RILKE: BEAUTY AND TERROR

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
by that greater existence. For beauty is
but the beginning of terror we are still able to endure,
and we admire it so because it serenely
disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.

~ Rilke, First Duino Elegy

If angels and other super-human beings -- providing they even exist -- do not hear us, then, Rilke asks, who can we turn to in our need? That unspecified need ultimately always comes to this: our terror of death, of non-being. Rilke is on that cusp of modernity that’s still willing to let immortals exist, but, as the enlightenment-era deists claimed earlier, the gods can’t hear us.

Then who can we turn to?

Not angels, not men;
and already the knowing animals
guess we don’t feel truly at home
in the interpreted world.
Can we turn to a lover? Are lovers not a great example of giving strength to each other? Rilke doesn’t trust romantic love that way:

. . . Is it easier for lovers? Alas,
with each other they only conceal their fate.
Even the consolations of nature don’t entirely suffice -- not the night, nor the wind that “gnaws at our faces.” Ultimately Rilke settles for music, though some doubt remains:

Is the old tale in vain
that tells how music began
in the mourning for Linos
piercing the arid numbness,
and, in that stunned space
where an almost godlike youth
suddenly ceased to exist,
made the emptiness vibrate in ways
that charm us, comfort and help?

The Greek poets would have said, “a godlike youth,” without the qualifier. But modernity doesn’t dare reach for such certainty. And that’s perhaps why only music, not needing words, can still soar. 
























Why do so many poems dance the dance of death? And why are dark poems [usually] more interesting and powerful? How do we account for the pervasive darkness of poetry -- not just in great poetry, and certainly not just the famous elegies, but 90% or more of poetry in general. When Billy Collins said, “poetry is an unending funeral,” we all nodded in agreement. That poetry deals with death and loss is a truism; even love poetry tends to have mortality as a hidden theme. Why? I once wrote an essay about it, but I don’t remember if I posted it.

How come I don’t remember? Well, adrenaline greatly helps us remember things, and there must not have been enough adrenaline in me at the time . . .  I’m no longer the high-adrenaline babe I used to be (a long sigh here, both of relief and sadness). And look, I inserted “usually” into the second sentence of the preceding paragraph -- a sign of intellectual caution, of the age of mind rather than the age of vitality, as Milosz aptly labeled the two phases in almost (“almost”!) every writer’s creativity.

*

I’m reading Rick Hanson’s Buddha’s Brain. This morning I was reading about how the brain is wired for "bad news" – the so-called "negativity bias." Every paragraph held my interest. The evidence was compelling: yes, of course it’s a hard-wired neural bias. Then, after making us see how we are compelled to remember the bad, the dark, and above all the scary, Hanson turns to the need for positive experiences and emotions. It's a rather boring chapter, and I made this discovery: positive experiences are soon forgotten because they tend to be boring, e.g. a trip to the zoo when everything went smoothly, no one fell into the moat separating the visitors from the lions, and the only controversy was whether to have lunch now or later.

If Adam Zagajewski had turned out to be genial and pleasant, chit-chatting with me about the weather or reminiscing about the problem Milosz had with deer grazing in his garden in Berkeley, how much would I remember about the Vermont experience? The badness was unpleasant while I was there and before it all fell together when I read about Asperger’s Syndrome. Now, with more understanding and the emotional discomfort long over, I find those memories interesting and also quite funny: a funny funeral, if you will. His bursts of narcissistic rage were priceless, as was his low tolerance for upstarts like the the ones gathered at the Vermont Studio Center who dared call themselves poets. And the impressive amount of talent, skill, and serious dedication displayed by at least half of those poets -- would I have noticed it as acutely if not for the counterpoint of Zagajewski’s attitude: “I and I alone am a real poet in this place”?

Also, in a different realm, would I have noticed how friendly Americans are in general if not for the contrast? Would I have found my fellow poets, writers, and visual artists so downright adorable? Perfect strangers smiling at me -- would I have even noticed in a low-adrenaline state?

*

To return to the book and the issue of how interesting and memorable dark experiences are. True, some mainly positive experiences can be interesting, but that’s because there is some tension mixed in: paradise, yes, but with the threat of loss. Falling in love is interesting. I find the very expression: to FALL in love -- unique, I think, to the English language -- to be psychologically brilliant. Likewise, novelty alone produces some tension as the brain is roused up and wildly scanning this new environment to make sure there is no danger to survival. Adrenaline, a flight or fight hormone, makes us remember things. Let me repeat this with more emphasis because it’s so important: ADRENALINE MAKES US REMEMBER THINGS. It's a great aid to memory formation. If you block adrenaline receptors, you block the memory. That’s how we (and other animals) evolved: adrenaline made us remember what leads to danger and what favors survival.

I found Terrence Malick’s 2011 movie, The Tree of Life, boring beyond belief because it has long “happy” sequences of a toddler doing toddler-type things, and then young boys doing young-boy things such as kicking a can etc -- hence the idea that it should be retitled “A Boy’s Life.” The father is authoritarian, needing to be the boss at any price, and that creates some tension, but the tension is not dramatic enough. The mother is just being a loving mother, without a single negative moment. The mother is a saint. There are some arguments with her husband, but we can't hear the words – we just assume she's defending the boys, so you can't blame her. And all ends well -- we are in heaven, which looks just like a California beach at sunset.

As movies go, The Tree of Life is an exception. I think movies in particular cater to our inborn negativity bias by presenting conflict and the drama around it. Any good story has the protagonist dealing with something bad. Even a Christmas movie such as “It’s a Wonderful Life” has plenty of darkness, including an attempted suicide! That’s the standard Hollywood technique: don’t make it all good or all bad, but create interest by mixing the two. Of course novels work the same way -- even pulp romances have the heroine nearly lose her purity.

The need for good-bad interweave also explains why happy-happy poems don’t really work, since even a poem needs some dramatic tension -- or call it A SHOT OF ADRENALINE. That’s why we can re-read Ancient Mariner, but who ever wants to re-read Wordsworth’s Prelude? Yes, even a poem has to have dramatic tension to hold our attention. As Zagajewski (a brilliant man who simply happens to have Asperger’s) said, “Poems are short tragedies.”

I’m thinking of a friend’s statement, “When you’re traveling, even the bad is good.” For a writer, the bad is especially good, a goldmine of material. If someone says, “My mother was a typical housewife,” who wants to hear about it? (This never stopped a certain woman whose name I blessedly forget from writing a four-section poem on the theme: Father liked mother’s apple pie best”?) But if someone says, “My mother was a schizophrenic,” or “On the way to a posh business party, I saw my mother searching for food in a dumpster,” you bet everyone's interested. The memoir becomes a best-seller. It doesn't have to be this extreme, but you get my drift.

Give me a good dark poem anytime. Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband is a work of genius from that perspective: funny in a very dark, brilliant way. Tears turned to diamonds. I loved it on my first reading. Now that I’m re-reading it, I love it even more. I’m awed by Carson’s genius, and I don’t use the word “genius” lightly. I reserve it for poets like Emily Dickinson.

I don’t mean to overstate the case for darkness. Some of my favorite music is an example of a positive experience that never bores me, and there are times I’d rather have the harmonies or Mozart than Beethoven’s drama. The beauty of nature doesn’t bore me, e.g. the Eastern Sierra or the Pacific Ocean. True, those are experiences of the sublime, and there is a threatening aspect to the sublime. In Rilke’s words, “beauty is but the beginning of terror, and we adore it so because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” But I don’t have to fall into the cascades at Whitney Portal in order to appreciate their beauty. The energy, the rush? Yes, but I also love looking at a calm lake.

It maybe true that it’s the outbreaks of the unpredictable and the threatening that stay in memory, the bear at the campground more so than another grand panorama, but I never saw a panorama I didn’t like. Animals don’t bore me. The only thing that makes me more happy than a kitten is two kittens. But some other experiences that are supposed to be positive – after a while I just go numb.

