Poems I Journey With 17

A young Adrienne Rich

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

Translations
December 25, 1972

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

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

obsessed

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

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

trying to make a call
from a phonebooth

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

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

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

The Briefest of Commentaries

An older Adrienne Rich

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

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

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

obsessed

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

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

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

The phone rings endlessly
in a man's bedroom

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

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

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

who becomes her enemy

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

ignorant of the fact this way of grief

is shared, unnecessary
and political.

Poems I Journey With 15

Old depiction of Horace

There is much richness in the classics, that is in Latin and classical Greek texts. Unfortunately, I never got to study classical Greek at school, though I did study Latin to Leaving Certificate level. Being reasonably good at languages, I also loved studying the poems of Virgil, Horace and Ovid and so on. Much of what I learned over forty years ago is unfortunately lost somewhere in the recesses of my memory.  Retirement will certainly entice me to reacquaint myself with the Latin language and some of the texts of those old poets. I remember well Horace’s agricultural metaphors and his love for wine. I’m sure the reader of these lines will know that most famous of quotes from his pen, namely “carpe diem” or “seize/pluck the day.”  These few lines from that famous Ode are worth quoting here for the beauty of the language: “Tu ne quaesieris — scire nefas — quem mihi, quem tibi finem di dederint, Leuconoë .... dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.” = “Do not ask — it is wrong to know (it is impossible to know) — what end (quem finem) the gods have in store for you or for me, Leuconoë .... while we talk (discuss) envious time flees away: pluck the day, and believe as little as possible in tomorrow!”  I wish I was at home in Latin so that I could translate the verses given on my own. I had to use an on-line dictionary and Google translate and compare to other translations.  Still I enjoyed the activity as I began to remember some of my old Latin skills.

The reason I begin this post with a diversion into an Horatian Ode is that I should like to share a poem from the great Professor, classical scholar and poet A.E. Housman (1859 – 1936) with you all this evening. He was steeped in all things classical and is reckoned to be one of the greatest classical scholars of the twentieth century. Such poets as those listed above and many others from both Latin and Greek would have influenced my chosen poet.

XXXI

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;

His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger

When Uricon the city stood:

'Tis the old wind in the old anger,

But then it threshed another wood.

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman

At yonder heaving hill would stare:

The blood that warms an English yeoman,

The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,

Through him the gale of life blew high;

The tree of man was never quiet:

Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:

To-day the Roman and his trouble

Are ashes under Uricon.

Briefest of Commentaries

A.E. Housman

This poem occurs in a collection called A Shropshire Lad and was first published in 1896 at Housman's own expense after several publishers had turned it down. His colleagues and students were surprised by the emotional depth and vulnerability it revealed in an apparently distant and self-contained man.  This poem is the 31^st poem, its title designated in Roman numerals as XXXI of some 63 poems in the collection.  In the distance, some five miles to the north of Wenlock Edge, is a forested hill, the Wrekin (pronounced REE-kin).

“Holt” is an old Germanic word (and English, with its Anglo-Saxon ancestry, is a Germanic language) for a wood, a forested area.  “Hanger” also comes from an old Anglo-Saxon term; it means a wood on a slope, like the forest on Wenlock Edge. The wind blew through those woods “when Uricon the city stood.”  He is taking us back to Roman Britain — Britain after the Romans had invaded and settled there.  His “Uricon” was the Roman city Viriconium/Viroconium, also called Uriconium, which lay where the present day town of Wroxeter lies, several miles west of the Wrekin.  It was the fourth largest Roman City in ancient Britain.

As a classicist, A.E. Housman is reminded of Roman Britain.  As he views the restlessness of the fleecy trees on Wenlock Edge and on Wrekin hill or mountain he becomes aware of his own restlessness and realises that such discomfort has been part of the human condition for hundreds of years. We are in the province, of course, of what was classically called “pathetic fallacy,” namely the attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature. Here “'Tis the old wind in the old anger,” and then we have the recalling or imagining of how a Roman soldier or official might have felt over 1500 years before:

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman

At yonder heaving hill would stare:

The blood that warms an English yeoman,

The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

A.E. Housman is moved by the restlessness of the wind in the trees and by his own inner restlessness as part of the human condition. He feels deeply his own continuity with the sympathies and emotions of another human being from more ancient times, especially with how a Roman soldier or official might have felt standing in the same spot as the poet. This is a wonderfully simple but an extraordinarily powerful poem from a very fine poet.

