WE ANSWER BY LIVING

Once in a while we happen on a poem as thrilling in its use of the imagination as Duffy’s “Mrs. Midas,” or as gratifying in the scope of thought as Alison Deming’s “The Enigma We Answer by Living.” Such poems spoil us – now we want all poems to be as exciting, not just the “top one percent.” My fear is that with so much static out there, so many poems that aren’t even poetry, the marvelous pieces (often by little-known poets) can get lost in the black hole of cyberspace. Let’s at least feast on them in the moment.

THE ENIGMA WE ANSWER BY LIVING

Einstein didn't speak as a child
waiting till a sentence formed and
emerged full-blown from his head.

I do the thing, he later wrote, which
nature drives me to do. Does a fish
know the water in which he swims?

This came up in conversation
with a man I met by chance,
friend of a friend of a friend,

who passed through town carrying
three specimen boxes of insects
he'd collected in the Grand Canyon—

one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,
one for butterflies and skippers,
each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,

tiny morphologic differences
revealing how adaptation
happened over time. The deeper down

he hiked, the older the rock
and the younger
the strategy for living in that place.

And in my dining room the universe
found its way into this man
bent on cataloguing each innovation,

though he knows it will all disappear —
the labels, the skippers, the canyon.
We agreed then, the old friends and the new,

that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart
from the whole, as if we'd sprung
from an idea out in space, rather than emerging

from the sequenced larval mess of creation
that binds us with the others,
all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet

that's made us want to name
each thing and try to tell
its story against the vanishing.

~ Alison Hawthorne Deming, Genius Loci

**

a skipper

I remember how excited and happy I felt when my father told me that the sun was a star. I was eight, and felt in possession of great secret knowledge. Then, carefree, I asked, “Will the sun always shine?” My father said, “No. It will burn out and be a dead star.” Seeing how badly shaken I was, how disconsolate, he laughed and said, “Oh, but that won’t happen until ten million years from now. That’s a very long time.”

I relaxed, but somehow that knowledge that the sun will die would not go away. It was a cinder of sadness that stayed in my mind forever. The death of other stars didn’t bother me. It was fascinating to think that the still light reaching us might be from a dead star. But the sun, I knew, was the source of life, and the thought of it going out, ever, saddened me. It saddens me even now.

Maybe that’s one source of my instant fascination with Alison Deming’s poem. Another source was my familiarity, also since childhood, with “natural history” displays: specimens in jars or pinned down on a chart, meticulously labeled. This poem made me think of endless species, especially of insects, pinned and labeled, a tremendous labor of love gone into the collecting, identifying, ordering, preserving and presenting. It is indeed as if humanity’s great task was to name the animals, to classify them precisely, living or extinct, whose name and “story” we need to know, meaning both decode and imagine.

Ancient Nankoweap granaries

“Oh blessed rage for order!” And the rage for order of a future taxonomist who may reclassify. The Logos, the collective psyche, is also a kind of Grand Canyon: the layers of knowledge and understanding that it has taken centuries to accumulate. But for now, I revel in how the poet makes a leap from something as small as an insect to the unimaginable enormity of the universe:

in my dining room the universe
found its way into this man
bent on cataloguing each innovation,

though he knows it will all disappear —
the labels, the skippers, the canyon.

Yes, this labor of love in the face of mortality is certainly the main point of “Enigma.” But another important point, it seems to me, is the fact that we are not “separate, different, and superior,” a “chosen species” that exploits nature rather than feels a part of it. Our genome clearly shows our kinship to other primates, and to animals in general. We are not “celestials.” We did not come, by UFO or teleportation, from another solar system; we were not “seeded” by super-beings from another universe. Nor, as the poem puts it in grander terms, did we emerge “from an idea out in space.” No, we evolved “from the larval mess of creation” (a marvelous phrase) right here:

It’s wrong to think people are a thing apart

from the whole, as if we’d sprung

from an idea out in space, rather than emerging

from the sequenced larval mess of creation

that binds us with the others,

all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet

The disdain of certain New Age writers for the earth, their insistence that humans came from a remote planet, or else from “another plane of existence” that had nothing to do with the body and dangerous “body fluids” and other slimy stuff that pollutes our auras, has always puzzled me. “My friends can’t wait to disincarnate,” a New Age acquaintance once told me. True, the body is to some extent a bother, but personally I’d be willing to put up with having to brush my teeth and other body upkeep for centuries, even millennia, if only I could go on living here on earth, in the joy of having the body and its senses, taking in the beauty. I don’t think I’d ever get bored with sunsets, clouds, waves, forests. Or with human eccentricities, for that matter.

What of it, some may ask, if it’s all doomed to extinction? If this is “the endgame of a beautiful planet,” then what is the “meaning” of the universe, the earth, the human mind that can name and classify and tell stories? Part of my journey has been to realize that some questions are the wrong questions. “What’s the meaning of life?” is a particularly wrong question, a dangerous question that can drive people insane; some are said to have committed suicide from too much staring into the abyss.

The human brain is magnificent, but it doesn’t seem to function at its best when dealing with huge abstractions, with absolutes like THE meaning of life – THE answer, THE truth, one universal meaning, the same for everyone, rather than something each unique person needs both to discover and create in his or her image.

Tolstoy, you may recall, did ask that question, could not find a satisfying answer, and fell into despair. First he thought that the answer lay in religion – if only we could discover the “true religion,” not the corrupt versions preached by churches. But ultimately he could accept only an impersonal deity who doesn’t interfere with the laws of nature, with “necessity” – and that’s not the protective Great Parent who could soothe us when we have bad dreams.

Worse than bad dreams – who hasn’t at some point felt the urge to end the journey right now, once and for all – to taste the imaginary sweetness of oblivion precisely because life doesn’t seem to make sense (“Life is a bitch; then you die”)? And didn’t Nietzsche say that we have art so we don’t die of the truth?

Deming’s poem doesn’t even attempt to explain the universe; it says only that the universe exists, the earth exists and is beautiful, life exists, we humans exist. We may extrapolate that therefore we should use our existence to do something that’s good, or interesting, or beautiful – ideally all of the above. To extrapolate further, at our personal and collective best have a “beautiful mind” (“Life is a bitch, but just when you least expect it, it has puppies.”)

But all the poem is willing to state clearly is that the universe exists, the earth exists, and we exist – and something about the way the earth is and the way we are has given humans the urge to explore and name and classify, to be curious about everything that exists or has existed (the Grand Canyon being the most amazing natural history museum), to want to know and preserve the stories we discover.

Poems are mostly about mortality. However, those poems that I call “comfort poems” find beauty and personal purpose in spite of mortality. We are of the moment, they say, but isn’t it magnificent to be alive, to possess that moment? Once we are fully conscious that we don’t have very much time, we can use our moment for happiness rather than self-destruction, kindness rather than harm. As the title of Deming’s poem tells us, we answer the enigma of being alive simply by living.