True, poetry readings that carry on and on, one poem darker than another, also make me numb. Ideally, we need an interweave: let the darkness deliver a jolt, a shot of adrenaline, rather than be a constant drizzle. Still, life can have long periods of constant drizzle, not to mention a vehement storm now and then. You have to admire poets for their honesty. They know better than to deliver sunshine, sunshine, sunshine.

What’s the point of poetry? It’s been said that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. I hold to the unpopular view that poetry too needs a thread of narrative on which to string its images; it needs both light and shadow to create dramatic tension. A poem is often a micro-narrative, a “short tragedy.” We are so strangely wired that we seem to need to deal with the bad news along with the good news. Our survival depends on it. And poetry is one way of grappling with the bad news. It is a safe container for it since the beauty of language is a victory, however slight, over the darkness. Those who love poetry do not mind the darkness.  

*

In any case, the darkness can’t be avoided if we want to live to the fullest:

You see that I want much.
Perhaps I want it all:
the darkness of every infinite instant,
the trembling light of every ascent.

~ Rilke, The Book of Hours

Rilke was familiar with Nietzsche (Lou Andreas-Salomé probably made sure of that), and Nietzsche’s command to “live dangerously.” Nietzsche, who also named alcohol and Christianity as “the two great European narcotics,” deemed it cowardice to try to avoid the distress that goes with any serious work toward an accomplishment. The hardship and darkness had to accepted and endured.

Nietzsche: The secret of harvesting from experience the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of it is -- to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!

True, some people take more risks while others timidly keep to the well-trodden path. But it seems to me that living is inherently “dangerous”: if you live long enough, the odds are that you will experience a personal tragedy and/or go through one or more periods of great suffering. I don’t know a single person who is an exception.

Creative people are in fact often given as an example of having been molded by a great deal of suffering. They often have to overcome an early trauma. “Overcome” is perhaps an overly optimistic term; in some ways, that trauma is always with them. When asked what a writer needs most, Hemingway famously replied, “An unhappy childhood.” And creative work itself, though a source of joy, also creates tension and frustration, and often the feeling of being a total failure. The light of a dream that an artist carries in her ascent is indeed like a trembling candle flame.

*

At the same time, we need to take care not to embrace the cult of suffering. There is much to be said for the Daoist principle of wu-wei: “not straining.” For all that has been said about the ratio of inspiration to perspiration, too much deliberate effort can interfere with inspiration. One of the most important principles of creative work is not to sweat too much. When an impasse develops, it’s best to walk away from the work. The unconscious will keep working on the problem, producing a solution unexpectedly and often at a notoriously inconvenient time, as when you are in the shower. That’s tough: you end the shower quickly and start scribbling. When the muse knocks, you open. Otherwise the muse will cease to visit.

*

But it won’t do to say that poetry is dark, the darkest of all literary genres. Great poetry tends to affirm life in spite the inevitable fate, in spite of mortality. Though we know that love brings pain and not just joy -- “that which is your greatest joy will also be your greatest grief” -- and even though we know what awaits us -- we’ve seen the cemeteries -- just to live is transcendent. As Rilke says in the Seventh Elegy: “to have been here even once is beyond words.” 

Again and again, though we know the landscape of love

and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,

and the frightening silent abyss into which the others

fall: again and again the two of us walk out together

under the ancient trees, lie down again and again

among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

~ Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell

SUFFERING FOR NON-BELIEVERS

WHY I DIDN’T COMMIT SUICIDE

                         Let us then begin
                         to walk toward infinity.
                         ~ Chuang-Tzu, The True Book of the Southern Flower

I slipped into my body’s warmth
as into a snug glove,
closed my eyes,
tucked in the blanket’s soft dark.

Suddenly a blackness
blacker than the night,
blackness like black lightning,
the edge of a scream:

my death.

I sat up, mouth open –
blackness
poured out of my throat.

Then far away I saw
a light brighter than any star.
Stepping on nothing
I began to walk
toward it until I fell sleep.

It was not a white fire
on the other shore,
pointing to something else.
There was nothing else.
I didn’t believe in God.

But a question had been asked.
My answer was blackness,
and that light
seemed another answer.

A friend once asked
why I didn’t commit suicide.

There was no need to.
In death I’d seen my life:
a pathless way across darkness
and the calm, inexhaustible light.

~ Oriana © 2013

The event described here took place when I was 25. I didn’t write the poem until I some ten years later. And even then I didn’t have the complete clarity I have now: this vision was produced by my brain in order to soothe me. It was effective at that moment. Later I thought a lot about it -- unforgettable!  But I never equated it with external reality.

Years later I read Jung on salvation being a journey toward the star within. I wouldn’t  use the word “salvation,” but I did experience something of this journey. Knowing which way to go meant everything.

If someone wants to call my “cosmic vision” a hallucination, I have no problem with that. Extreme emotions can cause hallucinations, often very interesting ones. The human brain has its amazing ways. 

*

Yesterday I entered a cloud bank enveloping the Coronado Bridge. The fog was thick enough to require headlights. And the city of Coronado was in fog too. With events of my life making me think of limbo, I thought, “I’ve entered the cloud of unknowing.”

Twenty minutes later, Coronado basked in the beautiful November sunlight, warm, almost coppery. You can’t be completely unhappy in light like that.

*

Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial. ~ Nietzsche

It still takes Nietzsche to say something as politically incorrect as this, and as exhilarating. Do we need “mystical” explanations of the universe? I think we can enjoy the mysterious without multiplying useless metaphysics.

I am thrilled that it's finally OK to reject mysticism and not provoke a storm by saying there is no soul nor the "beyond." When someone dies, he remains in the memory of others -- and that to me is an awe-inspiring neurobiological mystery. The underworld of our dreams is stranger and more fascinating than any idea of the afterlife. 

 *

I remember a TV interview with Ayn Rand, a public atheist. I’m not a fan of most of Rand’s ideas, but I admit I was impressed with her intelligence and her courage not to hide in agnosticism. “Now that you’ve become a widow,” the host began, “now that you’ve lost your husband, do you understand why people believe in god?” I admit I don’t remember Rand’s exact reply, and realize that I’m using her striking statement because that’s the one that engraved itself in my memory: “I define god as that which is the highest, and you don’t lose that.”

“That which is the highest” will of course differ from person to person. I’m also reminded of Ezra Pound’s

That which thou lovest best
remains,
that which thou lovest best
shall not be reft from thee.

 
*
~ After becoming disabled in an accident I did wish there was a consciousness -- or whatever you want to call a god -- to bargain with. That was a stressful, life altering event, but it did not change my beliefs that stem from logical reasoning and education.

I am an atheist in a fox hole.

~ I'm sorry to hear of your accident and subsequent disability. I was diagnosed with stage III/IV cancer two weeks ago (I'm 47 years old, the cancer will be better staged tomorrow when I have major surgery) -- and as an atheist I also didn't have even the teensiest tiniest little bit of epiphany or conversion or repentance or whatever it is that these people think I was supposed to have. I'm not in a foxhole although I am facing my own mortality in a very real way. I definitely have fears (mostly about how my death would affect my wife's life), but I'm still rational. To your good health (and mine too) -- cheers.

~ I live marginally above the poverty level on disability income due to an organ transplant. I have a number of health problems resulting from the illness that caused me to need a transplant including brittle bones which have resulted in my spine slowly collapsing upon itself leading to chronic pain. I have to take very expensive medications and that leads to anxiety over losing medical benefits through budget cuts, bureaucratic whim, or other things. I have problems with hernias from the transplant operation that need to be surgically corrected every few years. My partner does not have health insurance and is a cancer survivor. That leads to a lot of anxiety because we can't afford to pay out of pocket for the yearly screenings he needs to be sure his cancer is not returning.
So, I'd say my life isn't very "comfortable." I have a lot of stress both physical and mental to deal with and yet, I do not run to a god praying. I rely on my own wits, the help of family and friends when necessary. I'll leave the begging and pleading to imaginary friends up to charlatans like [name omitted]

~ I don't know about anyone else but when I'm under severe amounts of stress, religion and God are the last things that I think about. Then people use the phrase with you that “God never gives a person more than they can handle.” To which I always replied “God's pushing their luck then.” To appease them. The whole time thinking that God's not the one giving me all this stress. My boss is giving me these piles and emails. Bills are taking all my money. Time is breaking down my home so it needs repairs. It’s not God. It’s people, weather, and time. Medicine and science makes me better, not God. Praying for God to help me doesn't do anything. Asking my family and friends to help me does. I believe in karma not God. I believe in being a good person & helping others less fortunate. That will make me stronger, not praying for strength. I have a hard time understanding, sympathizing, or empathizing with my family of religious driven people.
 
