RILKE: THE UNICORN SONNET

This morning I was reading Rilke on how it’s not necessary for god to exist, since prayer creates him. And if such prayer-created deity doesn’t persist, that’s all the better, Rilke asserts: we’ll just pray again and again. I think it’s possible to understand this, and still get some benefit from the ritual of prayer.

Rilke’s famous unicorn sonnet shows how “belief can create,” at least at the subjective level:

O dieses ist das Tier das es nicht gibt

This is the animal that doesn’t exist. 
But they didn’t know it and dared nonetheless
to love its transformations, its bearing, its gait 
so much that in the tranquil gaze of light, it lived. 

Really it never was. Out of their love they made it, 
this pure creature. They always saved a space. 
And in that place, empty and set aside, 
it lightly raised its head and scarcely

needed to be. They fed it no corn, 
only the possibility that it might exist –

which gave the beast such strength, it bore 

a horn upon his forehead. Just one horn. 
It came to a virgin, all white, 
and was in the silver mirror and in her.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 4

There appears to be some limit to the power of strictly mental existence. After the Middle Ages, lack of credible evidence eventually eroded the legend of the unicorn. (Or was it that there was no real emotional need for the unicorn to exist?) But we can still enjoy the unicorn as art. And the unicorn is still the heraldic animal of Scotland — perhaps presaging the doom of Scottish independence for now. Imagine having as your emblem an animal that doesn’t exist — though of course it DOES exist as a concept and as poetry. Platonists would argue that a symbol is more important than pedestrian reality.

But if I may be pardoned for being Aristotelian: I wonder how many of our current beliefs will ultimately go the way of the unicorn.

PRACTICE CREATES BELIEF

But, as Rilke says, it’s not necessary to believe in god in order to pray to him. In fact it’s the reverse: prayer creates god, at least in the psychological sense. The more often you pray (go to mass, make a pilgrimage, etc), the more real god will appear. Practice creates belief. Being exposed to religious art and sacred music deepens that effect.

 I’ve noted this effect also with New Age practices. People start going to psychics and Tarot readings “just for fun,” but within a year or so they may find themselves taking classes, joining a chanting group, and so forth. Contrary to the idea that belief comes first and action later, quite often action precedes belief. 

Hence the New Age doctrine of reversal: put the desired outcome  first. Be happy, and the beloved comes. Love yourself, and the excess weight will melt with no effort. Start writing, and the inspiration will come. There are studies that confirm this. 

START WORKING, AND THE INSPIRATION WILL COME

Artists still talk about the Muse – not always in the sense of the beloved who inspires creative work, but in the ancient sense of “Sing, heavenly goddess, the wrath of Achilles.” Yes, that beautiful divine being in a pleated tunic, holding a lyre.

I could create the Muse in my mind, give her a name, say prayers, even create a little altar with seashells, a geode, candles, crystals – there are writers who do! But if a writer actually sacrificed a lamb to the muse, we’d see this as insane. Taking the subjective world literally to some degree is, well, a socially accepted sort of schizophrenia . . . But exceeding that degree becomes clinical schizophrenia.

It's a very tricky terrain, and I can't exempt myself from "doing what comes naturally," i.e. harboring cognitive illusions. It's just how we evolved, and it's only when that tendency is pushed to extremes that we get pathology (typically paranoid schizophrenia) in place of poetry.

(By the way, in ancient Greek the first word of the Iliad is not sing, but rage.)

 

**

THE TELEOLOGICAL FALLACY

God in his wisdom made the fly,

And forgot to tell us why.

                 ~ Ogden Nash

Due to my recent computer NDE, I found myself with more time to read (no curse without a blessing, no blessing without a curse), and read Jesse Bering’s superb The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. I read the chapters on destiny and “signs, signs everywhere” not once, but three times.

Bering writes:

Each of us, everyone one of the billions of individuals on this planet, feels as if we’re here to satisfy our own unique purpose, one crafted especially for us by intentional design. (p. 61)

This is an example of teleological (purpose-oriented) thinking (telos = end, goal). Young children, when asked a question such as “Why do mountains exist?” are likely to reply in terms of purpose: “So that animals have a higher place to climb.” Older children may shrug and say, “They just are.” Those who’ve had some science education can give a geological answer: volcanoes, and up-thrust mountains that result from the collision of tectonic plates.

