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.

3

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 21

A young S.T. Coleridge

One of my favourite Romantic poets is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I was lucky to study him from two angles, once in an English Literature course at undergraduate level and once at the level of philosophical theology whilst studying at postgraduate level. That means that I have been lucky to have studied both his poems and his literary/theological/philosophical prose works. Coleridge (1772 –1834) was a complex individual and an extremely erudite dilettante, being a poet, a literary critic and philosopher as well as being an avid walker and lover of nature. He was also a wonderful raconteur who loved to regale his friends with stories and witticisms. Again, he was more Dionysian than Apollonian in temperament, yet in his philosophical and theological musings he could readily access and use profitably and aptly the higher reaches of logical argument and thought, thereby embracing both heart and head in a splendid and felicitous harmony.

With his friend and colleague William Wordsworth, Coleridge was a founder of what is called the Romantic Movement in England. His most anthologised poems and well known poems are The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan while his major prose work Biographia Literaria is an amazingly erudite, eccentric and extremely sui generis  work of his literary imagination. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was and is highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture through his studies in the German language and German philosophy at Gottingen University.  Coleridge, as a result of his concentrated studies, coined many familiar words and phrases, including “suspension of disbelief, the “esemplastic power of imagination” and many more. He is noted as a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism. In short, then, we may summarise by saying that it was through Coleridge’s writings and translations that German transcendentalism entered the English and American Romantic Movements.

On a personal level, throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression. Some have speculated that he had bipolar disorder, though that is impossible to prove definitively. However, it is important to note that he became an addict of opium through its medicinal and all-too-easily attainable form called Laudanum. All of this feeds into the wonderfully complex and inspiring thought of a great poet and marvellously talented critic.

The poem I wish to offer the reader this evening is one of what is called his “conversation poems” namely “Frost at Midnight.”

Frost at Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud--and hark, again ! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings : save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not ;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, everywhere
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. 

Briefest of Commentaries

Here in this wonderful poem we encounter the very quintessence of Romantic poetry: an openness to the splendour, wonder and magic of nature where even “[t]he frost performs its secret ministry.” In other words, from the very first line of this poem we encounter the mystery of nature in the wonderful patterns frost forms all around us on a winter’s night. It is important to note that Coleridge attributes power to the frost, namely the power to perform a ministry or ritual that brings the believer into communion with the very heart of nature, namely the Creator revealed through the mysterious and wondrous patterns performed by a minister called “frost.” Again, what we have here is the personification of nature in the workings of the frost. It is significant, also, the Coleridge ends the poem with a second reference to the frost’s ministry in the third last line of the last stanza.

From the first we are drawn into the profound solitude that obtains in the poet’s country cottage in Cumbria. We encounter all the sights and sounds of Coleridge’s surroundings depicted in wonderfully clear and vivid images: “my cradled infant slumbers peacefully,” “the thin blue flame lies on my low-burnt fire,” the “film which fluttered on the grate,” “the old church-tower,//Whose bells, the poor man's only music,” “My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart//With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,” “For I was reared//In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,” and so on and so forth.  Unlike his father, his son Hartley will be reared, attuned to the sounds of nature and not in a great and noisy city. Again, all these images and this last aspiration for his son are essentially Romantic in nature, that is, they serve to help us to commune with God in and through nature.

In conclusion, let me repeat here the final eleven lines of the poem, which essentially sum up the Romantic credo to which Wordsworth et al subscribed and that S.T. Coleridge so eruditely wrote about in his prose writings.  With that thought I leave the reader to contemplate these last lines of this great poem:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

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 59

Poem 59

For governing a country well

there is nothing better than moderation.

The mark of a moderate man

is freedom from his own ideas.

Tolerant like the sky,

all-pervading like sunlight,

firm like a mountain,

supple like a tree in the wind,

he has no destination in view

and makes use of anything

life happens to bring his way.

Nothing is impossible for him.

Because he has let go,

he can care for the people's welfare

as a mother cares for her child.

