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.

THE WILL TO HAPPINESS

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm. 

The reader became the book; and summer night  

Was like the conscious being of the book.  

The house was quiet and the world was calm.  

The words were spoken as if there was no book,  

Except that the reader leaned above the page,  

Wanted to lean, wanted so much to be  

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom  

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.  

The house was quiet because it had to be. 
  

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:  

The access of perfection to the page.  

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,  

In which there is no other meaning, itself  

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself  

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

~ Wallace Stevens

**

First, let me quote again the wisdom of Larry Levis: “The moment of writing is not an escape; it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.”

Ecstasy is our birthright, our inalienable right – this rings more true to me than the “pursuit of happiness.”

The reason it rings more true may lie in the fact that ecstasy consists of moments. Call them “eternal moments” since they become such in memory, but as they happen, they are measured in minutes. We can bear ecstatic moments, while longer duration is not even desirable: moments are enough. And we certainly don’t have to feel guilty about moments. Should lovers apologize for their delicious dissolving? Yet next door to the lovers someone may be dying a lingering, painful death of cancer.

That’s how life is: agony and ecstasy side by side. If we live long enough, we’ll get to know both heaven and hell. There is no getting out of it – both heaven and hell, side by side, right here. It seems a reasonable assumption that we’d clamor for more heaven, for more ecstasy here on earth. Much of it is accessible, doesn’t cost much (if anything), might be as close as one’s stereo and listening to great music. Yet even when I do have the leisure, I often have to force myself to engage in blissful activities. I know I am not the only one with a rather undeveloped will to bliss.

“TO HELL WITH HAPPINESS”

Few people even have the leisure. Overworked and overwhelmed seems to be the “normal” condition of working mothers, for instance, and they are not the only ones. Let’s face it: building paradise here on earth has never been humanity’s major goal, much less a priority (though some scholars claim a small-scale exception for early Christianity, with their agape feasts – trying to create an earthly paradise of respect and affection for everyone).  We’ve heard the excuses, the chief one being capitalism, driven by greed rather than, say, love of man and nature. But then communism has been tried and shown to create efficient armies (or if not efficient, than at least they could sing: the Red Army chorus remains a favorite of mine), and a life of luxury for top Party members rather than the well-being of ordinary citizens.

Why is the will to bliss so weak? How come the phrase “pursuit of happiness” always makes me wince? Perhaps because meaning is more important and satisfying than any form of what we usually think of as happiness. For me the sense of meaning seems to come from feeling useful, and I don't experience that as often as I’d wish (fellow poets, how useful do you feel?) I still have no doubt that if I had a really strong sense of meaning, an urgent goal, I wouldn’t need much in way of pleasure. I could easily live without erotic pleasure, good food, movies, maybe even music (that would be the greatest sacrifice) – without all manner of comfort. Just give me something to live FOR. Nietzsche: “If you have a why, you can endure almost any how.”

And maybe the greatest happiness is having that why. Jonas Salk, trying to develop a vaccine for polio, had the why. Mother Teresa had hers. After the Haiti earthquake, I watched on TV an American surgeon who was doing surgery there on a volunteer basis, and thought, “This is the happiest man in the world.”

Alas, we live at a time when educated people whose talents lie in the humanities often find themselves “mentally underemployed.” Not too many jobs provide intellectual fulfillment. We manage to invent our own work projects, but the question of audience remains that “tooth that nibbles at the soul,” in Dickinson’s wonderful phrase. Even so, “think small” can save us here, so that an audience of ten is already a sufficient blessing (my first reading in Escondido had an audience of four – and I was already an advanced poet with a strong publication record).

But let me not digress. As one man said to me, “If you don’t have a goal, you might as well die happy.” Since feeling happy, or at least contented, is good for health and longevity (yes, we want to die happy, but only in very ripe old age), I’ve researched the subject and have come to several conclusions, some of which will sound untrendy or unusual. Examples: think small, think less, eliminate choice (or at least severely limit choice) , make yawning and smiling and push-ups your spiritual practice; the answer lies outside. No, I’m not just being provocative. I mean all of the above, and more.

Arcimboldo

THINK LESS

“What blocks you is that you think too much,” a friend diagnosed me. She wasn’t the only one. Since my early teens, I’ve been told, “Your problem is you think too much.” I used to dismiss that as typical misology (misologos = hater of reason). It’s only relatively recently that it occurred to me that friends see overthinking as my greatest problem because it IS my greatest problem.

Or at least used to be. In the last two years I have made progress against the kind of thinking that is either “analysis-paralysis” or, worse, feels like being attacked by a powerful demon. I still experience “thought attacks,” but I make sure they don’t last long. Now I take steps to defend myself rather than getting paralyzed or riding the adrenalin high of a good dose of hatred (not funny if it happens close to bedtime).  

