Poems I Journey With 22

Portrait of William Blake by Thomas Phillips

History has always thrown up amazing geniuses. There can be few more talented and extraordinary than William Blake (1757-1827). The list of his accomplishments is wide and varied: poet, artist, engraver, mystic and prophet. We are all acquainted with his simpler lyrics and even with his more popular engravings from our school days. However, behind these seemingly effortless and simple verses lies a complex and talented man of vision. Behind the popular engravings lurks a restless soul and talented artist.

Reading his poetry and studying his paintings and engravings can bring much pleasure and not a little insight into Blake's mystical and prophetic vision, both dimensions of which were so sui generis as to make his work in poetry and engraving individual and non-derivative to a fault. 

Before setting out to read Blake, one should realize that he was almost completely self-taught. This would probably account for much of his unconventional spelling and punctuation, and for his inconsistent use of terminology in his longer and more complex works. Also it is important to bear in mind that he was rebellious in spirit and just did not like to conform. He was original to a fault. Having spent seven years as an apprentice engraver, he progressed to study art at the Royal Academy but quit after a year because he rebelled against the aesthetic doctrines of its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. 

In writing his poetry, Blake also broke with convention by rejecting the high neoclassical style and modes of thought then current, preferring a simple and direct style – the language of the ordinary people that prefigures by some twenty years Wordsworth’s pursuit of the same goal – as exemplified in his lyrics. He was a nonconformist in religion, being born into a Dissenting tradition that encouraged extemporary hymn-singing. Hence, much of his religious thoughts were unorthodox and even heretical by the standards of the more orthodox Christian churches. However, having borne these preliminary qualifications in mind, we can still find his writings inspiring and personally enriching.

This evening I wish to offer the reader a copy of William Blake’s wonderful and much anthologized lyric "The Tyger" to read and to reflect meditatively upon.  Immediately, if you are a lover of Blake’s poems you will be struck forcefully by the strong contrast with the poem "The Lamb." ("Little Lamb, who made thee? //Dost thou know who made thee?" The answer is, of course, God, who became incarnate as Jesus the Lamb.) Here in this lyric "The Tyger," Blake asks the rhetorical question, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" And the answer is, of course, "Yes, God made the Tyger too."

A copy of the original engraving of Tyger by Blake

If we are to appreciate and understand "The Tyger" as fully as we possibly can, we need to know Blake's symbols. One of the central themes in his major works is that the Creator of the world is a great blacksmith. This is both God the Creator (personified in Blake's myth as Los) and Blake himself (again with Los as his alter-ego.) As an engraver and as an artist, Blake identified God's creative process with the work of anyone engaged in any artistic pursuits.

Blake's story of creation differs from the Genesis account – as I’ve already pointed out he is totally unorthodox in his personal beliefs, and this is something that endears him to the present writer as he had the courage to be wholly different at a time when it was simply anathema to be so. The familiar world was created only after a cosmic catastrophe according to Blake. The longer books that Blake wrote describe Los's creation of animals and people within the world of nature after that catastrophe. One particularly powerful passage in "Milton" describes Los's family weaving the bodies of each unborn child.

In believing that creation followed a cosmic catastrophe and a fall of spiritual beings into the atoms of matter, Blake recalls the early heresy of Gnosticism, a multi-faceted religious movement that had run parallel to mainstream Christianity. Unlike most other Gnosticizers, Blake considered our own world to be a fine and wonderful place, but one that would ultimately give way to a restored universe. Blake believed that his own visions, which included end-of-the-world or apocalyptic images and sometimes a sense of cosmic oneness, prefigured this restored world, and that his art would help raise others "to the perception of the infinite." For Blake as for St. Irenaeus, the purpose of creation is as a place for our own growth, where we are allowed to mature through our encountering very rough experiences of evil in its many manifestations in preparation for the beginning of our real lives. On the one hand, while the natural world contained much that is gentle and innocent (which we read about in the wonderful lyrics of "Songs of Innocence"), those who are experienced with life ("Songs of Experience") know that there is also much that is terrible and frightening. In other words, what I am getting at here is that the "fearful symmetry" we read about in “The Tyger” is the paradoxical contrast between the gentleness of the lamb and the fierceness of the  tiger – in other words we have here the paradoxical mix of innocence and experience in the one poem.