Commentary

Bust of Socrates

Let me return to two old chestnuts that I have used many times over in these pages.  The first is my love for what we were taught as one of Socrates' great teachings, namely that the surest starting point is our declaration of ignorance in any matter, and to progress in learning therefrom.  This is what I call the method of Socratic Ignorance.  At college in the late 1970s, I remember reading that once the humble Socrates met a man who was said by many of his contemporaries to be wise, but shortly after having engaged him in conversation, Socrates found that this man had no more wisdom than himself. Further, this supposedly wise man became very angry when Socrates had demonstrated by logic that he was not so wise after all.  Socrates famously concluded that "it seems that I am wiser than he is, to this small extent anyway, that I do not think I know what I do not know." (See Apology 21d)  The second old chestnut to which I have returned equally often in these posts is that of St Augustine who remarked that we progress in our knowledge of truth, especially truth with a capital T, by which he would have meant God, by way of a "docta ignorantia" or "learned ignorance." [Est ergo in nobis quaedam, ut ita dicam, docta ignorantia, sed docta spiritu Dei, qui adiuvat infirmitatem nostram: There is, therefore, in us a certain, shall I say (so to speak), a learned ignorance, but a learned one of the spirit of God, who helps us in our infirmity. My translation.  See Epistle 130, 14, 27).  It is interesting that Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) took the title of his famous book Docta Ignorantia (1440)  from this sentence in St Augustine's magisterial letters.  The whole aim of Nicholas of Cusa, taking his inspiration from St Augustine, is that one can only know who God is, or may be, through a negative theology or a negative way, Apophatic Theology, namely by amassing all the knowledge we have about who or what he is not!]

It must surely be, in this or a similar sense, that our Taoist poet writes above of knowledge of the Tao. Our poet writes that the mark of a wise man is "freedom from his own ideas."  It never surprises me to meet people who are so convinced that they are right with respect to this or that idea, or most certain concerning the motives of this or that person.  After all, ideas and concepts are just that, ideas and concepts. Indeed, opinions, which rate on a much lower scale than those of ideas and concepts, are also heralded by egotists to be almost set in stone.  There has to be room, surely, for movement, or flexibility in our opinions (certainly) and in our ideas and concepts (as often as is logically and practically possible) in order for knowledge to grow on the way to the Truth.  Again, the wise man learns to bend in the wind of opposition, to choose his battles wisely, to smile on opposition and criticism as well as on agreement and praise - hard to do, but very worthwhile practising.  Likewise, everything a wise man encounters, good, bad and indifferent is part of the overall picture of life.  All experiences, good and bad, are metaphorically "grist to the mill."

St Augustine at study - he was a lifelong scholar

Most spiritualities and religions talk about how we handicap ourselves, or how we smother our very light of life - to use another metaphor - by our clinging onto things and even people who are, in the context of time or of eternity, or compared to the infinity of the universe, mere impermanent realities.  Hence spiritualities and religions often ask their followers to let go of their dependencies, their clinging onto this or that or the other obsession. They advise us to "Let go and Let life!" or "Live and Let Live!" or "Let Go and Let God!"  All of these things are hard to do, that is why we must return again and again to our sitting position and attempt to meditate, to arrive at that still pointedness of existence, to the heart of the Tao.  After a while, all becomes so natural, just as natural as a mother caring for her child.  As Fr Richard Rohr so succinctly puts it, in the title of one of his many books, "everything belongs."

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 4

Tao Te Ching

Poem 4

The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.

I don't know who gave birth to it.

It is older than God.

Commentary

Wells are central to community just as water is central to life. Civilizations grew up around water, around rivers and lakes and wells. What could be more natural?  Indeed water is the source and summit of life.  Indeed, it is worth calling to mind that, depending on age, sex, health and weight, the human body is made up of anywhere between 55 - 75 % of water.  On a physical level water slakes our thirst.  In the Gospels, as in the Scriptural texts of all religions, water as an element and as a symbol features centrally.  One of the more popular of the stories relating to Jesus is that of his encounter with the woman at the well, where Jesus promises the woman "living water," a water that has the promise for the drinker that he or she will never get thirsty again.  Within traditional societies the well was the focal point of the very community because everyone had to go there to draw water.

The Woman at the Well by Carl Heinrich Bloch

Language works in a wonderful way by pushing its boundaries beyond its physical referents in order to attempt to describe abstract and theoretical concepts.  One might call this faculty within language the thrust to metaphor.  And so language pushes the word "heart" into more abstract territory to come up with a formula like "the heart of the matter" to express a more complex thought.  And so language always forces itself beyond its physical boundaries to embrace higher and loftier thoughts; ideas and experiences on many levels that must be explained.

There is a most famous and equally popular Christian spiritual classic based on Liberation Theology called We Drink From Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People by the Catholic theologian of note Gustavo Gutiérrez, a classic well worth reading and pondering.  Once again it is about the wells of inspiration that give a whole people hope.

