Poems I Journey With 4

W.B.Yeats, surely one of the greatest poets of all time who wrote in the English language, offers me so much artistic, literary, and dare I say it, spiritual sustenance, that my volumes of his poems are always well thumbed.  Therefore, let me offer the reader another of my favourites from his pen, here.  It is called, aptly enough, "The Long-Legged Fly."  There is something at once beautiful and somewhat gauche about the title as "long-legged" applied to any species suggests a certain ungainliness and a definite awkwardness in the first place. And yet the poem suggests a certain transcendent grace that builds its myth upon lowly nature; a certain extraordinary beauty that transcends the ordinary quotidian experience of life.

Long-Legged Fly

That civilization may not sink,

Its great battle lost,

Quiet the dog, tether the pony

To a distant post;

Our master Caesar is in the tent

Where the maps are spread,

His eyes fixed upon nothing,

A hand upon his head.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence. 

That the topless towers be burnt

And men recall that face,

Move most gently if move you must

In this lonely place.

She thinks, part woman, three parts child,

That nobody looks:

Her feet practise a tinker shuffle,

Picked up upon a street.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

Her mind moves upon silence. 

That girls at puberty may find

The first Adam in their thought,

Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,

Keep those children out.

There on the scaffolding resides

Michael Angelo.

With no more sound than the mice make

His hand moves to and fro.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence. 

Commentary

Something as beautiful as this poem simple defies commentary, and in so doing I am, in a sense being somewhat sacrilegious in attempting, as it were, to nail down the "sacred" experience of these well-crafted lines in more mundane words.  Despite that caveat, I shall try to express here, at least what this poem means to me, one solitary reader.  I love the scientific, very unpoetical term, a word, naturally enough, avoided by Yeats, namely "dolichopodidae" that describes that most cosmopolitan of fly families, namely that of the "two-legged flies." Apparently there are about 7,000 species of these flies at a conservative count.

When I read a poem I don't necessarily go in search for an exact meaning, for such an intention, to my mind, is sacrilegious.  In other words, I search for connotations more than denotations.  I have learnt to let a poem suggest meanings, obviously not outlandish and impossible ones, but rather more possible ones and as many of them as is reasonable.  In a sense, obviously, we will never know exactly what was in  the poet's mind when he wrote the poem, but we can make an educated guess anyway.

The refrain which marks the ending of each stanza is an amazingly powerful chorus that suggests the power of human reflection, awareness, concentration, meditation or contemplation from whose seeds all of civilization emerged.  It suggests that through this self-reflective power civilization emerges and is greater than the individual parts that go to make it up. Civilization and all its cultures transcend the individual.

Western monasticism and Eastern practices of Buddhism have always rated silence highly because silence is, as it were, the seedbed of creativity and wisdom.  Silence is also the seedbed of genius.  In the first stanza we meet the great Julius Caesar sitting in his tent looking into the distance, obviously pondering, with his eyes "fixed upon nothing."  In silence, he is obviously contemplating what he and his troops have as a goal.  The Romans were great conquerors, great men of action and one of the great builders of Western civilization.  Caesar needs to enter the realm of silence to garner inspiration for his conquests, to tap into his vision of future possibilities:

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence. 

In the second stanza we encounter the great Helen of Troy. Obviously, her beauty is directly conjured up in our minds by the lines:

That the topless towers be burnt

And men recall that face,

Move most gently if move you must

In this lonely place.

These lines remind us of the lines from Christopher Marlowe's play, Doctor Faustus, especially these lines put in Faustus's mouth by the playwright:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium -

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Helen is the very essence of beauty, a beauty so natural and so rhythmic that she captures its quintessence in the gorgeous peasant girl that dances so lithely in the streets. Through her, Yeats seems to be arguing that all beauty is made possible as she is its symbol or emblem in Greek civilization.  The Greeks, obviously, with the Romans were the two great builders of Western civilization. In this sense, we may say that the first stanza is essentially about politics/military affairs, which lie at the physical foundations of civilization, while the second stanza is about aesthetics and the innocence of pure alluring beauty which is also another source of the creative spark that set civilization alight.  One could also maintain that this second stanza highlights or underscores the power of creativity in the realm of mythology.  

In the last stanza, Yeats contemplates the spark of genius that inspired one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance period, one Michel Angelo, whom he calls Michael Angelo here in this poem.  It is, as it were, the "Arts" stanza as it describes the painting of the Sistine Chapel.   To put it rather bluntly the poet's wish "That girls at puberty may find the first Adam in their thoughts" suggests that the power of Michel Angelo's depiction of the naked male form may entice them to have children.

Once again, genius thrives in silence and peace:

With no more sound than the mice make

His hand moves to and fro.