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The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright, 
In the forests of the night, 
What immortal hand or eye 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

In what distant deeps or skies 
Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 
On what wings dare he aspire? 
What the hand dare seize the fire? 

And what shoulder, & what art, 
Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 
And when thy heart began to beat, 
What dread hand? & what dread feet? 

What the hammer? what the chain? 
In what furnace was thy brain? 
What the anvil? what dread grasp 
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 

When the stars threw down their spears, 
And water'd heaven with their tears, 
Did he smile his work to see? 
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright 
In the forests of the night, 
What immortal hand or eye 
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? 

Poems I Journey With 12

The world throws up many wonderful and wondrous souls over and over again, but none so wonderful and wondrous as Isaac Rosenberg (1890 - 1918) who was sadly killed at the age of 27 as he and others were returning to their trenches, having just finished night patrol. Rosenberg was the least privileged of the British poets as he was born into a poor working-class Jewish family that had emigrated from Russia.  His economic circumstances militated against his attending either Cambridge or Oxford. However, he was a talented artist as well as a great poet, whom both Eliot and Pound acknowledged as a good modernist poet - great praise indeed.  Had he lived he would have matched them with work equally as good as theirs.  Alas that was not to be.  Too many young men were killed during the Great War - "half the seed of Europe one by one" as Wilfred Owen, another First World War poet would put it. As a talented artist, the young Rosenberg enrolled in evening classes in the Art School at Birkbeck College, London University. Indeed, he had hoped to make his living as a portrait artist and had moved to South Africa to pursue that career when war broke out. Like most young men of his time he would have felt he was abandoning his native homeland were he not to return to England and enlist. He was no sympathizer with the war at all - he simply felt duty-bound like many a young man of his era.  He was to write in a letter to a friend that "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons.  Nothing can justify war.  I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over."  Commentators are united in their view that the voice of a modernist poet can be heard in his poems.

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is. 

And though we have our lives, we know

What sinister threat lies there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know

This poison-blasted track opens on our camp –

On a little safe sleep. 

But hark! joy - joy - strange joy. 

Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks. 

Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.

Death could drop from the dark

As easily as song –

But song only dropped, 

Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand

By dangerous tides, 

Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there, 

Or her kisses where a serpent hides. 

Isaac Rosenberg, selfportrait, 1915

It is somewhat ironic that it was when returning from such a patrol the the young artist and poet, Isaac Rosenberg was killed. "And though we have our lives, we know //What sinister threat lies there" are words sombre indeed as the night. The opening imagery is clear and stark: "dragging anguished limbs," "poison-blasted tracks," and then the wonder of hearing a little joyous song breaks the sombre tone with joyful aural images in the stanza

But hark! joy - joy - strange joy. 

Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks. 

Music showering our upturned list’ning faces,

lines that obviously make more sense when read aloud to get their full aural effect. And then, we are given the wondrous and wonderful final stanza that is loaded with mystery and magic interwoven with fear and dread. It is as if Rosenberg is taking the fear and awfulness created in the first and second stanzas and the joy, beauty and exultation of the third and combining them both into a rather eerily beautiful and shockingly scary mixture in the final stanza. It is indeed eerie and scary that death can drop from the dark sky just as easily as song, but that is the nature of war.  Then those wondrous and magical lines that suggest inevitable lostness (blindman's dreams) on "sands," (not a very stable support) which are right beside "dangerous tides" (being washed away to destruction.)  Then those juxtaposed opposites in "girl's dark hair" (love and beauty) and the "ruin" that may lie there is hauntingly bleak. Finally, then, even her kisses which should be sweet, may hide the serpent lurking deep within.  And so, to end, dear reader, let us reread and ponder the words of the last stanza:

Death could drop from the dark 

As easily as song – 

But song only dropped, 

Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand 

By dangerous tides, 

Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there, 

Or her kisses where a serpent hides. 