Though this is beyond the poem itself, I can’t resist pointing to numerous studies that show people generally become happier as they grow older. We learn how to be happy, more generous, more forgiving. The less life we have left, the more we seem to love it, to love the moment. We answer not in the abstract, but by living.

**

Hyacinth:

My favorite line is "Life is a bitch, but just when you least expect it, it has puppies." Thanks for sharing the poem. The naming of things comes early. My great-grandson Jacob took out the odd things I've collected  in a basket, pine cones, seed pods, shells , leaves, bark. Seemed delighted with the labeling, then put them carefully back. I learn a lot from children.

Oriana:

We are obviously wired for wanting to name things. It may be part of our innate language acquisition circuitry. 

Charles:

Grand Canyon pictures are so magical, especially the one with the bow in the sky.

Only a really happy person could write this: "I don’t think I’d ever get bored with sunsets, clouds, waves, forests. Or with human eccentricities, for that matter."

I totally agree with your questions like, “What’s the meaning of life?”, "Does God exist?", "What came before the bog bang?" Answer is that it doesn't matter. What matters to me is how can I become a better artist or how can I become a better human being?

Oriana:

Even before I chose to be happy, I couldn’t stop being curious about “what next.” I have always found the world endlessly fascinating and beautiful. This, I think, has kept me from suicide. What if something fascinating were around the corner? And I was always surprising myself. When that ceased happening, when depressive thoughts got to be more of the same, I got bored with depression, its staleness, the trite repetitions. That feeling of boredom made it easier for me to reach the point of paradigm shift, though the biggest factor was my belated grasp of mortality: finally seeing how little time is left. Only a limited number of sunsets; better not to miss any. And the uniqueness of each human being is an astonishing thing in itself.

I agree that we “answer by living.” Even the existence or non-existence of god is after all not as important as how we treat others and the earth. If there is a god worthy of worship, no denominational label can be attached to that worship. Picking mushrooms the caring way, leaving the underground mycelium intact, strikes me as a form of worship superior to praying the rosary.

Sometimes I do wonder what, if anything, existed before the Big Bang. But since I’m not an astrophysicist, I know that I’m not able to find an answer to that question, and I happily leave it to those who get paid to think about these matters, and can point to some evidence, e.g. a slight asymmetry in the shape of Big Bang radiation supposedly hinting at some residue of a previous universe. I can spend a few moments pondering that, why not. Then I look again at my to-do list.

Scott:

I very well recall Tolstoy's 'quest' that led him in his old age to flee the warmth of friends and family to die at a deserted train station. And Melville, who several times in his  life, rounded the Horn for the wide Pacific, through the straits of  Gibraltar and the despair of being a forgotten writer (yet Tolstoy was  beloved...but just as sad) I say, hitch my wagon to a man like Tolkien: a great lover of poetry, a devoted husband and father, a man who enjoyed his many friendships and his work and lived to old age and was able to see his children launched on their own careers and the last few years of his life his own masterpiece was being admired and praised.

Now Tolstoy and Melville still have important things to say, and you know very well my admiration for Melville especially. But they can also be quite the 'buzzkill' as the kids say! I can't live my life reflecting on the bad that can happen; I'm sure it's out there but so is the good...so is the good. And those good things are soooo abundant  and thankfully simple and attainable; a cup of coffee, a good novel or  book of verse, a woodpecker at my feeder. Yes, it will all pass but while I have it, I won't dwell on losing it. Now, your blog and my recent book of verse by Hafiz; a 14th century mystic poet speak volumes more than the petty squabbles at work. As I have written before, I am absolutely fascinated with the Quakers of Nantucket who settled Europe and the Americas...then sent their ships into every sea, searching for a 'New Nantucket.'

I continue that journey, even though I'm not a Quaker....or whaler! I declare my house 'Nova Nantucket'; a refuge port from where I can, through books, TV and the www explore the world around me while not having to risk shipwreck on the world's reefs. Oh I still have to work, still will of course deal with the strife and storms of life in the modern age but every night I will tie up here at home port and enjoy my family and be thankful for what I have. I will do this... I must; the alternative is to be bitter about life's pettiness and fearful, sad, and morose a Twain became thinking on what 'bad' things might occur. That's not life....that's existing, and a sorry existence at that.

I do so much appreciate the blog you maintain; the images and musings are incredibly insightful. You are truly, as C S Lewis would say, “a mind awake.”

Oriana:

In one of his most famous poems, “A Brief for the Defense, Jack Gilbert says,

To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

That’s why social activists can be insufferable: the fixation on what’s wrong (though I know I should be glad that someone is willing to look at the nastiness and screaming about it). To thrive, we need beauty and tenderness, and interesting sights, books, sensations, interactions and other stimulation to keep our brains humming. I happen to be an “augmenter”: I automatically augment stimuli so that a little bit goes a long way. This is very adaptive if you live in the suburbs. In Warsaw, if I wanted some new stimulation, I could just look out the window. Here I had to find other sources of nourishment. As you say, a cup of coffee and a good book, the wind in the leaves – that’s so wonderful and forever changing: “nothing twice,” as Szymborska famously said (the song was a part of her memorial service).  I could live forever and not get bored.

So my answer to anyone who asks about the meaning of life is “Keep on living. Life itself will show you what is most meaningful in your existence.” 


**

After a semi-surrealist poetry workshop:

Tremendously thistled by David Whyte’s saying we come from another world, a “greater night.” No, we chamomiled right here, blown over by the erotic wind. He imagines some spirit world – residing where? Inside a black hole? Then, to placate those possible listeners who don’t buy his “greater night” line, Whyte says, “or by an equally great miracle to have evolved in this world.”

What does he mean, “equally”? What could be a greater miracle than having started right here, “in the larval mess”? 

FATE VERSUS DESTINY

RAIN, LOS ANGELES

  

Turning left on Wilshire

in the splintering crystal

and the jazz piano

of a million dreams –

mother city where my

adult self was born –

my domino failures

amid the pink stucco,

my stuttering, foolish,
heroic first steps –

turning left on Wilshire

past saber-toothed tigers

burping methane bubbles

in the oily tar pits, 

past the jutting iceberg

of the art museum,

the galloping wet sheen

of John Wayne’s bronze horse –

Turning left on Wilshire,

past weeping shop windows,

fountains like glass wings

spouting under wheels –

Bubbling on the radio,  

more emerging artists:

a former nurse tells how

a dying insurance salesman

asked her, “What do you really

want in life?” 
She confessed, “I’d like to 
go to California

and work night clubs,

but I’m afraid I’d fail.”

From eternity’s portal,

he gave her a blessing: 

I hope you go to California

and fail many times.