Each of the three characters, one in each stanza, viz., Julius Caesar, Helen of Troy and Michel Angelo achieve transcendence, or an elevation to a higher plane, or a going beyond this physical world just as the long-legged fly defies gravity as it walks across the water.  Let us note here that the imagery in the last two lines, which function like a chorus from a song, is simply beautiful and so gently put because the long-legged fly can move across the surface of the water effortlessly, without disturbing it in the same way, as it were, that the genius of Caesar, Helen or Michel Angelo can move creatively from one idea to the next.

Michel Angelo, like Helen and Caesar, is inspired by a vision beyond him, some transcendent pull, as it were.  Aristotle called such a pull, a "telos."*

*A telos (from the Greek τέλος for "end", "purpose", or "goal") is an end or purpose, in a fairly constrained sense used by philosophers such as Aristotle. It is the root of the term "teleology," roughly the study of purposiveness, or the study of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions.  See WIKI here.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 69

Poem 69

The generals have a saying:

"Rather than make the first move

it is better to wait and see.

Rather than advance an inch

it is better to retreat a yard."

This is called

going forward without advancing,

pushing back without using weapons.

There is no greater misfortune

than underestimating your enemy.

Underestimating your enemy

means thinking that he is evil.

Thus you destroy your three treasures

and become an enemy yourself.

When two great forces oppose each other,

the victory will go

to the one that knows how to yield.

Commentary

Once again our Taoist poet is pushing us to the edge of incredulity and asking us to jump.  It is so hard to jump into the sheer irrational! There is a link here somewhere with Kierkegaard's "Leap of Faith," though commentators say that he spoke rather of a "Leap to Faith." It would appear that Kierkegaard was appealing to his reader, and to himself, to stop over-thinking, to stop thinking about thinking and getting all tied up in knots - as we are  so prone to getting caught up in philosophical, theological and even spiritual knots, it is surely better to just have faith, that is, take the leap to faith.  All of this is so hard to do as we lesser mortals need to prove so much to ourselves; we need to have the dubious satisfaction of having worked it out on our own; we simply are gripped so often by the childish need to shine up our egos.

Once again our Taoist poet is appealing to the wisdom of generals.  However, I don't know what generals he may be referring to as in the little I have read about war, mostly about World War I and World War II and the generals that were around then very few if none acted like the generals our poet mentions above. Those referred to above would never win any war with such a ridiculous strategy.

And yet, once again as we are becoming adjusted to the perspective of a Taoist take on life, we can glimpse a certain amount of truth and wisdom.  Even if all that's written above contradicts our reasoning we suspect there is a deeper wisdom being adumbrated by the poet.  I have always loved the wise saying: "This, too, will pass."  This piece of wisdom has been attributed to so many that it is hard to be exact about its provenance.  It bears similarity to the phrase "sic transit gloria mundi," or "thus passes the glory of the world," a phrase used at papal enthronement ceremonies from the fifteenth century right up until 1963, namely a warning to the Pope to realize that he too is very mortal indeed. However, these small points of not so useful information can be duly forgotten, but not their meaning or import, namely, that life is all too transient and fleeting.  With this wisdom in the back of our minds we may now read our poem again.  With this perspective or bird's eye view attained, we may swallow what has been presented to us in the above poem.

It is hard to take much of the above seriously with respect to war in the twentieth century, especially the lines:

When two great forces oppose each other,

the victory will go

to the one that knows how to yield.

Hitler and Stalin especially gave the lie to the sentiments expressed here. Think of Neville Chamberlain coming back to London, having swallowed all of Hitler's lies, saying to his nation and to the world from the steps of Downing Street on the 30th of September, 1938: "My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep."

Once again, this poem is pushing us to the edge of the cliff and asking us to jump; asking us to have faith; or to take the leap to faith; asking us to trust in a deeper or higher wisdom despite the evidence of our all too human eyes.  

In the final analysis we are a people of contradictions, and one suspects that Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he opined that we are only fruitful when we are "rich in contradictions.

The rest, my friends, is SILENCE.

NAMASTE!

Journal of a Soul 72

Looking Within

Portrane, Co. Dublin, February, 2015

Do you ever just sit and think? Do you ever take time out to see where life is going for you? Or is your life so busy that you rush from one activity to the next? If you are reading this, chances are that you have a few free moments at your disposal. This is a short invitation to look inwards, to answer the call to step within yourself.

At the start of most journeys we are full of expectations and sometimes anxieties. We don't know what surprises are in store for us further down the line. The journey inwards is no different. In fact it is probably the most frightening of all journeys - we are afraid of what we may find or uncover in our real selves. We may find a lot which we don't like, and which we may not want to change. Certainly we will find the negative, but if we journey long and deep enough we will unearth the positive too.