Poems I Journey With 6

Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918) from early on became one of my favourite poets.  Firstly, as a young boy and as a teenager I was always fascinated with wars, especially World War 1 and World War II, not from the military point of view solely, but primarily because of the havoc it had wrought on the world through the destruction of human life and property on such a vast scale.  Such wanton destruction on such unprecedented scales amazed and astounded me. That humanity veered so quickly and so spontaneously towards war, rather than engaging in political debate and conflict resolution was also an intriguing feature that seemed to suggest that there was something rather corrupt that stank to high heaven within the human make-up.  Then, I discovered the War Poets from both world wars, and those from the first of these wars were the more moving for me as that war in particular involved  the first widespread use of machine guns, air power, submarine operations, armoured vehicles, bigger and more powerful guns and the use of poison gas and, of course, the mad rush of opposing troops against each other across NO-MAN'S-LAND, all of which led the poets to describe the horrors of war in such graphic detail that I was hooked forever and still moved, often to tears, by their words and images.  To them we owe a great debt of gratitude for highlighting these horrors.  Wilfred Owen was only 25 when he was killed on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal exactly a week before the signing of the Armistice that ended the War.  In a rather ironic twist of fate, his poor mother received the telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day just as the bells rang out in jubilation at the cessation of hostilities.  He is buried at Ors Communal Cemetery.

Lieutenant W. Owen

Owen is the foremost poet of the Great War and his poems are much anthologized. Therefore, I will not publish any of his more popular ones hereunder as the reader will be almost too familiar with them.  Instead, I will quote here another powerful, but less well known poem from his pen:

The Parable of The Young Man and The Old

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned, both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets the trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one. 

Wilfred Owen

There is no need for commentary on this wonderful little poem save to say that it is crafted with care and based on the famous Old Testament story of God's command to Abraham to slay his son Isaac by way of offering to appease Him.  Those of us, au fait with mythology will know that such an image of God as a rather cruel task-master, who seemingly has no concern for morality as He is somehow beyond all such standards of proper behaviour, will realize that this is pure story, a story with a moral or a message - a story composed by priests or scribes simply to teach us lessons.  The lesson here is simply that God often tests our loyalty in strange and even cruel ways.  Whatever about Old Testament times the twentieth century unleashed the wrath of a most bloody God or Gods - Gods of greed and hate and vengeance - that slew "half the seed of Europe, one by one."  As an officer, the young Lieutenant Owen would have witnessed so much bloodshed and so many horrible deaths of his soldier comrades that it must have surely felt that some bloodthirsty gods somewhere were slaying the young men of Europe one by one.  This is not one of his famous poems, but I feel it is beautifully written, and most solemnly so as it practically repeats the beautiful English of the King James Bible and interweaves in the story images from the horrors of the First World War: "fire and iron," "belts and straps" (soldiers would have had many of these about their uniforms) and "parapets and trenches."  However, it is the last two lines that are the most effective for me as they sum up the horrors of the Great War:

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one. 

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 60

Poem 60

Governing a large country
is like frying a small fish.

You spoil it with too much poking.

Center your country in the Tao

and evil will have no power.

Not that it isn't there,

but you'll be able to step out of its way.

Give evil nothing to oppose

and it will disappear by itself.

Derek Lin's translation  of this poem is as follows:

Poem 60

Ruling a large country is like cooking a small fish

Using the Tao to manage the world

Its demons have no power

Not only do its demons have no power

Its gods do not harm people

Not only do its gods not harm people

The sages also do not harm people

They both do no harm to one another

So virtue merges and returns.

Commentary

I have given two versions of this poem to give me some inspiration, because what the poet is getting at is somewhat hard to unravel.  I use the word "unravel" intentionally, as the above poem needs to be contemplated deeply as it does not render forth its meaning easily, but that is often the case with mystical, and certainly with Zen-like, poetry.  So, therefore, let me here state clearly that I am offering a very personal and tentative interpretation. 

Garden, Glenview Hotel 1

Who would want to be a politician?  For me the answer to that question is crystal clear, a most definite, "No, certainly not me!"  Politicians put themselves up for election and stand before the judgement of the people at regular intervals. Once elected they have to put in amazingly long hours at the service of the State and of fellow citizens. Sometimes they make mistakes and sometimes they achieve much. However, they often get vilified by some sectors of the population for one decision or another.  All too often, they will fail to get re-elected because they must face their electorate at the end of their political term. Further, their moral and daily personal affairs are an open book as far as the media and the public are concerned. Who would want to be so much in the eye of a very judgemental public?  That's one reason why I admire politicians  because quite simply they have the balls to stand up and be counted, express their vision for the improvement of society and work towards achieving their goals.