"Void" refers to "a completely empty space."  Emptiness is, once again, one of a binary pair; its polar bedfellow being the idea of "fullness."  Being empty seems to invite being "filled up."  Or to put it another way, how can I know what fullness is unless I know what its contrary is, namely, emptiness. Our poem above invites us to see the emptiness of the Tao, or indeed our own emptiness which shares in that ultimate emptiness, as inviting an "infinity of possibilities." The notions of inspiration and enthusiasm are indeed also linked insofar as these words also imply a filling of the emptiness within.  The Latin root "inspirare" means "to breathe into," while the root of the word enthusiasm is to be "filled with the divine."  Hence, the notion of "void" is not one of total sterility, a conclusion we might jump to rather superficially at first glance.

The word "void" used above reminds me of a related word, namely "abyss." An abyss is "a deep and seemingly bottomless chasm."  It is a word that appears in much religious and spiritual writing like that of "void."  When speaking of mysticism, we often used both these words in an attempt to describe a mystical experience.  The psalms speak and pray and meditate about "deep calls onto deep" as in Psalm 42:7 where we read: "deep calls onto deep at the sound of your waterfalls.  And your breakers and your waves have rolled over me."  This is pure poetry like the poem above from the Tao and its implications are similar  to that insinuated by the above quoted poetic lines. Nietzsche says somewhere that when one gazes long enough into the abyss that the abyss stares back into you. Unfortunately, Nietzsche's abyss does not promise a polar opposite or possibilities of creativity, and, like its author, his words are redolent of depression and negativity.  For Nietzsche, it appears to me, the abyss calls us to our destruction, unlike its function in mysticism where it is preparatory for being filled with the divine, that is, with meaning.

The mysterious or mystical Tao is at once hidden and present - here we have our polarities or binaries or pairs of opposites again.  And again the line "older than God" is somewhat mind-blowing.  It seems to suggest that any human notion of God is always redundant as it can never capture whatever the source of meaning to and in life may be.  Even all the various religions, with all their various dogmatic formulas, fall far short of capturing whatever God may or may not be.  Hence the Tao must surely be older than any conception possible of God.

Journal of a Soul 71

The Journey Continues

Howth, Christmas Eve, 2014

A New Year has begun.  Another year has been clocked up on that strange weak vehicle of self or soul we call the body.  The calendar cycle has begun once again.  There is a wisdom in the seasons that seems to suggest that everything is cyclical, that progress is an illusion.  The way of wisdom is by the gradual erosion of our superficial beliefs bit by slow bit - like that proverbial drip that wears the stone.  Nothing is constant - all, as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus says, is "in a state of flux," and yet there is a paradoxical cyclical repetition to change. 

Heraclitus in Raphael's School of Athens

The New Year is ushered in by a review of the events - little and great, insignificant and significant, heroic and tragic - of the past twelve months.  It is as if the fires of the last year have all burned themselves down into the ashes of our memory as we look ahead in anticipation and hope to the brighter fires of the year to come. Sometimes one gets the distinct impression that the drudgery of the whole thing begins again.  It's as if our body is growing tired of the whole thing and that the spirit itself is flagging.  When one looks out into the grey skies of winter in this northern hemisphere it feels as if one might be a character in a Kafka novel or a Beckett play - just there on an indifferent stage not understanding what has happened to you in life and that the blessed thing has a habit of just going on and on.  Yes, the cycle begins over and over again. And where lies the meaning?

There are sentences that haunt the mind of this writer - ones indeed of Biblical portent and intensity. These are sentences that come whistling like boys walking past graveyards on a dark shadowy night. "There is nothing new under the sun," says Qoheleth, the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes and he proceeds in Kafkaesque and Beckettian tones, in absurdist or existentialist terms with these rather anachronistically modern lines that are paradoxically over 2000 years old:

A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.

All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.

There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be among those who come after. (Eccles. 1: 2-9)

And so here we go with another year. Where does that leave the writer of this blog? What about the progress on the spiritual way for this pilgrim soul?  I often wonder how far I have come and if any progress has been made at all.   Am I just beginning all over again? It often seems as if the spiritual journey is one of a cyclical nature too.  It feels as if the whole journey is beginning all over again from the start and that any progress that had apparently been achieved has now turned out to be a mere illusion.  With this in mind I can empathize with the young boy who informed me today that he had to get a repeat of his operation of four years ago to replace his VNS device (Vagus Nerve Stimulator) under the skin in his upper chest. This procedure is a modern treatment for trickier cases of epilepsy.  Or still again I can appreciate the predicament of anyone who has had a relapse of one or other disease that plunges them back to the beginning once again.

