TOLSTOY AND KING LEAR; ELEPHANT IN THE GARDEN (OF EDEN); OBESITY AND INTESTINAL BACTERIA

Rodin: Orpheus and Eurydice
 
WHEN ORPHEUS SANG IN HADES

all suffering ceased. The flaming wheel
stood still; Tantalus unbent
from hunger and thirst;
and Sisyphus sat down on his boulder.

During my own years of hell,
home after a day
of running the mimeo machine,
choking on the sour stench,

I turned on my stereo, and the slow
movement of the Italian Symphony
took me in its arms.
Adagios of rivers and meadows

swayed in the room’s dusk
like a calm faraway light —
and suddenly I couldn’t see,
the world glimmering through tears:

their salty sting on my face,
the moon of my breath
on the cold glass of night.
In that moment I knew

I had the best, the first-rate:
the song of Orpheus that made
any boulder a pebble
in the river of stars.

~ Oriana © 2016

Orpheus before Hades and Persephone, 1685
 
TOLSTOY AND KING LEAR
 
“Forty years later, George Orwell responded to Tolstoy’s 1906 attack [on Shakespeare as inartistic and evil] in an essay titled “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947). His answer? Tolstoy’s objections “to the raggedness of Shakespeare’s plays, the irrelevancies, the incredible plots, the exaggerated language,” are at bottom an objection to Shakespeare’s earthy humanism, his “exuberance,” or—to use another psychoanalytic term—his juissance. “Tolstoy,” writes Orwell, “is not simply trying to rob others of a pleasure he does not share. He is doing that, but his quarrel with Shakespeare goes further. It is the quarrel between the religious and the humanist attitudes towards life.”

But why, Orwell asks, does Tolstoy pick on Lear, specifically? Because of the character’s strong resemblance to Tolstoy himself. “Lear renounces his throne,” he writes, “but expects everyone to continue treating him as a king.”

~ But is it not also curiously similar to the history of Tolstoy himself? There is a general resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because the most impressive event in Tolstoy’s life, as in Lear’s, was a huge and gratuitous act of renunciation. In his old age, he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights, and made an attempt — a sincere attempt, though it was not successful — to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant.

But the deeper resemblance lies in the fact that Tolstoy, like Lear, acted on mistaken motives and failed to get the results he had hoped for. According to Tolstoy, the aim of every human being is happiness, and happiness can only be attained by doing the will of God. But doing the will of God means casting off all earthly pleasures and ambitions, and living only for others. Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him happier. But if there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was NOT happy. ~

Orwell draws an even larger point from the philosophical differences Tolstoy has with Shakespeare: “Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic,” he writes, “since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana…. Often there is a seeming truce between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and the next.” 

On this last point, no doubt, Tolstoy and Orwell would agree. In Orwell’s analysis, Tolstoy’s polemic against Shakespeare’s humanism further “sharpens the contradictions,” we might say, between the two attitudes, and between his own former humanism and the fervent, if unhappy, religiosity of his later years.”

http://www.openculture.com/2016/03/tolstoy-calls-shakespeare-an-insignificant-inartistic-writer.html
Derek Jacobi as King Lear

Oriana:

The irony was that in the end Tolstoy decided there was no personal god after all. Having rejected the Russian Orthodox church, he tried to construct a personal spirituality. He went through the trouble of combining the four gospels into one in an attempt to arrive at a coherent story of Christ, but even his own version failed him in the end. He thought that faith, no matter how irrational, is needed to make suffering and mortality endurable, but was careful not to connect this “faith” to any specific religion.

He still tried to defend a system of utopian social justice, however. Basically he was profoundly miserable. He became depressed in mid-life, after completing Anna Karenina, and never quite shook off his depression (which no doubt had a lot to do with his ever-worsening marriage). His religious and philosophic quest brought no healing (and no wonder — introspective overthinking was the last thing he needed). In particular, he rejected the epicurean position of enjoying life without asking about ultimate meaning — and Shakespeare stood for life in its richness without much interest in metaphysics.

Orwell is right: Tolstoy managed to retain the life-rejecting religious mentality even if he couldn’t quite swallow the Trinity, creation in six days, the devils and the angels and similar nonsense.

