Poems I Journey With 28

T.S. Eliot said in “Burnt Norton,” the first poem in the sequence of poems called “Four Quartets,” that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality here, I contend, can be interpreted as all that wears us down as human beings as we try to negotiate our way through life, as we try to cope with its many highs and lows and make some meaning of our own journey through it. Again, I repeat this great poet’s words merely to highlight our need for some form of escapism from time to time: a good holiday, an inspiring read, celebrations of all kinds, concerts, drama, plays, music recitals, and all the cultural conventions and traditions that attempt to help human kind cope with the “jagged edges of existence” or “reality” as T.S. Eliot puts it in the above quoted poem.

Here, I’d like to return to two poems from the pen of our great national Nobel Laureate for Literature, W.B. Yeats and reproduce here for the readers of these musings two lovely refreshing poems that quite soothe my drooping spirits in these stressful days after a traffic accident.

Poem 1: The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888):

Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Poem 2: The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

Briefest of Commentaries

Yeats was born in 1865 and so he was only 23 when he wrote “Lake Isle of Innisfree” while he was 34 when he wrote the second poem. Eleven years is a long time in anyone’s life, and the second poem is obviously a far more mature and far deeper poem than the first. However, they are both written against the background of the nourishing and sustaining power of nature for us humans. In short, a good walk out in nature can heal many a broken heart and lift many a depressed spirit. These poems help me cope with life then at this first level, that is, at the level of the balm, the comfort and the healing that nature can offer us if we are open to her charms.

As Yeats grew older he became much more interested in what we in Ireland call the “Celtic Twilight” period, namely that Romantic turning back not alone to nature, but also to mythology and the strong links that mythology had with nature as it developed.  Also Yeats as a poet became far more enchanted with anything to do with mystery, mystique and, indeed the mystical. To commune with nature was to commune with the sustaining power behind that universe – the pagan Celtic gods as represented in that wonderful body of Gaelic Celtic mythology that he himself did much to preserve and to promulgate.

The “fire” that was in his head is a very potent line because it shows the passion for nature that is in Aengus’s mind and indeed in that of the poet himself. Again, Aengus cuts and peels a “hazel wand” and we are immediately enchanted with a magical act that brings us into a more mystical world to which we can escape from the harsh reality around us.  Everything around Aengus is magical and mystical and shot through with the powers of the gods of nature. There are moths on the wing there while the very heavens contain the mystical “moth-like stars” and the repetition of words serves to enchant us further as this is indeed the song of a wanderer through nature with all its healing attributes – indeed it yields up a “silver trout” to feed us on our journey.

Then we are invited into Aengus’s company as he lights a fire on the forest or wood floor, and then some mysterious person calls Aengus, or indeed us the reader, by our name. For sure, we are now in the mythical and mystical woods of the Celtic imagination, of the Celtic Twilight.  Indeed, we are so enchanted that we want to stay there with Aengus.  Like a fairy presence, this female voice changes into a beautiful girl who enchants Aengus and us the readers:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Reading the final verse, this commentator writing these few reflections feels old like Aengus in the poem: “old with wandering” or old and worn out from looking for meaning in an often sad and painful world.  But this final verse is full of promise and hope; full of beauty and truth; full of wisdom and inspiration, for we truly can live in an enchanted world when we read those wonderful final lines of this second poem:

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 80

Poem 80

If a country is governed wisely,

its inhabitants will be content.

They enjoy the labor of their hands

and don't waste time inventing

labor-saving machines.

Since they dearly love their homes,

they aren't interested in travel.

There may be a few wagons and boats,

but these don't go anywhere.

There may be an arsenal of weapons,

but nobody ever uses them.

People enjoy their food,

take pleasure in being with their families,

spend weekends working in their gardens,

delight in the doings of the neighborhood.

And even though the next country is so close

that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking,

they are content to die of old age

without ever having gone to see it.