Men generally prefer action; women often get stuck in thinking. Now, I don't mean the kind of thinking that Einstein did (although we tend to underestimate the role of intuition in the sciences). I mean fruitless brooding about the past or worrying about the future. The sort of thinking that's basically on automatic. It's not a search for solutions; it's thinking for the sake of thinking, rumination as a kind of hobby.

It helps to have the “happy genes.” Every parent can tell you that there are happy babies and miserable, whining ones, and the pattern often continues well into adulthood. But regardless of genes, we are human, we can learn!  Happiness, too, takes practice. One skill I had to learn is avoiding overthinking.

Hiking – when I was more capable of it – used to give me a lovely feeling of well-being. This “hiker’s high” is usually explained as being due slight oxygen deprivation at high altitudes, which impairs cognitive function. The brain can't cogitate without sufficient oxygen. There is simply not enough brain power for brooding, and a carefree feeling takes over.

The same goes for just the right amount of alcohol. Alcohol impairs thinking. So does nitrous oxide, better known as the “laughing gas.” A bit of ether does the same. We use alcohol, oxygen deprivation at high altitudes, strange yoga postures, sex, etc precisely to kill thought (I’ll never forget the man who told me, “The great thing about sex is that it kills thought”) – because to think is to say goodbye to being carefree. The only other solution may be to channel the capacity to think into something unrelated to self, e.g. a scientific inquiry. Now that is what Buddhism calls “radiant thinking.” Likewise, an artist fully immersed in creative work can feel euphoric. No self, no problem.

Buddha tried to kill thinking with meditation, but for a fidgeting Westerner it seems to be the most difficult way. Doing nothing is more difficult by far than doing something with full concentration. Hard work, hard exercise, sex. Dancing of course. Petting a cat or dog, interacting with any animal. Dr. Jill Taylor, author of The stroke of Insight, may be right about happiness coming from the right hemisphere – except for reading something intellectually fascinating. I love the sense of learning something new. That’s where most poetry fails to deliver, and that's why it's never enough for me – it's not intellectually fulfilling. If I read a lot of poetry, my brain goes into rebellion and a feeling of revulsion is born -- even if it's good poetry (e.g. Hirsch). (How did I ever end up in this medium? I, a lover of essays? Rilke seduced me. Plath. Stevens. The difficult poets.)

Why does thinking, especially “overthinking,” lead to unhappiness? It could  be simply the tragic condition of human life, our awareness of mortality. We know we are not headed for a happy ending. Maybe when people expected to go heaven (utterly boring as that place always seemed), there wasn't such a strong need to suppress overthinking. I use primarily hard work, but I’m trying to develop more resources. I wish I had even more interesting reading on hand. Mark Salzman’s Lying Awake, a novel about a Carmelite nun who has mystical visions because of a tumor in her temporal lobe, amazed me – it was a magnificent pleasure to read. Short sentences, none of the usual slog through a clotted plot and pedestrian details that mediocre fiction tends to be. And yes of course I envied the fictional nun her mystical experiences; I envied her her tumor, even just for a while.

Significantly more women than men are overthinkers. Men, blessed with testosterone, the “let’s do it, let’s go” hormone, tend to be action-oriented. Women are more likely to brood over their problems, and are vastly more prone to depression. Women often feel they are helpless “victims of fate,” as my mother used to call it. “Don’t be a victim of fate,” she constantly warned me. I didn’t understand what she meant until I finally grasped it: don’t just sit there analyzing your misfortunes and mistakes; do something, anything.

This something need not be related to the stress-causing problem. It can be cleaning up clutter, washing the dishes, or getting exercise (see the section on push-ups). Not appealing? That’s where self-discipline comes in. You give yourself an order. With brooding made impossible by focusing on some type of action (it’s hard to worry while doing push-ups), within a short time you feel better, and may actually hit on a solution without even trying.

THE NO-THINK ZONES

I used to ponder subjects such as "Why did so many kinds of suffering hit me in my youth all at once?" Now I fully realize that I am not going to discover the answer to this mystery, and anyway, it’s over. I have already done all the mourning for my youth that could be done. So if I come anywhere near the no-think zone, I have to quickly shift into action that will increase my well-being. I am terrifically lucky that I can do not just writing, but push-ups -- my most reliable feel-good exercise.

One of my tools in staying depression-free has been not straying into my "no-think zones." These are questions such as, "What is the greatest mistake I ever made in my life?" I wince to think how many precious hours/days/months/years I have wasted meditating on the "greatest mistake" and similar depression-inducing subjects, e.g. the wretched relationships in my youth, or my friends’ speculations that I would have gained more recognition, both in Poland and in America, if I wrote in Polish. It’s impossible to know. What I do know is that great wave of sorrow that starts drowning me when I venture into the no-think zones.