And Tolstoy’s bizarre dismissal of Shakespeare as “inartistic”? The answer is surprisingly easy. To fully appreciate Shakespeare’s genius, you have to read him in the original. Then the poetry is simply overwhelming. But I remember, in high school, first watching Romeo and Juliet in a mediocre Polish translation and thinking, “What’s so great about this play? The plot is terrible. The two lovers have nothing profound to say. Why is this work regarded as a masterpiece?”

At the same time, even in my teens I realized that there had to be a reason why Shakespeare was universally celebrated as a genius. I was eager to master English well enough so I could read Shakespeare. Happily, I did reach my goal. And I was not disappointed. The great lines were there, and great scenes — think, for instance, how good Shakespeare is at mad scenes. Or the graveyard scene in Hamlet — it’s hard to think of anything that compares — unless another famous scene out of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s ability to create powerful, unforgettable characters is also one of the traits of his genius. Not that we have to choose . . . and of course there is no denying the greatness of the best of Tolstoy, but if pressed to the wall and told I could have only one, I’d pick Lady Macbeth over Anna Karenina, Rosalind or Portia over Natasha, or Hamlet or indeed even Lear, poor flawed deluded Lear, or almost any interesting Shakespearean character — even Caliban! — over any of Tolstoy's characters. Not that Tolstoy’s characters are not memorable, but — when it comes to Shakespeare, there is a quantum leap. Lear is timeless. Count Vronsky? Hmmm . . .

Overall, Orwell’s point is right on: the world of Shakespeare’s plays is basically secular, with an occasional religious figure like a friar being completely minor. Shakespeare is not concerned with metaphysics, compared to his interest in the politics of kingship, for instance, and the consequences of evil actions right here on earth. Like Dostoyevski, Shakespeare is a great psychologist. What happens psychologically to Dostoyevski's Raskolnikov is fascinating to watch — just as the unraveling of Macbeth's mind is.

Tolstoy’s great mistake was to seek a one-size-fits-all universal “meaning of life.” Shakespeare might reply that there are no answers; there are only stories. And there is language in which to tell these stories — and language has its own collective wisdom. Add to this the kind of ability to use language that a writer of genius has — and that is quite enough. Life is enough, and humanity is enough. Add to this the beauty of nature, and it would be ungracious to complain. 

Tolstoy with his daughter Tatyana, 1902

*
THE FIRST TIME I STOOD UP TO A PRIEST was just after I turned 14, a month or so after I'd left the church. The beauty of it unfolded when I suddenly realized I didn't have to stand there and listen to him practically yell at me in the street. It was a major, crowded street (Grójecka, in the Ochota district of Warsaw). The priest was having a combined rage and anxiety attack. He was red in the face and shaking. “Have you stopped going to church?” he asked sharply. Then, with unmistakable fear in his voice, “Have you stopped believing in god?”

His fear startled me. I didn’t answer. My silence was the answer. And this seemingly tiny fact — that a young girl had decided god didn’t exist — seemed to unnerve him to the core, to threaten his whole worldview. It was the first time in my life that I felt I was threatening to someone — a middle-aged man at that! Yet I was only a teenager, a “girl from a good home” who’d never be impolite to an adult. No need to fear that I’d say, “Fuck Jesus” or "Fuck god" or “give the priest a fig” with the fingers of my right hand. No.

I merely stood in the middle of the sidewalk, small next to this massive man, a sparrow against a crow — “little sparrows,” as our literature teacher called me now and then — a mere girl but suddenly with a mind that had obviously done something other than regurgitate catechism. He, red in the face and screaming; me, cool and silent, just staring at him.

After five minutes or so of listening to his frantic scolding, I turned around without a word and walked away. First the realization that god had no power to punish me, then the realization that my parish priest had no power to punish me. He continued to speak in a loud voice, getting even redder in his face, gasping. Without a word, I turned my back on him and resumed walking to wherever I was going.

But at that point it was no longer real courage. I wish I'd had courage back when hell was terribly real for me, and oh, how I hated going to confession! I might have stayed longer in a liberal Protestant church . . . or perhaps not as long because who knows at what point reading the bible would make me question the more revolting stories . . .

It was fascinating, though, to see a priest throw a tantrum in public, pedestrians in a quick staccato walking by us with with barely a glance at the spectacle — the usual human wave of faces lost in their own preoccupations. I threatened his worldview, while he did not threaten my new clarity. He, a suddenly scared priest of a dead god; I, suddenly filled with courage, my life ahead of me, the future, the new world.