TS Eliot

And yet,  the words of Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) lift me, as they always do, with their dearly-bought but deep wisdom:

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. ("Four Quartets")

As any teacher or indeed any maker of poems will tell you a question like "what does this poem or these lines mean?" is a rather inappropriate one to ask of any such work.  Poems are an intricate interweaving of words, feelings, inspiration and sound, and their meaning lies somewhere in the interaction of the reader with that complex phenomenon.  So meaning is a very dynamic experience that cannot be reduced to a mere paraphrase.  

Let's try, though, to tease out some of the connotations and implications for our lives from Eliot's intriguing lines: 

Most of us are searchers and explorers who want to make some sense of our lives.  And moreover, we may never cease from doing so as Eliot suggests.  Oftentimes, and indeed our poet suggests always, we arrive back where we started out and see the place anew.  On one level the place is obviously the same, but now we are seeing it with "new" eyes, with a new optic, from a new or deeper or even different perspective.  Now there are new dimensions to our experience - new depths and/or new heights to it!

Making Sense of Life and the Turn to Meditation

If we don't seek to make some sense of our lives we are somehow consigned to a rather humdrum, boring and meaninglessly repetitious existence.  In short, we are meaning-making creatures and were meant to be.  In so doing, we are in a growing mode, ready to embrace happiness or that state called "flourishing" or "eudaimonia" by Aristotle.

However, searching and exploring can tire the spirit and the body.  I remember many years ago attending a spiritual retreat where each group was asked to come up with a name for their group.  The names suggested were along these lines: Searchers, Explorers, Sunflowers, Wayfarers, Pilgrims, Brothers and Sisters and so on.  The name that showed the least sense of struggle, obviously, was that of Sunflowers.  That particular group explained that they were so aware that they were respondents to sheer gifts and graces that were lavished upon them by God, the Universe or Life itself that they could come up with no other appellation.  This, at first sight, is a rather strange way of responding to life, is it not?  And yet it a legitimate experience of thanksgiving for life's bounty or bounteousness  that quite a number of people experience.  Sunflowers turn towards the sun and are led to blossom under its rays.  There are people who experience living as such a response to what they experience as the sheer giftedness of their being.

In those dry periods when its seems that I am going around in meaningless circles, as so brutally expressed in my opening paragraphs, that I am seemingly in the same old place or predicament, I often find myself turning to meditation.  Meditation for me can be done at three levels, and often I can do it at each of the three levels according to how I feel in any given situation.  At level one we can meditate at a physical level, that is, we can engage in it  solely as an exercise to relax our body.  At level two we can go deeper still and relax our mind - that is, where the mindfulness exercise is one of mental or psychological relaxation.  As a believer in the spiritual realm, I accept and indeed experience meditation as allowing me to experience a sense of being in touch with a deeper ground of my being, namely a divine or spiritual level to my life and to the world.  

It is at this third level that I experience graced moments of contact with a deeper or higher level reaching into my own little world.  This is very hard to describe because quite simply one has to experience it, to be touched by it and moved by it so as to appreciate it in any way at all.  It is at this level, I believe, that the human meditator can become like a sunflower responding to the Sun or Ground of life that some dare call God.  It is at this deeper (or higher depending on one's spatial metaphor) level that in T.S. Eliot's words we recognize or "know the place for the first time."  It is also at this level that one realizes that despite the seeming stagnation, the apparent atrophy and the stupefying stasis, there indeed has been a significant shift at the level of meaning, at the level of being, at the level of the spiritual journey.

And so the spiritual journey goes on.  As any pilgrim will tell you, the road is often twisting and troublesome, sometimes dangerous and impassable and yet one knows one can never turn back.  It is the persevering on that journey that counts.  Paul Tillich, the great German-American theologian and philosopher, called on us to "dare to be!"  He reckoned that this was the call issued to every human being in the task of making life meaningful in a very secular age.  For the wayfarer on the journey to self-knowledge and wisdom, this call can be re-written as "dare to journey onward" or "dare to risk" digging deeper or climbing higher or journeying further in the task of knowing your real self!  That way we will encounter our true and authentic self in all its dimensions.