~ readers’ comments following an article rebutting the idea that under severe stress non-believers rush to religion (the old “No atheists in foxholes” argument) 

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201104/rebutting-more-outlandish-statements-about-atheists

an abandoned church (St. Boniface in Chicago)
 
*

Is suffering a test of atheism? Yes, this is a deliberate play on the old phrase that suffering is a test of faith (cf the story of Job). Studies indicate that the more suffering (poverty, illness, job insecurity), the more religiosity, and the more contentment in one’s life, the less interest in the supernatural. Atheism has been called the ultimate white privilege and a luxury stemming from a comfortable, secure life. The idea of “no atheists in foxholes” has been questioned; not so the finding that, aside from the rich districts of Johannesburg, there are virtually no atheists in sub-Saharan Africa.

Study after study has found religiosity correlated with hardship. Among the comfortable no one seems to miss the missing god. Who needs god when you are happy? You’re too busy being happy to think about metaphysics. If you have a strong need to express gratitude, you can always thank the universe and the people you love.

Happiness makes god as unnecessary as Stephen Hawking says he is. No new lovers wish to put Jesus at the center of their relationship (Jesus, let’s not forget, advised people to leave their spouses and children and follow him, since the end of the world was about to begin). But the argument as old as that of Satan in the Book of Job insists: just something take away your happiness and security, and we’ll see what happens to your faith (or atheism).

In the case of Job, however, Satan’s logic was the opposite of modern thinking: the Adversary (introduced as one of the sons of god) pointed out to Yahweh as the latter boasted of his faithful servant Job, that Job had every reason to be pious: he’d been blessed in every way. But take away his blessings, and he’ll CURSE god to his face. Not beg for mercy, but CURSE.

But Job’s response turned out to be quite complex. He continued to protest his innocence, which, his friends warned him, was to accuse god of injustice. Eventually he cursed the day he was born -- a milder form of cursing god, who presumably willed it that Job be born. And then, receiving no rational answer about the true cause of his suffering but only a narcissistic rant boasting particularly of the leviathan the behemoth as supreme marvels of creation, Job realized that he’s dealing with a dangerous lunatic who needs to be appeased with praise.

In a milder, modern version of Job, popularized by Rabbi Kushner, when bad things happen to good people, those good people who have enough remnant belief can turn to a new concept of god for comfort. Not for physical help -- this god will not break the laws of nature -- but for emotional solace of knowing that god cares and suffers with you (the idea of a happy, serene god is Eastern, not Western -- not counting the old pagan gods enjoying themselves to the hilt).

Making god suffer with me is the last thing I’d want. So I turn to music instead. In fact, my brain does it automatically, playing its own selections. Recently I was hit with major stress. I was startled to hear the International in my head, in Polish. I always loved the tune. Then I heard the Ode to Joy. And the Marseillaise. A Chopin impromptu. And on and on, until only Happy Birthday to You was left, which I quickly dismissed in favor of more Ode to Joy, all the time marveling at my brain’s attempts to soothe me. I don’t feel alone: I have myself. 

*

My own experience of suffering has had a convoluted history. It’s not even been entirely about suffering versus contentment, but about ideas versus ideas.

I suffered most during my twenties. I cried a lot (daily) and thought about suicide a lot (daily). Still, I never prayed. It simply didn’t occur to me. I don’t remember ever thinking of god during those years. There is some possibility that maybe I did, but later forgot. If so, I probably asked, “Why have you abandoned me?” (But I don’t remember asking that; I had real abandonments to come to terms with.)

The theist temptation emerged later, when I was in my thirties and my suffering lessened from acute to chronic. Thinking about religion was a luxury stemming from easier life. In my late twenties, I was too busy suffering to think about religion. Only later, when I was less desperate, I had enough leisure and material security to indulge in a “spiritual quest.”

Equally important, or possibly most important, the New Age movement was exploding. We were deluged with books on astrology, Tarot, synchronicity, intuitive healing, visualization as a tool for accomplishing “anything you want in life,” chanting for prosperity, and the “course in miracles.” You want a miracle? Scores of authors presented their recipes for “manifesting” a miracle.

How seductive those ideas were! Relax: life should be effortless and magical. “How to Live a Magical Life” was an actual book title, typical of the mentality of those years. It's enough to think about something and you'll “attract it” into your life. Suddenly I heard and read the opposite of what I had in childhood: not condemnation for being sinful, but "You are wonderful! You are magnificent! You have unlimited potential! You can be anything you want to be!” And of course the enormously seductive idea that what we are REALLY afraid of is our greatness.

And those books and magazines, even though I was browsing in them “just for fun,” smuggled in a new concept of god (sometimes called the Source or the Universe, which made it a lot more palatable): a totally benevolent deity (or universe) that wants you to be happy. Not the vengeful archaic deity, not the angry god. This was a friendly, happy, serene god, vaguely having something to do with quantum physics (or whose existence could allegedly be proved if only we understood quantum physics). The door of theist doubt was creaking open. Possibly the “real god” was somehow inherent in the universe, a friendly “ground of being” -- all you needed to know was the “laws of life” such as the Law of Attraction.

The priests and nuns of my childhood never suggested that god wants us to be happy. On the contrary, “God sends suffering to those he loves.” Suffering was holy; it was good for you. If Jesus suffered, then you should be glad you are suffering also. And the more you suffer in this life, the less time in Purgatory, since you have already “pre-suffered.” When I left the church, I thought this embrace of suffering went by the wayside, along with seeing myself as a wretched sinner and the rest of the masochistic nonsense.

But did it? True, I never saw suffering as redemptive. I knew it too well to think of it as ennobling. Did a bad knee ever make anyone a better person? Or a headache raise anyone’s thoughts to a higher plane? Or chronic depression lead to altruism?

*

Hangs by a thread --
Whatever it is. Stripped naked.
Shivering. Human. Mortal.
On a thread thinner than starlight.

By a power of a feeling
Hangs, impossible, unthinkable,
Between the earth and the sky.
I, it says. I. I.

And how it boasts
That everything that is to be known
About the wind
Is being revealed to is as it hangs.

~ Charles Simic, section I of “Two Riddles”

Yes, that boasting about how suffering imparts insight and knowledge. As if insight and knowledge never came from positive experiences.

*

Yet how come I had no interest in happiness, and in fact despised it? Why was the image of a fasting nun a lot more attractive than the image of a foodie enjoying dessert? The ascetic/heroic ideal always had more appeal. When a friend said, “My number one goal is to enjoy life,” I quickly turned away to hide my bottomless contempt.

And yet, strange to say, the same friend, who happened to have asthma, said she didn’t want to see a cure for asthma. Science should not try to find cures for diseases, she said. “Suffering is good for us. It makes us more spiritual.” Otherwise, I guess, we’d just enjoy life, which was supposedly her greatest desire. Of course all of us are bundles of contradictions, but in some that condition is more blatant.

I think there are two opposite currents in the modern culture, though they have less and less to do with religion.

SPIRITUAL NO MORE

Whatever the hidden influences, the short answer to the question of whether my atheism was tested by suffering is no. Intense suffering did not “lead me to god.” Would even more intense suffering had done so? No, it would have simply killed me. Instead of walking out of the hospital, I would have been rolled into the morgue.

(And there is no “mystery of death.” When a pet dies, no matter how beloved -- no matter how much we acknowledge the animal’s consciousness, feelings, and unique personality -- do we ever speak of the mystery of a dog’s death?)