Life today happens at such a fast pace. We constantly rush to keep appointments and run to catch the bus or train. With a little reflection it becomes apparent that not alone are we rushing to somewhere or other, but we are also running from somewhere or other. With a little more reflection we realise that we are running away from ourselves a lot of the time.

When you are alone in your home what do you do with the silence? Do you fill it with every possible distraction? Do you hurry to turn on the television, radio or stereo? Must you always find something, no matter how trivial, to keep yourself occupied? What about positively deciding not to do any of these things? For once why not do nothing? Yes, that's what I've said, simply try doing nothing. We are all afraid to look into silence, perhaps because we really hate feeling lonely, feeling alone, being just an island cut off from the mainland of life.

Reflections on a Rock: Portrane, Co. Dublin, February, 2015

Next time you are alone why not try challenging silence or even embracing it. As the legendary Snoopy of cartoon fame says, "Sometimes I sits and thinks. Sometimes I just sits." There is a lot of wisdom in that. Try just sitting in silence with your eyes closed. Get yourself into a relaxed position with your back straight - a kitchen chair is ideal. Too soft or comfortable a chair and it's bedtime! A simple exercise like tracing all the sounds both inside and outside the house, letting them come and go into your consciousness, is a simple way to begin. Just relax and let all of the strain drain from your body, down your arms and legs and out. This is not just simply an exercise in relaxation. Yes it is that, but it is much more. It is an exercise in awareness, becoming aware of yourself most essentially. The more you become aware of yourself the more you will know yourself. Of course, this is a long journey, and it will not just happen all at once. As soon as you have begun to become present to yourself you are ready to start out on the most important journey you can take - the journey into self and to self -awareness.

Journal of a Soul 10

Una Chiesa a Garace, una bellissima citta' in Calabria

We do like to fool ourselves into thinking that our words once written have some permanence.  Or at least we like to believe that they are somewhat more permanent when written down that when merely uttered.  The orator’s words may move us momentarily and then they just fade into the ether to be shortly forgotten.  A written encomium may be somewhat more permanent than its oral counterpart.  Or a snatch of a song that we hear or even sing is just that, a snatch of music that fades, even though somewhere in some musty drawer – or perhaps even in the corner of some virtual world - the sheet music exists.  Thoughts come and go like their close relatives called feelings.  Once again, they all fade into nothingness. 

These thoughts written here could have been penned by Qoheleth, that great wisdom teacher of the Old Testament, who kept repeating “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”  He was an existentialist before the word was invented.  For him, life was just a fleeting moment in the infinity of time, a mere nanosecond in terms of the duration of the universe.   When he saw humankind’s efforts to battle the inevitable constraints of life he just kept repeating the above sobering chorus: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” 

And so, I resume this journal of a soul after some eight or so months. In the interim I have been involved in writing other words elsewhere.  Some few readers of this blog have asked me the reasons for the hiatus – well I just did not feel the need, given that I was writing elsewhere.  However, these present thoughts were provoked by the sheer contingency of life.  There is nothing as sobering as attending the funerals of friends and relatives.  Nothing. Even philosophers and theologians baulk before the maw of death.  The litany of recent bereavements runs: one friend’s son ended his life in his late twenties, two aunt’s “shuffled off this mortal coil,” one in her mid eighties and another in her late sixties, and then a colleague died from cancer after four excruciatingly painful years of suffering – and he some three years younger than the thinker or writer of these thoughts.  And that leaves us with the big questions – What is life at all? What could possibly be its meaning? And mortality, what can it teach us?

Mortality teaches us the value of life, literally the value of everything.  When you sit listening to a song sung by your favourite singer, the fact that he or she is mortal magnifies its significance to the nth degree.  Art is art because it is produced by mortal hands, sung by mortal voices, composed by mortal minds and is inspired by mortal imagination. Mortality gives value to the fleeting enterprise of human hands and minds.  The fact that Michelangelo or Goya or Leonardo da Vinci or more recently Francis Bacon is dead only adds to the value and significance of the work.

Then, when one reads about the silly attempts some humans make to prolong life beyond its reasonable limits, one wonders again about our significance, and not a little about the sanity of those who propose such an idea in the first place.  Cryogenics is surely based on mere wishful thinking and sheer shallowness of insight. That some poor fools among us might think we are that important in the scheme of things is surely the funniest and most pathetic joke possible at one and the same time.