Journal of a Soul 68

Patterns

A pencil mandala I drew today - an attempt at a pattern in geometric terms.

In my last post in this blog I spoke about our being a meaning-making species.  For us, it is not enough to experience life in all its vicissitudes and vagaries.  No, we have a deep drive to make sense of it, to see some shape or pattern in the course of our worldly affairs.  We believe that everything we do must be meaningful and have some purpose.  We in the Western world seem to be caught up in rationalizing even our moments of joy and sorrow by attempting to explain these by philosophizing, psychologizing, theologizing, sociologizing, anthropologizing and so on and so forth. That is, we try to superimpose the shape or pattern of our own take on philosophy, psychology, theology, sociology, anthropology and indeed any other "-ology" we may know upon those experiences.  Hence, my title.  

We are the shapers and pattern-makers of our lives.  Indeed, one of the core drives in humanity, it seems to me, is the drive to knowledge, or to know more.  We might even describe this drive as the infinite desire to know. (see the work of the Jesuit theologian and philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, 1906-1986) To me this drive seems to be as strong as the drive within us to love others and be loved in return.  In our desire to learn ever and ever more about our world and indeed about ourselves we have discovered much order in the universe - common principles of mathematics, physics, science and technology and so on. And yet despite all our knowledge there is so much more still unknown.  Further there is also much disorder and chaos around us that we are striving to understand.

In this regard, we have also become aware of the seeming randomness of things and the sheer apparent chaos of both the origins and nature of the universe.  So much so that today scientists are exploring this latter through the use of what they term chaos theory. Epistemologically, coming up with a theory of chaos is in itself by association of the very terms "theory" and "chaos" a way of superimposing order on chaos anyway.  In other words, we are searching for a pattern and order in chaos itself.  Now, that to me is simply mindbendingly wonderful.  Only we humans could come up with that. The WIKI has a wonderfully insightful article on chaos theory within which we read about what the author terms "spontaneous order in chaos" of which he writes: "Under the right conditions chaos will spontaneously evolve into a lockstep pattern." (See HERE ) 

In the field of knowledge we try to discover patterns that are there already in nature in general - such is very pertinent to the growth of all knowledge especially in the natural sciences in general - whether that be the theory of evolution, the discovery and definition of gravity, the discovery of electricity and so on and so forth.  The furtherance of knowledge in the sphere of the natural sciences obviously led to the growth of machines and technologies of all kinds. Likewise, empirical or clinical observances and experiments done with animals and human beings have led to the growth of medical knowledge both in its physiological and psychological aspects.  Scientists have a very simple but effective approach to knowledge in general, that is, that all conclusions offered must be based on the sound foundations of scientific method understood in an objective and unbiased fashion.  

I understand the scientific method as being somewhat open-ended in the sense of the Socratic declaration that we must always declare our ignorance first and not be too quick to jump to narrow conclusions.  No scientist should take a very narrow optic on things, but rather be open to being surprised by the wonder of the universe.  In this sense, I am arguing for an open-ended scientific method that in its practice rules out a narrow scientistic reductionism that reduces all mystery and wonder to mere materialistic or mechanistic constituents. I hasten to add here that as a believer in good solid science I also decry a sort of reverse reductionism - maybe an "inflationism" if I may coin a term - like the approach of fundamental religionists and creationists that seek to look at the mystery and wonder of the universe through an equally narrow optic of Biblical literalism. (Here, let me cite the work of The Institute for Creation Research, which lists a good number of apparently eminent scientists on its web page, but starts off with a very narrow premise, namely one of Biblical literalism. Now, how they can square their very unscientific first principles with science is beyond this writer. They are equally as fundamental as those scientists who preach a narrow scientism that has scant regard for any theology or even philosophy , no matter how well reasoned and academically well researched. (See HERE for information on creationism and its efforts to prove God from science.) In my opinion all good science, and any authentic quest for knowledge in any sphere at all, should start from a neutral and objective first principle, namely a sheer openness to describe as objectively and as clinically as possible what it finds before it.  Starting off from a position of "The Bible is literal truth and everything we seek to find must be viewed from this first principle or axiom" is self-evidently unscientific and indeed unphilosophical in the extreme.  Being a believer after-the-fact is more objective and authentic than being a believer before-the-fact in my opinion.