New Age concepts had much more impact, I blush to confess. Ah, the joy of seeing of signs and wonders everywhere, the sweet feeling of being “guided by the universe”! Who wants to let go of that? And how sweet it was to hear that I was not a worthless sinner, but a magnificent being! Again, it wasn’t a matter of what I wanted. As before, with time new ideas entered my psyche, and the wishful thinking of my borderline New Age phase fell to pieces. 

Spiritual no more! The surprise was that hard-core atheism was not a bleak desert. An increased appreciation of life has followed my second “de-conversion.” A mellowing, yes, in the sense of greater affection for myself and loving my quiet life -- all this after decades of thinking that my life went wrong, that I made a fatal wrong turn into nowhere instead of the rich life I so much desired and had the intelligence and education to lead. Me, loving my life and interested in enjoying that quiet? Not desiring the noise of fame? It still shocks me to realize that I have reached a Yes on that.

THE GREATEST HERESY: NO AFTERLIFE

It's amazing how much follows from accepting that this life is it: it's now or never. For Dante and for Dostoyevsky, heresy did not mean saying there is no god; the real heresy was saying that there is NO AFTERLIFE. Once you accept this "heresy," you don't want to waste time! Or opportunities for rich, memorable experiences. I had to reinvent myself once I truly accepted that "this is it."

Gustave Doré: The Circle of the Heretics: Farinata in a flaming tomb. Farinata did not believe that the soul was immortal. 

*

Another important thing that follows from the insight that this life is all there is is what could be called "the culture of empathy." It's not just our earthly life that becomes infinitely precious to us. Others also become more dear. We are in this together, so the only thing is to help one another and be as affectionate as possible. War makes no sense. Not building flood protection makes no sense, and a lot of other things that now imply we don't fully value human life.

I’ve lost the attractive promises of Catholicism, and the even more attractive lies of New Age. But “that which is the highest” has remained.

ANOTHER DREAM ABOUT MY EXECUTION

All of us at a long school desk.
We’re told to tilt back our heads 

and slowly say, “Ouch, mother.”

A capsule is dropped down our throats

sometime during the vowels.

I fade out. Yet soon I walk, I love
the ash trees silver after rain.
The downtown hovers, half-cloud,
the bridge across the bay
spun with beams of light.

This is my world, my pearl,
my kingdom within and without.
And dying in the night, what is it
but a new self being born
to help us carry the questions.

I wake up refreshed 

in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Since childhood I have climbed
mountains; my sinews and bones
know that going downhill is the killer,

not the drunkenness of heights.
I have died more than once,
and look: I walk, I dream.
Siehe, ich lebe, “See, I live,”
I repeat after Rilke,

in the exquisite, horrifying tongue
of those who were executioners.
How close leben sounds to
lieben, the long liquid notes
of the same song:

Siehe, ich liebe, 
See, I love: it’s the story
of my life, of many lives.

~ Oriana © 2013

*

Wittgenstein: Don’t think. Look!

NO COWARD SOUL IS MINE

Lvov: Polish graves. Photo: Jan Pieklo.

The kingdom of heaven is within you.

 I. EMILY BRONTË’S “GOD WITHIN MY BREAST”

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life -- that in me has rest,
As I -- undying Life -- have power in thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.

With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou -- THOU art Being and Breath,
And what THOU art may never be destroyed.

~ Emily Brontë, 1846

This poem, widely regarded as one of the finest in the English language, has always astonished me. That a parson’s daughter could so fearlessly and absolutely dismiss organized religion was already amazing:

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

~ this is not Christopher Hitchens, this is Emily Brontë, a clergyman’s daughter, dismissing all creeds as vain and worthless. The true god was the “god within [her] breast.” I wonder what her father thought of this poem. It’s possible that he agreed, but he had his “pastoral duties” to perform, and wasn’t about to tell his “flock” (it’s interesting that the faithful didn’t object to being called sheep) that their creed was “worthless as withered weeds.”

Another astonishing thing is the cosmic sweep of the poem. Long before astrophysicists started speculating about the “multiverse,” consisting of many universes, this 28-year-old daughter of an obscure Yorkshire parson uses the plural, universes:

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

~ this is stated in terms that in no way allude to the Last Judgment or anything that might relate to Judeo-Christian concepts of the end of the world. It’s closer to the notion of Akashic Records (from Sanscrit akasha, space) -- a non-physical repository of all knowledge, nowadays analogized to a “cosmic super-computer.” Milosz, devastated by all the destruction he'd witnessed during the war, also yearned for that kind of cosmic storage where everything -- absolutely everything, down to every insect and blade of grass -- would have eternal existence.

Of course I’m not suggesting that Emily Brontë had any knowledge of modern astrophysics or computers. What she could imagine was a cosmic being who was the “real god” (for lack of a better term) and not a human invention, one of the multitude of gods created and worshipped by humanity, a petty sky god presiding over the earth rather than the multiverse. That "real god" was more like the "Hidden Power" that Shelley and Wordworth saw, governing both nature and the human mind. And let us not forget Coleridge's idea that we are all Aeolian harps "diversely framed," the music of humanity depending on how the Hidden Power, like the wind, happened to sweep across our . . . ahem, strings of the heart? Let's just say the mind. It's too early yet for neuroscience.

Like the great Romantics, Brontë comes across as a mystic. She has her personal faith, her “God within my breast.” Social convention forced her to attend church service, but, as the “creeds/weeds” rhyme suggests, her true worship was a solitary communion. She probably experienced it most during her long walks on the moors. A neighbor recalled seeing Emily return from her walk, her face “lit up by a divine light.”

Emily Brontë is one of the most puzzling figures in literary history. She left us a magnificent poem about her imaginary Beloved. She died at thirty. It’s possible that she had Asperger’s syndrome. She had no friends; there is no evidence of her ever having been in love. 

EMERSON’S GOD AS HIGHEST SELF

Harold Bloom, in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, says that this is his favorite sentence in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”:

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

Just as it’s startling that a parson’s daughter would dismiss all creeds, so it is at least somewhat surprising that a former minister would call religion “a disease of the intellect.” Given the American religiosity, it is a shock. But then Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, in spite of belonging to the nineteenth-century, still shock today’s readers.

Emerson left the ministry because he could not accept the conventional beliefs. Like Emily Brontë, he believed in the “god within,” who was also his highest self. Bloom quotes Emerson:

That is always best which me me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, obey thyself. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being.
 
(I had to look up the meaning of “wen.” It’s a “sebaceous cyst,” or a plugged up oil gland. Imagine comparing yourself to a wart and a cyst!)

In an unpublished early poem (or a poem of sorts), again quoted by Bloom, Emerson says,

I find [God] in the bottom of my heart
I hear continually his Voice therein
And books and priests and worlds I less esteem.
Who says the heart’s a blind guide? It is not.
My heart did never counsel me to sin . . .
The little needle always knows the north.

This is wonderful self-trust, or call it self-reliance: “The little needle always knows the north.” It reminds me of a sign on a T shirt: “God yes, church no.” It seems that people increasingly want a personal god, not the official one; they don’t want to be told what they should believe.

Emerson believed in self-creation, which reminds me of my own Kabala-inspired poem, “The Twenty-Second Name of God”:

God breaks our hearts
so we can create ourselves.

It also reminds me of Edward Hirsch’s poem, “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in Hirsch’s under-appreciated volume On Love:

Love is a bright foreigner, a foreign self
that must recognize me for what I truly am;
only my lover can understand me as I am
when I am struggling to create myself.

Emerson could also be called a “process theologian.” “God is, not was.” Conventional Christianity, Emerson observes, “proceeds as if God were dead.” He also famously said, “The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.” Sounding very much like Nietzsche, he summons us to greatness when he laments, “Man is the dwarf of himself.”

Nietzsche could also be called a prophet of self-reliance, and his rejection of religion was the most extreme: “All religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties.” 


EMERSON AND JESUS WALK INTO A BAR WITH SOMEONE WHO LOOKS LIKE YOU 
 
[I have asked Professor John Guzlowski to comment on the Emerson section. He also composed the heading of this section.]

John Guzlowski:

It’s hard to get to the core of Emerson on any of his ideas but I think you can make a start at getting at what he thinks about self-reliance and religion and the spiritual within the self by tracking what he says about Jesus in his Divinity School Address (the speech that got him into a lot of trouble).

