my previous ones on the "beyond debate" nature of many existential themes.  You will have read my thoughts and reflections on how human existence is such a complex reality that it can never be reduced to the parameters of an intellectual debate. This is my big theme, the central theme, indeed, of this very blog.  Existence cannot be reduced by dry logic and be summed up in a clinical equation as my above horrific story illustrates.  The human being is a complex totality like a diamond with many faces: the social, the personal, the emotional, the intellectual, the moral/ethical, the interpersonal, the spiritual, the cultural, the rational, the non-rational, the irrational, the aesthetic and so on and on.  It would seem to me that narrow debaters forget to their detriment the sheer complexity and wonder of the human entity and the sheer heights and lows of the human spirit.  I remember reading somewhere in the works of that wonderful Victorian theologian, John Henry Cardinal Newman, that to seek to comprehend the human being in his/her breadths, heights and depths was nothing short of trying to  "quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk." (i)

In the great universal scheme of things we are minuscule ants on a minuscule anthill called earth, lost in the infinity of space.  How do we cope with the fact that we as thinking and feeling subjects will come to nothing in the end.  Let us hear the words of the great Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard: "I stick my finger into existence - it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world?  Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here?  Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?" (2)

Existential Beings

In short what I am stressing here is that we are exceptionally complex beings who have had existence thrown upon us.  In that very "throwness" (Heidegger) and randomness of life, we are left with the task or project (Sartre) of making some sense and meaning of our little lives. Again, let me argue for the complexity of life that would allow, to our dismay, shock and terror the horrific nature of Luke's painfully lonely act of suicide. This latter topic was always central to existential literature from Dostoevsky to Albert Camus.  Both of these authors had scaled the heights and plumbed the depths of life's sheer complexity, though I hasten to add that neither took that fatal and final choice.  Let me put it this way.  They were both sensitive souls who embraced life in its totality and sought to make it as meaningful as they could for themselves.  As you will observe, I'm leaving their more philosophical musings to one side here.  However, what these authors of this rather amorphous Existential Group of philosophers (I am, like most commentators, loathe to call it a school given the great divergences from the admittedly common themes like alienation, individuality and anxiety to name but three) do offer us is a grappling with the big issues of human existence and considered reflections thereon.  Indeed, a wonderfully real school of psychotherapy has grown out of their grappling and reflections, namely the Existential School of Psychotherapy. Ironically, it is by acknowledging the painful and almost meaningless (note the adverb here please) nature of human life that some meaning is embraced in the client's life. Acknowledging the problematic nature of life, naming it in its sheer nakedness, stripping away all the superficial coverings which only hide and deny the real problems is the road to recovery.  Somehow on the road to recovery, with the help of other human beings we are healed.

Luke's death has shocked me deeply, and the picture of him, larger than life, in his sports outfit, playing basketball lives on in my mind's eye.  These thoughts are my tribute to him. Unfortunately, there was no one there for him to reach out to in the sheer hell of his lonely tormented mind.  Each day that I teach my poor needy SEN students I will think of Luke who had no one to listen to him in his pain.  For me philosophy will never be a game, or an intellectual pursuit alone.  It is and always will be a way of attempting to make even a little sense and meaning of the mystery which human life confronts me with - in its highs and lows; in its heights and depths; in its joys and sorrows; in its apparent randomness; in its occasional serendipity and rare synchronicity; in its rich bounty and supreme splendour; in its littleness and greatness; in its strength and in its brittleness.  St Augustine of Hippo says somewhere that life is a hospital and that it is our duty to care for one another and help heal the wounded soul and the wounded body of our fellow travellers.  In so doing, we are in fact engaged in making it meaningful and allowing a little light of understanding in.     

(i) The full quotation is from The Idea of a University and goes: "Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man." 

(ii) Quoted Lavine (1984, p. 322)

Journal of a Soul 30

Beyond Debate II

Religion as a Psychological Phenomenon

Daffodils, Ardgillen Park

Once again, the psychology of religion, like the sociological dimension, is a factor often totally ignored by the learned debaters whom I alluded to in my last post.  That these debaters are in any way wrong is not the point at all.  In fact, within the parameters of their debates they are justifiably right.  My argument here is that the parameters of their debate are just so narrow.  They seem to forget that religions with their ceremonies and rituals often provide psychological support for their followers.  Adherents gain sustenance from the scriptures read and pondered, from the words of inspiration and healing proclaimed by their ministers and from the meal shared if the Eucharist forms some part of their worship.  They feel closer to their God or Maker whom they believe supports them all the day long and they also believe they can have a personal relationship with their God.  Without a shadow of a doubt such believers gain much support and no little direction for their lives from their religious beliefs.  So, on a purely personal and psychological level they feel more "at home" and more at peace with themselves and others.  Religion gives a pattern and structure not alone to their lives  but also a deep psychological support.

