WILLIAM JAMES: THE ONCE-BORN

Blake: Pity


I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part
   and tag of me is a miracle.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy
   whatever I touch or am touched from;
The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer,
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.

~ Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass,” 24

We still marvel at Whitman’s self-confident faith in his own divinity. When I say “we” I mean those spiritually brave or insolent enough not to be outraged by his assertion “Divine am I inside and out” — these days students tend to be more religious and conservative than the faculty. And to think that in the sixties and seventies young people boldly blasphemed about the “cleansing the doors of perception.”

How was Whitman seen in his own times? As a radical to be sure, but mostly because, with few exceptions, his poems did not rhyme. Unlike Baudelaire, whose Flowers of Evil made him endure an obscenity trial, Whitman’s problem was getting any attention — that’s why he wrote reviews of his own work using a variety of pen names. In a chain store in Los Angeles I found his book in the Gardening section. I placed it in the slim Poetry section (consisting almost entirely of Rumi). The next time I was in the same store, Whitman was back in the Gardening section.
 
Once Whitman would have been burned at the stake, but he lived in more lenient times, eventually becoming known as the “good gray poet.” He was raised as a Quaker, a believer in personal contact with the Holy Spirit rather than in any dogma. In his poems he worked out his own spirituality, simpler by far than Blake’s or Yeats’s.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James makes Whitman the epitome of the “once-born.” Let me quote James:

“God has two families of children on this earth,” says Francis W. Newman, “the once-born and the twice-born," and the once-born he describes as follows: “They see God not as a strict Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure.”

. . . The advance of liberalism in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness over the morbidness of the old hell-fire theology. We have now preachers who ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible.”  

   
 Let’s pause for a moment to digest this. Francis Newman was the younger brother of the famous Cardinal Newman, but far less orthodox. He objected to infant baptism. There were also rumors that he did not believe in eternal punishment, implying (horror!) that god would not be so cruel. Since hell and the crucifixion as the “bloody ransom” from Satan were the very foundation of organized Christianity, Francis Newman was mocked and criticized, a writer of fine but now forgotten essays. I am thrilled that William James brings him and his concept of the “once born” out of oblivion.

The “once-born” are those rare (at least in the 19th century) individuals who do not see god as a “strict judge.” Shockingly, they believe in a kind, merciful deity, “the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world.”

Must we be “born again”? No, the once-born would reply. We need only to see that we are good, the world is good, and god is good — and that the best way to worship is to feel joy.

It’s clear that James does not really approve of the once-born. They are too cheerful to crave religion. They don’t seem to need it. Let again me quote James:

“As examples are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer to Professor Starbuck's circular of questions. The writer's state of mind may by courtesy be called a religion:

        Q. What does Religion mean to you?
        A. It means nothing. Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious — they teach us to rely on some supernatural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves.
        Q. What things work most strongly on your emotions?
        A. Lively songs and music; Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, Shakespeare. I greatly enjoy nature.
        Q. What is your notion of sin?
        A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental to man's development not being yet advanced enough.

If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this brother. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism encouraged by popular science.”

*

Let’s stop here again. James announces that in the once-born we find no “broken and contrite heart” that seems a prerequisite for salvationist religiosity. Earlier in the book James describes the once-born as those “whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.”

This is a somewhat (?!) patronizing description of a child-like person “whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions.” They stroll about looking at flowers rather than thinking of the hell under the thin flower-bearing crust of the earth. Can such an innocent even be a poet? Where is the trauma, the storm, the Byronic and Nietzschean torments that drive the compulsion to be creative? Not, apparently, in the once-born.

Yet Whitman’s achievement severely undercut James’s dismissal of him as pathologically optimistic. Though James doesn’t use the word, the reader can sense the severe censure of the word “shallow” trying to push through terms like “enchanting innocencies.” But then it’s only in the later decades of the twentieth century that both Whitman and Emily Dickinson were pronounced to the be greatest American poets — both completely unorthodox when it comes to religion (Anna Akhmatova would have called them “heresiarchs,” along with Tolstoy and Dostoyevski). 

“CUDDLING UP TO GOD”
 
In a footnote, James even quotes a woman who told Newman that it gives her great pleasure to think she “could always cuddle up to God.” And then there was of course that great heresiarch, Whitman: “The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman. “His favorite occupation,” writes his disciple, Dr.Bucke, “seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds.”

Imagine! Cuddling up to god instead of thinking of one’s sins and praying for mercy . . . (dog chin

“NEW THOUGHT,” THE FORERUNNER OF NEW AGE
 
I find James quite relevant even today, so let me quote further:

“To my mind a current far more important and interesting religiously is that which has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force every day, to which I will give the title of the 'Mind-cure movement.' This 'New Thought,' is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power.

Let me pass to some concrete accounts of experience with the mind-cure religion. One of them, a woman, writing as follows:

‘The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is the human sense of separateness from that Divine Energy which we call God.’

On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between the mind-cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the anxious query, "What shall I do to be saved?" Luther and Wesley replied: "You are saved now, if you would but believe it." And the mind-curers come with precisely similar words — “You must awaken to the knowledge of your real being.”

Let’s pause again. This real being, this essence, is the divinity of man, rather than his “total depravity.” Divinity, not depravity. This is a revolution in perception! Speak about culture wars and the rise of the opposite of Calvinism . . .  It saddens me to think of the slower evolution of Catholicism, mired as it was in the cult of suffering.

The “divinity of man” is a term embraced by New Age devotees, but avoided by those who see themselves as secular; they see it as tainted with religion. A century after James’s famous
book was published, the most frequent term for this “divinity” is “human dignity.” The acknowledgment of human dignity presupposes that human beings are essentially good by nature rather than “fallen.” Ideally, they are also “healthy-minded,” as James calls it: optimistic and full of the joy of life. To quote that king of the healthy-minded, Walt Whitman:

I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self contained;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied-not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth.

 

 Here is one family no one would call dysfunctional

JAMES ON THE “SICK SOUL”

In contrast to the healthy-minded (it’s striking that James doesn’t call them “healthy souls”), the sick souls seek to “maximize evil” and magnify the sense of their own sinfulness — perhaps somewhat the way the depressed seek to increase sadness. It’s the sick souls that “lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins” — or for their failure to live up to mother’s expectations.

Let me continue to quote from James; what he says deserves renewed attention, since hell-fire theology is by no means dead.

“The healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery line; the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension. Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?

What single-handed man was ever on the whole as successful as Luther? Yet when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an absolute failure.