MILOSZ ON DELECTATIO MOROSA AND “ESCAPE FORWARD”

One thinker who has helped me gain clarity about those “no-think zones” has been Czeslaw Milosz – not exactly an optimistic poet. He certainly confronted the tragic aspects of the human condition, but he also gave us poems and essays that point to how to carry on without succumbing to despair.

delectatio morosa ~ indulging in gloomy thoughts, taking pleasure in sadness, brooding, dwelling on melancholy matters

Once you've opened the door to depression, you seek to enhance the sadness. Milosz, by his own admission, was prone to gloomy meditations and feelings of worthlessness. Here is what he writes about it:

“The classic result of all sudden ruptures and reversals is the rumination on one’s own worthlessness and the desire to punish oneself, known as delectatio morosa. I would never have been cured of it had it not been for the beauty of the earth. The clear autumn mornings in an Alsatian village surrounded by vineyards, the paths on an Alpine slope over the Isère River, rustling with dry leaves from the chestnut trees, or the sharp light of early spring on the Lake of Four Cantons near Schiller’s rock, or a small river near Périgueux on whose surface kingfishers traced colored shadows of flight in the July heat–all this reconciled me with the universe and with myself.

But it was not the same as it had been in America; it was not only nature that cured me. Europe herself gathered me in her warm embrace, and her stones, chiseled by the hands of past generations, the swarm of her faces emerging from carved wood, from paintings, from the gilt of embroidered fabrics, soothed me, and my voice was added to her old challenges and oaths in spite of my refusal to accept her split and her sickliness. Europe, after all, was home to me. And in her I happened to find help . . . ”

~ Czeslaw Milosz, “Tiger 2,” Native Realm, 293

In this case, Milosz feels healed by directing his attention outward, by "gazing at the world," as Larry Levis would put it (he advised his students not to look inward, but outward, at the world).

Later Milosz also gained a philosophical outlook that helped him combat his proneness to depression (caused, he states, by "all the sudden ruptures and reversals," i.e. losses and heartbreaks). Unexpectedly, it was existentialist philosophy that helped (and not, as some dearly wanted to show, Catholicism).  Specifically, it was the Existentialist insistence that our past constantly changes, i.e. our recall is selective and dependent on how we see the meaning of a past event in the present.

“Do you know what the gravest sins in your life are? – I have made too many mistakes to trust my ability not to err now when thinking of my past.

I am not what I am. My essence escapes me. It is a durable achievement of existential philosophy to remind us that we should not think of our past as definitely settled, for we are not a stone or a tree. In other words, my past changes every minute according to  the meaning given to it now, in this moment.

Jeanne [Hersch], a disciple of Karl Jaspers, taught me the philosophy of freedom, which consists in being aware that a choice made now, today, projects itself backward and changes our past actions. That was the period of my harsh struggle against delectatio morosa to which I have always been prone. Monks suffering from delectatio morosa would plunge into meditation on their sins and found it a good way to shirk their daily tasks. The philosophy of freedom, practiced by existentialists, took over the classical methods of confessors and spiritual guides, precisely in that it advises us to direct our sight always ahead, not backwards. Largely thanks to its counsels, I stopped meditating and set about my work, which has always been to me an escape forward.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth, 121-122. (emphasis mine)

My own escape has been strictly pragmatic. I realized that I could waste endless time, and, in the end, my whole life, brooding over the disasters of the past – or I could throw myself into work. The choice was not between depression and happiness; it was between depression and work. Milosz has just provided the philosophical scaffolding for that position. Thank you, Czeslaw! I hope this reaches others who are prone to delectatio morosa.

SELF IS A VERB

The Buddhist idea of no-Self fascinates me: no self, no depression. When the self becomes a verb, for me it’s mostly “I read, I learn, I write, I love.” Sometimes: I stumble, I fail – but that’s not a permanent “I AM a failure” condition.

“STEP TO THE RIGHT”

This mantra comes from Dr. Jill Taylor, the neuroanatomist who experienced a massive stroke that disabled her left hemisphere. She lost speech; the constant nattering voice inside her head fell silent, and she got to experience the euphoria of communing with the world through its interface with the right hemisphere.

While there has been criticism of Jill Taylor for her insistence on the specialized functions of each hemisphere along the traditional division that places cognition and logic in the left hemisphere, and music, emotion, imagination, and metaphorical thinking in the right hemisphere, and while apparently things are less separate and more intertwined than that, Taylor’s advice to step into activities that are traditionally identified with the right hemisphere seems to work on the practical level. Instead of obsessively cogitating, listen to music, sing, dance, open an art book, look at a tree, pet a dog, take a swim  . . .  