My parish church in Warsaw. The brick used to be much darker. This photo was taken after a clean-up. I'm glad: it must have been the gloomiest church in the city.
 
THE ELEPHANT IN THE GARDEN (OF EDEN)

“Many Biblical stories have their "elephant in the room": An obvious, slap-in-the-face question that is so basic and so deeply troubling that until you find a way to deal with it, you really can't claim to have any understanding at all f the story you are reading. Is there a question of this sort -- a question of this magnitude -- that we need to deal with when reading the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden?

I think there is.

Let's talk a little bit about this mysterious tree in the Garden, the one that God places off-limits. It has a name. It is known as "the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil". By any measure, that's a pretty strange name for a tree -- but if that's what the Bible calls it, then that's presumably what it is: It somehow conveys a "knowledge of Good and Evil," an ability to distinguish right from wrong to those who partake of its fruits.

But there's a big problem with this. In a sentence, it is this:

"Why would God want to deny this knowledge to people?"

Think about it. Are human beings better or worse off, for their knowledge of "good and evil"? Is knowing right from wrong an asset or a liability for humanity?

Imagine a world in which people were pretty much the same as they are now — they were smart, they could walk, they could talk, they could drive cars and become investment bankers. They were missing only one thing. They didn't know right from wrong.

We have a word for people like that. We call them sociopaths.

A tempting way out of the problem would be to suggest that somehow, it was all a set-up: God really did want people to have the knowledge the tree would give them, and was in fact "glad" when they ate from it. But this approach is deeply problematic. For the way the Torah tells the story, the Almighty seems pretty disappointed with Adam and Eve after they ate from the tree; he in fact punishes them severely. How are we to understand this disappointment? It seems a little perverse to imagine the Almighty secretly chuckling with pleasure that Adam and Eve finally ate the fruit he put off limits — but hiding His joy behind a mask of displeasure and anger.

Clearly, God really did want Adam and Eve to avoid the Tree of Knowledge. But that brings us back to our question: Why would the Lord want to deny humanity an understanding of good and evil?

Catch-22 in the garden

The truth is, the question is really even a little deeper than this. It's not simply that it seems strange for God to have put a "tree of knowledge" off-limits to Adam and Eve. Rather, the very existence of such a tree seems to create a basic contradiction in the story as a whole. Here's why:

What happens immediately after Adam and Eve eat from the tree whose mysterious fruits confer knowledge of "good and evil"? The Almighty becomes angry with them and punishes them. But if Adam and Eve were punished for what they did, this presupposes that they knew they did something wrong. You don't punish people who are unaware that they did something bad. So Adam and Eve evidently had some knowledge of good and evil before eating from the tree. At the very least, they knew it was right to obey God when He told them not to eat, and it was wrong to disobey Him.

But now we're really stuck. For if Adam and Eve already understood good and evil before reaching for the fruit, well then, they already possessed what the tree was supposed to give them. And that would mean that the tree was useless, nothing but an empty farce.

http://www.aish.com/jl/b/eb/ge/48965251.html

My source didn't identify the painter, but the style points to the school of Claude Lorraine, especially for the landscape. 

Oriana:

“Did the person know right from wrong?” remains the foremost legal question. The insane and the mentally handicapped are not held responsible for their action because we assume they don't know right from wrong. And Adam and Eve presumably did not know right from wrong until they ate the fruit. But maybe they knew it was wrong to disobey? This is the Catch-22 in the story. Even a metaphorical reading is not exactly easy.

I suspect Cardinal Ratzinger, the Grand Inquisitor under Pope JP2 and later Pope Benedict, will come to be acknowledged as a revolutionary figure in the history of the church. It was a public secret that Ratzinger and JP2 both believed in evolution. Ratzinger was the author of the doctrine that heaven and hell were not actual places. He’s also on record as having said that Genesis was a mishmash of “pagan fables.” Without the charisma of either JP2 or Pope Francis, for now he gets no respect, but in the future, I predict, that will change.

 
This is Poussin's Adam and Eve (1639), with someone in the clouds appearing to wave hello. But Eve isn't waving back. She's looking at Adam, pointing her finger upward in an abstract way.