Ah, those pesky geologists! Ruskin complained that he hears the clinking of a geologist’s hammer at the end of each biblical verse. After all, it’s not just biologists who asserted that everything evolved over an unimaginable expanse of time. Still, it’s Darwin who is credited with endowing us with the evolutionary perspective that omits “purpose” or “design.” Bering quotes from Darwin’s letter to the botanist Asa Gray:

I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun and kill it, I do this designedly. An innocent man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t and don’t. If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament. If the death of neither man nor gnat are designed, I see no reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed. (p. 63)

Bering laments that parents and teachers unwittingly promote the idea of destiny, prophesying that Jimmy is going to be a pianist and Adele is already on her way to become a champion ice-skater. Few children live up to those glorious prophecies. They settle for an “ordinary” life. This is usually no tragedy, but in some cases this “failure” leads to a life-long resentment. I’ll say more on this topic in a future blog, “What gardens were you born for?”

My interest in the topic hints that it’s taken me quite a while – years and years of chronic depression – to overcome this kind of resentment. But my chief cognitive sin, I think, has been “navigating by omens.” It comes naturally to a poet trained to read “symbolic meaning” in poems that strikes the average reader as merely obscure. But no special education is required – we are wired to see pattern and meaning. Anything we see, anything that happens, can be interpreted as a sign, communicating to us who we are in our essence and what we are supposed to do. Consider this poem of mine:

  

AT THE WIND HARP

                       

   There are only miracles.

                                    ~ Franz Kafka

At the Marina, listening to the wind harp,

its rainbow of harmonics,

I felt a light touch

above my left wrist –

a little girl, maybe eight-years-old –
Down Syndrome –

pale skin, pale aqua eyes –

like a pretty ghost child.

She was just beginning to smile,

her finger pointing: “You.”
Then she ran off,

vanished like wind into wind.

*

In gilded medieval light, I stood

on a sand dune overlooking

the city of Prague –

zlata Praha,”golden Prague” –

its stony-ribbed cathedral,

royal castle of a thousand windows,

and the narrow crooked hope

in the crooked street below,

The Alchemists’ Lane –

And the legend of the Golem:

on the giant’s clay forehead

the word Emet, meaning Truth.

When the Golem grew dangerous,
Rabbi Liwa erased the first letter,

leaving Met, meaning Death.

And the Golem fell back to dust.

*

I started across the sand, but it bled

into flat suburban streets, the dream

fled. I lay thinking, will I ever

reach the golden city of Prague?

I thought of Kafka and the cold

cathedral, its moan of echoes,

prayers denied, denied, denied.

I thought of classes never taught,

of the ghost poems I wrote:

would they vanish like the night

into night? Then your image

returned – you returned,

child at the wind harp,

and with a touch as light as

one letter, changed the word

from death to truth. 

~ Oriana © 2012

**

Readers tend to like this poem, even if they don’t entirely “get it.” They like it because, as one person recently said, it gives a special (if unclear) meaning to a gesture made by a child. The mystical logic of the poem “animates the universe” that otherwise seems only “dead matter.”

Arguably it’s a flaw that the poem could use a bit of autobiographical explanation. The incident at the wind harp happened when I felt confused and defeated about my calling. If I was “meant” to be a poet, if this was what I was “born for,” the Great Dream of my life – shouldn’t there be, after so many years, a real audience, beyond a handful of friends? I was thrashing after any confirmation that I ought to continue on my frustrating path, to the point of wanting to believe that being touched by this little girl with Down’s syndrome singled me out for a difficult destiny. After all, a folk tradition has it that “holy fools” can see a deeper truth. And it all took place near a wind harp – harp and poetry, need I say more?