Touching a significant other or a pet is especially recommended, since it raises oxytocin levels, and oxytocin is one of our feel-good hormones.

The point, again, is to get away from overthinking – particularly from self-centered overthinking. As you let go of overthinking, you may not experience mystical ecstasy, but you will certainly feel less stressed.  A friend of mine said, “I don’t pursue happiness. I pursue peace of mind.” When you feel at peace, everything else follows, she said. I was instantly convinced.  

FEASTING ON BEAUTY

Flowers: I have learned to always have at least one flowering plant in the house. Orchids are the most lasting, and I love to watch the buds swell and open. We know that looking at flowers generates the positive emotions that heal the brain and keep it healthy. I prefer potted flowering plants to cut flowers, since those die too quickly. Fortunately, orchids have become inexpensive (buying tip: don’t decide based strictly on the flowers; look for healthy leaves).

Music: Taking the time to listen to music, even though I love music more than poetry, has been more difficult than acquiring the habit of always having a flowering plant in the house. But at this point I do listen to my favorite classical music at least once a day.

Communion with Nature:  Wallace Stevens said, “The greatest poverty is not to live in the physical world.” Whenever I take a walk, I make sure to “tune in” rather than continue thinking about my various tasks.  When driving, I look at the trees and sky – again, I don’t want to be so swallowed up in thinking about writing projects and other matters that I don’t really see what’s around me.  Now even driving to a supermarket has become a pleasure and not a chore – I cherish every tree and shrub along the way, every cat sleeping on the hood of somebody’s car. Again, it took deliberate effort, but I have finally learned not to work and read so compulsively, and make more time for being in touch with nature.

Glenstall Abbey, Ireland

Reading for Pleasure: That was the easiest blissful habit to re-establish, since I have always been a voracious reader and have never completely ceased to read “irrelevant” books and articles – which subtly let me know that I love non-fiction more than poetry. I don’t know if anything will come of this knowledge, but there it is. It’s a recovery from being a compulsive poet and feeling more like a complete human being again, with a lively mind that’s not taken over by seeking a better ending for this or that poem.

Large Red Man Reading

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,

As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae. 
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,

Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them. 
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost

And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves 
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,

The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:                                          Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are 
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.

~ Wallace Stevens

THE ANSWER LIES OUTSIDE

“Be a gazer at the world, not an obsessive gazer within.” I owe this motto to Larry Levis, who pointed out that bad advice was often given to beginning poets, to the effect that the source of poems is introspection. Look at the world, Levis insisted. Not that introspection is forbidden, but that looking at the world is likely to result in richer poems. Likewise, bringing other people into a poem will often enlarge and improve the poem.

Introverts do not need to be told to “look within.” They do that on automatic. The harder part is learning to look at the world. As with so many “good for you” things, it’s a matter of establishing a new habit. For an introvert, the answer does not lie inside. The answer most often lies in gazing at the world. 

THE BEST ANTI-DEPRESSANT: DOING PUSH-UPS

I should say, “the best anti-depressant that is under your control.” Falling in love with the right person is life’s greatest feast, especially in the second half of life. Of course we’d rather be in love than do push-ups. But the right love object is not going to “manifest” just when we could use a mood lift. It’s one of the perverse laws of life that it’s easier to find a mate when you are already happy and don’t feel you particularly need to meet anyone. “Be happy and the beloved comes.” Men prefer happy women, studies find (some women are fixated on unhappy men, however: a mistake).

Consequently, we have to learn how to make ourselves happy. And there is a growing consensus that the most effective mood lift comes from exercise. Any exercise has some benefit for mood, but one surprising discovery concerns strenuous exercise. It has been found to change the neural networks in such a way as to create resistance to stress.

But isn’t strenuous exercise itself stressful? That’s precisely the point. It’s like fighting fire with fire – an extremely effective technique. An inkling of that came with the early discovery that a small dose of radiation actually resulted in greater resistance to all kinds of stressors, including radiation itself.  The same was found true of heat stress (think sauna). A certain controlled dose of stress revs up the body’s antioxidant enzymes and other defenses. (This is easy to overdo; stay away from personal trainers who are deconstructionists.)

Reader, if you are a super-athlete who can do a hundred push-ups without even breathing hard, skip to the next section. For those of us who start breathing hard after five or six – sooner if we do it slowly – it’s almost mandatory to develop a daily push-up regimen. No need for expensive exercise machines and sadistic personal trainers. No need to buy reverse-gravity beds, exercise books and videos. Push-ups engage every muscle in the body. While variety is more fun, if you have time for only one exercise, push-ups will do. The simpler you make it, the more likely you are to get results. And for me, “simpler” is often just one exercise. Sometimes I go through a period of doing Pilates roll-ups, but more often it’s push-ups – more demanding by far, especially for a woman. There is absolutely no way I can drift into overthinking while doing push-ups.