Maybe she’s only saying, “I think it's going to rain.” But given the nature of such paintings, we know that’s not the case. They are meant to be pictorial sermons. At first I enjoyed the gender reversal: it's Eve doing the preaching. Then a friend said the obvious: Eve is pointing out the Forbidden Tree to Adam, encouraging him. Yes, of course. I was so distracted by the pale figure in the sky I didn’t even notice the fruit-laden trees.

BUT AREN’T ATHEISTS TERRIFIED OF DYING?

There isn’t a human being who has never been terrified of dying. It’s only normal, especially in a dangerous situation, e.g. being in midst of tornado, or being shot at. But I know that the question isn’t about the times of danger when we are on automatic; even the most deranged schizophrenics have been observed to evacuate a building on fire with great efficiency. Never mind philosophy: we seem to have a huge interest in existing.

But this is not about running out of a burning building. It’s more about waking up in the wee hours, safe in our comfortable bed yet suddenly seized with mortal dread.

I'm not sure if those moments are universal, but I have no trouble admitting that they have happened to me, and the intensity of the terror is unforgettable. But the interesting part is that I can’t remember the last time I experienced such a moment. What I do remember is that those moments used to happen with some regularity when I was young.

Ah, wistful words: “when I was young.” The unavoidable past tense. There were some very good things about being young, but . . .  there were some bad things too. And the worst period of youth was before I found my vocation.

In my twenties and even into my early thirties, I felt lost. I had no idea how to use my intelligence and intellectual skills, and what scattered but considerable knowledge I had. A wise counselor said, “You don’t fit into any category. You will have to create your own career.” But how? I did show an early interest in writing, but it was derailed by the verdict of “no talent” from an instructor (some people could be called “anti-mentors”). I’d throw myself into this or that field, only to see my interest die within a year or two. My jobs didn’t really engage my mind. My life was “not working.” And . . . I was experiencing occasional panic attacks about dying. It didn’t matter if I was miserable — the thought of not ceasing to exist was unbearable.

To summarize a long and complicated journey, in my mid-thirties I did gain a sense of vocation and my life’s work. I was busy with that work, and have been ever since — except for a period of mid-life depression, when I lost the sense of my vocation. I eventually regained it, in a changed form. Being cornered by mortality was a big part of that story, which I told many times. The gist of it is, again: work, vocation.

When I came upon Rilke’s “To work is to live without dying,” it made perfect sense to me. My experience exactly.

St. Augustine said something like (I quote from memory): “The key to immortality is to lead a life worth remembering.” I translate that as not literal immortality, but simply as not thinking about dying except once in a while — with some sadness, but without terror. The feeling of gratitude has long ago become dominant. I am grateful for having been able to make my modest contribution. I continue to share beauty and what I hope is some wisdom — or at least depth and honesty in my writing.

And yes, there is Epicurus, and that could be the answer right there. But personally speaking, my answer isn’t based on philosophy or logic. I’m simply too busy living.

What if I lost my ability to contribute? I'm beginning to suspect that simply enjoying life at a receptive level might be enough. It wouldn’t have been enough in my younger years, when I intensely needed to be productive. I realize that it’s not just my work experiences that I’ve come to regard as a “life worth remembering,” but all kinds of rich and beautiful experiences — and some painful but important experiences — even if they did not result in essays or poems. I’ve certainly been “mellowing.”

I don’t believe we “go anywhere” once the brain ceases to function. The consciousness ceases to happen (consciousness is a process, not a thing) the way a flame ceases when whatever sustained it is exhausted. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the lovely light. 

But what about the dying itself? Won’t that be terrifying?

Probably not. Experienced nurses tell us that practically everyone dies peacefully. Brain function diminishes; a special neurochemistry of natural dying comes into play, and it’s gentle: nature's last mercy. Dennis Nurske wrote a lovely short poem about it:

Psalm to Be Read with Closed Eyes
 
Ignorance will carry me through the last days,
the blistering cities, over briny rivers
swarming with jellyfish, as once my father
carried me from the car up the tacked carpet
to the white bed, and if I woke, I never knew it.


 
OBESITY GUT BACTERIA VERSUS SLENDERNESS BACTERIA
 
(For many years now I've been reading stories to the effect that fat people have different gut bacteria than lean people, but this one is the most specific yet).