Commentary

This poem is certainly one we moderns would not understand as we live in a global village where the whole world has become our home. We can travel anywhere, now that air travel has become relatively cheap and within almost everyone's capacity.  Very few of us in the Western world do not go abroad for holidays or business or whatever.  Indeed, should we not wish to travel somewhere physically we can even journey there virtually by way of cinema or the Internet, both of which can bring us anywhere we wish imaginatively.  And the imagination and reality are next-door neighbours in a sense. 

As a man of 58 years who was born in a small rural Irish town in 1958 and who experienced at least for a few years pre-television era in that country setting, I would have an inkling of what the poet in the above poem is getting at.  I well remember a young friend's parents having bought their first tv set as RTE, the Irish public broadcaster began life on the 31st of December 1961.  They must have bought it soon enough thereafter, so I would have been about 4 years of age at the time. The TV ushered in the New Ireland, as from then on the global visited in a virtual and imaginative sense the sitting rooms of all the homes in Ireland. Therefore, I can slightly understand the above poem.  Now, we must remember that the Tao Te Ching was written roughly around the sixth century BCE in a very rural and primitive setting so the values of a small community would have been the prevailing ones: working in the fields, ploughing, planting seeds, watering the crops, going to the market, harvesting, participating in  the local gatherings, chatting and conversing.  Everything would have revolved around the extended family or clan, and then around the local tribe or community. The home and the community and the values asssociated with both would have been the origins of the only values known to anyone.  Therefore, it is against this background that we have to understand the above poem.

The above poem presents us with the ideal, indeed with the idyll.  It is purely romantic and is filled with Utopian sentiments.  No such place on earth could possible exist.  However, when we remember that it is a poem, that it was written so long ago and that as a poem it should not be taken literally. Bearing all this is mind, we may then read it and meditate upon it and see what wisdom we might learn from it.

One lesson is that of valuing our lives, valuing our experiences of life in the now, valuing simply being.  We are all so busy rushing to succeed, make more money, get a better job, travel to more countries, gain more wealth, acquire X, Y or Z new item that we often forget that it is the simple things in life that really make us happy like those mentioned in the poem: (i) enjoying our workaday life, (ii) getting in touch with nature, (iii) gardening, (iv) building up and enjoying our homes, (v) enjoying simple but good meals with our families and friends, (vi) supporting all the events that take place in the community, and (vii) happily growing old listening to the sounds of what naturally occurs in nature.

These are obviously extremely romantic and Utopian ideas, but the poem hints that we may experience an intimation of that blessed state by being more mindful and attuned to living in the now.

Namaste, friends. 

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 41

Poem 41

When a superior man hears of the Tao,

he immediately begins to embody it.

When an average man hears of the Tao,

he half believes it, half doubts it.

When a foolish man hears of the Tao,

he laughs out loud.

If he didn't laugh,

it wouldn't be the Tao.

Thus it is said:

The path into the light seems dark,

the path forward seems to go back,

the direct path seems long,

true power seems weak,

true purity seems tarnished,

true steadfastness seems changeable,

true clarity seems obscure,

the greatest art seems unsophisticated,

the greatest love seems indifferent,

the greatest wisdom seems childish.

The Tao is nowhere to be found.

Yet it nourishes and completes all things.

Commentary

Scene on the Garovogue River, summer 2006

Once again, we are in the realm of myth and mysticism, and consequently we are immediately in the domain of poetry with its metaphors, images, paradoxes and seeming contradictions.  Quite simply, when we are in these environs we have to let go of all literalism.  Philosophers of the analytic school of philosophy seek to reduce reality to statements that either make sense or don't, to a reflection on experience that seeks to analyse it conceptually and express those concepts in logical statements.  From their point of view none of the above poem makes any rational or reasonable sense and is merely a flight of the imagination.  For us folk who have a religious or spiritual sense which we believe opens us to a mystery or a unity or a truth beyond our finite human reason and reasoning, the above poem brings us into a sense of wonder at the very mystery and often the painful beauty of life.  For the sceptic or the atheist such is mere delusion.  However, that is the way life is.  As the great scholar and theologian, John Henry Cardinal Newman, once remarked, "one can neither argue a man into or out of a religious commitment or belief" as it is as much, if not more, a question of the heart as well as of the head.