There are about a half dozen references to Jesus, and they suggest that Jesus is a man who embodies in himself the sense that he is divine and that he should display this divinity by sharing it with others who have basically forgotten that they contain sparks of the universal divinity.

Here’s the one central paragraph I think in the Divinity School Address that embodies this idea and talks about how Christianity has betrayed it.  (By the way, when Emerson refers in this paragraph to the Reason he means the sort of intuitive/spiritual sense of things that we associate with the Romantic impulse. The Understanding is its opposite):

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, "I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think." 

But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, "This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man." The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

Oriana:

This is so enlightening: the roots of Whitman’s ideas about being divine (“Divine I am inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from. The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer”). Of course he saw others as divine as well, which leads to an egalitarian attitude. 

What Emerson says reminds me of “Tat tvam asi”: You are that. According to a Hindu tradition, our deepest self is god, who is experiencing himself/herself by assuming human disguises. 

And of course Jesus said, “The Kingdom of heaven is within you.”

Not counting New Age fans, I think the modern secular stance is on the whole rather different from the "god within."Most of my friends say they believe that "there is something out there." If so, then it (“it” seems the most fitting pronoun) is a cosmic deity or force or energy, completely unlike humans, and not concerned about humans (though perhaps we are connected to this energy through some quantum entanglement). This is pretty much what the Founding Fathers and other Enlightenment thinkers believed: god created the world and then left it alone. God would never violate the laws of nature. 

(Speaking of being connected to some sort of cosmic energy, Emerson speaks of needing to be like those circus acrobats who can ride two horses at once, standing with one foot on each. We need to be present in our daily reality, but also gave at the universe and have a cosmic perspective.)

WALLACE STEVEN'S "LESS AND LESS HUMAN" (PLATO'S GHOST)

Wallace Stevens has poems about the impersonal god (if there must be a god to begin with). Let me quote from “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit”:

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly . . .

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak


*
 
And yes, I can see how Emerson’s Divinity speech could get him into huge trouble. Are our times an improvement when we consider that a minister preaching this would get death threats from fundamentalists? Maybe using "Mythus" rather than "Myth" would protect him, but I guess the first sentence which calls Jesus a prophet rather than the Divine Savior would be enough for those who put their passion into signs like "Accept Jesus or burn in hell."

Of course Christianity is mythology, precariously affixed on top of the Judaic mythology. Once I grasped that, I reached the point of no return. It wasn't that much about science: I could see ways to reconcile Darwin with creationism. It wasn't the problem of evil: the Catholic explanation in terms of free will is quite appealing, if we don't insist that a horrible atrocity like the Holocaust (I mean the more general term, beyond the Jewish Holocaust) would merit an exception and some action. But once I saw the Judaic deity as a tribal god of thunder, pretty much equivalent to Zeus and Wotan, and also knew that there were other death-and-resurrection stories in other mythologies, that was it.

As I explain later, in my reply to Hyacinth, in the past great thinkers such as Dante and Milton accepted classical mythology as real; it was just that now the worship of the old gods was forbidden. I wonder if they had at least some vague notion of how dangerous it is to dismiss any mythology as not literally true. If one mythology can be dismissed as "not true," what's there to stop the downfall of all mythologies (not as profound literature to be understood metaphorically, but as literal truth)?

To question the literal truth of one mythology is to question all mythologies. And let me quote Joseph Campbell here: What is mythology? - Other people's religion. ~ What is religion? - Our own mythology. 

I suspect the word "Understanding" is a clumsy translation from German. It should be intuition vs the rational mind (not that intuition is irrational; that's a misunderstanding of how the brain works "behind the scenes").
 

THE “TRUE GOD” OF THE GNOSTICS

I recalled Brontë’s poem after reading the interview with Stephen Mitchell, the celebrated translator of Rilke as well as Genesis, the Psalms, and Tao Te Ching. The god of Genesis, Mitchell concludes, is a human invention and not the real god, who corresponds more to the Tao. I also recalled that the Gnostics did not regard Yahweh as the true god, but only as a demiurge, a “half-maker,” who made a flawed world and arrogantly demanded that only he be worshipped. Christ, however, was a messenger from the true god, the ultimate source of being, also known as Pleroma (fullness) and Bythos (depth).

Gnosticism did not speak of salvation from sin, but of release from ignorance. Christ did not die for our sins; he came to impart knowledge of the true god (it is striking that he keeps calling god “father”; heretofore the deity was never called father, but rather “the Lord”). Deep understanding of the Love Commandment and communion with the “god within” make sinning virtually impossible: that’s why the Love Commandment supersedes a multitude of religious regulations. The Christian Gnostics rejected the Old Testament.

But Gnosticism has its unpleasant aspects as well. It’s quite hierarchical. A small minority of people are the Pneumatics, the “spiritual.” They possess Gnosis and are ready for paradise. Most people, however, are the Hyletics: they are materialistic and superficial. Finally, there are the Psychics -- those who live largely in their psyche. If the Psychics are open to the message from a messenger of light, they can undergo a transformation that makes them ready for paradise. In fact, according to Gnosticism, each person has the proverbial “divine spark” in them and an “angelic twin,” or higher self, waiting for a reunion.

This sounds pretty much like standard New Age lore; the trouble starts when we start reading about the Gnostic contempt for the world and the body. Since the body is evil, sex is of course evil, creating more bodies. The world is a prison and the body is a prison of the soul.

Some writers disagree and claim that the Gnostics believed that sex was a sacrament. To be sure, there were various schools of Gnosticism, but given the foundational belief that the world was created by not by the true god but by a morally deficient demiurge, rejection of the world, body, and sex makes sense. This is also the typical tendency of all major religions. The spirit is good, matter is bad. Celibacy is a hard sell these days, so New Age writers try to slant Gnosticism toward the Tantra.

In my eyes, the most attractive quality of Gnosticism is its rejection of blood sacrifice as necessary for entry to paradise, and its more sophisticated emphasis not on sin and the need for salvation, but on release from ignorance. 

One who knows, who has access to the “god within,” is not interested in doing evil. This contrasts with the Catholic obsession with sin and human depravity. There is more paradise in Gnosticism, more emphasis on “the god within” (“The kingdom of God is within you”). Communion with the inner god seems to indicate that paradise is available now, and not necessarily only after death. Maybe that’s why Emily Brontë’s face looked to her neighbor “as if lit by a divine light.”

Much of this sounds good and “spiritually correct.” Its harmony with New Age beliefs likely accounts for the current rise of interest in Gnosticism. In place of the toxic, vengeful god of fundamentalist Christianity, we get an all-embracing cosmic god who is also the “god within my breast.” Nevertheless, we must not forget that the Gnostics did not regard Yahweh as a human invention. For Gnostics, Yahweh did exist and did create the world -- it’s just that he was a deficient deity, a “half-maker.” He was not a false, invented god; he was just the wrong god, not worthy of worship.

ALEKSANDER WAT’S GOD BEYOND HISTORY

The true god of the Gnostics does not suffer. It (this seems to be the most fitting pronoun) dwells apart, happy and serene. And that in turn reminds me of the mystical experience that a fascinating Polish poet (a dadaist in his youth) and writer, Aleksander Wat, had in a Soviet prison in Saratov, in the south of Russia on the Volga (after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, at Stalin's order the so-called Volga Germans were deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan).

Wat came down with dysentery and was running a high fever. One night, when a patrol boat on the Volga sailed back and forth, sounding the anti-aircraft alarm, Wat couldn’t sleep. Feverish and half-starved, he had a vision:

I heard laughter, a flourish of laughter that kept approaching and receding. A vulgar laugh, actually. I didn’t like opera, but my brothers and sisters did. And so I had seen Faust as a child and I knew Mephistopheles’ laugh from it. It came in flourishes. Ha haha ha! Ha haha ha! It kept receding and approaching. It was then that I had a vision of the devil. I won’t even try to reconstruct that night because I wouldn’t succeed. But it was then that the breakthrough occurred. Evidently, there had been something missing. There had been some obstacle, some last partition, and then it broke with that laughter of the vulgar, the most vulgar devil of all, flourishes of vulgar laughter that kept approaching, then receding far away fora long time, a very long time. I saw the devil. Well, I saw a devil with hooves, the devil from the opera. I really did see him -- it must have been a hallucination from hunger, but not only did I see him, but I could almost smell the brimstone. My mind was working at terribly high revolutions. It was the devil in history.