“The logic behind weight-loss surgery seems simple: rearrange the digestive tract so the stomach can hold less food and the food bypasses part of the small intestine, allowing fewer of a meal's calories to be absorbed. Bye-bye, obesity.

A study of lab mice, published on Wednesday, begs to differ. It concludes that one of the most common and effective forms of bariatric surgery, called Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, melts away pounds not — or not only — by re-routing the digestive tract, as long thought, but by changing the bacteria in the gut.

Or, in non-scientific terms, the surgery somehow replaces fattening microbes with slimming ones.

If that occurs in people, too, then the same bacteria-changing legerdemain achieved by gastric bypass might be accomplished without putting obese patients under the knife in an expensive and risky operation.

"These elegant experiments show that you can mimic the action of surgery with something less invasive," said Dr. Francesco Rubino of Catholic University in Rome and a pioneer in gastric-bypass surgery. "For instance, you might transfer bacteria or even manipulate the diet" to encourage slimming bacteria and squelch fattening kinds, said Rubino, who was not involved in the study.

Fattening bugs, slimming bugs
 
For many obese patients, particularly those with type 2 diabetes, gastric bypass has succeeded where nothing else has. Severely obese patients routinely lose 65 to 75 percent of their excess weight and fat after the operation, studies show, and leave their diabetes behind.

Oddly, however, the diabetes remission often occurs before significant weight loss. That has made bypass surgeons and weight-loss experts suspect that Roux-en-Y changes not only anatomy but also metabolism or the endocrine system. In other words, the surgery does something besides re-plumb the gut.

That "something," according to previous studies, includes altering the mix of trillions of microbes in the digestive tract. Not only are the "gut microbiota" different in lean people and obese people, but the mix of microbes changes after an obese patient undergoes gastric bypass and becomes more like the microbiota in lean people.

Researchers did not know, however, whether the microbial change was the cause or the effect of post-bypass weight loss.

That is what the new study, by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, set out to answer.

They first performed Roux-en-Y on obese mice. As expected, the animals quickly slimmed down, losing 29 percent of their weight and keeping it off, the researchers report in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

To make sure there was not something about the general experience of surgery, rather than gastric bypass specifically, that affected the animals, the scientists performed "sham" Roux-en-Y on other obese mice. In this procedure, the researchers made incisions as if they were going to do a gastric bypass, but instead connected everything up as nature had it.

The researchers then transferred gut microbiota from the Roux-en-Y mice to microbe-free obese mice. Result: the recipient mice lost weight and fat - no surgery required. Crucially, obese mice that received gut bugs from mice that had received sham Roux-en-Y, not the real thing, did not slim down.

It is the first experimental evidence that changes in the gut microbiota cause the weight loss after gastric bypass, and that the new, post-bypass mix of microbes can cause weight loss in animals that did not have surgery.

In particular, just a week after surgery the Roux-en-Y mice harbored relatively more of the same types of bacteria that become more abundant in people after gastric bypass and that lean people have naturally.

"The effects of gastric bypass are not just anatomical, as we thought," said Dr. Lee Kaplan, senior author of the study and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "They're also physiological. Now we need to learn more about how the microbiota exert their effects."

Slimming bacteria work their magic in either of two ways, studies of gut microbiota show. They seem to raise metabolism, allowing people to burn off a 630-calorie chocolate chip muffin more easily.

They also extract fewer calories from the muffin in the first place. In contrast, fattening bacteria wrest every last calorie from food.

Transferring slimming bacteria into obese people might be one way to give them the benefits of weight-loss surgery without an operation. It might also be possible to devise a menu that encourages the proliferation of slimming bacteria and reduces the population of fattening bacteria.

Another new study found that figuring out whether you have slimming microbiota or fattening ones might be as easy as breathing.

In a study published in the online edition of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles report that people whose breath has high concentrations of both hydrogen and methane gases are more likely to have a higher body mass index and higher percentage of body fat.

Methane is associated with bacteria called Methanobrevibacter smithii, which in overabundance may cause weight gain by extracting calories from food super-efficiently, Cedars' Ruchi Mathur, who led the study, said: "It could allow a person to harvest more calories from their food."

The breath test could provide a warning that someone is at risk of obesity because he harbors fattening microbiota.