Another great exercise is standing on one leg – lifting the other leg forward, sideways, behind – try all three positions. It’s amazing how the entire lower body is engaged that way, how many muscles go into action to keep you from falling.  (By the way, talk about a great exercise for developing “buns of steel.”) You’ll be building muscles and improving your balance at the same time. And it’s impossible to worry about anything while standing on one leg.

I repeat: studies show that strenuous exercise makes us much better at handling stress. It remodels the brain so that we become more stress-resistant and more flexible when it comes to adapting to whatever life throws at us. It’s one of the most magnificent ironies to have come out of recent research: the best exercise for the brain is physical exercise.

The beautiful thing about exercise is that if you do it, you get results. It doesn’t take talent, only systematic effort. And “effort-related reward” is quite exhilarating. People in the creative fields where reward, or at least the external reward of recognition, is not clearly related to effort, especially need to find another activity where effort quickly and reliably pays off. Exercise is such an activity.

SMILE AND YAWN

It’s official: smiling, for no reason at all, automatically lifts mood. No big surpise. But who knew that yawning could be a spiritual practice, a sacred ritual?

Yawning is relaxing, since it’s basically a long exhalation. Exhaling activates the “rest and digest” parasympathetic system, and laid-back twin of the fight-and-flight sympathetic system. Yawning lowers stress.

It apparently even increases empathy! Cats and dogs are great yawners, but yawning is contagious (even just reading the word makes you yawn – admit it, Yawning Reader) only among humans, great apes, and certain species of monkeys.

YAWN AND THINK OF A POSITIVE IDEA

Yawn and think of a “big idea” (peace, compassion, a loving companion, “God as you understand him/her/it/them”)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvhCLXEeSDQ

LIMIT OR ELIMINATE CHOICE

This video explains it best:

http://biopsychiatry.com/happiness/choice.html

Let me also quote this:

“The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means “two,” and the word zweifel which means “doubt” – suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented not with two or even three but dozens of choices, and you begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, Committted

SLOW DOWN; SPEAK SLOWLY

The Taoist sages said it best: the more you rush, the less you accomplish. “Slowing down to the speed of life” is fabulous! If only we remembered to slow down more often. As with so much else that’s good for us, it takes practice.

AND FINALLY – SURPRISE! – FOLLOW YOUR BLISS

I realize that it might be more cautious to say, “Practice contentment.” That is a good principle. But at least some of the time, if bliss is attainable, why not?

At first, with my low will to bliss, I thought it might be a case of “fake it to make it.” It turned out to be much easier, and the benefits come quickly. For instance, I stopped torturing myself reading poetry the first thing in the morning. If “the truth shall make you free,” then my truth was that I get more out of a Reader’s Digest article than out of a typical contemporary poem. My favorite poems are in a special category, but the average poem by W.S. Merwin, say, or even by a  more lively poet, tends to be a dull exercise of plodding through contorted language, hoping to extract a sliver of meaning. You lift that sliver, hold it up to strong light, and . . . it isn’t much. But dive into a page-turner (and there are certainly non-fiction page-turners too), and at the very least you gain enjoyment. Often you learn something you didn’t know before, and I love learning new things perhaps more than even music. 

The surprise – though it’s not surprising in the light of the studies that show “pleasure comes first, then success” – is that I feel I have developed much more both as a poet and writer and as a human being ever since I ceased to whip myself through those grim first-thing-in-the-morning poetry-volume reading sessions. Life really is too short for that.

Now, an exquisite little poem the first thing in the morning, or even just one stanza – that might be worth trying – before I fall into a book that offers itself like a lover.  

**

Michael:

[re: yawn and think of a big idea] 

I am struggling to breathe as I try to pry Waldman's empirical fingers from my sensitive Jungian neck. The thumb of convergent thinking is particularly painful. He's just so...so...un-poetic, so reductionistic. Bring on the images that churn the mind, circle the mystery, welcome the shadows. And newsflash--he doesn't come close to the impact of your blog. I do agree that god is a big idea, and it is important how we handle it, but can't follow to the twist on positive thinking. Too much of a leap. 

Oriana:

Being an atheist with mystical leanings, I thought I'd always have to live with dissonance, the two selves, the irreparable division within. This remains, but it's less painful after doing the yawning exercise (which isn't the only one – I've started collecting brain-regeneration exercises), and focusing on a “big idea” – in my case, that of being a bearer of light. For you, it might be "I am a builder of god." The beautiful thing is that we won't try to kill each other over which it should be. And yet, centuries ago, vicious wars were waged over whether Christ was literally present in the Eucharist, or only symbolically.