And I felt something else, that the majesty of God was spread over history, over all this, a God distant but real. I can’t decipher it fully, I can’t remember it all, but it was so actual, so sensual, as if the devil was in my cell, the ceiling of the cell was lifted away, and God was above it all. It was all straight from commonplace religious folk art. I don’t know. I didn’t see God because God did not even actually show himself to Moses. God is blinding, but I did see that God -- now I can say it -- had a beard. The God of iconography. And a devil with hooves.

. . .  It was then that I began to be a believer.  . . . Everything was one that night. The main feeling was the feeling of the oneness of the experience and my oneness with it. Before then I had felt mostly discord within myself, but that night I had such a feeling of monolithic unity, of a sort I was never to experience again in my life.

. . . That night certainly transformed me and also the way I acted in prison. I have the impression that it was only after that night that I became human and was able to live in society with people. I changed my attitude toward my fellow prisoners, and I thought less about myself. Though I still thought constantly of Ola and Andrzej [his wife and his son] . . . that too had changed a lot because belief in the immortality of the soul had come to me with that experience. My relationship to my cell mates changed. I had learned to live with people, and it had come suddenly. Something had turned around and, for all my grief, I had peace.

. . . I had dysentery. By then I was a Christian. I had a temperature of almost 106, but the hallucinations did not return, even during the fever. (My Century, 291-293).

Later, out of prison, in Alma Ata (the capital of Kazakhstan), Wat wore a cross on a string around his neck and freely spoke of his conversion experience. Mikhail Zoshchenko, a satirical writer, challenged Wat:

“All right, we’re sitting in this room. Close your eyes and ask yourself if you believe in the divinity of Christ. Do you believe in the resurrection of the body, in the immortality of the soul, and so on?” I was a bit taken aback by that question, which was asked very seriously . . . I didn’t close my eyes, but I tried to sound myself out. I really couldn’t answer his question.

I told him that I didn’t think it mattered if I believed at this very minute or not (after reflecting on it) but I assumed that once you had real faith, it was totally yours and you could not become a disbeliever, because you were in a place without any fundamental contradictions, where all the counterarguments were meaningless. That if you had been in that place once, you could find the path that led back to it. But it’s like a fairy tale: the place is there but the path is lost (p.325)

Aside from the “human, all too human” detail of God’s beard, Wat’s vision of the deity also seems close to Gnosticism: a remote, serene god, “distant but real.” The devil ruled over history, full as it was of hatred, fanaticism, and violence. But above it spread divine majesty and peace, and all was harmony and oneness -- perhaps akin to the pleroma (fullness) of the Gnostics. There was no contradiction and no room for doubt.

God’s beard and the devil’s hooves aside (oh, the power of images!), the god of Wat’s vision seems to be the god of deists. America’s Founding Fathers, for instance, believed that god created the world and the laws of nature, but afterwards he never concerned himself with the universe. He only set it in motion. As Shelley put it in “Mont Blanc”:

Power dwells apart in its tranquility,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible.

an abandoned locomotive in a site of a former gulag in Siberia

**

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

I have discovered that atheism is a journey and has various depths, just like stages of religious belief. From the perspective of time, it seems somewhat funny that my own journey started with the complete skepticism of a child who felt (but didn’t dare admit out loud) that the Bible stories were fairy tales, except much more disturbing. Then followed a period of devout faith (after reading Terese of Lisieux Story of a Soul I did, of course, want to be a Carmelite nun). That faith began crumbling as I grew older and couldn’t quite resist the impression that it was all nonsense.

I always hated the choking smell of incense, even before I knew that originally, in the Jerusalem temple sacrifice ritual on which the Catholic mass was based, it was meant to cover up the smell of the blood of the sacrificed animals. The smoke of incense grew more and more irritating. It seemed so primitive and discordant with the liturgy that evolved later. It was when the smoke created a bluish curtain around the altar and my eyes teared from the pollutants that I couldn’t help intuiting what was being hidden from us: not only was it all nonsense, but sheer archaic nonsense, millennia behind the times.

At first I was very upset over my growing doubts -- a sin! I was sinning in thought! I tried to redouble my zeal. Finally, at fourteen, I had my “de-conversion experience,” if I may coin a term. In a second, the thought “It’s just another mythology” reversed years of Catholic indoctrination. And the thought itself was irreversible.

I thought I was done forever not just with Catholicism, but with any form of theism. Soon after my arrival in America, I was severely warned never to describe myself as an atheist because I would shock and offend people. I labeled myself an agnostic.

It’s amazing what a word can do. “Agnostic” precluded the possibility of knowledge, but not the possibility that a deity might actually exist. Agnosticism seemed intellectually superior to atheism. Theistic doubt began encroaching on my atheism. What if god did exist? Not the god according to the Catholic church, but  . . .  a true god, a cosmic god, beyond human comprehension but perhaps able to manifest itself and communicate through signs such as natural phenomena and synchronicities.

This seemed pretty attractive: a friendly universe. The churches were corrupt human institutions and could not be trusted; not so the universe. The stars shone with a pure light, unclouded by the stench of incense. The New Age movement was in full bloom all around me, and the word “spiritual” was in the air. Almost everyone I met kept saying, “I am not religious, but I’m spiritual.” And it was not unusual for me to hear, “I think you are a deeply spiritual person.” My poetry was praised as spiritual.

I didn’t know why people perceived me as spiritual -- I didn’t meditate  or practice yoga. I didn’t even keep a journal, though all my women friends did. Perhaps it was enough that I wasn’t interested in money, but rather in ideas and meaning. And perhaps some of my vague longing for the “real god” did show, especially in my poems (but was it really my own creative unconscious that I was coming to trust?). I offer the one below as a bit of comic relief:

GREATER LOS ANGELES

“Now the weather for Greater Los Angeles,”
the announcer would announce. I was thrilled

by those words, thrilled to live 
in Greater Los Angeles – as if beyond the city

rose a greater, more magnificent city,
not of suburbs and shopping malls,

but of towers, temples, and aerial bridges.
The downtown had its moments of grandeur:

the pyramid-hatted City Hall, the sprawling
post office, its two tiled domes,

the Egyptian tomb of the Central Library,
the Union Station inlaid with rare marble;

above traffic signs, a billboard like blue flame:
ETERNAL VALLEY, SECOND EXIT.

Greater Los Angeles! It sounded like a promise
that greater everything existed: a luminous sky

beyond this pallid and polluted one; a greener
green, not this parched beige-gray. Watching over,

not the jealous god of wrath, not the tribal warlord
who sayeth, Vengeance is mine, but a greater

unknown god of whom Thomas Hardy wrote,
and Emily Brontë – for whom they wrote.

“Who is your audience?” teachers always
asked, but I wasn’t going to tell them.

~ Oriana © 2012   

*                                                                                                                                                                

Hardy wrote the poem “Agnostoi Theoi” -- “To the Unknown God.” It’s not a very good poem, but the title -- the best part -- made a great impression on me when I was in my twenties and not ruling out some degree of return to religion later in life. As I already mentioned, I started to be haunted by theist doubts.

It wasn’t the kind of torment that trying to believe was, being beset by atheist doubts; I felt that the only god worth worshipping would not throw people into the burning lake for not having adhered to the right doctrine. It (that still seemed the most fitting, cosmic pronoun) would consider only kindness, and even then, would take a compassionate, psychological approach: for instance, an abused child  might come to identify with his tormentors and later find it difficult to be kind -- those extenuating circumstances would be considered. There’d be understanding and consolation, not punishment.

I still believe that kindness is very important. Imagine if the only religion in the world was what the Dalai Lama said: “My religion is kindness.”