Garden, Glenview Hotel 2

Now that I have expressed some of my ideas about politics and politicians and the governance of any state, I must now turn to where the above Taoist poem touches me.  What lines spring off the page?  The image of "frying a small fish" offers itself vividly to the mind of this reader, and poking it too much will certainly break it up into little pieces on the pan. That image courts another image in my mind, an image which is also culinary, namely "too many cooks spoil the broth!" The wisdom of this saying is obvious.  Someone has to be the main chef or cook.  Someone has to make the decisions or be the leader; otherwise there will be chaos and the big fish of State will break into little pieces. There has to be order in society. And yet, the realists among us know all too well that this is the very reason that politicians of Right and Left are often caught in verbal fights most of the time. However, verbal fights are far superior to fist fights and, God forbid, wars between nations. Moreover, the realists among us become aware all too quickly of the virtual inevitability of wars. Another image that springs to my mind here is a famous phrase uttered by the great wartime U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill: "Jaw, Jaw, not War, War!"  

Garden, Glenview Hotel 3

What makes this interpreter of the above poem pretty much lacking in hope, but certainly not despairing, is that our writer is so impractical, so unrealistic, so thoroughly positive that he or she appears to be a totally dyed-in-the-wool idealist who believes that our politicians can be motivated by being steeped in the Tao or in the Still Point of Being. Yes, indeed, like any of you reading this post, I should dearly like that such would be the case, that all the politicians that lead my country, Ireland, should be centered in the Tao and that "evil will have no power."

And yet, it is so right that the Scriptures of any religion, that the ideals of any belief system, theist, atheist or agnostic should propose values which we should, of necessity, strive to achieve.  Otherwise, we would be so much poorer in being bereft of some guiding star, some goals and hopes to reach for.  

Garden, Glenview Hotel 4

Our poet does underline the fact that we will always have evil out there in the world, and often, unfortunately, even in here in our hearts, but he tells us that if we ground ourselves in the Tao we will be able to avoid such evil.  Meditation and mindfulness do help us ground ourselves in the essence of life, in the Still Point of Being, in following the path of the good in our lives and in avoiding evil.  The final two lines are very hopeful, even if they smack of wishful thinking and a positivity that does not seem to allow for the jagged edges of existence and the seeming deep-roooted-ness of evil in the world to rear their ugly heads. 

Yet, such is the challenge of spirituality and all spiritual reading, no matter what its provenance, that we must read and re-read, contemplate and re-contemplate its words and be challenged to the core of our being with the truth of the lines such as the ones with which our writer challenges us by way of concluding the poem:

Give evil nothing to oppose

and it will disappear by itself.

Thoughts on the Tao te Ching 39

Poem 39

In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creatures flourish together,
content with the way they are,
endlessly repeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.

When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.

The Master views the parts with compassion,
because he understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn't glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged and common as stone.

Commentary

Pont des Arts, Paris, June, 2007

There are so many questions that any thinking and reflecting human being can ask about the world in general, about life as we experiences it and about how we might explain that meaningfully to ourselves.  Big and small questions like: Where does the rain come from? Where do I come from?  Is there more to these questions than the how of their physical formation? Why is there pain and suffering in the world? Is there a meaning to life?  Does Truth exist in itself?  What is reality?  Does God exist?  What is life about anyway?  Why does the world exist? Why do I exist? Who am I? What is identity? What is meaning? Why do we pursue meaning? What is love? What is colour? Why is there something rather than nothing?  