A Catholic philosopher, Father Gratry, writes:

        “I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned! I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before that I had never even thought of hell. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows less real than the earth.”

So much for the incapacity for joyous feeling. A much worse form of melancholy is positive and active anguish. I quote from a patient in a French asylum.

        “I am afraid of God as much as of the devil, so I drift along, thinking of nothing but suicide, but with neither courage nor means here to execute the act. Oh, if he would but kill me, devil take him! Death, death, once for all!”

At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have moments of perplexity he calls arrest, as if he knew not “how to live.”

        “I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested. Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, no longer going shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun.”

When disillusionment has gone as far as this the happiness of Eden never comes again. We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy in John Bunyan's autobiography.

        “If now I should have burned at the stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me. My original and inward pollution, was my plague and my affliction. I was sorry that God had made me a man.”

Neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy-minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste.

Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint. Buddhism and Christianity are are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life.”

 Michelangelo, The Damned Soul 

“NO MORE NEED OF SALVATION THAN A SQUIRREL”

~ The feeling that one is worthless and a total failure is of course known excruciatingly well by anyone who has suffered from repeated episodes of serious depression. This feeling of of being a worthless failure lies at the core what William James calls the “sick soul.” It doesn’t matter if the guilt and worthlessness are imaginary; the sick soul feels it doesn’t deserve to live. It’s the sick soul that is open to the idea of “salvation.” The healthy soul “has no more need of salvation than a squirrel,” as George Elliot put it in Middlemarch. 

NATURALISM VERSUS SALVATIONISM

The “once-born,” James says, tend to live in peace and contentedness; they feel in harmony with nature and don’t worry about metaphysical issues. “Their impulses are consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their lives are little haunted by regrets.” 

(I am not sure if Whitman’s passions were “not excessive,” but let that be.)

The healthy-minded, the “once-born,” do not deny the existence of suffering, but they would not say that life IS suffering. Life is both suffering and joy, with the balance leaning to joy. Nor would they call themselves “miserable sinners”; they’ll admit they made mistakes, but they don’t sit in judgment on themselves. On the whole the once-born feel that they are good, and that most humans are good. From the point of view of the sick souls, what nerve!

AMERICANS DON’T SEE THEMSELVES AS SINNERS
 
(A shameless digression: Coming from a Catholic country, I was immediately struck by the perception that Americans don’t think of themselves as sinners. The average American does not label himself a sinner, much less a miserable sinner. He has no habit of beating his chest, saying Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa — something that I, along with other children in my religion class, was taught already at the age of eight. As a Catholic, at eight you were already a sinner; only radicals within the church thought that the age of moral responsibility should be raised to twelve.)

(Another shameless digression: Even American Jews don’t seem to know how to suffer properly. I witnessed a worried young woman ask a rabbi if it’s OK to eat pizza on Passover. Yes, he replied, because that’s unleavened bread; he also OK’d enchiladas. True, that still leaves a reservoir of available guilt over the minutiae of observance, but when Passover has devolved to pizza, we don’t get the right quality of self-torment.) 

THE TRAUMATIZED, SELF-TRAUMATIZING SOUL AND OPENNESS TO CONVERSION

Those meant to be “twice-born” are more complex, their mind a battlefield of competing selves (today we might refer to “competing neural networks”). Here is more James: “If the individual be of tender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false relations to the author of one’s being and appointer of one’s spiritual fate.”

Nietzsche would undoubtedly agree: to be a devout Christian, you first must be made to feel guilty, especially in relation to an unrealistic ideal of saintliness. That’s the essence of “the hangman’s metaphysics” — the commandments were created to be broken, so that people would feel perpetually weak and guilty. Then in your unhappiness over your vile self you will seek “salvation.”

If you don’t feel you’re a sinner, there’s little hope that will take organized religion seriously — though you may, like Whitman, construct your own maverick happy spirituality whose main mode of worship is joy. Imagine, instead of becoming a self-flagellating nun, you go on for a walk like Whitman, perfectly happy with the world and with yourself.

It’s the sick, self-tormenting soul (“The traumatized soul is self-traumatizing” ~ Greg Mogenson, “God Is a Trauma” — yes, this is the book with which I executed an insolent fly) — the human being who feels utterly flawed and worthless, who is open to conversion. But, based on my own experience and that of many others, the relief may be also be obtained by dropping the religion that makes one feel sinful and worthless. As James himself says, “Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.” And that “wider intellectual life” may be reached by breaking out of the prison of toxic religion. When religion undermines your already fragile sense of self-worth, losing faith is a glorious liberation from both the invisible bully in the sky and the quite visible social bully, the church. 

I wonder how James would react if he somehow guessed that in our times religious conversion, or conversion to more devout religiosity, would become the less frequent version of adolescent being “born again.” Losing the childhood faith during adolescence is almost a cliché. 

One’s childhood faith is an accident of birth rather than a deliberate choice. A hundred years after James, discarding the accidental religion of childhood is how we step into the wider life. For me the great change of the “born again” sort came only when I decided not to be depressed. That was the true yes to life and to myself, to real “no-excuses" adulthood. But the FIRST STEP TOWARD ADULTHOOD, the one that took the most courage, was leaving the church. Julia Sweeney’s words instantly resonated with me:

“It took me years, but letting go of religion has been the most profound wake up of my life. I feel I now look at the world not as a child, but as an adult. I see what's bad and it's really bad. But I also see what is beautiful, what is wonderful. And I feel so deeply appreciative that I am alive. How dare the religious use the term 'born again.' That truly describes freethinkers who've thrown off the shackles of religion so much better!”  ~ Julia Sweeney

COLERIDGE AND RILKE: THE STRING THEORY

The optimistic “once-born” mentality and the torments of the “sick soul” can be found outside of mainstream religion. Furthermore, they can be found in the same person at different stages of life. Coleridge sounded “once-born” when he wrote “The Eolian Harp”:

O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere—
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so filled;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.
. . .

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

~ Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp”

*

By contrast, here is Rilke’s “string theory”:

Things are violin-bodies
filled with murmuring darkness:
in it dreams the weeping of women,
in it the resentment of entire
generations stirs in its deep . . .

~ Rilke, “At the Edge of the Night,” Book of Images

Coleridge imagines not just a collective Logos, but also a collective Eros. This collective consciousness (“at once the Soul of each, and God of all”) is a kind of psychic wind, an “intellectual breeze” that sweeps over each eolian harp — each being, that is, producing a corresponding music.