Turning left on Wilshire
years from now, by rainlight,
I pray to remember

that whatever happened
had glimmers of glamor,

red and green skids of light
streaming over the asphalt
and a sluggish pelvis

from La Brea tar –

Will I be as bitter

as cold ocean water,

or will I become
like the rain, touching all
with promiscuous tenderness –
turning left on Wilshire
past art-deco theaters,
past the stars on the sidewalk
like coins from the dead;

past myth, past mirage,

a deluge of smiles,

the palm trees applauding

because I have come
to California
and failed many times.

~ Oriana © 2012

**

From where I am now, it’s easy for me to conclude that it was my fate (a combination of the having the right mother and the right ignorance) that brought me to Los Angeles, and my difficult but inevitable destiny to become first a poet, then, more broadly, a writer. I was thinking again about the great lecture by James Hollis on fate versus destiny, so I started searching for my write up of it – my long-forgotten poem “Poe’s Raven” turned out to be a part of it. Below is the email to Lucrezia (a woman in Florida – we used to work for the same org) in which I summarize the lecture. This post goes back to February 2002.

**

Friday night I went to an interesting Jungian lecture that asked the question: can we create our lives?  Friday night, when the young, "those dying generations," fluoresce in the hope of a hot date. Can you take fate – or is it destiny? – in your own hands and create your life? The answer is both yes and no, an interplay between fate and destiny. Fate means the circumstances given to us: the parents we had, the genes we inherited (who paid the ticket of the genetic lottery?), the parental family’s income and lifestyle, the education and religious indoctrination we received early in life. Destiny is not our circumstances, but “what we are summoned to become.” We don’t necessarily welcome the summons of destiny. Jung said, “You find your destiny on the path you take to avoid it.”

The speaker, James Hollis, a noted Jungian writer and lecturer (“Valleys of Despair, Mountains of Bliss: Measuring the Forces of Destiny”), translated the interplay of fate and destiny as a “flowing within” (whatever that means; Jungian lingo is always in flux, and you don't step into the same definition twice). Fate is what has been given to us, both advantages and limitations. Destiny is our potential, what is calling to us, trying to live through us. “Something wants to come into the world through us.”

Jung was interested in destiny rather than fate. He perceived the curative factor in therapy to be not the insight into the past, as Freud claimed, but rather an insight into the future. An important task of therapy was to guide the patient toward a larger, richer, more interesting vision of himself or herself, to hear the summoning call of destiny and respond to it.

It was a brilliant lecture by an extremely articulate author. One of my favorite quotations:  “Authority keeps a person infantile. We need to ask what the soul wants of us, since external agenda is regressive, while the inner agenda is developmental.” 

Hollis also spoke of the difference between the first and second half of life. Jung, unlike Freud, was more interested in the second half of life. Hollis spoke of the midlife crisis: “The heroic ego project of youth has failed. How do we get out of the bog of depression?” His answer was that we must consciously start serving the needs of our soul, and listen to the call of our unique destiny.

But what percentage of the population gets to be in the sort of profession where you can be your own boss? This is where writers may lose sight of how the average reader/lecture goer is struggling just to cope with the brutalities of that external agenda, i.e. job, car payments. I’ve seen talented poets fall by the wayside under the pressure. 

I’m tempted to say that mere talent has little to do with it – a kind of “destiny drive” too powerful to be resisted needs to be there, and what I’d call an abnormal ability to make sacrifices. The role of fate, i.e. of circumstances, is hard to estimate. How many acorns get to develop into an oak? 

Hollis also said, “Most of us do not have the permission to be who we are. We all walk in shoes too small for us.” So he does recognize the problem, but I don’t think it interests and engages him enough, the dilemma of those for whom serving the soul would mean the loss of livelihood. 

Another crystalization: “Ideologies tend to annihilate the soul.” As do theologies, I want to add (note that mystics are hardly orthodox; they are heretics, creating their own god). That fits so well with my observations, and that’s why true poetry, the language of the soul, is so subversive. 

Someone in the audience asked about where the speaker stands in terms of his own life, at seventy. Hollis said, “Right now it’s so rich, I can hardly bear it.” And he choked up a bit, and teared up with obvious gratitude for the miracle of a life richer than he dared imagine during the hardship of his younger years.

**

AFTERTHOUGHTS, TEN YEARS LATER

First, I am struck by a certain flatness in my writing ten years ago. I wrote in a more vivid fashion while I was actively a poet, and then again after 2002, when I returned to poetry; after a year or so, more fluent and “cinematic” personal writing came automatically. Did pale Nordic Hollis seem caged in his un-Jungian business suit, or, on the contrary, perfectly framed in this trophy of triumph? I didn’t encode it back then, and now I don’t know. Now, when I write about an interesting lecture, the account creates a little drama. So I’ve done some “growing into destiny,” to use the phrase that Hollis favored.

In a psychology article, I have found this quotation that favors a shift in emphasis toward destiny and the future versus fate and the past:

I think Freud made a huge mistake when he rejected conscious purpose as a motivational construct and opted for a mechanical model of human behavior. If we want to understand people, I think we need to find out what they are trying to accomplish with their behavior. Freudians don't ask people, “What are your goals? What are your values?” Instead, they ask, “What happened to you in childhood? How do you feel about your parents?” ~ Steven Reiss, Ph.D. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/who-we-are/201203/what-is-motivation

(And as a shameless, inexcusable Moby Dick-like digression from the topic, it’s just occurred to me that Dostoyevski, a secret fan of his own Grand Inquisitor, would have loved the modern finding that choice is stressful, and thus strict churches that tell you what to eat, what to wear, how to speak, what to read (no Internet surfing!), whom to date etc, are thriving and keep growing. Want to be happy and successful? Limit choice. Even better, eliminate choice. Stick to one thing; call it your destiny if that makes it more appealing.)

DAIMON: THE “GUARDIAN ANGEL” OF DESTINY

I am surprised that Hollis didn’t speak about the two destinies of Achilles (or if he did, I failed to record it). Let me run through it quickly. Unlike other human beings, Achilles was born not with one destiny, but with two; later he had to choose between a long life without glory, or a short one with glory. What motivated him to choose the latter was his all-consuming rage and need for revenge after the death of Patroclos. Achilles is not exactly a role model for us – no Greek heroes are, though the idea of arête (excellence) has remained a perennial inspiration.

But this is a chance to introduce the fascinating concept of a daimon. Scholars differ as to the precise definition, so we are free to choose the one that still has some meaning for us. Apparently, every human was assigned a spirit to guide him, somewhat like the Guardian Angel. But the daimon was the spirit of destiny, a voice that helped us find a way to fulfill that destiny. Today we’d speak of inner guidance or intuition or maybe even the “higher self.” But I rather enjoy imagining a little guiding spirit. You have to be alone and very quiet to hear your daimon. Maybe you’ll get to hear the daimon only once in your life – but it will be unforgettable.