As I have just returned from the rather wonderful film Room directed by Lenny Abrahamson and written by Emma Donoghue, my mind is quite full of these types of question outlined above.  The screenplay is based on the book of the same name that Donoghue also wrote. As a result the film is particularly true to the original novel.  The plot is very simple: after having been held captive for a period of five years in a garden shed - called "Room" by the little boy  - a young woman and her five-year-old son finally manage to gain their freedom.  The film follows the attempts by both mother and son to cope with, in turn, their experiences of captivity and freedom. In this film, the imagination of both mother and son helps them cope with the complexity of their situation both inside and outside of the room.  Big questions crop up for the viewer as they undoubtedly do for the characters:  What is the real world? What is reality?  What is the imagination?  Where are the demarcation lines between reality and imagination? Do not imagination and reality overlap anyway? Indeed, what is the real world? Is not what's real for us the world of our perceptions anyway?  In other words, does reality equate solely with our perception of it?  Indeed, all literature, film, music or whatever cultural means we conjure up are essentially ways of creating meaning or structure so that we can survive in the world around us.  The mother (just a grown-up adolescent anyway who was kidnapped five years previously as a teenager) needs to create a world where her son can learn to live within a dreadfully confined space.

Compassion and care for the young: Work experience: TY 2003

Why this seeming wandering away from our given text?  Well, as I reflectively ponder the above Taoist poem, I am struck by the power of the human faculty of perception.  What are the ways we perceive the world? Are there different perspectives we can take?  If I look on my own life as a story I am writing or as a film I am directing then perhaps an author's or a director's viewpoint can be more objective and indeed more creative for me, and consequently I may be less likely to grow depressed and less likely to indulge in narrower and more restricted perceptions of any particular situation I might find myself in? Hence, the power of the following lines of the final stanza of Poem 39.  Let me quote those two powerful lines here:

The Master views the parts with compassion,

because he understands the whole.

There is one take on perception that has always appealed to this author since he first learnt a bit about rudimentary psychology as a trainee teacher, namely Gestalt psychology.  It is really a theory about how the human mind perceives and makes sense of the world. Its central contention is that the mind forms a "global whole" with self-organising tendencies. To my mind Emma Donoghue's book and Lenny Abrahamson's film illustrate this dynamic in the human being to make his/her world meaningful through imagining it as a "global whole" that has inherent self-organising tendencies.  The human mind is hardwired to form a gestalt or total or unified perception of its world as a whole or as an overall or over-arching unit.  This overall or over-arching perception has its own reality independent of its parts.  It is interesting to note that the original phrase used by one of the first Gestalt psychologists, Kurt Koffka is "The whole is other than the sum of its parts" and not its usual misquotation as "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."  There is a particularly important difference and nuance contained in "other than" that is not contained in the idea of "greater than." What Koffka wished to underline or stress is that the whole simply has an independent existence apart from its constituent parts, not that it was greater which is far too mathematical or quantitative a concept.

Meditation, no matter what its provenance in whatever religious or non-religious context, is always about attaining perspective, of retreating from the noisy world of conflicting parts, of centering self in some interior unity or one-ness or whole, of finding a still point of existence, of collecting or recollecting the self, of reassembling or re-member-ing or putting the self back together.  It is essentially about attaining and rejoicing in the view of the whole, in the unity of the totality while having complete compassion for the disjointedness and disunity for the parts.  It is in that disjointedness and disunity that evil, suffering and pain exist.

Journal of a Soul 63

From the Ashes of Despair

It's hard to know where to start.  Like drawing a circle, I suppose one can put the compass point anywhere on a sheet of paper, set the radius randomly and start at any point to describe it.  Writing about the Soul or Self or Meaning, or lack of any one or all of them, is somewhat similar, I guess.  The alcoholic writer, Charles Bukowski, whom 1986 Time called a "laureate of American lowlife," described despair as only an alcoholic could as: “my beer-drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.”  What, I hear you chorus in response to these words brings you to write about despair?  Well, I suppose when we are inundated on all sides by pain, suffering, dying, death, war and destruction we can be forgiven for at least being a little sad.  What motivates these thoughts forming themselves in words upon this virtual screen is the well publicized death of the brilliant, inimitable actor and stand-up comic Robin Williams, whom the director Steven Spielberg has described as "a lightning storm of comic genius" and the on-going murder of innocents in Gaza, not to mention other places in the world that we forget so easily where such wanton killings of innocents continue to scar and mar the human face of the world.  We forget these poor souls because other more recent horrific news gains sway in the headlines. As I type these poor inadequate words, I am listening to a live radio show here in Dublin, Ireland where parents, sons and daughters and siblings are describing their pain at the suicide of one of their relatives.  If anything, the late great, wonderful human being Robin Williams is still touching our lives all over the world by helping raise our consciousness of this issue. Robin Williams R.I.P.