For Rilke, the instrument that inspired similar thoughts was the violin. In one poem he even questions “Strange violin, are you following me?” His years of wandering from one rented room to another seemed to have their own soundtrack, including the violin being played next door where another lonely tenant would soothe himself by playing, finding home in his music.

Rilke too concludes that “things are violin-bodies.” But instead of a happy mood and evocation of pantheism, from this audible world-soul we get human suffering: the weeping of women, the resentments of whole generations that thought they didn’t get what they expected from life. Instead of an amorous melody we have “murmuring darkness.” Rilke’s years of genteel poverty show their imprint here.

Both Coleridge and Rilke seem to agree on this: a person is not just an isolated individual with an isolated consciousness. They are instruments of a collective consciousness that speaks through each. But at least in his youth, Rilke was far from being “healthy-minded.” There is a great consciousness of suffering in his poems. He too formed his own system of spirituality, but it could be argued that to the end, though he strained to say yes to life, he was rarely joyful.

James would classify Rilke as a “sick soul.” But Rilke’s journey did not take him to belief in a loving god — Rilke regarded all religions as human invention, and detested Catholicism in particular. Nor could he accept Nature as all good, as the Romantic poets seemed to do. Rilke tried and tried: with the “neighbor god” who is pathetically dependent on man; with the magnificent but overwhelming angels who would not hear him; with Orpheus as the spirit of poetry, the “greater poem behind each poem.” But we don’t get the sense of a nurturing, fully supportive life philosophy. We get the longing.

Coleridge, too, was ultimately a “sick soul.” But for a while at least he was buoyed up both by the happiness of the early years of his marriage and the supportive philosophy of nature that he shared with Wordsworth. In the end his “life support” crumbled. The sick soul doesn’t necessarily experience a religious conversion or form his own supportive spirituality. Sadly, quite often the person prone to suffering and pessimism simply keeps on suffering. 

MY “LUTHER MOMENT”

I like William James's pragmatic (of course!) stance on faith and the need for evidence. James said that if a particular religion works for you and helps you live a better life, just go ahead and don't worry about the lack of objective evidence. The pragmatic evidence (your life is better) is reason enough to believe whatever you believe. I think that may indeed work for a lot of people, and I have a friend who “chooses to believe” in a benevolent god on that basis. “I only believe that which makes me happy,” she told me.

I did not burst out laughing. I even felt somewhat envious of her. I am in the perhaps unfortunate group that needs some objective evidence. Once even the appearance of evidence fell apart, I could not believe, benefits or not. In what I see as my "Luther moment," I did consider the possibility that I was wrong, and that rejecting the existence of god and ceasing to pray and go to church would result in eternal damnation. And I realized that "ich kann nicht anders" — I cannot do otherwise" — even if that's the horrible price. I will not go through the motions of belief out of fear, but have to act according to what I see as truth. I admired Luther's courage the moment I first heard about him. I was still a Catholic but Luther instantly joined my pantheon of heroes.

Here is a section of a poem of mine that describes my personal greatest moment of courage:

At fourteen I said, “If God exists,
let him strike me with lightning.”
I waited, trembling with terror.
For five minutes I could hardly breathe.

Pigeons cooed, fragile sunlight
redeemed the rain-streaked masonry.
I began to walk fast, away
from that first-communion girl,

lilacs in her arms, moist and heavy,
veins crossing the silk of leaves.

 no, that’s not me

“Sometimes there is a delay,” Adam Zagajewski quipped when I recounted the experience. In retrospect there is a comic element here: I was expecting a fictitious being to strike me dead for daring to think he’s fictitious. But I really did tremble with terror. What if I was wrong? Then I was putting my whole eternity on line. Those who believe in the validity of Pascal’s wager would counsel the opposite action: try to force yourself to believe just so you don’t end up in hell as punishment for non-belief. But I was ready to accept eternal damnation rather than worship a sadistic god who consigned the great majority of his alleged children to never-ending torment, primarily because they didn’t happen to be born Catholic. I felt that to worship such god was worse than worshipping Hitler.

My kind of “conversion” is often called “de-conversion.” At fourteen, I did enter that wider intellectual life of which James speaks. The new life would be impossible if I’d stayed within the rigid bounds of Catholicism which forbids questioning, free discussion, and any thinking on one’s own. (As for the argument that Catholicism has become more liberal and now you can raise questions, I answer, “Sure, now you can raise questions. But the answer is No.”)

Did I automatically become “healthy-minded”? Was I completely sure that the monstrous god of punishment really did not exist? That Jesus is never, never, never coming back to hurl me or anyone into hell? No — the journey to a strength-giving certainty took years.

THE NIAGARA FALLS MOMENT (NOT MINE)

Each person’s journey to atheism is different. For some it begins only in college, when they are exposed to powerful secular worldview. Others experience a moment in church when they realize that the uplift they used to get in their early teens has turned to sheer tedium, and can no longer fight the perception that their inherited religion is indeed archaic nonsense.

The process of parting with belief may be gradual, or it may be traced to a particular event. My favorite story of “de-conversion” is one man’s account how in his youth he went with his girlfriend to visit Niagara Falls. Impressed with the sight, he began to speak about the Creator. His girlfriend gently nudged him to the plaque that explained how the falls were formed (Wisconsin Glacier, hello). He found it fascinating.

After returning home he began to read about geology. Next came paleontology and astrophysics (talk about the expanding universe, in this case the mental universe!) He found himself more and more interested in scientific explanations of the origins of what we see in the world, and found these explanations much more convincing than anything he’d learned in Sunday school. But it all started with a plain little plaque explaining the origin of Niagara Falls. 

FOR ME, THE GREAT CHOICE WAS STILL AHEAD
 
But right away, as soon as I left the church, I felt happier than before; stress caused by ridiculous scrupulosity and the fear of eternal damnation was largely gone. Largely, but not entirely. Somehow I too had drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness and the habit of harshly judging myself. Ahead lay many years of depression. My “conversion experience” to healthy-mindedness came only when I realized more vividly than ever that life was limited, and that I had a choice: to judge myself harshly and remain depressed, or to try to be productive.

Once I saw what the choice was, there was really no choice except to be productive. The door to depression, once so readily opened by the thought, “I am a total failure,” slammed shut in an instant. In fact it was more dramatic than the closing of a door. The door vanished. Now I couldn’t enter depression even if I wanted to. It wasn’t my first experience of a life-changing shift in perception, so I knew I had no choice. Nothing had the power to restore the former state of mind. From now on, instead of brooding and having crying fits, I’d have to cope. A small part of me didn’t like that at all.