TRANSCENDING FATE

What does your daimon say you should be doing? What does your soul want of you? If you are religious, then what is the will of God for you? Should you sit down and brood on this critical question of the second half of life? Should you to a therapist or a psychic (where I live, psychics are more popular, not to mention relatively inexpensive)? In an odd way, therapists almost stand for Freud, who analyzed the past, while psychics, like Jung, are concerned with the future: with destiny.

But the guidance will come neither from brooding nor from Tarot readings – though the latter may toss in a helpful image or two, a hint of something larger. In my experience the answer comes without conscious effort and when you least expect it. It’s yet another hint that our cognitive processes are unconscious – though an important answer will be communicated to consciousness. That answer may be different than anything we imagined. It may be terrifying, and we may try to do anything except obey that command. But to choose against growth means misery.

Emerson said that intellect annuls fate. I would narrow that to insight. Once I have an insight – and that’s a neurological event, that burst of high-frequency gamma waves from the right temporal cortex (the area that “gets” jokes and metaphors, art and myth) and the formation of a new neural network – my behavior changes, and I can’t go back to the old mode of perceiving and behaving. This happened when I clearly saw that I must not allow myself to be depressed – and in an instant I was done with chronic depression (not to be confused with temporary event-based sadness) for the rest of my life. This was terribly demanding, that imperative to live from my greatness rather than from my wounds. I was reminded of Kafka’s “There is a point of no return. That point must be reached.” To get back to Emerson, I’d say that, to a degree, insight annuls fate – fate understood in terms of limitations and disadvantages, such as genes that create a greater susceptibility to depression, or having grown up in poverty or wealth, or in a particular culture and religion.

But fate means also the advantages you’ve been given. When I think of my literary paternal aunts and a cousin who also became a poet, I can see that “writing runs in the family.” Talent is largely genetic, or at least genetic to start with. Looking at my parents, I can see that intelligence is mainly genetic. There is no personal merit here, just sheer genetic luck. On the other hand, talent and intelligence need to be developed. Part of it is the right environment, including education. Here again I can claim no personal merit. The only bit of pride I can take in this matter is when it comes to hard work and not giving up. But I know that persistence is a genetic trait, so the best attitude is to drop any pride.

“Poets are not born in a country. Poets are born in childhood,” according to a Russian literary critic, Vladimir Khodasevich. Is this fate or destiny? It begins as fate, but development either follows or doesn’t follow. Or it follows, then ceases. There may be a change in direction. In my case, I found prose, especially personal essay, more in line with my workhorse temperament.

I rejoice in my luck. In 2009 I had the great double luck of having the insight that it’s too late in life for depression, and of discovering that “working works.” This blog exists because working works – at least for the lucky me. It also worked for Milosz, who experienced his share of depression and despair – and then discovered “escaping forward” into work.

“BOWING TO FATE, GROWING INTO DESTINY”

Recently, reading a review of a book by Hollis, I’ve learned that he rejects the afterlife (this seems rare among Jungians, who typically believe that the mind has nothing to do with the brain; the word “brain” is simply not used, unless to degrade the brain to “only a kind of a radio” that receives the thoughts broadcast from the astral world – if I hadn’t heard that statement made separately by two lecturers, I would have never believed that non-schizophrenic, educated people could go for that). Hollis says he gave up the “shaky promises” and decided to live “more fully in this fallen, precious, richly divine world.”

“Bowing to fate, growing into destiny” is another summary of the message Hollis tries to communicate. Bowing to fate means total self-acceptance, including negative things you can’t change. For instance, I can’t change my crazy/scary medical history. It’s best for me not to dwell on it, I say, “It’s in the past,” and shift to counting my blessings.

“Growing into destiny” can be more difficult. The years when I had little idea of what would be meaningful work for me were the hardest years of my life. Then the great luck of finding that work, with all kinds of zigzags, spirals, and ups-and-downs. But still, having met people who never seem to “find themselves” and go through life drifting and dabbling, I’m thankful for my luck.

Re: “destiny drive.” I’m thinking of a certain wanna-be painter I knew when I lived in Los Angeles. Unlike people who say, “I’ll start painting after I retire,” she said, “Once I have the right relationship, then I can put my energy into painting.” I sympathized with her need for a lover, but I knew that she’d never become a painter.

As I watched her drifting and dabbling, I was on my way to becoming a serious poet, and knew that for me neither romance nor making money could come ahead of writing. But I learned that only in my mid-thirties. In my twenties, I was a slave of love. Thank God there was at least enough intellectual drive to serve as a “destiny drive” of sorts – my mind kept developing. (As the saying goes, an intellectual is someone who’s found something more interesting than sex.)

The time I drove to Los Angeles in the rain, Cecilia was reading The Gypsy (the entire book) at a café in Orange County – and that was our first meeting when we reconnected after many years. Fortunately it wasn’t to be our last face-to-face meeting, but back then I wasn’t sure. Life taught me to take nothing for granted, and to expect many losses.

POE’S RAVEN

I listened to Poe’s raven as I drove

to Los Angeles in the lashing rain,

more than a hundred miles

to see Cecilia, an old friend –

to chat with her for ten minutes,

with luck, during the break.

The main route was flooded.

Looking for blurred street signs,

rain-blind and half-lost

in the wet and cold,

I knew it could be the last chance:

a raven from the black

Forest of Nevermore

was perched on my dashboard.

How visionary the doomed

poet was, to choose not an owl,

the bird of wisdom,

but a raven, bird of fate.

Not the ghost-like flight

of wished-for destiny,

but a more emphatic raptor.

I know he’ll be flying by

more and more often now.

Then he’ll move in,

a part of the family.

In the end, the only family.

It’s an impressive bird

in his elegant undertaker’s plumage,

but his vocabulary’s limited.

That’s where our part

rises up: to speak

that which is not silence.

**

I was beginning all over as a poet after years of informational, journalistic prose. In my original write-up of the lecture on fate and destiny, I found this forgotten (and justly so) poem, possibly the first one I wrote after my long absence from poetry. The poem can be seen as being about fate. The ending, however, shifts to destiny. 

Whether "destiny" is the right term is another matter. I will delve into it in future blogs. But looking at people who get anywhere in the arts, what I see is a terrific drive, a great (some would say: abnormal) intensity. They write, paint, sculpt, etc., because they have to, and they are willing to make great sacrifices. Romantic love isn't as important (someone even said, "Your creative peers are more important than your lovers"). Family love is not primary in their lives either. Thus the question really is, as Bill Mohr said, "Are you abnormal enough?" Any notion of a "balanced life" is ludicrous. 

**

John:

Thank you.  I loved the poem, especially that about the gift of failing many times.  I also liked the bit about the Jungian lecture.  Can we invent ourselves?  And the answer is yes and no.  