No Substitute for Experience

The subtitle here says it all, I think.  There is, indeed, no substitute for first hand experience.  Also to sound a very old tune in these pages the cerebral or intellectual only captures such a small, albeit a significant part, of the human phenomenon.  There are so many other dimensions of that phenomenon that can only be described after one has experienced them. These are all those non-cerebral, non-intellectual sides to our character like relationships, experiences of beauty, truth, love, compassion, companionship, care, love, hope, spirit, genius, laughter, genius and even that spark of madness all of which Robin Williams so much embodied in his sheer humanity.  And to that list, dare I say it, I must, of course, add despair.

I have said that there is no substitute for experience.  I have also written about my own experience of clinical depression when I was 40 years of age, now some 16 years ago.  That place or space was one where there was no soul, no meaning, no self.  That was a place or space of despair that only seven weeks hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital could mend. Thankfully, due to medical intervention, I have never had the experience of revisiting either the hospital or that space or place of pain since.  Important here has been a comprehensive understanding of the nature of depression which can be (i) of the clinical or endogenous variety (in other words, a biochemical disorder that can be corrected as far as possible by pharmacological intervention or medication) and (ii) the reactive variety where our life situation brings us down.  In this second variety, counselling and therapeutic intervention are very effective, though sometimes prescribed drugs can help to kick start the process, medicines that can later be withdrawn.  Also, I find that in the case of clinical depression, care of the soul through the creative arts and reading and attending self-help courses also helps.  The worst thing for anyone who knows anyone who is depressed  is to offer them cheap black and white advice.  There is no simple answer as depression varies from person to person in its symptoms, and a "both/and" and not an "either/or" response is the correct approach with regards to medical and therapeutic interventions and helps.

In matters of the mind, cheap advice can be useless at best and destructive at worst.  In all cases I have found that to be with and to accompany others in their crisis is the right approach.  What's said, in the end, does not matter much.  Being there is what matters. It's about presence or being present with others who suffer.  Of course, that is more easily said than done.  The accompanying person or companion will often feel helpless and so useless and more often than not seemingly ignored as the poor wretch suffering their despair simply cannot respond or reach out because they are not able to.

Falling Apart

Often in these times I find turning to poetry one of my resources.  Again, at the risk of repetition ad nauseam in these pages, let me come to William B. Yeats.  He wrote a wonderful poem in 1919, shortly after the ending of The Great War called "The Second Coming", some appropriate lines of which I will quote here:

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.

While Yeats spoke about the disintegration of the outer world in the wake of the Great War, the lines touch and move me on a personal existential level of inner disintegration and inner falling apart.  To that extent those words of Yeats are really very apt indeed. In this experience of inner disintegration, I am so much reminded of other lines from the wonderful father of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard that run:

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.” 

                            (― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death)

Pulling the Parts Together: Standing Together in Hope

Early Christian thinker, Origen, 185 - 254 A.D.

This is so hard to do and so much easier said, so the naivete of the subtitle here has to be forgiven, at least momentarily.  If anything, we humans have to learn over and over again the lesson of our brittleness as human beings. Too often, we believe the myths we have created about our power over all things and even, God help us, our power over ourselves. The old writers and artists often got it right: An early Christian theologian, Origen, presented a response to the problem of evil which cast the world as a schoolroom or hospital for the soul. It is interesting to note that the great Romantic poet John Keats saw the world as the "vale of soul-making" and his thoughts were very much in line with those of Origen.  In other words, to be truly human is to be a carer, a nurse, a doctor or a paramedic for each other.  To be truly human we must be soul-makers, not soul-breakers.  Too much of modern life is into soul-breaking rather than soul-making. To be a soul-maker is to be a compassionate healer.  The answer is seen in all the ways we can become caring communities rather than anonymous urban sprawls that dislocate and break souls down. Indeed, pulling the parts together is no easy task.  We live in a world that almost prefers disintegration to integration.  We care little about others, especially strangers.  We care little even about our neighbours, and often even less about ourselves.  Anonymity is seemingly preferred to being accepted as belonging. Indeed, it is so hard to put down roots in the masonry and concrete of our modern cities.  And yet there are so many reasons to hope as is shown in these two wonderful videos I am placing here below. The first is the moving video of the meeting of two wonderful young human beings one a Palestinian American and the other a Jewish American, both of whom were beaten up by Israeli police at various times in the last several years. Its viewing brought tears of hope and peace and brotherhood to my eyes.  The second is even more moving recent video as the human hands of love speak so powerfully by scratching at the earth and lifting stones and rubble to bring a wonderful little child back to the fresh invigorating air of life. My heart breaks in hope for our stained humanity.  Maybe the youngsters of today will teach their children better than we have done ours: (i)Two Modern Heroes and Healers  and (ii) The Healing Hands of Love.