More than the Intellect

I return here, yet again, to an old chestnut that I repeat so many times in these pages, namely that the intellect is just a small, albeit important, element of what goes to make the human phenomenon.  Multiple Intelligences, a broad theory of the nature of intelligence, offers us an important perspective on the mystery of humanity and of the universe that humanity encounters.  This model was proposed by Howard Gardner in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Gardner articulated eight incarnations of human intelligence: (i) the musical–rhythmic, (ii) the visual-spatial, (iii) the verbal-linguistic, (iv) the logical–mathematical, (v) the bodily–kinesthetic, (vi) the interpersonal, (vii) the intrapersonal and (viii) the naturalistic.  To these listed intelligences or kinds of intelligence he later suggested that existential and moral intelligences might also be worthy of being added.  Daniel Goleman, another pioneering and popular American psychologist, has spoken learnedly about what he terms our Emotional Intelligence (EQ). This particular take on the emotions equates more or less with Gardner's Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Intelligences.  There are many other scholars who argue for more intelligences, not the least of which is called Spiritual Intelligence (SQ).  All these categories of intelligence, of course, are an effort to give the lie to the reductionist (another of my favourite terms in these pages, which no doubt the reader is by now bored with to the point of nausea!) pigeon-holing of people by traditional IQ tests as spearheaded by the great 19th century psychologist Alfred Binet and his followers.

More rather than Less

Here is where the proof mentality of reductionists like Dennett and Dawkins and so on can be seen as delimiting. Such philosophers and scientists wish to reduce what the phenomenon of humankind may be to certain categories within a narrow vision of what science and indeed knowledge itself may be.  They would be working from a very narrow take on intelligence, I firmly believe.  They show scant regard for either a philosophy of science broadly understood or a broad take on epistemology. For them epistemology is largely a quaint take on linguistics that is nothing short of meaningless.  The "how" question features largely in their vocabulary to the detriment of the "why" question.  Indeed, some of their number positively avoid the latter question.

Again, Dawkins et al  seem to give short shrift to the concept of holism, that the whole might be greater than the sum of its parts, that the network or grid of connections in the universe just might be more rather than less.  Apologies if this journal of the soul is getting lost sometimes along the back-roads and sometimes veritable labyrinths of theology and philosophy, but once again if we are to take holism for what it truly means we must always stretch for what is more in the human person at all times and this may mean journeying down those by-ways as well as the more obvious highways. 

It is salutary to call to mind that the very term "mind" is in itself a commonly accepted one that refers to a very abstract reality that we intuitively assume exists.  We cannot see it or prove that it exists per se or in se and yet we believe it exists as it gives us a way of describing what the human phenomenon entails.  In fact, many of our human sciences are based on the assumption that it exists: psychology and psychiatry are two major ones that so depend.  We also assume that the mind somehow resides in the brain - at least that was the general assumption until in more recent years research has shown that the mind may also encompass much of the nervous system itself.  There are even those philosophers who maintain that all of human information is an extension of the human mind and so on and so forth.  Here, needless to say, we need to employ the fields of epistemology, philosophy of mind, the psychology of consciousness and so on again.

That anyone of us can assume that either we or our fellows within our various disciplines have a monopoly on knowledge or indeed on how we may find it is sheer arrogance in the extreme.  What's needed here, again, is a Socratic ignorance, or what St Augustine termed a "docta ignorantia", that is a "learned ignorance," an epistemology that leaves us open to greater discoveries and to the sheer wonder of the universe.

It is my argument here the the notions of personality, "the self,"the "soul," "the heart" and the "spirit" are all equally intuitive assumptions akin to that of the mind and symbolise realities we intuitively assume exist.   They are, in my opinion, equally valid working assumptions that make life more livable and more humane. Admittedly, they are terms that may be hijacked by the lunatic fringe which we will always have with us.  That they are easily so hijacked is no reason at all to jettison them from either our vocabulary or our deeper beliefs.   