I wouldn't dream of speaking seriously in such terms, implying that everything has a secret meaning and “there are no accidents.” In conversation I would never assert that the child at the wind harp confirmed what my “destiny” was – a single, special destiny being as much a myth as the one and only “soulmate.” We make up our “destiny” as we go along. Some believe in a “divine plan” designed especially for them, but there is no evidence for it, no matter how many people testify before a TV camera, “I know I was saved for a purpose.” What about the three hundred others who went down with the plane, while one lucky would-be passenger had a flat tire on the way to the airport, and thus missed the departure? What was the divine plan for those who didn’t survive? But it would depress us to ponder that chance plays a huge role, so we reject this frightening hypothesis. During a storm at sea, D.H. Lawrence soothed his wife by saying, “Of course the ship won’t sink; after all, I am on it.” He wasn’t joking. He had a destiny to fulfill.

THE COGNITIVE ILLUSION THAT EVERYTHING HAS A MEANING

Jesse Bering, a cognitive psychologist, makes a compelling case that it’s all cognitive illusion. But in poetry one can get away with all kinds of mysticism. A poet is pretty much compelled to be a mystic, at least for the duration of a poem, or s/he risks being called “pedestrian.” Ideally, there should be at least two layers of meaning in a poem, and three or four layers make it all the more wonderful. Signs, signs everywhere. As I say in a different poem, “Hel Peninsula,” already as a child I discovered layers of meaning:

      . . . Everything

is a language, has a secret message –

specks of insects glimmering in amber,

the bronze mermaid slippery as tears.

**

In retrospect, I see another, more plausible meaning of the “child at the wind harp.” Depressives tend to feel unloved and unlovable. Receiving even a slight token of affection from a child or an animal contradicts this assumption, and briefly lifts the heart. The poem need not be read in terms of the Death of the Great Dream, and its partial restoration when attention shifts to “truth,” the sacred task of a writer – a masked truth, hidden in symbolic images. Another “truth” contained in this poem is the power of affection to reverse the death of the heart. 

SYNCHRONICITY? 

                                                                                               

The human mind is nimble enough to read some kind of message or meaning in practically everything that comes to its attention. Fortunately, not everything comes to our attention, or we’d be overwhelmed. And that’s another factor we need to ponder in this strange game that the universe seems to play with us: SELECTIVE ATTENTION.

While composing the blog, having just copied the Wind Harp poem, I went to the mailbox to pick up my mail, these days sadly dwindled to bills and advertising. This time it was a travel supplies catalog, and on its cover, a lovely view of Prague in a gilded late-afternoon light. Jungians would love this. The human brain is wired to seek pattern and meaning: randomness can never satisfy it.

After all, it’s to this pattern seeking that we owe the arts and sciences – the entire human culture, in fact. Destiny and omens are cognitive illusions, and even “miracles” have a natural explanation, though we may not see it, just as we don’t perceive how a magician works his magic. Still, our highly developed ability to detect and create patterns has mostly served us well. As Howard Nemerov concludes in “The Blue Swallows”

 

O swallows, swallows, poems are not

the point. Finding again the world,

that is the point, where loveliness

adorns intelligible things

because the mind’s eye lit the sun.

Sunset, Hollywood hills. Photo: C. Sherman

##

Hyacinth:

Enjoyed it thoroughly. Your unicorn poem belongs on this blog.

Oriana:

Just for you, sweet Hyacinth:

UNICORN IN CAPTIVITY

15^th century French tapestry

Smooth as a leap and of the moonlight

even in plain day, it grazed so deep

in the woods of the inner eye,

it evaded mere seeing –

They wove it into a garden;

it would come to a virgin –

they wove the deceit – the delicate,

bell-like drops of blood –

They enclosed a profaning fence,

fixed a fine chain, a gem-set collar,

a pomegranate tree for a stake; violets

and columbines its embroidered domain.

Then they forgot about it.

Only the girl came to it in the still

morning-amazed world,

to touch it with a tender and imagined hand.

~ Oriana © 2012

**

SIGNS, SIGNS EVERYWHERE

Mary:

Maybe it's not just that our brains are wired to perceive signs. My own feeling: in some sense they really are "out there" as well as "in here." After all, evolution is adaptation.