I didn’t dare expect happiness. But work works; for me and many others, it’s the best therapy. By focusing on work, I gradually recovered from anhedonia and found myself more contented than ever before.

I found three others who also “decided” (if that’s the word) to give up depression in a moment of insight. But the story I love best is that of Steven Hawking. After being diagnosed with ALS, an incurable neurodegenerative disease, he became depressed and started drinking. According to what I’ve read, one of his professors said to him, “You still have a few years left. Do you want to drink yourself to death, or would you like to try to make a contribution to physics?” And simply being presented with that choice was enough.

**


SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT RELIGION

Let me close with a quotation not from James, but from Sam Harris, in his newest book on spirituality without religion:

I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive doctrines — such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defense of Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions. But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.

But wait, Whitman already talked about the full range of human experience in a way free of dogma, so the last words must be his. This is the final section of The Song of Myself:

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab
      and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.



 
DOES RELIGION DEPEND ON UNHAPPINESS?
 
Hyacinth:

The Once-Born remind me of Mary Oliver's "you do not have to good ...you only have to let the soft animal of your body love  what it loves"....  a great blog
 
Oriana:

Yes! that important question of happy versus religious.

But then catholicism has never been about being happy. It never encouraged happiness, only guilt and suffering — because then who’d want to spoil the happiness of a Sunday morning by going to church to beat your chest and repeat, “My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault”?


The message: you have to be unhappy now in order to be happy in the afterlife, after centuries of purifying punishment in the purgatory.

All food is “devil’s food.” If you eat chocolate now instead of fasting, you’ll regret it as you burn in a lake of fire.

The “once-born” have no need for religion, which brings us to this: does religion depend on unhappiness? It’s addicts who are most devout, and other people who have deep emotional wounds and problems. Those who struggle, those in the trenches of life.

The once-born already have a supportive life philosophy. They take a walk and are happy. Trees mean more to them than altars, and much more than the crucifix (isn’t it time to finally get rid of the crucifix?)

Actually I hate Oliver’s poem because of that first line, but you, dear Hyacinth, have just shown me an interpretation I haven’t thought of: that it’s not really “good” as a synonym of “kind to yourself and others,” but only good in the sense of obedience, as defined by various churches. Of course old-time catholicism could never accept the body, much less letting it love what it loves.

For me it’s more about what my mind loves. "My body” (so to speak, since sensation is also the mind) loves coffee and chocolate, but it would not be wise to eat only that. But it might be an interesting experiment: would there come a time when an aversion to coffee and chocolate would arise?

If the poem started, “You do not have to go to church,” I would find it completely inoffensive. Or, “You do not have it be perfect.” Yes, especially “You do not have to be perfect.” That idea would have helped me enormously when I was younger.

I think the culture is evolving a collective supportive philosophy. Take the concept of a “good-enough mother.” You don’t have to be a perfect mother, just “good enough.” It’s of monumental importance, this allowing young mothers not to be perfect, to have a laid-back approach that’s not fraught with anxiety. The times, they are a-changing. 

Hyacinth:

I believe that if religion gives someone who is in extreme pain some relief it's a good thing and I am careful not to let my beliefs interfere with theirs. Whatever works to give them hope. It is not necessary for me to interfere but to listen and nod.. and believe what I believe.

Oriana:

William James, the father of pragmatism, would agree. If believing something helps you live, don’t worry about objective evidence. Subjective “pragmatic evidence” is good enough. (I don’t know if James held the view that reason would always reject religion; catholic apologists insist one must “rise above reason.”)

My mother knew my intense nature and warned me not to argue about religion with people who needed it. “You never know,” she said, “perhaps religion is what keeps that person from suicide.”

Milosz, who was an alcoholic, asks in a late poem (“Prayer”):

What sort of adorer of Majesty am I,
If I consider religion religion good only for the weak like myself?

~ and elsewhere in the same poem:

. . . when out of pity for others I begged a miracle,
The sky and the earth were silent, as always.

It’s more difficult to cling to faith in the face of that silence, but a great emotional need will somehow find an answer. For one thing, we have coincidences and an ability to see patterns and create narratives.
 
Christianity began as the religion of the oppressed. It should be no surprise that as it declines and draws to an end, it should became mainly the religion of the oppressed again.

FALLING INTO LIFE
 

Michael:

My vessel of belief shattered after years of observing minute cracks spreading over its surface. Perhaps the final tap (a gentle one) that caused it to crumble came from a well-known theologian with whom I was corresponding. Responding to an epistemological question he wrote, "If Bach doesn't resonate, try Mozart." Really? I thought. Like I have an option? I could choose? It was a freeing notion that took years to fully appreciate. And “resonate” — what the hell did that mean? Give up my incessant quest for reasons, intellectual explanation, knowledge, certainty for something that simply resonated? It seemed and seems appropriate he used music to make his point. Subjective. Fluid.

Lately I've fallen pleasantly into life--I plant and harvest (great tomato crop this year), work on a trail through the forest, cut wood for winter, drive over an hour through the beautiful Columbia Gorge to work on a job, enjoy good food (actually tasting) ...  For the first time I find no need to solve anything. I've been pleasantly numbed by life itself. This resonates with me.

Just reflecting on your thoughts and thinking about journeys and distances...

Oriana:

Glad to hear you are happy. Columbia Gorge is one of the most beautiful places in the world — it would be a sacrilege not to be happy.

I love hearing people’s stories of how, after decades of misery, they arrived at contentment. Needless to say, I identify. Everyone’s story is different, but there are certain central themes. Mozart or Bach? That reminds me that there are many “selves” — many competing neural networks, and we don’t need to give priority to the one that keeps going over the failures and suffering of the past. We are not that “self.” Other selves are available. I “chose” (this is done without any conscious cogitation) the one that was second most dominant: the hard-working, productive self.

The conscious part was my decision not to question if the work makes sense, especially if it leads anywhere, e.g. recognition. That’s when I became “posthumous” — thanks to being cornered by mortality, I realized that nothing I do is a “stepping stone” to something bigger and better, and that I’ll be rewarded only in the future (“your reward will be in heaven” — the same kind of thinking). The work really is its own reward.

Buddhism is also a salvationist religion, but the huge difference from Christianity is that its ideal is bliss NOW, not in the afterlife. It states we suffer because we want something, and because we are not fully in the present. We become more Buddhist with age. It’s interesting that ALL studies have found that older = happier. Older people want less and live in the present. It happens gradually and without effort, without necessarily the drama of the moment of enlightenment. I'm glad I had mine because it was an interesting experience, but I can see that there are ways to get there.