It appears to the present writer of these marshalled thoughts that we must avoid two extremes – that of inflating our importance on the one hand and that of deflating our significance on the other.  We are the singers of songs, the composers of music, the writers of novels and poems, the creators of art in all its myriad forms and shapes, the builders of huge skyscrapers, bridges and roads that seek to shape our world to our needs.  We are the thinkers of thoughts, the possessors of feelings which we express as wonderfully and in a way that is as aesthetically pleasing as we can.  That we are dreamers of other worlds beyond our ken – mere pipe dreams or intimations of immortality none can tell – marks us out from our fellow animals.  And yet does it matter at all?  Does it really matter?  Perhaps the meaning lies solely in the poem written, in the song sung, in the story told, in the project done, in the sweat expended to bring it about.  Therein lies its value, made meaningful paradoxically by its sheer meaninglessness.  Perhaps the only meaning we can find in this life is the living of it to the fullest extent possible, and in making it as tolerable as we can for all those we love and, indeed, for every inhabitant of this little world spinning in the immensity of indifferent space.

Journal of a Soul 5

Clump of wood, Isca Marina Beach, June 2012

As I write a monastic silence prevails, and how I love periods of silence.  There is nothing to be heard around me and my little apartment except the twittering of the birds and the occasional noise as a neighbour moves.  The Carthusian Monks or Trappists speak of the Magnum Silencium – the Great Silence.  Whatever about a great silence, a small one - Parvum Silencium - is enough for me.  At this moment in time I am the recipient of a small silence which reigns in my Heart.  For these occasional small silences my Soul lives.  Enter into the sanctuary of your own Soul, a deep voice within tells me.  And yes, this peace of mind is what monks and nuns of old and of new mean when they say they meet their God in the great and small silences of their lives.

Just above, I have said that I am the recipient of the gift of silence.  And gift –“donum” as they call it in Latin – is one of the most powerful words we can use spiritually.  We experience life as a “given” or as a “gift,” as something we have no real control over – either in its coming or in its going, in its growing or in its passing away.  And, it is only when you reflect on your life in the silence of your own Heart or Soul that you know this, or learn in absolute humility to accept the bounty of life over which you have no absolute control, though we often like to fool ourselves with our technologies of all types that we have some.  However, the wonderful Anglican Divine and Poet, John Donne, had an answer to this egotistical hubris of humankind when he stated in one of his sermons that we should not ever ask for whom the bell tolls, for, verily, it tolls for us.  Our mortality is at once, then, our greatest strength and our greatest weakness which takes most of us almost a lifetime to accept.

Indeed, one does not have to be a monk or a nun, a Christian or a Buddhist to know this.  One can be a believer of any hue or none, indeed, to learn to appreciate the sheer gift and bounty that life is. Moreover, you can either learn this lesson positively or negatively, but learn it you will.  As I sit here now in the silence of my little Calabrian sanctuary I am learning it positively by being open to the gift that all life is to me and for me.  There were times when I encountered the gift negatively, that is, in all those times when I experienced loss, when little or indeed big things were taken away from me – the death of my father, the loss of a job, the disappointment in not getting promotion, the dissolution of a relationship, the slow dissipation of strength as I age, the odd bout of ill-health.  All these very negative things subtract much from life and sometimes they can bring us down into the very pits and dungeons of dread and despair. 

Then, thankfully, there are these moments of small silence as I call them, moments of sheer blessedness when one’s Heart almost sings for joy at the sheer giftedness and bounty of life.  As I say, this is where even an atheist can pray.  Spirituality is a most human thing, and in its sheer depths and heights, in it lengths and breadths, there are those who call it divine.  And, I say, “why not call it such, if you so wish?” because once I felt like that, too.  But for this solitary pilgrim, this word “divine” is a metaphor for the heights and depths of humanity at its best.  Religion, uncoupled from the energising power of spirituality, is a frightful thing indeed.  Uncoupled from spirituality, whose fruits are faith (faithfulness), hope (hopefulness) and of course, love (lovingness), religion descends into what its worst critics like Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens would have it – a veritable and unique source of evil in the world.  Unhitched from spirituality, religion becomes at best a tawdry and bankrupt, if arcane, system of rules, and at worst a corruption of truth in the pursuit of temporal power in the guise of the divine.

One of the local bars/restaurants in Isca Marina

And therein lies the moral of this short tale.  Seek out the silent places and spaces in your own Heart or Soul.  Drink at the wells of your own depths. Seek your own truth by travelling down into the dark passages of your own being.  Acquaint your Self with the shadowy corners of your own Soul and well as with its brighter pastures.  Climb the frightening cliffs of self-knowledge in the hope of gaining some little Self-acceptance.  But in all of this, dear friends, remember to linger often on your journey, and just sit in Silence and let it take you into its loving and sustaining embrace. Truly, you shall not be disappointed.