Oriana:

Jesse Bering is good at explaining the adaptive value of seeing signs in things, and how natural selection worked to heighten this human capacity. Out of everything “out there,” we tend to single out certain things and occurrences as signs and omens because once that was crucial for survival. For instance, we are hard-wired to see "faces" in things -- this was useful for recognizing predators, with their frontal eyes. And even now -- or perhaps especially now -- it’s important that we recognize the emotions and intentions of people we meet.

Can this become borderline irrational? It happens all the time. As Steve commented in another post, after making a decision, a friend of his “watches the universe for signs” and concludes on that basis whether or not the universe favors his decision (note the theory of mind here – this man animates the universe; the universe either likes or doesn’t like his decision, and will communicate its attitude).

Our minds are very good at finding meaning in just about anything. But we should remember that it’s all interpretation. As the old rabbis said, a dream isn’t complete without an interpretation. That holds for just about anything we pay attention to.

(P.S. Alas, we've lost Mary in December 2012. She was a beautiful human being, an activist who tried to make contraceptive rights more widely available to women -- among her other causes.)

JAMES HILLMAN'S VIEW OF DESTINY

Darlene:

What is your view of Hillman “acorn” theory of destiny?

Oriana:

You are referring to The Soul’s Code, in which Hillman proposes a kind of “DNA of the soul.” How I wish Hillman were still alive and could read Bering’s deconstruction of the soul, destiny, omens, and especially of the mind/body duality in general . . . All this Platonism really has to go. It's more than two thousand years out of date.

Still, you know how much I love Hillman’s idea that extraordinary people are extraordinary because they are so dedicated to their calling. And I am grateful to Hillman for trying to dismantle the psychoanalytic idea that parental influences and early childhood experiences make us who we are. Una, a mother of five, often says, “What you do as a parent doesn’t matter that much. They always turn out different than you expected, and each one is different from the day they were born.”

At the same time, we should beware of falling into genetic determinism (I don’t think we need to reach for some imaginary and non-material “DNA of the soul” when the actual DNA encodes so much: intelligence, persistence, ability to delay pleasure, risk-taking versus caution. But even genes don’t have absolute power to determine who we are, how we “turn out.” That would be like claiming “god’s master plan.” Caroline Myss says somewhere that even which tomato you pick at the supermarket has been determined in advance as part of your destiny – “it’s that specific.” That’s absurd. The interactions with the environment are very complex. We shape ourselves as we go along. We invent ourselves – within limits. Contrary to blithe New Age pronouncements, no, we can’t be anything we’d like to be (Hillman would agree with that).

THE SELF-MADE MAN AND THE VICTIM

I also like this perceptive statement by Hillman: “The current American identity as a victim is the flip side of the coin whose head brightly displays the opposite identity: the heroic self-made man, carving out destiny alone and with unflagging will.” But when we take a closer look at the “heroic self-made man,” he (self-sufficiency is a masculine ideal) is never 100% “self-made”; we discover a multitude of people and factors that helped shape the person. Usually the truth resides not at either extreme, but somewhere in between. 

If we are lucky, the dominant talent encoded in our genes will be allowed to develop and find an outlet. But a lot of people are not lucky, and besides, we tend to be gifted in several areas and may not have a single dominant talent that shows already at an early age. It’s more realistic to think in terms of several potential paths in life rather than a single “destiny.” But once we commit to a path, at the beginning it may be helpful to think of it in somewhat absolute terms. Remember, choice is stressful; eliminating choice and focusing on one path makes sense in terms of maximizing accomplishment and happiness (“why quitters win” – they concentrate on one thing).

I’d call this a pragmatic view of destiny. Calling a particular path our “destiny” may help us focus and put enough work into developing the required skills that we achieve excellence, perhaps even become “extraordinary.” I suspect, though, that the concept of destiny will eventually fall into disuse as a leftover from archaic modes of thought. It’s not as bad as believing in karma from past lives, but if you get too literal about your “acorn” (or daimon or genius or guiding image or any other metaphorical-mythical representation of “destiny”), you get simplistic. There are many forces at work and in constant interaction; our knowledge of what shapes us and how and why we consciously try to shape ourselves is likely to remain partial. There are worse, ahem, fates.