Poems I Journey With 10

Archibald Macleish

Archibald Macleish (1892-1982) is a major modernist American poet and writer of the twentieth century, and I first discovered him through his critical writings, rather than through his poetry.  I have beside me as I write the first book I bought by him way back in 1978 when I was a mere twenty years of age.  That book is called Poetry and Experience (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961).  I remember being blown away by how easily he communicated to the reader his understanding of what poetry does and is.  In part one of that book, he discusses in a comprehensive way how poems work through sound, sign, image and metaphor.   In the second section of the book, Macleish treats of how what he has discussed in the first section functions in the works of Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Arthur Rimbaud and John Keats.  This book, consequently, would be a wonderful introduction to poetry appreciation for anyone wishing to learn more about how to read and enjoy it.

The Old Men in the Leaf Smoke

The old men rake the yards for winter
burning the autumn-fallen leaves.
They have no lives, the one or the other.
The leaves are dead, the old men live
Only a little, light as a leaf,
Left to themselves of all their loves:
Light in the head most often too.

Raking the leaves, raking the leaves,
Raking life and leaf together,
The old men smell of burning leaves,
But which is which they wonder – whether
Anyone tells the leaves and loves –
Anyone left, that is, who lives.

For me, it is the existential thrust of this poem that engages me as a reader.  I have already alluded to the psychiatrist Dr Irvin Yalom's listing humanity's awareness of its mortality as being one of the four great ultimate concerns in every human being's life.  Raking leaves is a perennial occupation for anyone with trees in their garden.  Growing up, it was one task I loved to do when I visited my country cousins and when I spent some three years as a would-be monk.  This poem uses the leaf as a symbol of the mortality of humanity and for the shortness and beauty of life.  I love the way Macleish speaks of "lives" and "loves" and "leaves" as they are, in effect, slight or partial rhymes as these words share the consonants "l," "v" and "s."  Such felicity of language enchants this reader, simple though this use of words is.

Repetition in the poem gives it a song-like sound.  As a country boy, I can almost smell the burning leaves as I have stood beside many a man burning dead vegetation in my time. Another riveting thing about this poem is its apparent simplicity that somehow draws us into the deeper mystery that life is.  It would seem that life is an amorphous mix of things in unity rather than a collection of random things.  When one rakes a garden one rakes many bits and pieces of vegetation and insect life and mud and clay together in a unity, and that unity in plurality suggests a mysticism at work in Macleish's sensitivity.  And this latter mystical sensibility is all too apparent to the perceptive and open reader.  Let's read the second stanza slowly and meditatively with the thoughts and sensitivities of this paragraph in mind:

Raking the leaves, raking the leaves,

Raking life and leaf together,

The old men smell of burning leaves,

But which is which they wonder – whether

Anyone tells the leaves and loves –

Anyone left, that is, who lives.

Mystically and linguistically leaves and lives and loves are all somehow magically one.  We are one with the poet raking them together as we live. On the one hand, then, this is a sad and depressing poem, and yet, on the other, this is a poem that suggests that we are part of the great cycle of nature, and we are ennobled by being part of it, never lessened, as, after all, we are the ones who do the raking.  We are the ones who do the maintenance on the garden.  We, in our turn, will become old men or old women, as the case may be, and we will surely smell of leaves and loves and lives.  Then, the beauty of the poem is that it does not state too much.  It connotes rather than denotes, and that is a wonderful device at the very heart of poetry.  Mystery, mystique, wonder and magic are always beyond capturing in prose.  They are more readily captured but never subdued or crushed in poetry.  That's why the last stanza defies paraphrase, which is surely anathema to anyone with a poetic sensibility.

Journal of a Soul 76

Summer Retreat

La Basilica di San Pietro, Roma, giugno, 2015

It is hard to say something new. That is surely the greatest problem facing anyone who wishes to write something. With regard to spiritual/meaning matters I feel this is especially true. Travelling on one's own I feel is a form of pilgrimage as one is journeying inwards as well as outwards as it were; the spiritual journey mirrors the outer physical one.  One thing I like about such travelling is that one ends up talking to people out of necessity simply because of the desire to hear one's own voice again as well as the natural desire to reach out and communicate with others.  Sitting on some steps in Piazza San Pietro, Rome, just three days ago, a young Australian lad struck up conversation with me, opining that it was "very peaceful here." Our conversation spanned from Irish to Australian cultural similarities and differences, and why so many young Irish people wished to take a year out and backpack "down-under."  He shook my hand as I departed: the desire to acknowledge another human being who had the courtesy to listen. 