For me it's a supreme thrill to contemplate the idea that you don't have to believe a bunch of archaic nonsense in order to reap the benefits of what I call "bliss therapy." Interesting, too, the way that sermons like "Sinners in the hands of an angry god" have mostly fallen by the wayside. The toxic, vengeful, monstrously cruel deity of the past is now ebbing away, even in Catholicism (“I am a sinner" was the desired self-image in my own traditional Catholic childhood).

In parallel, people's physiological markers (e.g. blood pressure) improve when they meditate on “Elohim” but worsen when they are exposed to the name “Jehovah” – probably because the latter is associated with an a vengeful deity.

It’s Dickinson, however, who best renders faith. For the most part, she seems unorthodox, a doubter, an agnostic. But she also has a handful of poems where her faith – or her love – seems absolute.

I see thee better – in the Dark –

I do not need a Light – 

The Love of Thee – a Prism be – 

Excelling Violet – 

I see thee better for the Years 

That hunch themselves between – 

The Miner's Lamp – sufficient be – 

To nullify the Mine – 

611, 1862

**

I love these lines:

The Miner's Lamp – sufficient be –

To nullify the Mine –

How little it takes! But we must be willing to light that weak lamp.

In spite of dark and absence, we go on living and loving. In spite of various betrayals, we go on trusting. In spite of disillusionment, we go on believing in something. That is the most amazing thing about being human, that we manage to work, love, laugh and sing – knowing that any day, any moment, might be the last one.  Some claim that it is precisely mortality that gives life its enormous value; others, including myself, say that they would gladly live for centuries, millennia, and not find life any less precious for that.

TIME IS THE GREATEST WEALTH

What I love most is the quiet hours of my life – that is my greatest wealth, and that is when I feel “happy like God.”

On the other hand, there is no question that to some extent money does buy happiness: the rich tend to rate themselves as more happy, just as men rate themselves as more happy (the "happiness gap"). I would like to travel all over the world . . . it would enrich me, enlarge me . . . and look, I can't even afford health insurance.

But I've turned down several lucrative jobs because I'd have to give up my quiet hours, and that I refuse to do. Give me my quiet hours; all else is secondary.

Michael (this is an excerpt from my previous correspondence with Michael, used with permission; an update follows):

Rilke speaks for me:

If I had grown in some generous place -

if my hours had opened in ease -  

I would make you a lavish banquet. 

My hands wouldn't clutch at you like this, 

so needy and tight. 

~ But I didn’t. And they didn’t. I’m impoverished, and I don’t want to be. I used to think of it as the cold claw of depression but I've since decided it is only a claw – cold would be welcome – but depression is worse than numb. Rilke: I’m slipping, I’m slipping away like sand slipping through fingers. All my cells are open, and all so thirsty. I ache and swell in a hundred places, but mostly  in the middle of my heart. I want to die. Leave me alone. I feel I am almost there – where the great terror can dismember me. 

To some extent I welcome the descent into Saturn, much as Rilke loved the dark hours of his being (there he could find, as in old letters, the days of his life, already lived). But when the voice whispers - Destroy! - I listen every time, as if a new voice speaks, and every time, I ponder the suggestion. What if? and then? and why not? and after traveling the worn path again, oddly not recognizing the landscape, I decide to linger. Is this where hope springs eternal? And eventually all the clichés give birth -- there is light at the end, a silver lining appears, blah, blah. Nowadays I just look at it from consciousness's bleacher seat. It doesn't take the non-pain away - I just look, sometimes, when the energy is available, with fascination. Here I go again . . . 

But something needs to die. Through the haze it may come to me what it is. Or it may not. Then it returns for round two. Curse it all. Where was my generous place? What happened to my hours of ease? Many years ago I worked with several carpenters who would spend the tedious hours of nails and hammers pondering the virtues of various beers and plotting the post-work foray to a bar. I envied them. My life would not yield to simple pleasure. And still. And though I now understand William Carlos William’s juxtaposition of Springtime and hell, I'm heavily weighted in favor of hell. Hell is the default, I have to work for spring. 

The great insight of depth psychology for me, or at least as Jung models it, is seeing the landscape of the psyche just for what it is. No posturing needed. No lamentation – I don’t expect a tree to be other than a tree. Trees are just treey, that's what trees should be. Treey. Puppies can’t be other than puppies. Puppies do what puppies do. This realization has given me patience with my landscape. I just am what I am – pretty much mid-stream human.  