Scene from the Garavogue River, Sligo, Summer 2006

To achieve the status of the "superior man" is no mean feat and requires a lot of practice and discipline.  So few of us are able to so "embody the Tao."  To embody the Tao equates with what the Buddhists term "enlightenment."  It would be nothing short of hubris to insist that such a state is achievable with ease and facility.  This is the import of stanza one. Stanza two is the one that abounds in well balanced polar images: light vs dark; forward vs back; strong vs weak; pure vs tarnished; permanence vs change; clarity vs obscurity; sophistication vs simplicity; wisdom vs stupidity; love vs indifference and being lost vs being found.

In conclusion, I invite the reader to read the above poem reflectively and to let whatever word or phrase suggests itself become a mantra for a short meditation.

Namaste, friends. 

Journal of a Soul 67

The Passage of Time

Interesting evergreen tree at Newbridge House, Donabate, Co. Dublin

The passage of time seems to be quicker the more one ages.  Indeed, as a friend of mine who is a mathematician stated: "This is quite logical because  to a 56 year old person like myself on the cusp of his 57th birthday another year is in comparative terms a mere one 56th or a one 57th of your life depending on how you calculate it.  One way or another ageing is inevitable.  Recently, I was quite intrigued when a past pupil who was about 19 declared that he would like to live forever.  Another young man in our company replied that such "would never happen and that his wishful thinking was in every sense delusional." St Augustine once defined time as "the measure of change." The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus averred that "one can never step into the same river twice," and further that everything was in "a state of flux." I was amused, as I say, by the wishful, if delusional, thinking of my young friend.  I thought to myself how great it was to be so innocent and full of enthusiasm for life. This was also quite ironic as we were in a local hostelry imbibing some alcoholic beverages in the wake of a commemorative service for one of his friends who had ended his life by suicide. Obviously this latter person had found living life totally unbearable.

The Importance of Philosophy

Philosophy is more an activity and a process than a learned body of reflections on life. While it may be the latter as is witnessed by all the countless books written on the subject, it is so much more.  It is the activity of questioning to the nth degree everything around us, the nature of the universe; what knowledge may be, if there is any such thing as Truth in an objective sense or is it always relative; what love, faith, hope and charity may be, indeed what emotions may mean; what the purpose and meaning of the life we humans experience is and so on and so forth.  There is also a philosophy of every subject under the sun.  We can surely ask what the nature of numbers is and what we are at when we do mathematics.  Are the tenets of mathematics universal and true everywhere in the universe.  We believe so and can adduce reasons to substantiate our contentions.  We can study the history of science and also its philosophy. What is the difference between practical knowledge and scientific knowledge? Is all scientific knowledge empirical?  In many cases, yes, but both at the subatomic and astronomical level, no - we need to use very abstract and much speculative thought there, but such thought is no less rigorous than the process of arriving at conclusions from empirical evidence. There are so many questions we humans can ask and none may be as important as the moral one as to what are right and wrong actions.  What is morality and why need we act in such and such way and so on. My young friend obviously had never encountered philosophy, that is, the radical questioning of one's own thoughts and opinions.  What would it mean to live forever?  Follow the thought experiment through, young man. Would you keep ageing and ageing and yet never die? Even simple tools eventually wear out? Humans are made of material stuff which breaks down.  Does not the simple physical law of entropy imply that everything eventually burns itself out? If we never died what would birth mean at all? There obviously would be no point in birth if there were no death! How would we deal with the population explosion? These are all philosophical questions, which at first glance may seem somewhat silly, but on reflection clarify superficial thought and silly shoddy thinking.  Essentially to live implies within its ambit the process of dying itself.  In fact, to live is to die.  Think of any simple plant or flower you might have at home or in the garden.  It grows, blooms and eventually dies.  I remember meeting a most interesting man who owned a pet shop.  One could see his total commitment to and love of animals of all varieties.  He opined that it was important for youngsters to keep pets, to nourish and see them grow and eventually die.  Keeping pets, he felt, taught children to accept that death and dying are parts of life.  As an animal, albeit human, I consume food, burn it and transform it into energy to keep my body going.  It is obvious that my body will wear out, break down and die - such is only natural.