Journal of a Soul 62

Dealing with Evil 3

The crooked wood of humanity: Dublin Zoo

In my last several posts, I dealt with the problems of pain and suffering, both of which are graphic examples of evil.  On one level the problem of evil is just that a problem, a cerebral difficulty that presents itself as a philosophical conundrum that many erudite and astute minds attempted to solve intellectually over the years.  But  as I never cease to point out in these posts the cerebral or conceptual is just one (albeit great and important) aspect of the total reality that makes a human being.  Existentially, evil presents itself at a lived and experiential level in our lives as namely pain and suffering in all their various manifestations and incarnations.  

Outrage at Terrorism and Wanton Violence

As I sit here writing these words on this virtual page, one would want to have a heart of stone not to be moved at the outrage of all the various terrorist and and wanton acts of violence being perpetrated throughout the world.  The shooting out of the air of the Malaysian plane over eastern Ukraine, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the on-going civil war in Syria where thousands of innocent people have been murdered and continue to be.  One of the reasons that Israel is smarting at the world's hostile criticism of its violent acts against the Palestinian people is the instant delivery of visual reports of its violence through smart phones and so on.  This is not to deny that there is no terrorism by the Palestinians as there quite obviously is.  It is just to point out that State terrorism also exists, and many nations have been guilty of this for years and some continue to do so.

Simplistic Divisions of Good and Evil

Dublin Zoo

Somehow or other we instinctively or intuitively believe that Good and Evil are separate and inimical elements, unmixed and unmixable.  But sound thinking and good psychology teach us otherwise.  In wars, we are quick to demonize the enemy, because in that way it is so much easier to maim and kill them.  All soldiers are taught that the enemy is evil.  In fact, in all conflicts language which diminishes the humanity of the enemy is always used. A sophisticated and canny reader will always be aware and conscious of the uses and abuses of language by journalists.  On the one hand, we demonize our enemies and canonize our friends.  Indeed, that means that we put these frail human beings up on a pedestal, while we sentence others to hell.  That is why, like many other commentators, I have problems with the Roman Catholic Church's propensity to canonize certain people as Saints (very much a medieval preoccupation, pretty much redundant in modern society).   Again, these two extremes show us our instinctive and intuitive or unconscious pigeonholing of people.

Lessons from more Informed Film Directors

We can learn much from wonderful authors of novels and brilliant makers of films who see the human person in a more balanced and rounded a way than the media would want us to have them.  There are those among their number that do not deal with issues in a black and white, right and wrong or judgmental way.  The first film that comes to my mind is Downfall (Der Untergang) which is a 2004 German war film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, depicting the final ten days of Adolf Hitler reign over Nazi Germany in 1945. This film caused much controversy in Germany when it first came out because of its not depicting Hitler as an absolute monster.  In the film he does have some few redeeming features (very few), and no doubt Hitler did have some.  The second is a TV series made for HBO, namely The Sopranos, created by David Chase where the protagonist, Tony Soprano is a struggling father and husband who attends a psychiatrist on the one hand in an attempt to get a handle of the meaning of his life and on the other is a vicious murderer.  As a viewer of this wonderful series, I like many other fans, found myself becoming quite sympathetic to Tony as a human being.  It is my argument here that the directors set out to present their protagonists as somewhat more human and less demonic or demonized than the protagonists in the run of the mill films or novels.