That's a profound answer and the answer to so many questions about the self and life.  Can we know ourselves?  Yes and no.  Can we know another's self?  Yes and no.  Can we be content, happy, accomplished, winning, successful, or anything else?  Yes and no.  Can we be whole?  Yes and no.  Can we know the secret of the universe?  Yes and no.  Will what I'm saying here be sensible to you?  

Well, yes and no?

Oriana:

Hollis would probably reply that it’s always an interaction between fate and destiny. There is certainly a limit to which we can “invent ourselves.” We can’t change our genes – which, interacting with the environment, determine whether or not we’d even want to invent ourselves.

By the way, the very idea of “inventing ourselves,” as opposed to “discovering ourselves,” has been described as an American idea, and more specifically one that prevails in California (though I suspect New York rivals California). The idea that we can somehow decide what we want to be, what we want to do in life, stems from the concept of having considerable freedom, rather than being hugely hemmed in by circumstances. Yet more choice also means more stress, so in a way it’s embracing what is without trying to change is that would be best from the point of view of being contented. Obviously, some people are motivated by something other than peace of mind (by the way, I wonder what Jefferson really meant by the pursuit of happiness. I suspect that he meant a rich life filled mostly with doing what you love doing, but not really peace of mind).

I was thinking of the two words in Polish, los (fate) and przeznaczenie (destiny – the root is znak – sign, mark – you are marked for something). Los is more negative than fate. My mother often used the expression, a victim of fate, in a voice full of utter contempt. Not being a victim of fate but rather working toward fulfilling one’s destiny (perhaps we could substitute here the pedestrian phrase “one’s goals in life”) was the noble thing. Stephen Hawking would be an example of such triumph of the human spirit. My mother had had some pretty horrific encounters with fate, so coming from her mouth, the mouth of a survivor, it had special weight – this contempt for fate and admiration for people who overcame circumstances rather than being defeated by them.

So you are right, yes and no. It’s all a matter of degree and of the interaction of fate and destiny. What Hollis wanted to emphasize was that Jung was more interested in destiny, in how the vision of the future can shape us as opposed to Freud’s fixation on the past. Was Jung right? Yes and no. Was Freud right? Yes and no. So it goes.

John:

I wrote my PhD dissertation on a Laingian approach to psychological analysis of literary character. Based on the theories of R. D. Laing, this approach was interesting because he combined Jung and existentialism. What Laing believed was that in part we invent ourselves but that we have to realize that part of the self is not invented by our self. It's what's in place – plus it's what others see in us (fate? destiny?) For me, Laing came closer to what I feel is the truth of the self because his view wasn't as mechanical as Freud's and it took Jung's notions of complementary aspects of the self (yes and not) and multiplied them.  

The self is finally always more than what we say it is.

Oriana:

With the Buddhists saying that the self is an illusion and there is no such thing, and others saying that the deepest self is the Christ, or Shiva, or take your choice, I think there is really no way out except to say that the self is a verb. It’s in constant flux, with only some continuity.

Rilke says that life always says both yes and no, but death says only yes. I experienced that when mortality finally hit home and changed me. That was my satori: be happy now while there is still time. I apologize for the lack of originality. Never mind that I’d heard that a million times; it had to hit at the personal level.

The rest of it, many selves or one, inventing a different self or several selves (I think that happens spontaneously depending on who we interact with: I become somewhat different person with different people; likewise, English gives me a somewhat different personality than the one I have in Polish) – that’s minor details.

I like a combination of the Jungian approach with existentialism, but with the emphasis on the existentialist insight (I’m following Milosz here) that you can’t really know the past; the way our memory works, the present changes the past. We are our own unreliable narrator. What “really happened” is both unknowable and not that important; it’s what we remember and how we choose to tell it (Octavio Paz, later vindicated by neuroscience) that influences the unfolding of our life.

John:

And then sometimes the self feels like an old pair of shoes we've been wearing for too long. 

I think it's time to read Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium again.

Oriana:

We are creatures of the moment and of changeable moods, to be sure . . . Sometimes I can't stand poetry and the thought I gave my life to it is sheer hell; at other times, a poem can feel ecstatic. Immodest as that may sound, that goes for some poems of my own! -- but only when I am in a certain mood.

Re-reading Byzantium is fine (note how much better the first three stanzas are than the final stanza; no one ever mentions how Yeats flubbed the last stanza!), but I love Jack Gilbert’s poem about aging, “Scheming in the Snow”:

SCHEMING IN THE SNOW

There is a time after what comes after
being young, and a time after that, he thinks
happily as he walks through the winter woods,
hearing in silence a woodpecker far off.
Remembering his Chinese friend
whose brother gave her a jade ring from
the Han Dynasty when she turned eighteen.
Two weeks later, when she was hurrying up
the steps of a Hong Kong bridge, she fell,
and the thousand-year-old ring shattered
on the concrete. When she told him, stunned
and tears running down her face, he said,
Don’t cry. I'll get you something better.

~ Jack Gilbert

You said something very important: we do get tired of the same old self saying the same old things etc. And it's not as if we could buy a new self like a new pair of shoes. And then the next day we wake up all happy and in love with ourselves. So it goes. Life, just life, and the self selving. Is this selving governed by an actually destiny pulling us toward it? Only if we say so. Aside from what might be called biological destiny, to some degree we are free to work toward a goal. That’s all, but it’s magnificent.

Charles:

The affirmation “I hope you go to California and fail many times” really hit home with me and then it was the last line of the poem. WOW!!!

Love all your Freud/Jung contrasts. Absolutely brilliant blog.

Oriana:

Thank you. Actually, the more one tries to untangle the fate/destiny interplay, the less possible it seems. Does anyone really choose to be a poet, a sculptor – or a UPS truck driver, for that matter? We are back to determinism and free will – and I’m not going there. But as long as the blog provides both pleasure and food for thought, that’s good enough for me. 

Scott:

Really insightful post. I really must re-read some Jungian musings. The old Quaker whalemen sailed the Pacific in the first half of the 19th century, discovering new islands; one they named 'New Nantucket.' I like the notion of having a place of my own, of creating my own 'New Nantucket', an island of peace, stability and sanity in a world where it seems those things are rare indeed. As Melville famously wrote, 'you won't find it on any map, true places never are.' I realize that sounds kinda airy or dreamy but like poetry, it may not be 'practical' or even seem nonsensical but the dream is still vivid.  

Oriana:

I love the Melville quotation:  “you won't find it on any map, true places never are.” True places are states of mind, and what we remember trumps what is objectively there. So that’s your destiny (another word for a compelling dream), the creation of your New Nantucket. Good luck to you!

Brenda:

Especially enjoyed the Poe poem.

Oriana:

This is wonderful to hear. So far only the rain poem has been commented on. Well, Hyacinth liked the line about the raven’s “limited vocabulary.” Personally I’m thrilled to have rediscovered the poem. And as for Poe's "Raven," it is an uncanny masterpiece. Practically every American knows the poem, which should give us a pause. That music is powerful, and the poem does deliver an insight that would otherwise (if not presented in this ballad style) be quite uncomfortable to most.