It could also validate what many overweight people have long suspected: if their slim friends eat two slices of bacon-cheeseburger pizza the 600 calories go through them like celery, but if the overweight person indulges then every calorie seems to turn into more fat. People absorb different quantities of calories from the exact same food, thanks to their gut microbiota.”

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/03/28/after-weight-loss-surgery-new-gut-bacteria-keep-obesity-away.html

Sea lions in La Jolla Cove. Photo: Gwyn Henry

ending on beauty

I looked into the waters
seeing not only
my reflected face
but the great sky
that framed my lonely figure . . .
and I allowed myself
to be
astonished
by the great everywhere
calling to me
like an old,
invisible and unspoken
invitation

~ David Whyte, from “Twice Blessed”

photo: David Whyte

WE HAVE ALREADY LIVED IN THE REAL PARADISE

Caspar Friedrich, The Chalk Cliffs on Ruegen, 1818

The past week started badly: Monday I woke from a nightmare in the wee hours, my heart pounding so loud and fast that scared me as much as the nightmare itself. The dream seemed a relapse to the years when I had recurrent dreams about being in a Nazi concentration camp. Then, in two dreams in a row, I was able to escape (in the last one, simply walk out) – and thought that this was the end of that nasty series. I even celebrated it with a little poem that wrote itself in my early minimalist, unpunctuated style (startling, those incursions of a younger inner poet):

THE ROAD TAKEN

Only a year ago I finally understood
the kingdom of hell
is within you
and chose to walk out of
that concentration camp

the gate’s wide wings stood open
the guards diligently did not look
the road led through sunlit woods
between bridal birches the road in heaven
I must have seen in childhood and forever

and only yesterday looking out the window
I thought this is my country now and not
a Nazi factory or a Siberian gulag
astonished that after all
I wasn’t sentenced to hard labor

only this morning I saw
my task is to keep on walking
reading sunlight and shadow
listening to birds in all their languages
announce the holy word home

~ Oriana © 2012

**

Re-reading the poem after my nightmare I remembered that in the camp lingo, “the road to heaven” – Himmelweg – meant to way to the gas chamber.

So there it was, an invasion of the awareness of evil into what otherwise seemed like a peaceful and happy period of my life. Another night’s good sleep normalized me, but I know I’ll remember this experience as another example of how the good and the bad, sickness and health, happiness and unhappiness, and side by side, woven (or maybe “tangled”) together. Just when you think everything is going great, life will send you a reminder that things are never so simple. And the other way: even while watching a harrowing Holocaust movie like “In Darkness” (one of the best ever, comparable to “The Pianist”), I couldn’t help thinking, “These are the cutest rats.” Pigeons never looked so good either as glimpsed from that sewer manhole.

Evil, evil everywhere. Evil and flowers and iridescent pigeons (isn’t it time to admit how beautiful pigeons are?) Thus, when Jack Gilbert says, “We have already lived in the real paradise,” I nod my head (a gross understatement: when I first came upon the line, it hit me with great power). I, with my nightmares and memories I’d rather not come near – though I don’t claim to have suffered more than most – I am strangely moved and shaken by this assertion: “We have already lived in the real paradise.” Not the imaginary one, but the real, imperfect paradise, to steal Linda Pastan’s phrase.

Yes, our very imperfect paradise, with one kind of hell or another periodically tossed in. I don’t know a single adult who’s been spared, who doesn’t know what pain is. But paradise nevertheless. And that is stunning, that we have had such abundance of beauty and affection. I think that has kept most of us alive – the secret knowledge that no matter how great the suffering of the moment, we know what paradise is because we have seen and experienced it. When people say, peacefully, that they are ready to depart, I sense that they feel they have already had their share of paradise.

We judge a poet by his or her best poems. And ultimately, I think, we also remember life by life’s best poems. I’m a softie. One great sunset, and I forgive everything.

Gilbert puts it best:

GETTING AWAY WITH IT

We have already lived in the real paradise.
Horses in the empty summer street.
Me eating the hot wurst I couldn’t afford,
in frozen Munich, tears dropping. We can
remember. A child in the outfield waiting
for the last fly ball of the year. So dark
already it was black against heaven.
The voices trailing away to dinner,
calling faintly in the immense distance.
Standing with my hands open, watching it
curve over and start down, turning white
at the last second. Hands down. Flourishing.

~ Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven

Gilbert deliberately chooses non-spectacular details: horses in the empty summer street, eating a hot sausage on a freezing day, “the voices trailing away to dinner, / calling faintly in the immense distance.” The ball “black against heaven,” then turning white when very close. I know nothing about baseball, and my examples would be different, but I know what Gilbert is trying to convey: the wonderful moments can’t be denied. And maybe the harder the life, the more the moments of grace seem paradise. During my hardest years, the years of perdition, I remember hearing Haydn’s trios for the first time. So yes, I have already lived in the real paradise.

In a short poem, every word matters. It’s interesting that Gilbert chooses the word “heaven” (“already it was black against heaven”) rather than “sky.” “Heaven” amplifies “paradise” – the paradise in this life, as the poem makes clear. Gilbert’s heaven is in line with Jack Lennon’s “above us, only sky” (“Imagine”), but having that sky is marvelous. Later we have “voices . . . calling faintly in the immense distance.” These are human voices, the voices of mothers calling their boys home, and the distance is not literally immense. It’s immense in memory, and immense when we think of all the mothers calling their children home for dinner.

It’s not that Gilbert doesn’t realize that there is much evil in the world. But in his view, “we must risk delight.” Even if another, gentler world awaits, we must drink in the glory of the earth. In one of his best-known poems, “A Brief for the Defense,” Gilbert insists,

To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end has magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.

           

“Music despite everything.” While seeing earth as paradise, at least some of the time, is a modern attitude, music has often been recognized as a portion of divinity that we can know while alive. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s praise of music could hardly be higher:

Music, the greatest good that mortals know,

And all of heaven we have below.

For all my love of music, I must object. Music is all of heaven we know? My heaven includes the shrill cry of a seagull, the ocean waves, the mountain meadows, the great mossy woods of northern climates – the list could go on and on, and include also the beautiful silences when love is being born, the lovers’ happy laughter, the affectionate talk of heart-to-heart friends. With more domestic comfort now and less premature dying, we can relax and look around: there is indeed plenty to celebrate, and this is not the Vale of Tears even if it occasionally seems just that.

Keats put it much better by calling the world “the Vale of Soul-Making.” Jung spoke of “individuation.” Maslow came up with “self-actualization.” Then there is the worn phrase, “fulfilling our potential.” It’s a modern ideal; we know that in traditional societies there was much less freedom to explore and pursue one’s interests. I shudder when I think of the past. I find history fascinating, but there is no century in which I’d rather live, especially as a woman.

Joseph Campbell disposed of questions about paradise by saying, Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all you need. He defined “sacred space” as a “place that lets you experience your own will, your own intention, your own wish.” (A room of her own! Did Virginia Woolf know how revolutionary her suggestion was?) This sacred space can be your study and/or your kitchen (women will understand what I mean), or, in the absence a whole room to yourself, a favorite armchair where it’s quiet enough to hear your thoughts – where you can read, and from where you can watch the birds. But Campbell also speaks about the “sacred space within yourself” – “the further you can get into that, the more at peace you will be with yourself.” For me that going into that inner sacred space occurs when I’m deeply engaged in reading or writing. For someone else it might be gardening. We are unique, and our sacred space, within and without, is also unique. Let’s cherish it. Let’s get a geode or a cluster of crystals to “mark our territory.”

“Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do” – that’s certainly one quite plausible definition of paradise. But simply experiencing the beauty of nature is paradise. Yet before the cognitive evolution that has allowed us to see the earth as paradise, even a poet who was a great lover, even a worshipper, of nature’s beauty, Wordsworth assumed that the real paradise is elsewhere – this is where the soul comes from. In his most famous ode, he says,

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

   Hath had elsewhere its setting,

       And cometh from afar.

This sentiment is still repeated by the likes of David Whyte and many other New Age writers. They assume that our essence is not terrestrial but astral, formed on a different, “higher” plane – in the true paradise whose memory we lose as we grow beyond infancy. I’m amazed that the medieval attitude of rejecting the world is still with us, though the ideas of the “fall of man” and exile from the original paradise, or humanity’s decline from the “Golden Age” to the “Silver Age” to the “Iron Age” and so on, a constant diminishment from the original perfection – such notions are finally on their way to becoming intellectual relics. The denigration of this world has long been recognized as essential to organized religion’s attempt to sell to us the next one, with or without the seventy-two virgins. I have to exempt Judaism here, with its solid earthiness and this-life orientation. And I hurry to say that both Wordsworth and Whyte celebrate the beauty of the earth.