All Too Human

In the early twentieth century, humankind really came of age in a most horrific way, that is, through the bloodbath of the Great War where countless millions of soldiers were killed, giving the lie to the simplistic belief of their Victorian and Edwardian forefathers in the onward positive direction of progress that would continually improve humankind's lot. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Freud was already unmasking humankind's deep dark unconscious motivations.  The god of rationality that had so painstakingly been enthroned on the plinth of our worldly devotion instead of the God of religion was now in turn being unceremoniously debunked.  The deep dark cesspit of humankind's unconscious motivations was now being revealed in all its seediness and filth.  Carl Jung was to call this the shadow aspect of our nature.

I remember many years ago an astute and wise English teacher telling us during our reading of the text of Shakespeare's Hamlet that anyone of us was capable of murdering another human being, that we humans were an amorphous mix of good and evil and that's why we needed to educate our conscience.  

The Buddhist Understanding of Evil

Imprint of Gorilla hand: Dublin Zoo

As we have seen, good and evil are often looked upon as diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. But in a reality, in a practical sense, such a simplistic way of thinking is unsatisfactory. Even the cruelest of criminals may possess a strong sense of love or compassion toward his parents and children as we have seen in case of Tony Soprano above. Is such a person fundamentally good or evil? Buddhism says that everyone is a mix of both. The Buddhist understanding is that good and evil are innate, inseparable aspects of life. This view makes it impossible to label a particular individual or group as "good" or "evil." Every single human being is capable of acts of the most noble good, or the basest evil.  This is how one Buddhist site puts the Buddhist take on evil:

A Buddha is someone who has the courage to acknowledge these two fundamental aspects of life. As Nichiren states, "One who is thoroughly awakened to the nature of good and evil from their roots to their branches and leaves is called a Buddha." Buddhas accept their innate goodness without arrogance because they know all people share the same Buddha nature. Buddhas also recognize their innate evil without despair because they know they have the strength to overcome and control their negativity. (See HERE )

So, every human is a mix of good and evil motivations.  The Buddhist is called upon to be equally aware of them and to practice meditation and compassion to conquer our base motivations and urges. Some religions teach that evil is a force outside ourselves that seduces us into sin. This force is sometimes thought to be generated by Satan or various demons. The faithful are encouraged to seek strength outside themselves to fight evil, by looking to God. The Buddha's teaching could not be more different:

"By oneself, indeed, is evil done; by oneself is one defiled. By oneself is evil left undone; by oneself, indeed, is one purified. Purity and impurity depend on oneself. No one purifies another." (Dhammapada, chapter 12, verse 165)

Buddhism teaches us that evil is something we create, not something we are or some outside force that infects us. As I have pointed out so many times, intellectual problems are just that - intellectual; and the cognitive is just one of the many dimensions that go to make up the totality of humankind in all its complexity.  Hence, the most astute theodicies and the most learned ruminations of our best philosophers and scientists fall far short of the mark on a human level.  Those who accompany people during their final days and nights on this earth know that human companionship, just the presence of significant others with those making their final journey, the use of appropriate meditation and visualization techniques are all of the utmost importance and are most beneficial.

On the level of existential mystery the basic lessons of Buddhism can hardly be bettered.   Traditionally, it is believed that the Buddha stated his basic precepts called The Four Noble Truths immediately after his enlightenment. I shan't rehearse these four truths here, but you may hit the following link if you wish to read about them more fully: Four Noble Truths.  What I wish to discuss here are the second and third noble truths viz.,  The Second Noble Truth states that the origin of suffering or dukkha lies in our cravings that occur on three existential levels - (a) craving for sensual pleasures, (b) craving to be that certainly encompasses all we Westerns construe as ego and (c) craving not to be - somewhat like Freud's Thanatos instinct, that is the desire for extinction and death. These cravings are just that, cravings and are really self-delusions on our part. The Third Noble Truth is the truth of the cessation of dukkha. The term cessation (Pali: nirodha) refers to the cessation of suffering and the causes of suffering, by realising that our sufferings are caused by our obsessions and cravings, by our unwarranted and unrealistic attachments to the things of this world.  Such a cessation of suffering can only happen after much spiritual work on oneself through meditation and works of compassion.