THE DARK SIDE OF INTUITION

spiral galaxy M74

 LAST WORDS

  

“You should have gone into physics –

there’s so much poetry in physics,”

were my father’s last

words to me – a last shining of the light

for a moment, the last time

he recognized me in the nursing home.

My father did not believe in God.

He believed in physics,

the greatest poem of our time –

But I wasn’t a poet enough

to ride on the lip of infinity,

the event horizon before the birth of stars.

Leaning forward with slight menace,

my father would remind me,

“An electron is not a thing.

It can be described only in mathematics.”

“It’s not about numbers,” he insisted.

“Mathematics is about beauty.”

Everything’s mainly nothing,

a black hole of whirling metaphors.

One time, an impatient schoolgirl,

I asked, “How do you know

how to solve this equation?

He replied: “Intuition.”

One night I will go leaping

from moon to moon to star

to test the curvilinear

poetics of space-time.

Somewhere along a nebula,

in fluent mathematics,

I’ll wave to my father who told me

not to worry about the universe –

the red shift of receding galaxies,

silent music where nothing is lost.

~ Oriana © 2012

**

Intuition. We know that writers are guided by it, that all artists do. But mathematicians? I instantly knew that my father told me the truth. How did I know? Intuition.

Cormac McCarthy, a novelist known chiefly for “No Country for Old Men” (ironically, he first penned it as a film script, which got rejected) and one of the chief figures at the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute, has noted a deep similarity between writing and science: “Major insights in science come from the subconscious, from staring at your shoes.”

My father, a physics and mathematics professor at the University of Lodz, didn’t stare at his shoes. But he did at lot of staring – mostly at a page with an equation on it. Now and then, that page would be presented to him by me as a high school student who had only so much patience (about five minutes) with any math problem that resisted a quick solution.

After duly noting my mental laziness, my father would take a look at the equation, pick up his pen and scribble the solution. Now and then, however, an equation would prove resistant. That’s when the staring happened, of varied duration. In the end, there was the familiar reach for the pen and quick scribbling. No cold sweat of laboriously trying this or that. He “saw” the solution. Intuition.

Of course, mathematical intuition takes years of study and practice to develop. The same goes for a mechanic’s knowing in a flash what’s wrong with the engine, a pilot’s “intuitively” knowing how to react to an emergency, and so on. The list goes on. My ability to understand poems seemingly without effort came only after reading thousands of poems – slowly and with effort at first (I found the language contorted, but that’s precisely what intrigued me; the difficulty drove me on). There is no need to belabor the point: like talent, arriving at effortless intuition takes time and effort. And even after you sense that you are there, if you continue engaging with the work you love doing, intuition continues to grow (“you arrive in magic, flying”)

Below: my father at fourteen. He studied mathematics textbooks for classes ahead of him and tutored mathematics at all levels to help support his mother and five sisters.

FREUD'S COGNITIVE REVOLUTION

In his article “Freud’s Cognitive Revolution,” David Livingstone Smith (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/philosophy-dispatches/201202/freuds-cognitive-revolution-0) states that Freud “cut the Gordian knot by discarding the entire Cartesian package, beginning with body-mind dualism. Freud became what is nowadays called a physicalist - that is, he came to assert (many decades before this was intellectually fashionable) that mental states are brain states.

He also jettisoned the view that all mental phenomena are conscious. In fact, Freud argued that all cognitive processes are unconscious, and that the outputs of some of these processes are secondarily displayed in consciousness. So-called conscious thoughts are merely representations of unconscious thoughts.

Freud's philosophically momentous change of mind anticipated much of what occurred during the cognitive revolution of the late 20th century.”

All cognitive processing is unconscious? Or just unconscious at first, but then partly conscious? Have patience – we’ll consider a more complex picture when we get to the “two systems” posited by Daniel Kahneman.

But first, let me repeat what I’ve said in response to Rae Armantrout’s clever lines: 

There are two kinds of choices: 

unconscious and desperate

~ As Freud first posited already in 1895, all cognitive processing, including choices, is unconscious. Some “answers” are then transmitted to consciousness (of course we have no choice other than to believe in free will). This is not a cause for despair. The process is affected by endless variables, more than we can consciously know (or would want to; part of the wisdom of aging is that we don't crave to know everything there is to be known; you come to understand that knowing can be a greater burden than it’s worth carrying). Our brain tries to make it easy for us. Having too much information and too many choices is stressful. Simplify, simplify! Reach for a book by your favorite author, and dive deep.

THE FAST AND THE SLOW

Nietzsche called a human being a dark and veiled thing; and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: This is really you, this is no longer outer shell. But current thinking is that it’s not some hidden sexual secrets that make us so ignorant: it’s rather that we are “dual-process thinkers.” 

Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, and unexpectedly also a author of psychology books, described the fast system as intuitive, associative, metaphoric, impressionistic, and automatic. It can’t be switched off. It’s like the parallel processing in computers. The slow system is deliberate and effortful. It’s analogous to serial processing. An example would be doing some calculations by hand, or trying to find the documentation you need for the IRS. (Jung was groping toward that dual system when he spoke of Eros and Logos, Eros being metaphoric, the language of dreams and human relationships. Kahneman’s two systems are more encompassing, and have neuroscience behind them – and besides, to me they feel intuitively correct.)

I remember taking a class in cognitive psychology, and the professor asking, “Which American city is also the name of a large hoofed mammal?” I answered instantly: Buffalo. “Did you make a list of all the names of American cities, and another list of large mammals, and compare to see which word was the same on both?” Of course not. That would have been the slow, serial processing. The brain prefers parallel processing, or something like it – the brain isn’t conscious of how it’s accomplishing its miracles. Personally, I love it – what writer doesn’t love mysteries and paradoxes? What scientist?

Niagara Falls; the cruise ship might be Miss Buffalo. I can’t forgive myself for not having taken that little cruise on Miss Buffalo. It’s what we haven’t done that we tend to regret most.


A MATHEMATICIAN KNOWS


It’s obvious which cognitive system is the brain’s preferred one – just as it’s immediately obvious which kind of writing is “inspired,” and which is the dull, belabored product of the slow system. Generally, the less you push and strive at the conscious level, the more you “stay out of your way,” the better the results.

Once, talking with a mathematics professor, I remarked that novelists say that they work out a deliberate detailed outline, but at some point the characters “start acting on their own,” saying and doing things the author didn’t plan. The mathematics professor smiled. “That’s because writing comes from the unconscious,” he said. Not something I expected a mathematician to say, but should have, given my father’s reply about intuition. Mathematicians understand about intuition, also called parallel processing or “fast thinking.”