THE LADY AND THE UNICORN TAPESTRY

Charles:

I love this image but don't know what the symbolism of the flag is.

Also love the human face on the lion and the background of all the animals.

THE LION AND THE UNICORN

Oriana:

Yes, both the lion and the unicorn are quite endearing. In fact all the animals here are. 

Note the wonderful flourish of the tails.

The banner is the pennant of the French nobleman Jean de Laviste, who at the end of the fifteenth century commissioned the six unicorn tapestries They are now at the Cluny Museum in Paris.

The background of the tapestry is known as the mille-fleurs design.

Charles:

Interesting if an artist made a sacrifice of a lamb to a Muse 2000 years ago she would have been considered a pagan.

Same is true today except it isn't politically correct to smite a lamb for any purpose unless a butcher does it.

Love the story of the Down syndrome child, literally touching and the afterthoughts about it.

Oriana:

Sacrificing either humans or animals to a deity used to be customary, a pious practice. To most of us, blood sacrifice is a repulsive idea. Only Jesus as a human “sin sacrifice” is still the official dogma. At long last at least some more liberal Protestant theologians (e.g. Bishop Shelby Spong) are protesting that we need to drop this archaic and barbarous concept of an innocent being killed for anyone’s sins. The religious right, on the other hand, constantly invokes the “blood of the Lamb.”

Then there is the doctrine of trans-substantiation. As a child I was force-fed the belief that the communion wafer and wine literally became flesh and blood. Talk about organized schizophrenia . . .

It’s interesting that the crucifix wasn’t part of early Christian art. Early Christians preferred to depict paradise. The crucifix became dominant during the Middle Ages (I still can’t understand how humanity survived the Middle Ages).

The girl with Down Syndrome was amazingly lovely and endearing. If I happened to be a mystic, I’d probably see her as an angel. But then the mind is awfully good at creating meaning. When the meaning stays private, it’s usually harmless. But if I took being touched by this “special” little girl as a sign that I am a prophet and should start preaching (some might argue that being a writer is similar), that could be a symptom of a psychotic breakdown. Sometimes the line between normal cognitive function, including seeing meaning in something we see or experience, and psychotic delusions, seems rather faint . . .

THE CHARM OF THE ILLUSION OF DESTINY

Lilith:

Oh no! Can’t you leave me the illusion of destiny just to tinker with. You are so right, and I’ve never seen it written before, that I have been all my adult life an atheist-poet-intellectual-literature professor navigating through written language omen by omen, synchronicity by synchronicity, searching for connections.

As though humans are like ants in a colony, all connected on one wave length, and that wave length just might be poetry. And one day I understood that we, and all of the earth and its creatures, are made from the same star and are thus the same stuff. I had to look that far for connection, which might be the only truth that’s not an illusion, in the Hindu sense of peeling away the illusions so we can reach enlightenment. 

Oriana:

Actually, even the atoms in your right hand most likely come from a different stars than the atoms in your left hand. The reason is that it took the death of many stars to produce the atoms that now constitute our bodies. Every atom inside us was once inside a star! Now of course any of those atoms is in a very different configuration than billions of years ago. Who knows where it's been. 

Of course we are connected in all kinds of ways. We are of the earth, we are the children of the Universe. And there really are patterns out there -- just not necessarily the kind that correspond to our desires. But much is yet to be understood. I’ll leave it at that.

I think Daoism is compatible with no personal deity, no destiny, and no afterlife. "Soul" in the sense of psyche dies when the brain dies. But we remain right here on earth in the memories of others, and through the ripple effect -- "the immortality of influence." I do have a blog on that: the accidentally hilarious interfaith panel on the afterlife. You'll love it. 

http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/12/immortality-of-influence.html

ARE LOVERS PRE-DESTINED TO MEET?

Teresa:

“An invisible red thread connects those destined to meet, despite the time, the place, and despite the circumstances. The thread can be tightened or tangle, but will never be broken.” ~ Chinese proverb

Oriana:

This is lovely as poetry, but it's based on our tendency to think that because something happened, it HAD TO happen. Funny, it was Milosz, a public Catholic (though full of Gnostic doubt), who taught me this principle of cognitive bias.