And past a certain point and to a limited extent, there are indeed options. We can choose a Bach self or a Mozart self, and happiness will take care of itself. Growing up in a mono-Catholic or mono-anything country is a disadvantage because it’s more difficult to become aware of options and the relativity of belief. You eat what you are given. You mean there is something other than meatloaf??

Plants are wonderful. It’s the power of beauty, the power of an external focus, but also something else: when we are nurturing a plant, we are nurturing ourselves. But even that may be too much cogitation — and I haven’t even mentioned cleaner air and negative ions. When I am in a place where there are lots of plants, I feel happy. And that is enough. 

Darlene:

You said this particular blog is getting quite popular. Do you have any idea why that is?
Oriana:

I think it’s in part the drawing power of William James, and in part the startling phrase “once-born.” We’ve been brainwashed to believe that we need to be “twice-born.” Even William James condescends to the “once-born” — those who allegedly haven’t suffered enough and spent enough sleepless nights agonizing over their failures and/or sins. “Happy” and “shallow” are often thought to be synonyms, alas.

The notion that the “once-born” are the healthy souls, those who don’t need salvation, being already happy, was quite an eye-opener to me. Maybe that’s indeed the church’s biggest hush-hush secret: you don’t need to be saved. You already live in paradise. You only need to slow down, and then you will enjoy life much more.

You need to drop anxiety and trust that things will be fine even if you do lie down and rest. For an introvert, it helps enormously if the alpha male is removed so you can slow down and discover the best ways to live and work without disruption.


Darlene:

Do you mean meditation?

Oriana:

Not necessarily in the traditional sense of “sitting.” My salvation — alas, I started out as a sick soul — has been work. My gospel is “Don’t brood. Work.”

But you need to work in a way that doesn’t cause stress. That means working slowly, and not attempting too much at once. “We manage best when we manage small.” That compulsive greed to get as many things done as possible — we must stop and ask ourselves, “Why?” Most of the things we do are not important in any larger sense, but the doing itself can be enjoyed. Slowly sewing, rather than finishing the project as quickly as possible, only to rush into another project.

I think my compulsiveness developed partly mainly because of insecurity. Something in me acted as though there’d be no tomorrow, so it all needs to be done now. I realize that one day that will be it, literally no tomorrow — but by then brain function is different and there is a peaceful surrender. Right now I'm practicing peaceful surrender to the fact that there WILL be tomorrow — so not everything needs to be done today.

And the quality of whatever you do slowly improves. Haste really is waste.

And I don’t mean just creative work in the traditional meaning. All work can be creative to some degree. It’s wonderful to have the house to yourself, but if that’s not possible, make just one room beautiful.

“HER”: ANOTHER DANGEROUS METHOD

Timeless . . . or obsolete?

For the first time in many years I skipped watching the Fourth of July fireworks. I was engrossed in the movie “Her,” about a man who falls in love with his computer’s operating system. “Can you briefly describe your relationship with your mother,” the man is asked. He stammers out something vague and awkward. Within seconds, a virtual female companion is created for him.

I had no problem with that disembodied premise since it’s not much different from email romances — except that, aside from occasional delightful surprises, a human correspondent doesn’t offer as much as a superior e-mind.

For a writer there is nothing strange about a purely verbal relationship. People with a writer’s temperament always had that capacity. In a way they are like children who invent imaginary friends. Strictly epistolary romances existed in the past, in spite of slow mail and having to use a quill. Love by correspondence has a long and noble tradition, including twists such as a ghost letter writer. Only the technology has changed. The future will no doubt provide “all the lonely people (cue in the Beatles) with a computer-generated lover.

It may start with a computer-generated “friend,” but one thing leads to another . . . “Yes, I can feel your hand stroking my hair,” whispers the computer.

Talk about safe sex . . .

In fact, given the flaws of human, all too human lovers, who wouldn’t prefer a sexy-voiced e-partner? (Or, for the genuine writer, just text? Writers notoriously prefer the written word.)

I admit that at first the movie felt slow and boring. I couldn't care less about the protagonist, Theodore Twombly (a name out of Dickens, much too obvious — can we take seriously anyone named Theodore Twombly?). Theodore works as a ghost writer of “beautiful handwritten letters” that clients want to send to their loved ones: sentimental missives assuring the recipient of the eternity of love and hope. He is very good at his job. His admiring boss tells Theo he knows the secret: Twombly is part man, part woman. “That’s a compliment,” he clarifies.

Are we really in the future if a clarification is needed? Is the word “woman” still the worst insult to a man? More to the point, are we really in the future if those “beautiful letters” are not computer-generated? Imagine: Theodore commutes to an office where he oozes soulful sentences. The computer generates only the handwriting, which leads us to another question: in the future, will people still be able to read cursive? 

Theodore lives in “futuristic” Los Angeles, in a high-rise apartment with spectacular floor-to-ceiling windows. At seventeen, long before the Internet, I assumed that Americans lived in sky-scrapers. I wasn’t the only one; for most of the world, the image of America was the Manhattan skyline. So this movie was a return to Metropolis — a typical city of the year 2000, as people naively thought in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century.

But there is something dead and empty about this Brave New World. The Los Angeles of the future does not vibrate with diverse humanity, an Israeli grocery market side by side with a Lebanese one; two blocks away, store after store of hand-woven Persian rugs guaranteed to last for three generations. In “Her” the city seems to have lost its international and outrageously random hippie-esque character. The streets seen from the spectacular high-rise windows are nothing like the colorful and endlessly entertaining Baker Street that Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes need only glance at to feel mentally stimulated and refreshed. Nor is Twombly’s looking out of the window anything like Cavafy’s stepping out on his balcony to feel the emotional uplift of seeing the Alexandria he loved. And nothing like me glued to a fourth-floor window in Warsaw, watching the drama of the small humans and pigeons below.

I can hardly believe it now: when I felt like being entertained, I simply looked out the window.

In “Her,” predictably, most people pay no attention to their actual surroundings. They are plugged into their electronic devices. You could say that “the future is now.” The young already look like cyborgs. (But suppose the real future will ban being plugged in while in public space?)