The irony is that we tend to give slow thinking the credit for making most of our choices and generally for “being who we are.” But writers know that they don’t choose what they write about. And mathematicians and physicists? One thing I’ve noticed, and this is also true of many scientists, is that they are constantly cracking jokes. And getting them in an instant. All those puns and metaphors, all that parallel processing . . .   


THE DARK SIDE OF INTUITION

The brain evolved to give us quick, effortless answers. “The quick and the dead” comes to mind as an easy rationale for this evolution. So, should we just forget about slow thinking? Alas, that would be the kind of mistake that our intuition is prone to making. Yes, there is a dark side to intuition. The price of speed is jumping to conclusions, falling for all kinds of myths and illusions, and often being biased – with an absolute sense of certainty that we KNOW. System I, the fast (parallel) unconscious cognitive processing, has sent an email to our consciousness, a message of bone-shaking clarity. We stand by our deepest knowing even though we can’t provide an iota of evidence, or else our evidence is dubious at best. Never mind: we simply, suddenly KNOW.

Still, every writer (and mathematician, and scientist) knows how wonderful it feels, that high of a Eureka! when intuition relays the high-voltage answer. But mathematicians and scientists have to verify their intuition, to prove its validity. Lawyers have to win their case. Writers, preachers, politicians – they can cling to intuitive certainty, and it can be harmful.

Poets’ intuition generally does no harm, but it can be blind the person as to why certain lines should be left out of the poem. I remember a workshop where most participants strongly urged a certain woman – a radical feminist, certainly non-religious – to drop two lines that were interesting in their of-the-blue strangeness, but didn’t fit with the rest of the poem. The poet tossed her waist-long hair and reduced us to silence by declaring: “I can’t drop these lines because they were given to me by God.”

Yes, that’s how absolutely correct, how “sacred” inspiration can feel, even if it’s . . . ahem . . . wrong. 

In case you think that this example is invalid because poets are lunatics anyway, let’s turn to science. During my years as a journalist, I attended a gerontology conference and was privileged to hear Dr. Denham Harman describe his experience of hitting on the free-radical theory of aging. He used to work for Shell Oil before switching to biochemistry research at the University of California at Berkeley. He was particularly interested in the cause or causes of aging. One night, he told us, he started thinking about it so intensely that he couldn’t fall asleep. The few existing theories were full of holes, and he rejected them one by one. After some fitful sleep, he woke up and KNEW: it was the same as the “aging” of rubber that he studied at Shell Oil. Free radicals.

He became so excited that he got up early and rushed to the campus. He accosted every scientist he ran into, saying “I know why we age. It’s the same as with rubber: free radicals.” And, wild-eyed, he’d proceed with a short lecture. His startled colleagues would then mutter something like, “Are you sure there is enough evidence?” Harman could only shrug. He already KNEW.

We loved the story. Some time later, however, a big problem came to light, thanks to that inconvenient question that science must ask: “What’s the evidence?” The evidence turned out to be inconsistent, and the administration of anti-oxidants did not slow aging. Harman tried more potent anti-oxidants, and modified his theory, but it wasn’t enough. Other processes, such as a genetically determined biological clock (clearly seen when it comes to puberty and menopause), were at work. Free-radical damage could account for some of what we see in aging, but ultimately it wasn’t the answer.

Science is self-correcting. The role of intuition is enormous, and there are more wonderful stories than Harman’s – stories with a “happy ending,” since dull, laborious experiments proved the intuition to be right. And mathematicians? They may see the answer in an instant (or after prolonged staring, and then in an instant), but they still have to work on that equation step by step.


NEGATIVE CAPABILITY

And . . . artists? Here I am reminded of something I witnessed at the Blue Mountain Art Colony, back when I was still able to go for long walks. At the start of my walk, I passed by an artist’s studio. I peeked in through the large window. She was sitting across from a freshly painted canvas, staring at it. On the way back, an hour later, I peeked in again. There she was, frozen in the same posture, staring at her painting. Later she explained, “I spend a lot of the time just staring until I know what in the painting doesn’t work and what to do about it.”  

Why go into all this “staring” and “knowing” in a post that’s supposed to be, in some way, about poetry and writing? Because pondering both the wonders and perils of intuition – the jumping to a conclusion, to a premature closure – made me remember the wisdom of Keats about “negative capability” – the patience we need when facing the “Penetralium of mystery” (Keats’s phrase). The human brain may be the most magnificent thing in the universe, but it is lazy. It loves a quick answer. Many times it’s right on the first try: “First thought, best thought.” But not always. 

Kafka had a sign over his desk: WARTEN – wait. In my experience, you have to do some ground work first to get the process started. But don’t push too hard. Lie down and stare at the ceiling a little – or a lot. Take a shower. Take a walk. Sleep on it. Sleep on it for a week, months, years. Typically when you least expect it, a deeper answer will come. Suddenly.

“I JUST KNOW”

John Guzlowski:

From the film A Beautiful Mind, a piece of dialogue.

--"Did you ever just know something?"

--"Constantly."

Oriana:

Wonderful, thank you. A Beautiful Mind was one of the most inspiring movies I ever saw. It hit home. If schizophrenia could be kept under control by the “sane” part of consciousness, how much easier in the case of mere depression . . . I was just beginning to recognize the false, delusional nature of depressive thinking. However, at the time I saw the movie, I still didn’t have the motivation to stop going into depression. But I saw that an exceptional person could control a much worse dysfunction.

Back to intuition – or, since that word is contaminated with what Freud would call the “black mud of occultism,” to the fast, parallel-processing System I that gives us the quick answers tinged with a strong sense of certainty. We “just know.” That system of cognitive processing has both advantages and the perils (especially if brain function goes wrong, as in schizophrenia; the so-called “psychotic insight” is the sudden unshakable knowledge of the sort: “only I can save the world”).

A quick synopsis: John Nash, future winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics for his win-win game theory, develops paranoid schizophrenia. Treatment works poorly. But John has a breakthrough when experiences an insight: one of the people in his hallucinations, a young girl, the niece of his supposed roommate, never grows older, “so she can’t be real.” He discovers who else can’t be a real person. The moment he labels his hallucinations as just that, hallucinations, he chooses the reality-based side of his double consciousness.

Some film critics pointed out that perhaps the best thing the movie portrayed was the Cold War as a collective paranoid delusion. Alas, all I can say is that this “makes intuitive sense to me.”

John:

Here is a quote from Jung you may find interesting:

Analysis of artists consistently shows not only the strength of the creative impulse arising from the unconscious, but also its capricious and willful character. The biographies of great artists make abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness.

The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle.....the creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment.  ~ Carl Jung

  

Oriana:

I think Jung is guilty of reifying the creative impulse when he calls it “capricious and willful.” It may seem that way to those who are not familiar with how the brain works, and how the automatic background processor provides answers to the consciousness when the answers are ready. Not that Jung, writing long before neuroscience at least partly described cognitive processes, should be blamed for speaking of the “creative impulse” as an entity with its own capricious “will” – we don’t blame Darwin for not knowing genetics, and thus not being able to give a more complete account of the mechanisms of evolution.