And yet the existential trials of life walk with us as we make our pilgrimage.  Indeed, we mostly repress those existential trials in order to survive.  But there is a further "and yet" that needs to be acknowledged.  That "and yet" is that the existential trials of life, and most especially death and dying are the greatest repression of modernity, as the great contemporary existential psychotherapist and psychiatrist Irvin Yalom has so perspicaciously and wisely pointed out.  Let me illustrate for the briefest moment.  If you are Irish or Irish-American you will be well aware of the tragic deaths of those young 21 year old J1 students from Ireland who died when a balcony collapsed recently in Berkeley California and the number of others seriously injured, especially those who suffered life-changing injuries.  The trials of these last mentioned are only beginning.  Or to put it in more poetic words: their pilgrimage truly begins now.

As I write, I have just read that another mad gunman - appropriately dressed in black - has gunned down countless tourists on a beach in Tunisia, among whom one Irish mother was murdered.  The mind boggles. Moral evil raises its ugly head all too often.  Indeed, let us add another "and yet" here: if none of us risked anything in life humanity would amount to very little.  Life is about risk.  Without risk it is hard to envisage any life worth living at all.  How true that old proverb is: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained!"  If you don't go a J1 visa to USA you miss out on a lot.  I had not got that opportunity due to family circumstances and financial constraints at the time.  It is a super opportunity for personal growth.

Life is fickle and chance-bound.  I remember when I first started in my present school some 27 years ago that as I descended the bus at a stop near the school that a motor cyclist nearly mowed me down; that as a young four year old boy I was nearly killed by a lorry from the local bacon factory - I can still hear the screech of brakes and so on.  Recall here your own near misses.  We have all had near misses - some nearer than others.  And yet, if we had not had the courage to venture forth, we simply would not be the people we are today, in this moment of time.  That is what life is about - the courage to take risk or as the existentialists put it the COURAGE TO DARE.

There are other thoughts and feelings that throng my conscious mind, and yet like a meditator of some thirty years or more, I know that I must learn to still those thoughts and feelings, to just let them come and go as the waves of the sea, and then attempt to let them slide from consciousness and dwell in pure awareness.  No easy task, that, I assure you.  And yet, I believe that is the goal of life.  Recently I was at a conference and a Ph.D, candidate, dedicated teacher, committed family man with wife and family and a former student of mine (who had lost both his parents when he was all too young) asked that old chestnut of a question: "What's it all about, anyway, Tim?  I was brought back thirty years to Ger Smith, a teacher colleague who had asked me the same question.  It was only a couple of years later that I had learnt that Ger had died of a congenital heart disease to which there was no cure. I was not then to know that man's inner tormenting question in its fullness.  Today I understand it better having been through my own personal wringer of which I have written about widely in these pages, so there is no need to repeat the obvious.

And so as we journey we carry all the above questions in our backpack, and that is no harm at all.  Indeed, it is a gift.  Meditating on death and dying, chance and mischance, accidents and life-altering occurrences are all part of the deal.  Risk is simply part of the deal with life and let us not forget that.  In short, what are these pages, these writings, these reflections teaching me?  Well, they are teaching me to DARE TO BE, to keep right on, or as one of my favourite singer-songwriters puts it, "to keep on keeping on."  Those words as no doubt you will know are sung by the infamous Bob Dylan. That's what it's all about: to keep right on till the end of the road.  Once, when my mother had fallen in her early eighties and had crawled to the wall for support. she marvelled out loud to me when I had picked her up: "I wonder is it coming near the end, Tim?"  I asked her how she was and she said: "I'm fine. I slipped after dressing myself and couldn't get up, but as I knew you'd drop by at lunch time I'd only have to wait four or five hours here!" She died at 96 in a nursing home.  Her whole motto was simple: "Keep going!" Or as the great poet Robert Frost once remarked rather succinctly, when asked what life was all about: "It goes on!" The same wisdom as that of most of humanity. All spiritualities teach us to live in the "now," to have no regrets about the past or fears for the future, but simply to appreciate the now.  Dear reader, let us learn to Dare To Be, To Dare to Risk or to Dare to Live!!  Aude Vivere!!