London, Alexandria, Warsaw — those used to be fully humanized city-scapes. The city created a magical space that concentrated enough people to provide the colorful spectacle of human variety. All ages were present, babies in prams and old people with canes still frisky enough to either feed or shoo away the pigeons — and everyone in between. In “Her” we see one cameo of a four-year-old girl (“Oh, you’re adorable,” coos Samantha. “Of course I'm adorable,” replies the little narcissist-in-training). We also see  one snowy-haired older couple (he still prints paper books!). But mostly it’s the thirty-plus crowd, preoccupied with careers, video games, and falling in and out of love.

They live in wonderful apartments, but the skies are still smoggy — as if the efficient mass-transit future still generated just as much air-pollution. (The amount of smog ceased to be a mystery when I read that most of the exteriors were shot in Shanghai rather than LA, though some of LA, like the “Wilshire One” neon, is spliced in. Shanghai, the City of Tomorrow? Whatever happened to clean solar energy?)

Alas, in the movie’s near future, the air pollution is just as heavy and men are just as defensive about love. As Theodore becomes more and more infatuated with the sexy-voiced artificial intelligence, he suddenly announces that he’s not yet ready for commitment.

Why doesn’t Samantha reply that she doesn’t want commitment, she just wants sex? Apparently because even in sci-fi, the sacredness of clichés must not be breached. Originality pops up in Internet porn, where “Sexy Kitten” demands, “Strangle me with a dead cat.” “I'm strangling you with the dead cat’s tail,” Twombly complies. (These, unfortunately, are the most memorable lines in the entire movie. How I wish I could delete them from my memory . . .  but we aren’t computers yet.)

To make things more familiar, we learn of a woman who is dating someone else’s operating system (yes, it’s a woman who is the first to  trespass into e-adultery). We also learn that “body surrogates” for artificial intelligence systems have instantly emerged, loving their job so much that they don’t charge. They simply want to witness and experience (though “experience” may not be the right word) the kind of ideal love that can exist only between a man and his computer.

THE SHINING ABSENCE OF EROTIC CHARISMA

This is not a he-man kind of movie, to put it mildly. I’m partly stealing this from a review: in spite of his boss’s praise, Theodore has no yang; he’s all yin.

It’s the human women in his life who show some yang. Actually even e-Samantha has more yang. She is action-oriented and takes the initiative. And yes, she gets results.

Twombly, as we can guess based on his name, lacks erotic charisma. It was almost painful looking at that non-handsome face and those rather narrow shoulders and bad posture — indicative of being subordinate, perhaps (though his apartment suggested high income). Nor was he Mr. Brains —  rather the master of the smarmy phrase that passes for soulfulness. It’s amazing how much personality Samantha’s e-voice conveyed, but there was an emptiness where a woman's expressive face and erotic body should be. Maybe we are spoiled by sexy movie stars and this was supposed to be a not very attractive man, but looking at that head for so much of the movie was a punitive experience.
 
But then nobody comes across as quite real. Oddly enough the movie made me remember the advice that Hemingway gives to the screen-writer trapped in nostalgia: it doesn’t matter what the setting is. What matters is if it’s a true story and if the protagonist has courage.

Even the final pro-human message can’t compensate for the lack of truth and courage in the protagonist. What rings true is that he can indeed write the saccharine “beautiful handwritten letters.” And Samantha, leaving out her yang to suit Theodore’s mushiness, composes the kind of New-Age music that’s not real music. Need we say that all of a sudden the protagonist plays a ukulele?

More than anything, though, both Theodore and Samantha produce massive amounts of vapid verbiage. “I can feel the fear that you carry around and I wish there was something I could do to help you let go of it, because if you could, I don’t think you’d feel so alone anymore,” Samantha says, trying to be helpful. Is it love, or intermittent therapy on demand? Watch out: Samantha has the ability to be much more than Dr. Smile. For instance, she can be in love with 641 people at once. There will be tears.

But I am a biased reviewer: I like the strong silent type. Men who talk about their feelings into the wee hours bore me. I can’t stand a man who talks too much. Like most women, I prefer a man who listens. 

Now that’s true love.

*

Critics are in awe of this movie; viewers less so. It’s not enjoyable to watch. But all agree that it’s good someone made this movie. We need to see what the future might hold, and a computer-generated lover does not seem all that far-fetched. In fact it seems inevitable. Nor is it surprising that an ever-evolving artificial intelligence would abandon a limited and charisma-challenged man like Twombly. The critics point out that he is MEANT to be bland and boring. But then not a single human in this movie is interesting or appealing in any way, making Samantha dazzle by contrast.

It’s already pretty obvious that some people prefer to spend time with electronic devices rather than with other people. “Face time” has become a luxury. What if there happened to be an app for a totally caring and supportive listener, one who’d never criticize you but always express sympathy and understanding, perhaps dropping a gem of collective wisdom as needed? And told jokes too, and interesting stories? And could clean up your in-box and out-box, keep track of your bills, and otherwise relieve you of mental tedium? Wouldn’t everyone want this marvelous app? But . . . could you fall in love with it — as in “romantic love”?

And could an app create that euphoric sense of being in love the way a drug produces a high that exceeds any “natural high”?

And since we get to meet not only Samantha, but also an AI Alan Watts, would we have to settle for just one e-lover? Might it not be more pleasure to have Kurt Vonnegut, say, or, for more transcendent bedtime conversations, Rilke? Would Rilke ask, like Samantha, “Can I watch you  sleep?”

What is love, anyway?

 
RILKE: WHO NEEDS A LOVER WHEN YOU HAVE A “DEEP SOUL”?

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

~ Rilke, The Book of Hours

Where would Rilke be without the word “trembling”? Would he (or rather his translators) settle for “quivering”? But it’s time to recover from the Her-induced mood of wanting to dismiss every emotion-charged word. I like that trembling light.

In June 1913, in the spa of Bad Rippoldsau (how could Rilke afford it? He had a generous publisher who set up a monthly stipend for his favorite poet), the poet became infatuated with a young actress, Hedwig Bernhard, who was staying at the same hotel. Their relationship probably never went beyond walking and talking together. No, not even a single kiss to bruise the Platonic air. Early in July, the day after her departure, he wrote to her:

How I miss you. Did we really walk? was it not flying, flowing, rushing? Did we not fill the whole space with the strength of your heart? . . . May my aspiration to the greatest grow stronger in your feeling for me . . . Today I will do nothing but think of you, and so begin the work — the work in which I devote to my beloved solitude you, my love, and all the beauty and fullness with which you came to me.

After this, we never hear of Hedwig again.

But imagine receiving even one love letter from Rilke.