A Hymn to the More 

A coloured mandala I drew today - the magic and mystery of geometry

Let me here end on a more poetic or soulful note.  Let me sing a hymn to the mind, to the self, to the soul and to the spirit, acknowledging their intuitive presence and their similarities and differences.  Let me sing a hymn which intuitively acknowledges their presence or at least my experience of their presence.  Let me sing a hymn to the "more" in humankind, to its possibilities, to its hopes and desires, to its limitless possibilities and to its dreams and visions of a better world for all, for a greater peace than that which we know now. The hymn that I sing is one that acknowledges so much beyond my limited and finite ken, that bows down in wonder as a minuscule dot on a minuscule planet orbiting a Sun that is itself minuscule in infinite space.  This is a hymn that notes that I am a grace-filled being that experiences his little life as a gift beyond his own making.  Truly mine is a poetic yet humble spirit gifted with a life I am so thankful to live.  My little mind is overwhelmed by the beauty and the wonder that surrounds it, a mind whose desire to know is infinite, that in stretching out its puny boundaries against the huge weight of the universe is awe-struck even that it exists to know anything at all.  This is a prayer of a small mind with an infinite desire to know.  It is a mind that prays the traditional prayer of the old sailors in Brittany long ago "Oh Lord, thy sea is so great and my ship so small."  This is a mind even that allows that this quoted prayer may be metaphoric and not literal, and yet it is a mind that needs to pray, that needs to acknowledge its littleness before the awesome mystery of life and of the universe.  This is a hymn to the "more" in the phenomenon that is human life. This is a hymn to the self that I want to be, to the dreams and visions of the True Self, of the Real Self that resides in the depths within.  This is a hymn to the "more" that is the soul whose home and habitat lies somewhere in the mists of mystery, in the highways and by-ways of an identity greater than the individual, whatever that might be.  This is a prayer that acknowledges the "more" of the great Spirit of the universe that astounds the little self  with its awe and beauty.  This is a hymn to those grace-filled moments of encounter with the "more" which some dare call God.                                                                                                                                          

Journal of a Soul 52

The Courage to Leave the Orbit of Little Self or Ego Self

Imbalance: Going it Alone

Fast flowing stream, Marley Park, April, 2014

I finished my last post by saying that going it alone is always dicey.  Why?  Because the Soul or Self is a very fragile craft that can all too easily founder on the rocks of despair rather than taking to the open sea of promise and of life lived fully.  If any of you is a reader of this blog you will have read quite often in these pages that I say that the Self is a work in progress, never complete, but always on the way, as it were.  The development of Soul or Self is one that takes place through the interplay with other Selves (I mean other people essentially here, of course) who guide us and help us in that development.  Our identities, then, not alone have a personal psychological dimension but also a social and interpersonal one.

Balance: Being Lost and Being Found

Over the years I have always been fascinated with literature, and William Blake has been a luminary in my pantheon of poetic heroes.*  Why?  I suppose the simple answer is that not alone did I love the vivid imagery of his poems, but I was always truly moved by his balancing of opposites or polarities, and his ability somehow to sustain that tension all the way.  Hence, we have the title of one of his earlier books of poems, namely Songs of Innocence and Experience.  Notice the balance of opposites here, or the interplay of "antinomies" as William Butler Yeats would call it nearly 200 years later.  John Keats had a similar insight where he writes in his letters about "negative capability," that is where a great thinker is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” A poet, then, has the power to bury self-consciousness, dwell in a state of openness to all experience, and identify with the object contemplated.  Lest I get lost by too many literary allusions and end up roaming the back lanes of my literary past, I will return immediately to my initial point about the balancing of opposites.  While Blake wrote the Songs of Innocence, he also wrote the Songs of Experience.  Therein, he wrote about little boys and girls who were lost, and balanced those poems with ones about those same little boys and girls being found. 

Journeying is quite like that, I suppose, sometimes we get lost, we have to ask directions, consult maps, take help, hitch lifts, find fellow travellers to journey with us to find the right road, even to accompany us part of the way.  Big question, that, the right road, that is.  What is the right road?  What direction should we be travelling in?  Maybe, we can only work that out together.  Education certainly helps us - all the knowledge and wisdom of the ages that are handed on culturally.  

Depression: The way Out  and the Journey Towards Healing

Love: always a sign of hope: Ardgillan Park, April, 2014

These thoughts were also inspired by my reading in one sitting today the autobiography of the Irish playwright, actor and novelist Michael Harding called Staring at Lakes.  As I will review this book over on my other blog, I shall not say too much about it here, save to say that it is a tour de force of deeply personal insight into the highs and lows of one human being's life.  However, that book, in my opinion, shows more of "the little boy lost" than it does "the little boy found," though towards the end  we realise that he is making great strides on the way to either finding himself, or being found, as it were.