Journal of a Soul 64

Of Torment

Sand on Donabate Beach

Humans beings are complex creatures.  All our sciences - both natural and human - have attempted to plumb both our depths and our heights.  From depth psychology, person-centered counselling, cognitive behaviour therapy and existential psychotherapy on the one hand to biochemistry, neuroscience and psycho-pharmacology on the other we seek to map both the landscape and the mindscape of what it means to be human.  Whether we have achieved much or not in that task, I suppose is for the scholars in those various areas of specialty to delineate and their clients or patients to give either oral or written testimony as to the efficacy of the various approaches.  Be that as it may, some of our number do remain tormented souls.

A Brief History of Torment 

By torment I mean the proclivity within a certain number of us to mentally torture ourselves.  The history of self-inflicted torment is as old as humanity itself.  I remember when I was studying Scripture many years ago one of our more erudite lecturers introduced us to the ancient Egyptian poem known in English as The Man Who Was Tired of Life or The Dialogue of a Man and His Ba (or Soul). This composition is universally regarded as one of the masterpieces of ancient Egyptian literature. It is also one of the most difficult and continually debated, as well as being the subject of more than one hundred books and articles.  It is the author's mental anguish or torment that intrigues this writer here - one could say, to use a definite anachronism, that this early poem is pure existentialism. This poem dates back to the Twelfth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, a period that spanned from 1991-1803 BCE.  In the text the man accuses his soul of wanting to desert him, of dragging him towards death before his time. He says that life is too heavy for him to bear, that his heart would come to rest in the West (i.e. the afterlife), that his name would survive and his body would be protected. He urges his soul to be patient and wait for a son to be born to make the offerings the deceased needed in the afterlife. His ba describes the sadness death brings and retorts to the man's complaints about his lack of worth, his being cut off from humanity and the attractiveness of death by exhorting him to embrace life and promises to stay with him. Scholars have disputed as to whether the author is intending to take his own life or not.  One way or another the author of the piece is a highly tormented being and one full of angst to use yet another anachronistic term associated with existentialism. Here is a brief snatch from this rather pessimistic and angst-ridden poem:

To whom can I speak today?
Hearts are rapacious
And everyone takes his neighbour's goods.   [To whom can I speak today?]
Gentleness has perished
And the violent man has come down on everyone.
To whom can I speak today?
Men are contented with evil
And goodness is neglected everywhere.
To whom can I speak today? (see HERE)

Moonlight over Donabate strand this evening

There are other ancient documents, too.  For example, the earliest is the Sumerian text  A Man and His God, dating from 2000 - 1700 BCE describes the unjust and innocent sufferings of a righteous man. An Akkadian text called Ludlul Bel Nemeqi (I will praise the Lord of Wisdom), dating from 1000 BC, describes a nobleman praising the Babylonian god Marduk. This god had healed the stricken nobleman on account of his religious and cultic piety. Yet another ancient text is the Babylonian Theodicy which was composed between 1400 and 800 BCE. It consists of a dialogue between a sufferer and a comforter that seeks to explain why an innocent and good-living man should suffer. All these ancient compositions thematically resonate with the book of Job and demonstrate that the themes of theodicy were important pieces of the theological discourse in the ancient Near East. 

Of the Book of Job the WIKI records that it is:

one of the Writings (Ketuvim) of the Hebrew Bible, and the first poetical book in the Christian Old Testament.^[1] Addressing the theme of God's justice in the face of human suffering - or more simply, "Why do the righteous suffer?"^[2] - it is a rich theological work, setting out a variety of perspectives.^[3] It has been widely and often extravagantly praised for its literary qualities - "The greatest poem of ancient and modern times," according to Tennyson,^[4] and the only book of the Bible on one list of "The 100 Best Books of All Time". (HERE)

Job simply cannot understand why he is seemingly being punished by God as quite obviously he has been a righteous and good-living man all his life.  The ancient theology is quite rightly debunked by Job, that is, the traditional theology that argued that retribution always followed an evil man's deeds and that the good and righteous always prospered. That's why he gets so upset with his so-called comforters who argue that he must have done something wrong to merit God's retribution.  However, Job will have none of their arguments.  For him, the questions of God's justice and of human suffering are far more complex than traditional  theological thought was able to comprehend.  I shan't rehearse any of Job's arguments and protestations here save to illustrate how tormented a soul Job was. Very early in Chapter 3 he laments the fact that he was even born at all:

“Why is light given to him who is in misery,
    and life to the bitter in soul,
21 who long for death, but it comes not,
    and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,
22 who rejoice exceedingly
    and are glad when they find the grave?
23 Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden,
    whom God has hedged in?
24 For my sighing comes instead of[a] my bread,
    and my groanings are poured out like water.
25 For the thing that I fear comes upon me,
    and what I dread befalls me.
26 I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;    I have no rest, but trouble comes.” (Job 3: 20-26) ESV

There are many other quotations from the Book of Job that illustrate all too vividly his tormented state of mind, but quoting more of them would be redundant to my argumentation here.  I merely wish to comment on the angst or torment dimension of his mind. Let me place a quotation here from the father of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard, a quotation I'm sure I have used here on too many occasions:

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?” 

One can note the same existential angst and torment in all these quotations, both ancient and more modern.  One might also mention here another tortured literary soul, viz., Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) As I noted some years ago in a previous blog (Dostoyevsky):  The first book I read by Dostoyevsky was Notes From Underground.  This book was written in 1864 and  is a short novel that is quite easily read.   It is considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as "The Underground Man") who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.  I was transfixed by this nameless character's alienation as a young nineteen year old student.  The "Underground Man's" life is quite dry and meaningless and without purpose and he seems to delight in pain and suffering which alone seem to keep him conscious of actually being alive.  He describes war early on in this small novel as being people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history.  Hence, life is wearisome, tedious, frustrating and tormenting.  Here, our anonymous antihero tells us that “I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.” Consciousness itself is the problem.  The fact that suffering exists is a given but the fact that I am aware or conscious of it just adds to my human burden.  Our man is a highly educated and sophisticated human being who is deeply disillusioned and he savages both the lofty romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the contemporary socialist principles that correspond to his middle age.  This is a very dark novel, written in equally dark times. However, we also must bear in mind that its author is also a deeply suffering, tormented and alienated individual.

Fairview Park, Autumn 2013

Torment Today

That torment exists in our world today is wholly and patently beyond doubt.  In the past few days here in Ireland a young lad of eighteen years of age took the lives of his eight year old twin brothers and then drove some distance and ended his own life in a lonely spot on the bank of a river.  What desperation of soul or torment of mind drove him to that awful crime and sad denouement in the taking of his own life?  perhaps we'll never know.  One could list many more examples of such lonely despair, of such inner desperation and painful torment, but such a rehearsal would only serve to sicken both this writer and his intended readers. This contribution to the journal of a soul was not meant to be a sad one.  Rather, it was meant to be a sobering one calling us back to a realism that means we have to have our feet firmly planted in the ground of meaning in our own lives.  All these instances of torment must call us to a new and strong realism that is able to accept the pain and suffering that is obviously there in the lives of all human beings and to have the strength to work to help assuage it. Denial of mental torment and suffering is an avoidance of the important issue of mental health both in our families and in our communities.  This reflection is a call to be active and pro-active, to be on the alert for signs and symptoms of distress, depression and torment in the lives of significant others.

Choosing Life

The tormented want escape from their troubles.  Our task is to help them realize that an action like suicide is too extreme a reaction to what may be a mere temporary though significant problem.  There is always a possible solution to every problem if people are taught only to reach out to all the aid that is available all around them today.  Sigmund Freud spoke about two drives in life: Eros - the drive to procreate and indeed to live and Thanatos - the drive towards death and extinction.  When these two options present themselves to us we must train our hearts and minds to choose Life always and to avoid the drive towards death as an extreme answer to what are often temporary problems.  We choose life everyday when we get up and face the world, when we go out there to work and to be with others, to help them and care for them and to simply do our best in everything that we do.  We choose death every time we are in denial, ever time we are negative to self and others, every time we chastise and complain, refuse to get up or go to work, every time we intentionally malinger or put obstacles in the way of others.  Let us have courage always to face life head on, to choose it over death as a way of living happily and cheerily on Mother Earth.  Let us always be kind and compassionate to self and others and to plant those seeds of kindness and compassion in the hearts of our fellows.

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.