Reflections on Death and Dying 

Having been brought up in a rural setting one could say that I am somewhat at home with the cycle of the seasons, with the sowing of seeds, the growth of plants, their cultivation and harvesting and so on in a never-ending cycle.  Within that scenario, death and dying are seen as a natural process. The peasant folk had and obviously still have their traditions like the waking of the dead - the celebration of the life of the departed one about the open coffin that is positioned centrally in the house of the departed.  Within this context not alone is grief made bearable but the sting is taken out of death at least for a short while.  These ancient rituals grew up within various communities as they attempted to help the grieving party cope with their sorrow and to make some social or communal sense of the experience of death.

And yet, existentially we all face our own extinction in a very private way - we each of us have to make some personal sense of our mortality, that is, if we are at least half thinking or even semi-reflective persons, as quite simply, no matter how many or how few are our family or friends, we die alone.  It is, alas, a journey only we ourselves can embark upon as we pass through the portals of death alone. Perhaps the greatest myth in our modern culture is the growth of sheer individualism with all that it entails. Modern individuals have built up around themselves their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a sense of identity - and all of that far too superficial or lacking in any depth.  Very soon we tire of superficiality, of building up  these rather tawdry worlds of vast egotistical proportions - rather like that portrayed in the novel, The Great Gatsby and most effectively indeed in the film of the same name.  All of these fantasies of individual power and prestige cannot keep the gnawing tooth of mortality at bay. Nor can any of these superficial attempts to build identity on the shifting sands of materialism keep the lonely soul protected from anxiety, angst and a host of concomitant emotional and psychosomatic complaints.

Some Personal Memories

The first death I can remember was that of my Grandmother Mary Phoebe Brophy in 1968 when I was ten years of age.  My young mind soaked in the experience as my mam and dad, as well all my uncles and aunts (all 11 of them) were very upset.  Perhaps the most consoling moment of the whole experience was being requested to kneel down and say a prayer at my grandmother's bedside and to touch her beaded hands.  I can still conjure up the vision of my grandmother's body in that bed all those years ago.  However, all in all, it was a positive experience, one that we were unconsciously taught to accept as a part of life, the final  mile stone along the journey of life if you like.  Then the second death I remember was that of my Uncle Paddy Quinlan at 58 of a rare cancer in 1970 - I remember so well the packed church and all the people who came to say goodbye on the day of his funeral.  I can still hear and feel the crunch of gravel under my shoes as I walked up to the graveside.  As I stood beside my father as they lowered the coffin, I saw a little white one and my father said gently, "that's your little angel brother Thomas who died many years ago." Since then, of course, there have been many other deaths, not the least of which were the deaths of my father and mother - experiences which I have recounted here and elsewhere in the blogosphere. Those particular deaths were wrenches to my being that I find quite difficult to describe.  One knows that when one has experienced their leaving of this world that your generation is next.

Existentialism

Sundown, Phoenix Park, October 2014

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?”(Lavine, T.Z. (1984) From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest New York: Bantam Books)

Making Meaning

We are meaning-making creatures.  We are forever forming and moulding meaning from the very stuff of life.  If we do not do so we are an empty, hollow people whom T.S. Eliot describes so vividly in his poem The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken grass
In our dry cellar.

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion ...

These people who are hollow are the superficial people we described in one of our opening paragraphs.  They are the ones who have built their identities on the shifting sands of their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a false sense of identity - and all of that, as I have said, far too superficial or lacking in any depth. Something in us is repulsed by lack of meaning and superficiality.  It's almost as if there is something in us - some divine spark - that wishes to ignite and set the fire of enthusiasm and joy alive in our our hearts.  We feel, indeed intuit or know at a deep level, that there is something somewhere drawing us on towards meaning, some amazing, if imaginary lodestone, drawing us ever onwards.  This spiritual spark in me demands that I call it God.  Perhaps, that is overstating my case.  And yet, those are the words that came out as I wrote these lines.  There is a fullness of life to be experienced if only we have the courage to reach out and embrace it.