Wordsworth was a pioneer. We owe it to the Romantics that the beauty of the nature became celebrated. In the Western culture, for many centuries nature used to be seen as merely savage and dangerous. Forests and mountains were the meeting places of witches. Before 1750 or so, the idea of hiking in the wilderness for pleasure would strike most people as insane.

Contrast this with Byron’s famous lines in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

As for Wordsworth's descriptions of nature, there are too many to choose from. I don't mean just his joy in the daffodils and rainbows and cuckoo calls, but more so his feelings of awe as he watches a sunset, the sea, forests and lakes, a mountain waterfall. Nature is his greatest inspiration, even though he goes only halfway toward the modern acknowledgment of the earth and this life as a difficult paradise of the sort that Jack Gilbert presents, along with many other modern poets. 

"We have already lived in the real paradise." For me, this line is revolutionary. Don't forget: I started in the Vale of Tears. An unbaptized infant was already a depraved sinner. All non-Catholics were doomed to burn in hell fire forever. Using the microphone, priests continued to preach the Dark Ages. It's been quite a journey before I could embrace this life and this glorious blue-green planet. 

. . . paradise was when
Dante
regathered from height and depth
   came out onto the soft, green level earth
into the natural light

~ A. R. Ammons

Let me close with this passage from David Wagoner’s “Getting There”:

What have you learned so far? You’ll find out later,
Telling it haltingly
Like a dream, that lost traveler’s dream
Under the last hill
Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.

You’ve earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another
Journey without regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom

~ David Wagoner In Broken Country

Hyacinth:

It seems to me that each blog gets better and explores or maybe sets up the exploring of things I am writing about. It inspires me to not give up when I think I'm so far off the meaning of what I want to say. David Whyte has been an influence on my writing. I like especially the way when he gives a reading he repeats a line maybe several times or reads the whole poem over. We get more out of it at every reread, and he knows this.

Oriana:

Thank you. I feel that I’m deepening my own exploration of various central themes that engaged me over the years. What I seek in poetry is wisdom – an unfashionable attitude, so I’m thankful to all the readers of this blog for their loyalty and interest.

David Whyte has done a service to poetry lovers. I hope I didn’t come across as condemning him. His New Age incursions are few; on the whole he is in awe of the mystery of life right here. He wants us to listen to our deeper knowing. Insofar as I’ve done it, it has moved me toward my “happy atheist” stance and away from any delusions of a better life in some New Age neverland. We should call ourselves earthlings or something similar that would announce our being part of nature. It’s the constant setting ourselves as apart from nature that has brought about much evil. We evolved right here, in this glorious place; let’s fully embrace our home. 

**

(I sent John an old Jewish saying: Life is so terrible that it would have been better not to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand.”)

John:

Good quote – it gets to the complexity at the heart of so many things.  I think people like to see the world and life and themselves simply (I'm blessed) but it's not just that.  We're also doomed and damned and happy and confused and clear

– all at the same time.  My mother was in a convalescent home recovering from cancer surgery and she heard some nurses down the hall laughing about something and she turned to me and said, "Half of us are dying and the other half are going to a party."  

I think what she was said was true about the self too.

Oriana:

Yes, I remember it – another wonderful quote from your mother. It does apply to life, to self. Everyone’s life is part happiness, part suffering. Yet we see life as a blessing, as having a great value. I’ve grown to love this quotation: “There will be music in spite of everything” ~ Jack Gilbert. And his life was rough in so many ways (I speak in the past tense, since now he has dementia).

Yes, we have to acknowledge both the paradise and the suffering. It’s still a real paradise, but when hell opens up, it’s real too. Again, it helps to remember that there will be music in spite of everything. There will be beauty, and couples who have just fallen in love, and laughter, and joy.

WE ANSWER BY LIVING

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 cataloging 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 Big 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.” 

Or, as the Buddha said, The purpose of life is to find your purpose in life, and then to live it fully. 


**

After a semi-surrealist poetry workshop:

I feel tremendously thistled by David Whyte’s saying we come from another world, not from this night but a “greater night.” No, we milkweed-parachuted here on earth, blown over by the erotic wind. Whyte 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”?