Michael’s 2011 update:

The excerpt from the letter comes up through my body and I'm reminded of that darkness! Agh! I appreciate your shift to “not succumbing to despair.” That I can savor. For a long time I put my hand on my sword when happiness came bouncing up the path – I thought it was not to be trusted, too easy to confuse with deflection, or distraction (or bliss), but I'm now happier with happiness. We're buds. So I now know, as you do, we do change. Life can be better.

Oriana:

Yes, we do change. The saying is “older and wiser,” but perhaps there ought to be another maxim: “older and happier.”

For most of my adult life, “hell was the default.” I don’t think it was due to any inborn “morose disposition.” When good things happened, I was radiant. And it took a lot of bad things happening, due mainly to bad luck, and also to my teenage ignorance (isn’t it frightening to consider that a teenager makes giant decisions about our future?), before I came to expect bad things to happen. And even when they were no longer happening, anything could set off bad memories. A nightmare could ruin several days that followed, until it gradually stopped haunting me.  

And then it happened: growing older. More wisdom. Lots of good mood and happy moments. Like Michael, I’m now “happier with happiness.” 

Matt:

I'm reminded of the Taoist saying that every state implies its opposite. Bliss is wonderful, but I think I'd prefer to be indifferent to bliss or its less pleasant counterpart. The Stoic ideal was Apatheia, for the Epicureans it was Ataraxia, both about the same thing in my view – indifference. And the Taoists would say live and stop watching yourself. Just live.

And as you said, an ecstatic vision would not be truly ecstatic without musical accompaniment ;)

Oriana:

It’s interesting that you brought up apatheia; I think I am genetically too passionate for it. But a certain measure of serenity strongly appeals to me, as long as I can have moments of transcendent, euphoric bliss as well. I agree about not watching yourself – but in bliss you don’t; likewise while serenely focused on work or maintaining good form while doing physical exercise.

I would like love to be like the Tannhäuser Overture, to which I can listen twenty times over (Solti conducting). Then silence, while the music keeps soaring in my head. But there is much to be said for solid everyday affection, some soothing little nocturne.

This brings me to the almost inevitable statement: “There are two kinds of bliss.” I like both euphoric bliss and what I call “serene bliss.” I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but serene bliss is what I experience while doing my favorite Pilates exercises, or even just lying on the mat, sensing the improved musculo-skeletal alignment – as though my body were saying “thank you.” There is a sense of peace, all worries disappear, I love the instructor and everyone in the class, and even the little Pilates jokes I’ve heard dozens of times before . . .  Who knew that an exercise class could be a religious experience.  

Jon:

Oriana, interesting post. I think the Buddha wasn't trying to turn off thinking. He said people don't perceive reality correctly because they think the self is permanent. This is the mistake that leads to suffering. Also in meditation instruction one is taught that there is natural thought and deliberate (maybe obsessive is a better word) thought. Natural thought is OK. Deliberate thought is what you're trying to let go of in the mediation period. Of course, you need deliberate thought when it's appropriate to plan, etc., just not during meditation practice.

Oriana:

I apologize if my “Think Less” section gave the impression that thinking is to be turned off entirely. There is the kind of thinking that leads to real solutions (I believe the Buddha called it “radiant thinking”), and then there is dysfunctional thinking that has also been labeled “automatic negative thoughts” (ANTs). It’s this type of brooding and obsessing that is the “second arrow” in the Buddhist parable of two arrows (the second arrow being our response to something bad).

Rick Hanson’s Buddha’s Brain has a wonderful discussion of how the evolution-wired “negativity bias” creates a vicious cycle of suffering, and how we can overcome that bias through deliberate practice. I am certainly in favor of meditation, but want to add that phenomena such as the “hiker’s high,” which I call “drunkenness of the heights,” not to mention moderate drinking, point to the benefits of mild cognitive dysfunction, or, in Dr. Jill Taylor’s terms, partly shutting off the left hemisphere. Her “step to the right” suggestion is in line with what we know about the healing benefits of music. 

Maja Trochimczyk on Facebook:

In her intensely intelligent essay, Oriana wrote an ode to non-thinking as a key to bliss. 

Oriana:

Yes, it takes a intelligence to argue against thinking – or introverted overthinking, to be exact. Interesting that the “think less” portion of this post is getting the most attention. I am certainly aware that some situations require us to think more. But productive thinking is “task-oriented thinking.” By “think less” I meant introverted overthinking that in my case invariably led to the conclusion: “I am a failure.” Maybe the word “thinking” should not be even applied to this phenomenon. It’s an automatic delusional train of thought that is not to be confused with functional thinking or the creative process.