What we still do not fully appreciate is the extent to which artists, like other achievers, tend to be workaholics. Here is Nietzsche on the complexity of the creative process:

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration… shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering. ~ Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Ursula:

That's a wonderful poem and full of history and meaning for me. My father was a professor of chemical engineering who later was one of the pioneers of computing. He said mathematics was the only perfect language and, of course, told and sought endless jokes and was particularly fond of puns.

I never thought of his work as being intuitive, but it must have been. He always had his yellow legal pad and no #2 pencils. Total silence came out of his home office. Whatever he was doing brought scientists from Moscow to Michigan in the 1950's.

Oriana:

Thank you, Ursula. Interesting about your father! Sense of humor has a high correlation with IQ.

I always carry a notebook and pen and keep paper and pencil by my bedside – intuition-insight-inspiration (it’s difficult to separate these concepts) can strike any time. They are not under voluntary control (Kahneman observes that System I is on automatic and can’t be switched off) – which is both wonderful and frustrating.

Hyacinth:

I have always thought I didn't have intuition, confusing it with instinct?? The only time I let my "intuition" mean anything is when I meet someone and have bad feelings for no reason. When I don't go with these instincts I am usually sorry.  My intuition about people is usually right.

Oriana:

I realize that I never defined intuition, and the term has some fuzzy connotations, including “mystical knowledge.” I mean the fast “system I” as described by Kahneman.

Though you are aware only of your social intuition, in fact, like all of us, you operate chiefly at the “fast” level. We don’t know why we think what we think, why we write about what we write about. We make up reasons to uphold the image of ourselves as making rational choices, but in fact we have little clue about the “real” reasons. System I has its reasons of which System II knows nothing – this is a steal not only from Pascal, but also from someone else who was commenting on the two systems.

Scott:

A very intriguing post, it hits very close to home. As you are very much aware Moby Dick is my obsession, at least literary. (By the way, Cormac McCarthy's on record for stating his favorite book is...you guessed it...Moby Dick.) And Nietzche's quote brought to mind a favorite Melville quote of mine:

'Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have more to do, we have done nothing.'

And when I came across Carl Dennis's poem 'Not the Idle' with his line on Moby Dick I knew, by intuition, I had 'solved' Moby Dick. Now I could focus on it's further treasures but the source itself had been  found....at least for me. Intuition is, and has been, a 'firm foundation' for me for some time. Its very nature of not being able to nail it, like the coin to the Pequod's mast, as a firm fact further attests to its truth! Paradox I know, you are so on the mark; what writer or person who loves to dive deep does not love a paradox?

The Quaker whalers are that paradox to me; the most pacifist sect of Christianity engaged in a holy war against the largest animal on earth and employing some of the roughest set of rouges to man their ships that ever sailed the seas. Lowell's 'The Quaker Graveyard on Nantucket' again attests to this paradox and he does it in verse! (I must one day visit Nantucket and see that magical isle for myself). 

Who can truly explain what they know and what they believe, the paradox of paradoxes.  To me, poetry explains it all and it took nearly 50 years to realize it. I would not have been ready for verse at 20 and your blog would have been an enigma. Not that I have you pinned down or  pigeonholed, you are too deep for that – as the Quakers called those of deep thought and true heart you are a 'Weighty Friend.'

Oriana:

I love being a “weighty friend” – strictly in the intellectual sense; I hope that I’m not intellectually overweight. Your reassurances have been helpful. My blog is a kind of Moby Dick, I feel, with tone and texture as important as the intellectual “plot” – the unending thread of the argument. My blog as a whole is like a huge 19^th century novel. Everything connects with everything; digressions open up infinities. Adam Zagajewski called these infinite connections the “jungleness” of a piece. He saw me as a kindred writer, trying to balance a narrower focus with the tendency to write about everything at once. And that everything is in flux, a Heraclitean river always near flood level. 

A favorite college instructor once said that I can’t be pigeon-holed, and that’s why most people are not comfortable with me – they can’t put me into a familiar slot. “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Intuition thrives on that; it plays like a dolphin in the waves of several disciplines: psychology, philosophy, comparative religion, science, literature, history, and more. 

As a writer, I find that there are gradations in intuition. What gets instantly transmitted to consciousness may turn out to be too glib. I click “delete” on that “first thought” and wait for the next (and presumably more-searching) wave of unconscious processing to signal its findings. It can take a few minutes, but it can also take decades – I’ve waited 25 years or more for some of my answers, especially endings to certain poems. 

Scott:


Yes, YES, THAT'S IT! Your blog IS like Moby Dick in its digressions 
and wide reaching topics, I can't believe I have not seen that before. 
Just came across a great article on the Irish poet Paidrac Colum and his appraisal of Moby Dick not as a novel but as an epic poem; I think he's right on the mark.

Oriana:

Yes, my blog is in some ways like Moby Dick. Furthermore, I am Ishmael. Think of my journey to America, and my continuing journey through America, so to speak. The commentators have become my shipmates. But there is no Ahab, unless to some extent I am Ahab – in moments of resentment, perhaps. Is either the Catholic Church, the religious right, or the Hebraic god my White Whale? On the whole, by now I’m too mellow for any revenge plot. Even my hostility toward organized religion isn’t so intense that I don’t at the same time think, “Whatever works. Some people need that.”

To the objection that humanity will never grow up unless there is a concerted effort to expose religion as fairy tales, and I’m not doing enough toward that, I say that I am still too much a poet, interested in creating beauty more than in carrying on an argument. I refuse to narrow myself. Others are better at marching with banners.

One of my conscious goals is to show atheism as a life-affirming philosophy. Just how well I fulfill that goal is another story. The writing takes me all over the map. I do it intuitively and don’t try to force a preconceived agenda.

But that’s my quick intuition speaking. Who knows, my deeper intuition may find something else. 

Steve:

As usual, I LOVE your blog--and the poem about your father is exquisite. Also as usual, your thinking and discernment amaze me. What wonderful insights on the nature of intuitive versus linear thinking. ("Versus" is not really the right word, as your blog demonstrates so well. The "partnership" of the two might express the relationship you delineate so clearly. Maybe even the "dance" of the two.)

Oriana:

Thank you for pointing out that indeed what we have here is a dance of the two cognitive systems. And the credit goes to Daniel Kahneman for going through neuroscience studies and distilling the description of each system. I dressed Kahneman’s theory in poetry and images. By the way, someone just expressed surprise at how quickly I can revise a poem. It’s the same phenomenon as my father’s ability to look at an equation and see the solution. He just knew. I just know. After many years of practice, of course; nor am I done learning.