My adolescent de-conversion experience did not change my ethical values. I still take great delight in beauty and affection. People I have known for a long time continue to grow ever more dear to me. Being alive is precious and amazing; having consciousness is a gift, a feast, a miracle almost. But the hunger for the “real god” seems to have faded away. The universe does not need a ruler any more than the ocean needs an ocean deity. The cosmos is self-evolving.

I can’t point to the exact moment when I gained what I call “atheist clarity.” Perhaps it was when I was talking about medical advances yet to come and my listener said, “Oh but I do want to die. I want to experience living in the spirit world.” Once more I realized that I did not believe in any spirit world. I did not believe in ghosts, including the inner little ghost that would survive physical death. “Soul,” for all the Jungian attempts to revivify that word, to make it non-denominational and acceptable to the educated, was simply psyche, the activity of the brain (and no, to me the brain could never be “a kind of radio,” receiving signals from the astral world).

And synchronicity, that new holy of holies and supposed manifestation of the spirit, was due to selective attention and selective memory. As for personal “destiny” and meaning in life, we both discover and create those ourselves. I definitely don’t believe that a pre-existing, brain-free “soul” chooses its parents and its task in life, but the memory of its choice is erased before birth so that we would start out clueless and confused in the dark woods of life -- just a divine game that results in much suffering, but so what? Just learn to navigate by omens. I used to do precisely that, and actually still often do, as part of the creative process -- but with the understanding that it’s not the universe trying to guide me, but my brain trying to find pattern and coherence.

The fear that life would seem very bleak as a result of dropping “spirituality” has proved false. Oddly enough, just as people report greater appreciation of others after a conversion experience, the  more I acknowledged being a hard-core atheist, the more I saw how amazingly heroic and kind people can be, what a hard struggle many lives are, how impressive the things that can be accomplished not only by individuals, but especially as a result of cooperation. To the question, “Don’t you wish there was someone to say thank-you to?” I reply, “But of course there is: the people around me.”

*

And yet I have to admit that there used to a persistent fantasy of “someone.” A mind, a voice -- “face to face” was hoping for too much, and besides, isn’t the starry sky face enough? But for lack of a better word, yes, someone to greet me at the end of the journey, like a loved one waiting for me at a train station. Someone who’d just answer my questions: Why was I born? Was there a special task I was supposed to accomplish? Like Dostoyevski’s Ivan Karamazov, I did not want paradise, but answers to my questions.

Now I know that those were the wrong questions. I was born, period. Not “born for” any special purpose. I have to discover and shape my own purpose, different at different stages of my life. I alone can answer my questions, not so much at the end of the journey but all along.

Of course no man or woman is an island; our logos is part of the collective logos. Among the people to whom I want to say thank you, I single out Jesse Bering, the author The Belief Instinct. His book brilliantly dispelled any lingering nostalgia for the “real god.” The exposition of why god is a cognitive illusion is empirical rather than merely philosophical, and beautifully non-shrill.

Bering even wonders if shattering the illusion of god is good for humanity. I can’t speak for humanity, only for myself. Unexpectedly, I became a happier person as an unblinking atheist. I felt more clarity than I’d ever dared hope for. Closing the “spiritual” door focused my attention on how best to live this life, without wasting time on speculating about the afterlife.

But remembering that no so long ago I too entertained some hope that a “real god” might exist helps to keep me tolerant -- at least as long as no one threatens me with hellfire. For me heaven and hell are states of mind. By choosing the peacefulness of “heaven,” I too can have my mini-experience of Emily Brontë walking on the moors, the Gnostics contemplating the blissful union with “fullness,” or Aleksander Wat’s vision of serenity even in wartime.  And -- what a gift! -- I’ve come across a quotation from Rilke: “To work is to live without dying.”

In my youth I half-suspected that the fear of death and a longing for an afterlife would in the end prevail over the voice of reason. What could poor reason do as it got closer to the abyss? Who knew that quiet voice had such power . . . 

And imagine the joy of discovering: no coward soul is mine.

  Darlene:

Have you seen Vincent Bugliosi’s article on Huffington Post?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vincent-bugliosi/why-do-i-doubt-both-the-a_b_844611.html
 
Let me quote the last two paragraphs:
 
I believe that the question of the existence of God is an impenetrable mystery and beyond human comprehension. As Einstein, who was an agnostic (so was Darwin), put it: "The problem is too vast for our limited minds." But even if it were not, doubt is divine in that it impels a search for the truth, thereby opening the door to knowledge. Faith puts a lock on the door. And as knowledge increases, faith recedes. Even though I don't feel that a belief in God (theism) or disbelief in him (atheism) is unintelligent, I do feel that a certitude about either of these two positions, even a strong belief in them, which is so extremely common, is, perforce, unintelligent. Put another way, since the depth of a belief should be in proportion to the evidence, no sensible person should be dogmatic about whether there is or is not a God. I have always liked Clarence Darrow's observation about the existence vis-à-vis non-existence of God: "I do not pretend to know what ignorant men are sure of."

The whole matter of God can perhaps be distilled down to this. Is there a God who created the world? Or is God a word we use to explain the world? In either event, God should only be a question.

Oriana:
 
Yes, I’ve read the article. I love it: God should only be a question. I realize that intellectually agnosticism cannot be touched -- unless by statisticians who might argue that if the probability that god doesn't exist is 99.9999%, that's as good as non-existence. 

But maybe there is an emotional element in my relatively recent preference for clear-cut atheism: I love mystery, but in some matters I prefer the cold light of clarity. Keeping options open in the “I don’t know” position is somewhat stressful. Closing an option lets me move on. I’m happier now than when I saw myself as a “spiritual seeker” -- though I realize that “happier” is not intellectually respectable. For intellectual respectability, I refer everyone, including myself, to Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct and its very satisfying demonstration that god is a cognitive illusion based on our brain’s hardwired tendency to see pattern and purpose, and an agent behind that purpose. It's been argued that it's more natural for us to believe in the supernatural.

I’m indebted to Bugliosi for pointing out that there is no scriptural validation of either immortality of the soul (the idea comes from Plato) or free will (all that happens is the will of god; furthermore, god leads us into temptation).

But Bugliosi misrepresents the argument that Dawkins makes about the complexity of god. Dawkins argues that, based on evidence we have, we conclude that evolution proceeds from the simple to the complex. To assume that a deity of unimaginable complexity would precede and create the simple (but with evolution toward complexity somehow predestined) strains belief. 

But all is forgiven for the sake of the quotation by Gertrude Stein that this article provides, and on which I’m willing to fall back in those situations where to confess to atheism would be social suicide:

There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.



Hyacinth:

Emily Brontë's poem gets more pertinent every time I read it, especially that third stanza: "Vain are the thousand creeds / that move men's  hearts, unutterably vain." The choice of the word vain. She voices the conclusions I have come to.

And yet I do not begrudge the years I spent in the church. Better to have had beliefs and change them than to have nothing at all, no foundation. It's the Judeo-Christian god I disbelieve but not that there is a presence (god within). By “presence” I mean the feeling of harmony and being one with everything, an experience I have when I am in nature and take delight in watching the moon rise, for instance.

Walking the moors as Emily Brontë did feels the equivalent of my long walks on the beach. The ocean helps me override the daily stuff.

I would recommend the course I took, or rather sat in on, called the Bible as Literature. I gained from it even though it has taken years to give up God with capitol G and accept that god is everywhere and in everything, and is not vindictive or  jealous.

I'm working on a poem right now questioning "soul” -- what is it, or who. I agree with Bugliosi: "god should only be a question. "

I like the Dalai Lama's  "my religion is kindness." It should be a motto for the world.

The blog is exceptional and the choice of art always adds so much. Thank you.

Oriana:

I’m all for Bible as Literature. “The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (no wonder that the new conservative students reject Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman . . . I'm not sure about Dickinson, but she wasn't exactly orthodox . . . )

Do I regret having been indoctrinated? Yes and no. No only because without knowing the bible stories and the whole religious mentality one can't understand the literature of past centuries. Or art right up to the Dutch art -- so much art before then is religious; imagine not understanding what a pietà is about, and all the crucifixes. So for the Western cultural heritage, the religious grounding is needed. 