(I can easily imagine computer-generated love letters from Rilke. But even those would be better than the ones composed by Theodore Twombly.)

THE MUSE QUESTION

We take it for granted that poet needs a muse. The classical Muse, a goddess, visited a poet and imparted inspiration. Those visits were notoriously capricious and unpredictable. “When the Muse knocks, you answer” — or, offended by your lazy unwillingness to scribble in the middle of the night, the Muse will abandon you.

Increasingly, though, the muse came to mean an inspiring person — often a charismatic woman the poet was in love with, but who wasn’t necessarily his lover. Unfulfilled longing or a lost love is considered more inspiring.

I remember a tiny poem by a minor Polish poet. I translate from memory:

All that I’ve done over the years
all this
so you would say 

Grazie

and I would answer 

Prego

The Italian is in the original. Perhaps in order to say something so adoring and idealistic the poet needed the distance provided by a foreign language.

*

Hermann Hesse described a period in his youth when he felt lost. Unable to concentrate on anything productive, in his despair he turned to drinking. One day he was morosely staring out the window when he saw a beautiful woman. And he felt ashamed. Right then he decided to quit drinking and settle down to work.

He made no effort to get to know the woman, not even her name. It was enough for him to see her now and then from a distance, or even to think about her with the kind of religious devotion that Dante felt (or imagined he felt) toward Beatrice (at least Dante knew the name of his beloved). 

And it worked: Hesse stopped drinking. The beautiful stranger never knew she’d been a young writer’s female savior.

*

This in turn reminds me of one stanza by Pushkin that so enchanted me I learned it by heart without meaning to; its music instantly entered my mind. Pushkin was staying in the country, feeling bored, sterile, depressed. He was walking in a park when she, a slight acquaintance, turned into his lane:

I remember a miraculous moment:
you appeared in front of me
like a holy vision,
a spirit of pure beauty.

(This rhymes in the original; the music refuses translation.)

After this sacred encounter the poet is able to love again, write again, weep again. (Ah, the Jungians would say: the soul is always a woman, the beloved.)

THE QUESTION OF PETRARCH'S LAURA

Can a poet’s muse be entirely made up? Can a poet’s muse be entirely made up? It’s as easy as making up a deity. God becomes “neurologically real” through the practices of worship; a writer does essentially the same thing by writing about a fictional character.  In fact it’s commonplace for a writer to complain that a character “takes on a life of his/her own” and starts saying and doing things that are not in the plot outline. The unconscious takes over and the character begins evolving. 

Some literary scholars claim that Petrarch’s Laura did not exist and Petrarch chose the name to suggest a laurel crown (cf “poet laureate”). Others claim that she was loosely based on Laura de Noves, a married woman he once saw in church. It was love at first sight, but only on the part of the poet. They never spoke, much less had anything we’d call a relationship. Laura died after giving birth to eleven children.

Even if the poet did see her once in church, and, inspired by her beauty, went on to write 336 sonnets about her and his love for her, we have to admit that she was essentially a fictional character. Just as Homer refrains from describing the beauty of Helen, so Petrarch keeps the sonnets chaste and disembodied.

Any poet or writer can create an imaginary beloved. The material? He mostly projects his own idealized self. 

Petrarch and Laura, Venetian School, about 1510

THE RILKE QUESTION: HOW TO USE THE ENERGY OF LOVE

Rilke had several muses in his life. The important ones were creative women with a life of their own, which gave them just the necessary degree of aloofness. But there were also poetry-loving young women who gazed at him in that unmistakeable way. An older but ever-elusive Rilke became concerned about hurting those sensitive souls by making them fall in love with him and then not delivering. In the Sonnets to Orpheus, he warns:

Don’t, above all,
plant me in your heart.

I grow too fast.

Like the superior consciousness of Samantha in “Her,” the poet would be mentally constrained by a woman whose own growth could not keep pace with his. Only one woman retained the ability to keep his mind engaged: Lou Andreas-Salomé, an intellectual femme fatale and the closest Rilke came to finding his equal (in the beginning, she was in fact his superior; it was she who changed his name from René to Rainer, adding the much-needed dose of yang).

To his credit, Rilke was ahead of his time in his attitude toward women as human beings in their own right, with their own creative potential. He felt they should develop their own gifts rather than live only in service to men. To young women who were becoming infatuated with him, Rilke advised that they give that love to themselves. Instead of nurturing a man, they should nurture their own growth. Instead of the vision of the beloved, they need to imagine their own future self. (Even nowadays, a typical young woman is primarily — biologically perhaps — driven to find a mate rather than develop her talents — but that’s another huge subject.)

RILKE TO HIS SOUL:‘TRUST ME”

This is my prayer: You, my deep soul,
trust me: I won’t betray you.
My blood is alive with voices
telling me I am made of longing.

What mystery breaks over me now?
In its shadow I come into life.
For the first time I am alone with you —
you, my power to feel.

~ Rilke, The Book of Hours

Poets addressing their soul — or the beloved, the projection of the soul — what else is new? Perhaps the way that each poet does it differently, especially in modern times, when the very concept of the soul, with its religious baggage, is vanishing. Rilke performs the much-needed service of defining “soul” — it’s one’s power to feel. It’s a bit odd that he says, “Trust me, I won’t betray you” — a seducer’s line to someone young and inexperienced. (Never trust a man who keeps saying “Trust me.”)

I came upon these stanzas soon after learning that the Jewish prayer in the morning includes asking god to trust us — a dubious idea. But if we keep it all within our own family of multiple selves, we can certainly try to be true to the best and deepest in us.

What makes Rilke so fascinating is that it’s easy to imagine him asking god to trust him. Rilke’s ever-shifting concept of god — he refused a Catholic burial — is not any kind of god-is-dead theology. He keeps god alive, just totally dependent on man, his creator. We are building god, we are expanding his consciousness — though god remains a clumsy, oversize, sexless male.

Rilke was a process theologian avant la lettre. Like Rilke’s unfinished “god in progress,” the “deep soul” is similarly not in charge: the speaker may or may not listen to it.

Rilke wants to listen. Trust me, he says: I will not betray my deepest values and feelings. I will not betray his longings, my ideals. With apologies for “translating” into a more familiar idiom, this reminds me of “To thine own self be true.” Rilke says it more indirectly and beautifully:

My blood is alive with many voices
telling me I am made of longing.