No, lovers are not predestined to meet. We could be wonderful "soulmates" with a thousand other people. But lovers always see each other as inevitable -- at least as long as they are in love. "Destiny" is an illusion. There are infinite other plots, perspectives, narratives -- as many as there are people, each with his/her own "contract with life."

It’s not just that lovers aren’t predestined to meet. Nothing is predestined in this probabilistic universe. But the redeeming feature here is that we can learn lessons from whatever happens. Response is everything. Learning and growth are everything. 

THE SEA UNICORN

Scott:

Love the 'sea unicorn', the Narwhal. The poet Louis MacNiece has a great line from one of my favorite poems, 'Thalassa'

'The Narwhal dares us to be free'

Lawrence was a great early proponent of Melville, as was the Catholic poetess Viola Meynell, a friend of his in the 20's post WWI literary circle.

Oriana:

Scott, you are amazing. And you’ve taught me something – I used to think the narwhal was just a “northern whale,” an arctic species – and didn’t know this was indeed the unicorn – the sea unicorn! The “horn” is a greatly elongated left canine. Below is an image of narwhals “tusking.” 

FATE VERSUS DESTINY

RAIN, LOS ANGELES

  

Turning left on Wilshire

in the splintering crystal

of the jazz piano

and a million dreams –

mother city where my

adult self was born –

my domino failures

amid the pink stucco,

my stuttering, foolish,
heroic first steps –

turning left on Wilshire

past saber-toothed tigers

burping methane bubbles

in the oily tar pits; 

past the jutting iceberg

of the art museum,

the wet sheen of John Wayne’s 
bronze horse –

Turning left on Wilshire,

past weeping shop windows,

fountains like glass wings

spouting under wheels –

Bubbling on the radio,  

more emerging artists:

a former nurse recalls

an insurance salesman

asked her dying, 
“What do you really

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

and work night clubs,

but I’m afraid I’d fail.”

From eternity’s portal,

he gave her a blessing: 

I hope you go to California

and fail many times.

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

that whatever happened
had glimmers of glamor,

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

rearing from La Brea tar –

Will I be as bitter

as cold ocean water,

or will I become
tender like the rain –
turning left on Wilshire
past art-deco theaters,
past the stars on the sidewalk
like coins from the dead –

past myth, past mirage,

a deluge of smiles,

the palm trees applauding

because I have come
to California
and failed many times.

~ Oriana © 2012

**

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

AFTERTHOUGHTS, TEN YEARS LATER

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

FREUD'S ERROR

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

(However, one needs to remember that Freud's rich neurotics had no goals. He completely despised his patients as people who had nothing to do except cultivate their symptoms.)

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

DAIMON: THE “GUARDIAN ANGEL” OF DESTINY

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

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

TRANSCENDING FATE

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

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

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

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

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

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

“BOWING TO FATE, GROWING INTO DESTINY”

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

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

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

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

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

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

POE’S RAVEN

I listened to Poe’s raven as I drove

to Los Angeles in the lashing rain

for a hundred miles to see an old friend.

The main route was flooded.

Looking for blurred street signs,

rain-blind and half-lost

in the wet and cold,

I knew it could be the last chance:

a raven from the black

Forest of Nevermore

was perched on my dashboard.

How visionary the doomed

poet was, to choose not an owl,

the bird of wisdom,

but a raven, bird of fate.

Not the ghost-like flight

of wished-for destiny,

but a more emphatic raptor.

I know he’ll be flying by

more and more often now.

Then he’ll move in,

a part of the family.

In the end, the only family.

It’s an impressive bird

in his elegant undertaker’s plumage,

but his vocabulary’s limited.

That’s where our part

rises up: to speak

that which is not silence.

**

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

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

**

John:

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

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

Well, yes and no?

Oriana:

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

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

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

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

John:

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

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

Oriana:

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

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

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

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

John:

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

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

Oriana:

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

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

SCHEMING IN THE SNOW

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

~ Jack Gilbert

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

Charles:

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

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

Oriana:

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

Scott:

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

Oriana:

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

Brenda:

Especially enjoyed the Poe poem.

Oriana:

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