The whole concept of god is not one I'd have ever figured out for myself -- as a child, I felt no need for such a being. Smelled rat as soon as the nun said "He's invisible because he’s a ghost" (in Polish, as in German, the word is “ghost” -- there is no distinction between “spirit” and “ghost”). I still remember how her voice hushed up with reverence when she said “ghost.” I never believed in ghosts, witches, Santa Claus, etc. God was a strange ghost, though, not the white shape but a middle-aged (or old) man with a beard. Robes and other things varied, but the beard had to be there.

Speaking of the beard: Michelangelo seems to have fixed its length, so it wasn’t the waist-long white beard that you see in early icons. Michelangelo based his god directly on Zeus. And that reminds me: to understand literature, especially the literature of the past, one also needs to know classical mythology -- at least the major myths. And it’s fascinating to ponder the fact that Dante and Milton, to mention just the giants, wrote about Greco-Roman mythology as factual. No mythology was to be questioned; it’s just that you were forbidden to worship the old gods. 

And that made sense: if you say that any mythology is a human invention, that Wotan or Zeus never existed, then what’s to stop exactly the thought that I had at fourteen: that the Judeo-Christian tradition is just another mythology. The creation myth, the flood and Noah’s Ark, the three magi, the savior born of a virgin and a god -- that’s so obviously mythological. I’m all in favor of studying these stories as literature and mythology. Then we can really take delight in them, just as we enjoy sacred music -- no belief required. As for the nasty stories, they can be skipped, perhaps? Or maybe de-emphasized? I realize the magnitude of the problem, with so much sex and violence in the bible.

What I regret is the enormous anguish the religious indoctrination caused. I felt I was a dreadful sinner and would certainly go to hell. I despaired of ever being able not to sin in thought. My actions weren’t too bad, but my thoughts, so sinful! For instance, I'd look at another girl's pretty dress, and wish I had this dress -- right away the sin of envy! Or was it "coveting"? To be on the safe side, I confessed to both. What nonsense all that was. So much suffering in the world, and here priests and nuns worked to torment children in this manner -- thinking it was a saintly thing, of course.

And the Judeo-Christian god had a huge ego. I was always put off by all the required praise, praise, praise. As an adult I saw that that was a primitive form of appeasement. Early in the history of humanity, all deities were mostly cruel, but if you praised them loud enough and long enough, morning noon and night, and offered sacrifices (eaten by the priests, but that was OK for some reason), the god in question was less likely to hit you with lightning, earthquake, flood, etc. Praise was prophylactic. It didn’t always work, but you didn’t dare stop praising (a similar phenomenon occurred with the cult of Stalin and Hitler -- you had to praise them. On a minor scale, employees are likely to flatter the boss).

I’ve never felt the “presence,” no matter how defined, but I’ve felt tremendous love for trees, birds, squirrels, a bear seen at a safe distance -- for nature. And cats and dogs, even fish and turtles. It used to worry me somewhat, this not “feeling the presence.” I didn’t feel the presence of god in nature -- I just felt that nature was magnificent, amazing. But in the end kindness means so much more than subjective feelings.

I’ve felt awe, of course, and other intense positive feelings. But divine presence, never. Divine love for me, never. That was OK, in a way, since I did not love god -- how can you love someone you fear? If you fear someone, the normal reaction is to hate him. My inability to love the god of wrath worried me, another reason I expected to go to hell. I would be damned to be tortured for eternity because I could not force myself to love  this nightmarish monster that spied on me and wrote down my sins. (The nuns at least created the impression that all sins are written down on one side of the ledger, and “good deeds” on the other side -- maybe not in the case of non-Catholics, who were going to hell anyway, so why keep records.)

Christ said “no judgment,” and yet he was to come the second time as the judge presiding over the Last Judgment, separating the saved from the damned. Note the innumerable paintings of the Last Judgment -- a favorite subject. Even that church in our Little Italy -- Our Lady of the Rosary -- has a huge, horrific fresco of the Last Judgment (facing the fresco of the Crucifixion). And that church isn’t that old -- it was built in 1928. Keep them scared -- the foundation of old-time Catholicism was psychological terror. Knowing that, it’s all the more remarkable that the mystics (in all religions) all seemed to experience a loving deity. But mystical visions generally arise in situations we’d call abnormal: epilepsy, starvation, high fever. The clergy wanted blind obedience from their “flock of sheep,” and not mystical visions that were typically contrary to the teachings, with benevolence instead of hellfire.

Hyacinth:

The angel is so lovely. Sad that her arm is broken. Tied to the tree she could be Joan of Arc, such a gentle loving expression.

Oriana:

I'm amazed that someone cared enough to tie the angel to the tree -- and she is beautiful -- rather than just let the statue lie on the ground and decay. These are the untended Polish graves -- untended because at the end of WWII the Polish population of Lvov got expelled and resettled either in Poland (the lucky ones, including Zagajewski's family) or in the remote Asian regions of Russia.

I think I read (Zagajewski?) that a handful of Poles did manage to stay in Lvov somehow. Maybe one of them cd not bear to see the lovely angel "die." An even more touching possibility is that someone Ukrainian fell in love with this loveliest of cemetery angels, and wanted to save it. 

John:

It's hard to be around believers.  Yesterday, I went to a local writers' group.  It's been a while since I attended, and there were some new members.  One woman, a hospice volunteer, a new member, introduced her prose piece by talking about how it was written as a response to a prompt.  All the workers and volunteers at the hospice were writing about how they saw heaven.  She talked about how what she wrote was just that, her personal vision of what heaven is.

Listening to her intro, I felt this will be interesting.  I thought about my daughter's childhood vision of heaven as a place where she would meet her favorite book characters.

The woman's piece was a disappointment. Her vision of heaven was the thing I least wanted: rainbows, 12 pearly gates, people walking around in long white robes with gold trim and talking about how beautiful the gates are. There was nothing of her in the vision. Nothing personal. Not a single reference to "I." No real comfort finally.

When she was finished, one of the other new members talked about how much he liked the piece and the great rewards that come to us even here on earth if we believe in Jesus. He talked too about the punishment that comes to people if they don't believe. Misery, poverty, and sudden terrible death, tsunamis and earthquakes, mudslides and tornados.

I was thinking about the two of them as I wrote you that note about Emerson.

There's something sad about the vision of heaven and monstrous in the vision of life and punishment.
 
Oriana:

Thanks for sharing this. I suspect that for some people there has been a mental regression -- literacy has ebbed, and they are simply less intelligent as result of not reading anything the least bit challenging, and maybe even more so as result of not having read books in childhood when the brain was developing. Televangelists who say that Sandy Hook happened because there is no prayer in school make things worse. But essentially it's the lack of education that makes part of the American population primitive in their worldview, and religious in that stick-and-carrot way.

I know you live in a small town, and as you said, that’s in many ways like the 19th century. Small towns can be so backward, with their fundamentalism and their love of guns, their paranoid hatreds and alcoholism. It all somehow goes together with believing in a monstrous god of wrath. Apart from campus town, large cities seem to me oases where educated people live, with their broader outlook and more modern, secular worldview. Or maybe they are New Age, which may be silly but at least it let go of eternal punishment. Step outside these academic or metropolitan oases, and you are in enemy territory. 
 
**

John:

Many years after the war, my mother went back to her home town west of Lvov looking for the graves of her mother and her sister and her sister's baby.  She asked at the churches in the area, and she asked the people who were her neighbors.  No one knew anything about her graves or what happened to the bodies of her mother and sister and the baby.  She and my father finally bought a plot at the local cemetery and placed a stone on it with the names of my mother's dead.  
 
Oriana:

This salvaged angel seems the perfect memento of those who never got a proper burial.

I am glad your deceased relatives got a commemoration. Three of my relatives (an aunt and two cousins) died in the camps and they have no graves. The older cousin fought with the resistance and his name is on the monument to war heroes in his hometown. The other two were simply innocents who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Peace, peace.