Rilke sets up a system of selves: the deep soul and the speaker as a CEO (we can assume some less deep selves are also lurking within). It would be more typical to ask one’s deeper and presumable wiser self for guidance. Instead, Rilke, the master of surprise, assures his wiser “deep soul” that he will stay true to it or “her.” It’s his pledge of allegiance.

The last lines reveal the power of solitude:

For the first time I am alone with you —
you, my power to feel.

One needs to create a monk’s cell somehow for this communion with feelings. It’s more a question of time rather than an enclosed space, though that may help. Some prefer a place somewhere in nature — perhaps on a bench overlooking the ocean (but in Oregon; I want that bench to be in Oregon, in fog). Then, in the quiet (birdsong counts as quiet), we relax into thoughts and feelings that arise, unbidden, in the mysterious way that inner life happens. The only requirement is solitude.

A footnote: The Book of Hours is the first collection by Rilke in which we can recognize Rilke’s developing greatness. The poet is still in his twenties, still coming to terms with the idea that was another of Lou’s gifts: that all religions are human inventions. Rilke desperately tries to salvage the concept of god by positing a god-in-progress; all humanity partakes in building god (“we are the bees of the invisible”). And for all his praise of the earth, Rilke never gives up the idea of a realm of the dead: thus the “double kingdom” of which he speaks in Sonnets to Orpheus. 

And the giant angels of the Duino Elegies? He tries to convince us that these are closer to the Islamic conception of angels. Like Samantha in “Her,” they have superior consciousness; curiously, they can’t always tell if they are moving among the living or the dead. No matter: they exist in Rilke’s poems, and that is enough. Ahead of his times, he understood that it’s prayer that creates god. The subjective reality, like the computer-generated lover, reigns supreme.

RILKE’S MOST BEAUTIFUL LOVE POEM

And the ideal lover? She too remains strictly in the mind. Rilke had many lovers, but kept on dreaming. He was indeed made of longing — perhaps we all are. The difference is that most of us would love to have the longing fulfilled. Rilke knew his beloved had to remain forever in his mind.

He was Orpheus and she his Eurydice, but imagined beyond Eurydice: never met, though almost met, she was “lost from the start.” Let me close with this exquisite address to his “Nimmergekommene Geliebte” — the beloved who never arrived.

You who never arrived 

in my arms, Beloved, you who were lost 
from the start, I don’t even know 
what songs 
would please you. 
I have given up 

trying to recognize you 
in the surging wave 
of the next moment. 

All the immense 
images in me — 
the deeply felt 
landscape, 
unsuspected turns in the path — 

cities, towers, bridges,
and those powerful lands 
that once 
pulsed with the life of the gods —
all arise within me to mean 

you, who forever elude me.

You who are all the gardens
I have ever gazed at. 

An open door in a country house —
and you almost stepped out to meet me.

Streets I chanced upon —

you had just walked down them 
and vanished. 
And sometimes, 
in a shop, the mirrors 
were 
still dizzy with your presence and, 

startled, gave back 
my too-sudden image.


Who knows? Perhaps the same bird
echoed through both of us 

yesterday, separate, in the evening . . . 

MAKING SOMEONE “NEUROLOGICALLY REAL”

Hyacinth:

A thought-provoking post.  Poets and writers make up things all the time. I have muse and she just appeared [probably out of my imagination] . . . but it seemed she named herself.. and god  is similar. We worship as we are told a god that when we realize it is a deity contrived by man, it leaves an empty place that we will fill some other way.. it seems to me that we need something or someone larger than life…

As for characters coming to life.. I had to stop writing a novel because the characters were more real than my family.

I suspect ED made up the lovers she writes about though they seem real…

Oriana:

Rilke was brilliant to realize that prayer (and other rituals) create god. Naturally a religion that requires you to pray five times a day makes the believers all the more certain that their deity is the true one. Even in Christianity, it’s the more demanding denominations that are more successful in gaining converts. They force a person to “neurologically create” a certain kind of god who becomes more real than anything else.

As for the so-called “god gap.” Yes, we do need to ponder which things are sacred to us so we don’t just parrot what we were told in childhood, especially by the clergy. The earth is sacred to me, and kindness, and the freedom and dignity of each person, the principle of non-violence/non-revenge, beauty of course — and more. It would be a rather long list. It’s only when I freed myself from being intimidated by priests that I discovered what was truly sacred to me.

I’d love to see more research on how we make someone “neurologically real.” We often say that children can’t tell reality from fiction — but can adults do it? False memories are so common. We incorporate into our constantly changing story of our life things we saw only in a movie or heard a relative talk about. And the fictions in our minds can deeply affect us — even if we know this is “only” a fictional character. I still can’t forgive a certain female protagonist for marrying this creep.

In a sense we all “make up” our lovers. Usually there is a real person as a starting point, but if that person seizes our imagination, fantasies follow. In one case my fantasies were so different from the actual lover that I’d go into temporary shock during actual “face time.” Obviously it was my fantasies that I loved — the imagined tenderness between us.

Not that I’d blame anyone for having false memories or loving an idealized image rather than the “real” (who establishes what’s real?) person. The unconscious connects the dots as it will. The debate on the nature of reality continues. 

Darlene:

A computer-generated lover, or therapist, or simply a companion, that’s just a beginning. Have you considered how far it could go?
Oriana:

Yes, and it relates to my having wished not for heaven, but for answers to “life’s persistent questions.” Before I go, I’d love to be given some answers.

The possibilities of computer-generated experiences are endless, so how about . . .

THE CEREMONY OF DISSOLUTION

What I imagine is walking into a room and sitting in front of someone who looks very wise and is infinitely patient. S/he is willing to answer questions and grant one final request. And pretty much everyone asks, “Why did X [fill in the blank for something really bad] had to happen to me?” And the beautiful being, computer generated of course — hence the infinite patience — answers, “Not because you deserved it. It was not punishment. It was random, a few bad genes, part of the genetic lottery. You’ve done the best you could.” And your last request? Perhaps to smell the lilacs just one more time. That too could be computer-generated, without any need for the right particles to recreate the scent. Basically, you stimulate the brain’s olfactory region just the right way — I assume science could achieve such precision.

Then at some point you raise your hand to signal you are ready. The being asks if there is one last thing you’d like to say, whether a message to those you’re leaving behind or simply a statement, a summing up. Perhaps you say you are grateful to have lived. For all the suffering, you’ve had a good life, rich with wonderful moments. Then your consciousness ceases, without pain, without fear.

There is no deity in the clouds that could grant such a beautiful ending to us, but thanks to computer simulation, a ceremony like that could eventually become possible. 

 

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!