And as a meaning-making species we have conjured religions up from our collective unconscious to guide us and lead us ever onward on our human journey to meaning and personal truth.  We have embraced spiritualities of various types to give us the courage and the sustenance to support us on our journey.  Whether such religions and spiritualities are actually the result of our own imagination matters not a whit.  Perhaps it comes from an outside power, namely God, and of this I am quite convinced some of the time, especially at moments when I experience all too transiently beauty, truth, love, wonder and mystery.  But yet, in another sense that matters not a whit either.  What matters is that we have a meaning, a reason to live and a reason to die.  In our faith, in our imagination or in our soul, our very meaning lives on, and that is what makes all the difference, a difference that no proselytizing atheist can ever take from us.  And death and dying in this scenario are surely as natural as birth and growth.  Yes, indeed. Amen to that!!

Journal of a Soul 45

Wooden sculpture, Botanic Gardens, Belfast

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

The above rather long quotation with which I begin this post this evening is the third stanza of W. B. Yeats's masterful poem Sailing to Byzantium.  This poem recounts the Nobel Laureate's frustration with the body as he grows old.  The first stanza talks about Byzantium's being "no country for old men," stanza two that "(a)n aged man is but a paltry thing", and then in the above quoted stanza we read that the poet's heart or soul is "sick with desire//And fastened to a dying animal//It knows not what it is."  In other words, Yeats is cursing the body in a way, or at least writing it off as a very frail vessel for the soul/heart. Now, these poetic sentiments are all very much in the tradition of Western Philosophy and Western Theology, firmly reinforced by the Cartesian dualism inaugurated in the seventeenth century and almost fully swallowed whole by more unquestioning scholars in the centuries thereafter.  What I am speaking about here is what the modern English philosopher Gilbert Ryle decried as the "ghost in the machine," a severe criticism of Descartes' mind-body dualism or mainline Christianity's  soul-body dualism.

Immortality, a work I reviewed here.  The exact sentence that elicited this post were: “But it is precisely in this contradiction that I find the crux of the human condition: our heads are full of dreams but our behinds drag us down like an anchor.” (Immortality  by Milan Kunders, Faber and Faber, London, 1992, translated by Peter Kussi, pp. 269-270). 

Body and Mind/Soul/Self

Art on concrete path, Baldoyle, Dublin

Some of the more vexed questions that bother me from time to time, and perhaps sometimes the readers of this rambling journal, are (i) whether the mind equates to the self, (ii) whether the self equates with the soul, (iii) whether the three concepts are really the same and (iv) whether any one of the three survives after death or more specifically whether in my more spiritual moments I really believe that the soul itself continues in another dimension of existence after we have "shuffled off this mortal coil" (Shakespeare) and have left the "dying animal" (Yeats) behind.  These questions bring me into the land of mystery and wonder, rather than into the land of strong belief on the one hand or the land of strong unbelief on the other.  After much reading, study, reflection and discernment I still remain with an open mind, not too sure at all, at all, but that is fine - after all, what is wrong with open-ended-ness?

Where does all the foregoing speculation lead?

Speculation is just that, speculation.  In the end, we humans are left with our experience.  No concepts, no matter how intellectually convincing they may  be, will, in the end, "cut the mustard" or "come up to the mark" when it comes to matters of deep human or existential concern like when we are faced with life or death crises, deep emotional pain or some such human trauma. And so, where does the speculation lead?  In a sense, all speculations only matter as supports for what's deeply held in our experience.  It's hard most times, I believe, to move from speculation or thoughts or theories into deep conviction, though if we are to believe many authors, both theists and atheists, that thoughts and thinking can and do lead to deep confidence in this or that principle.  However, I have always been captivated by John Keats's remark that "axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses." In other words, we will deeply hold philosophical (or theological) axioms only when we have validated them first in our experience.  Hence, the only place we can really turn, then, when we have ceased all our intellectual explorations is to return to the, perhaps not very solid, but nonetheless somewhat firm ground of our own experience.  It is to this ground of personal experience to which I wish to devote the immediately following series of posts.