Once again, whether God exists or not, or indeed whether one can advance reasons for or against His or even Her or further even Its existence is in many ways quite beside the point. What I am arguing for here is that we just look on life objectively with no presuppositions and watch how religions of all hues offer both sociological and psychological support to their followers.  My own mother was a woman of deep religious faith who was a daily Mass goer and Rosary sayer for most of her long life.  That the Catholic Church provided her with something to do, somewhere to go, many friends, emotional and personal support and indeed gave meaning to her life is beyond question.  That she was of a more traditional era is perhaps worth noting as also is the fact that she died in her 97th year.  That other clubs could provide such sustaining roles I will, of course, allow.  It stands to reason and indeed to critical and objective observation that other organisations could possibly offer such support. Church attendance here in Ireland has now plummeted to practically meet the figures observable on the Continent of Europe.  Indeed, I readily agree that this is a very good thing as those who now attend are doing so because they want to and not from social pressure. That such clubs could offer the depth of meaning that religions might offer is, of course, debatable, but this argument is not ad rem here. 

Ancient tree, Trinity College, famous seat of learning, Dublin

In this regard, I recall the remarks of an outstanding academic, Sir Kenneth Dover, one time Professor of classics at Oxford, later President of Corpus Christi College and finally Chancellor of St Andrew's University, Scotland who succinctly told his interviewer, the late great Irish Psychiatrist, Professor Anthony Clare, that at a certain stage in his life he had "quite outgrown religion." For more information on my review of Clare's discussion with Sir Anthony see the following posts in one of my old blogs HERE  The point I wish to make here is that while Religion can and does offer psychological support, people can actually grow through and beyond that support when they feel they simply no longer need it.  And again here, I wish to underscore the point, needing or not needing religion are both fundamentally acceptable ways of being in the world.  As we grow we have various needs at various stages of our lives and to say one stage is better than another is quite ridiculous unless one is suffering or something during one or other period.  In other words, what really sane person would condemn a three year old for needing the support of a toy, a toddler finding it hard to separate from his parents on the first day of school, an eight year old for sulking, a ten year old for not being able to be independent and so on.  One is not necessarily stronger for not needing religion.  That's where I feel our debaters alluded to at some length in my last post have gone wrong.  Because the parameters of their debate are so narrow they do not leave room for the complexity of the human phenomenon.  Dawkins is a member of The Brights Movement who literally believe they have transcended as it were the childishness of religion and have embraced the clarity of the well-founded, the logically proved and scientifically justified conclusions that there is no God and that religion is just a load of poppy cock anyway.  See the following link for information on this movement of intellectual clarity: The Brights Movement.  Without a doubt they are somewhat condescending in their attitudes to believers.

Complexity

In summary, then, my argument here in this journal of a soul is one which stresses that the human phenomenon is a very complex one which should never be reduced to any one dimension of its complexity.  In that regard it is quite like a diamond with hundreds of faces and each face, as it were, allowing a different avenue of exploration into the mystery of what the human phenomenon is.  This diary or journal, like my previous blog, Still Point, is essentially my way of exploring the mystery of who I am.  In that journey I have learnt to be suspicious of all who seek to offer simple answers to life's complex questions, no matter whether they are scholars of standing or not.  An old acquaintance of mine, long since dead, used quote an old Catholic saying attributed to St Thomas Aquinas: "Homo unius libri timeo" or "I fear the man of a single book." In other words, let us read widely, ponder deeply and consequently be enabled to argue well.  Another slant on what the Angelic Doctor (i.e., Aquinas) was getting at would be to avoid what we call "reductionism" today.  In other words, we reduce the mystery that the human being presents us with when we examine that reality from the narrow perspective of one viewpoint only.  There are many optics by which to view the human condition; there are many sciences to examine the reality of humanity; there are many voices of experience worth listening to; there are many insights we might dismiss to our detriment.  These pages, then; these considered thoughts and reflections; these insights of a one lonely soul offer a plea for expanding our vision of what the human being is and can be.  In that respect, religion and the spirituality it introduced this writer to, can never be summarily dismissed.