I am also thinking of Dante’s warning against the misuse of the intellect. To Dante, misuse of reason was the source of all sin. But what truly haunts me is Jack Gilbert’s dementia. He used to be brilliant, and his best poems are indeed very good.  His earlier photos showed a craggy, gloomy face, all sharp features and no smile. His recent ones show him with a roundish, cherubic face, and a happy smile at last. I am tempted to say he (involuntarily, to be sure) traded intelligence for bliss (in some cases, dementia disables mostly the left hemisphere, leaving the victim cheerful and sweet and childlike, delighted by the smallest things). Would I ever trade my intelligence for this kind of bliss? Never.

For all this brave talk about bliss, I put intelligence first. Nothing comes ahead of intelligence. If I had a choice between more intelligence or more bliss, I’d take more intelligence, in spite of the biblical warning that “in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Eccl 1:18). Intelligence can be either a source of deep pleasure – when I read a challenging book, for instance, one that makes me think – or a tool of torture when it turns against me, trying to find answer to questions such as “What is the greatest mistake I made in my life?” It’s thanks to my intelligence that I know there can be no reliable answer. I also know that it doesn’t matter what the mistake was, since the process of healing remains the same: I have to forgive myself, acknowledge the huge role of circumstances I couldn't control, and move on (what Milosz called “escaping forward into work”).

It’s thanks to my intelligence that I decided not to be depressed, and defined my “no-think zones” – my former portals to depression, which I could enter at will as a refuge against the hardship of engaging with the world. It’s thanks to my intelligence that I can read, re-read, and analyze – and write. I’d still choose to be intelligent rather than happy, assuming such a choice existed. But since the proper use of intelligence – going into a subject in depth, for instance, or “gazing at the world” – gives me great pleasure, it’s not an either/or. My new ideal is “intelligent AND happy.” 

There is the kind of bliss which gives the brain a rest from thinking, or else the thinking is effortless: the surprising discovery and insight, the right ending for a poem. For me, these are watery phenomena that occur while I am in the shower.  But there is also intellectual bliss, the bliss of making a huge, dedicated effort – the bliss of studying and learning, the bliss of writing a complex piece of prose (I typed “peace,” since writing prose is so beautifully peaceful in contrast to writing poetry, which easily slides into the hell of obsession). Of course I enjoy and welcome the watery bliss of non-thinking. But I am not giving up the bliss of complex thinking, of using my conscious mind to the utmost. 

Hyacinth:

Favorite lines: "the moment of writing is an insistence of imagination on human ecstasy" (even when writing about heartbreak?) Haiku seems the best medium for capturing a moment of ecstasy. It’s usually about nature, and as Milosz points out, Nature helps heal. I sit outside, now that I can’t walk and do my gratitudes, my form of meditation.

I think laughter is the greatest gift, the rolling on the floor laughter that children know and as adults we rarely find again.

Favorite word is Zweifel (“doubt”) – so accurate a description of the 21st century where choices are far too abundant.  Even down to little things like choosing a soup or a toothbrush. Maddening. this madness of too many choices.  Also the statement about how we think self is permanent – how arrogant.

Oriana:

I am so glad someone addressed what is an extremely important section here: ELIMINATE OR LIMIT CHOICE. Even retroactively, it helps to think, “I had no choice,” rather than be mired in regrets and might-have-beens.

Some people point to the success of arranged marriages as an example of the benefits of “no choice”: the bride and groom have no choice except to learn to love each other and be happy; otherwise, it’s hell. While I wouldn't go so far as to argue in favor of arranged marriages, I think we would do well to experiment with limited choice. I hate long menus; I hate being forced to ponder what to order. I love to go to the same places and order the same thing again and again – because it spares me the bellyache of trying to decide about such trivia. Katherine Hepburn dressed exclusively in black and white – she never agonized over what to wear. Think of the time women waste trying on a dozen outfits. It’s not fun; it’s sheer waste.

For me being in love is the ultimate feast, but it’s a complex and fragile joy, not without anxiety. Laughter is a supreme simple pleasure. And of course it’s also an element of being in love; happy lovers laugh a lot. A couple that laughs together stays together.

Yes, I think even when writing about heartbreak we imply previous or potential ecstasy. Or else the poet gives us the ecstasy of wonderful language. Anne Carson is a fabulous poet of heartbreak. Her genius turns it into a feast.

Milosz built most of his poetry on his protest against the impermanence of the self. Tough, we are attached to that quirky, unique person that we are. But thanks to my name changes, I have experienced a bit of impermanence, a certain flavor of it . . . with each name, with each language, with each person I interact with, there are personality shifts that seem enlarging. 

I love your phrase: “I do my gratitudes.” That’s why you are such an inspiration, a lantern to us all. And to "do one's gratitudes," or count one's blessings, means entering the "generous place." We are poor no more. Suddenly we see our wealth, our great good luck.

Let me end with a quotation from Joseph Campbell:

We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. Sanctify the place you are in. Follow your bliss. . . .