To be lost is a dreadful state in which to be as anyone who has ever been so will testify.  However, for the sake of our mental health, none of us can remain lost for too long.  Otherwise, we will end up in "the Slough of Despond" (as the great John Bunyan put it in his Pilgrim's Progress) or the depths of depression, to put it in more contemporary terms. In the above named book, Harding admits he has been a sufferer from depression for most of his life, but really had never admitted it until more recent times, because like a brave soldier he felt obliged to tough his experiences out. There is much despondency in this book, though there is the light of hope at the end where he wishes to start anew.  We feel instinctively that he will find himself, that he is being found in the comforting arms of his family and others, and perhaps by the Source of Life itself,  by what we traditionally term God, if his image of that God has not been totally destroyed by the more negative theology and spirituality harshly promulgated by some reactionary strands in the Catholic Church in Ireland over the years.  And yet, he, a former priest, is a truly spiritual one, truly a real pilgrim on the way to Self-acceptance and Self-healing.

The Fear of Extinction in Death

Portrane Graveyard, July 2013

As I type this post a good friend of mine has just informed me that his mother is dying and that he has to go to her bedside.  That feeling of mortality is very close to the bone for me as my own mother died last July and my two brothers and I waited over twenty hours by her bedside until she breathed her final breath.  It was agony watching her, though we were informed that she could feel no pain.  I am very much with my friend in spirit as he goes through these final hours of his mother's life.  The wound of mortality is the one wound we can never heal.  It is the one great common denominator that makes us human, or rather our consciousness of it does, more to the point.   In short, this awareness of the brevity of life leads to the very heart of what philosophers call existentialism, namely, what the so-called founders of this amorphous and disparate school of thought described as the feeling of angst or anxiety. **

This is the very heart of the existential dilemma, that is, the fear or anxiety of the very nothingness of our existence. This fear, Kierkegaard tells us can never be objective at all, because effectively it is a subjective anxiety that everything that I hold dear, including myself, will in the end, sooner or later, crumble into nothingness. Death takes everything away and, ironically, the very uncertainty of when it will happen only adds to our anxiety or angst.  Such angst is at the very heart of Harding's book.

Transcending and Healing Our Fears

And yet we cannot afford to dwell at such depths of angst or anxiety for too long, because it is essentially a bedfellow of depression, possibly even its author for more susceptible and fragile souls.  Living, I believe, requires us, not so much to overcome in as many ways as possible that anxiety at our essential fragility, but rather to transcend it - paradoxically, by acknowledging its role in the task of living.  Such acknowledgement means seeing death and dying as part of the great cycle of life.  That's what I wrote about in the immediately preceding post to this one.  There is the upside as well as the downside to life, the upswing and the downswing, the rising and the falling, the growth and the decay - essentially, the great wheel of life (or Rotha Mór an tSaoil  as we call this in our native tongue), the great circle, the eternal cycle of things. However, an appreciation of the foregoing requires amazing humility, an objectivity that demands an uprooting of the great tap root of obsession with self, that is, with the ego-self.  Further, it requires great courage by demanding a perspective that entails a moving out from our puniness and littleness in the scheme of things, a moving away from being grossly preoccupied with our pride as crafters and shapers of our little lives.  Preoccupation with the ego-self is a loss of perspective that can lead to the depths of despair.  This moving out into the world of Greater-Self or True Self or Real Self is one of sheer humility before the awesome power of the Universe, one of sheer wonder at its beauty and terror The origins of the word "sublime" and all it denotes and connotes lie in that latter paradoxical contrast of beauty and terror.  And yet, the true voyager beyond the small orbit of the little self often instinctively knows or intuits a safety or safeness of being embraced by a greater more benign power.  Some dare call that an experience of God, the truth which like the Sun, we stare at to our peril.

Notes

* I have written about William Blake on many occasions.  A short essay I wrote about this startlingly original genius, artist and great pilgrim on life's spiritual way can be found here William Blake

**The theme of anxiety was at the very heart of existentialism from its very origins. This is a sense of anguish which can be defined as a sense of dread at the nothingness of human existence. This theme goes back as far as Kierkegaard in modern existentialism though it stretched way back further into ancient philosophy, too. In fact, anxiety as a theme pervades this philosopher’s work. Kierkegaard lived his relatively short life (1813-1855) in Denmark. The meaninglessness of his existence filled him with anxiety and despair and a sense of hopelessness and deep depression. At base his anxiety was a deep despair at the very nothingness of human existence. In the great universal scheme of things we are mere 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’s hear Kierkegaard’s words: “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?” [Quoted Lavine (1984, p. 322)]