TRANSCENDENCE FOR NON-BELIEVERS; THE ANSWER LIES OUTSIDE

The brain is wider than the sky. ~ Emily Dickinson

It wasn’t the problem of evil that made me leave the church. It was the Universe. Or rather, the insight “It’s only another mythology” AND the Universe. Just the other night I looked at the stars -- they were exceptionally bright -- the night sky clear without the mucilage of even the wispiest white cloud affixed there like a postage stamp on a letter to an unknown address. Again I thought that no being, especially no one looking like a man seated on a throne somewhere up there, could have created the stars. They are gigantic nuclear reactors (fusion, not fission). They are formed, exist for billions of years, then die. The distances involved are beyond what we can grasp. Assuming that Jesus travels at the speed of light, after 2,000 years he still has not left our galaxy.

(Yes, I realize that one can try to interpret this as entering another dimension, but it’s the same as with the string theory: a wisp of proof, please. But it’s not provable; in a wonderful new phrase, the hypothesis is not falsifiable, and in order to be a useful tool, a hypothesis needs to be falsifiable.)

This is obviously a fake church bulletin, and an exaggerated one: it’s not a question of proving ALL of this. Proving ANY of this, even a small portion, would be astounding. As my one and only astronomy professor said, it’s not that we throw up a handful of pebbles up into the air and expect them to fall down so as to spell “god.” It’s not that we are waiting to hear from the Voice from the Whirlwind. A small still voice, a whisper practically, might do -- with the disclaimer that auditory hallucinations are the most common kind. But even so.

Recently I had yet another reminder of what made religion so impossible to return to. It had never worked for me as consolation. Aside from the threat of hell, the complete silence on the other side of prayer was unnerving. 
A brave little boy actually questioned the nun: “How come god spoke to Moses, but never speaks to us?” The nun sighed and smiled a vague appeasing smile: “The times were different then.” This seemed as suspect to me as god’s invisibility.  



Still, during a period of exceptional stress, I too ask the absurd and all too human question, “Why do we suffer so much?” After a reading, I was talking with the series host, Jon, one of the two local poets I know who happen to have a Ph.D. in physics (!) Like Ms. Job, I said that I never wanted heaven, oblivion was fine, but first, I wanted an answer to the question, “Why do we suffer so much?”

Jon replied that he would like to know why gravity is such a weak force. Are gravitons leaking into other universes? Soon he was speaking about gravity waves and Einstein’s time-space curvature hypothesis, and . . . I noticed that I felt exhilarated. I said as much to Jon, who told me that while waiting  in a medical office, he happened to read an article on the Big Bang. “It really cheered me up,” he said.
 

 
That’s when it hit me — again — “The answer lies outside.”

All the psychobabble we’ve heard over the years tries to tell us that the “answer lies within.” Look within, and your problems will vanish. I say the opposite. The answer lies in self-forgetfulness, which means looking at the world. 

SCIENCE-RELATED MOOD UPLIFT

Later I remembered another time this “science-caused” change of mood happened to me in an even more dramatic way. My father was in the final stages of Parkinson’s disease (the most macabre way to die I’d ever witnessed), and a neighbor handed me a newsletter about Parkinson’s that summarized new research. I read it in one sitting, totally fascinated and strangely exhilarated. The disease was gruesome, but I couldn’t resist the mystery underlying it. What caused the dopamine depletion? Inflammation, yes, but why specifically the destruction of dopamine-producing neurons? Boxers and women who’ve had hysterectomies -- the risk factors didn’t add up but remained a haunting tangle.

The following weekend I went to the BioMed Library at University of California, San Diego: the first weekend of many. I feasted on the books, and even more so the journals; eventually gravitated toward endocrinology. I, who never thought I could cease writing poetry, who regarded poetry as an all-powerful addiction, let poetry vanish from my mind -- for about eight years.

To get to the point: once I began reading science article, both popular and professional, I couldn’t help noticing the emergence of a much more “sane” self. I traded the anguish that went with poetry and po-biz for serene contentment. I wasn’t depressed anymore. The pressure to hurry and struggle were gone. So this was mental health, I thought: reading about dementia and experiencing mysterious contentment.

Listening to Jon speak about gravity waves, I experienced a mini-version of this return to sanity. I was no longer interested in the metaphysics of suffering. Obviously there were different causes of different kinds of suffering. But why even think about it, when there was so much to learn about the world. I was in the grip of rationality, and loving it.

Why the uplift? Bearing in mind that science is more about the fun of pursuing questions rather than positing answers -- those are always partial and subject to change as new evidence emerges -- we can tentatively state that the activation of the left prefrontal cortex leads to a brighter mood and positive emotions. Intellectual stimulation activates this region. Brooding about one’s problems and negative emotions are associated with more active right prefrontal cortex. Furthermore, an active left prefrontal cortex can decrease anxiety and other “negative affect” -- what I call the “screams of the amygdala.” 

So yes, an easy way to cheer up is to activate the left prefrontal lobe -- and an additional factor may be being reminded of science, that astonishing and triumphant human enterprise.

*

PRAYER NEVER WORKED FOR ME; RELIGION NEVER CONSOLED ME
 
A believer might argue that the best way to decrease anxiety and improve mood is prayer. But that’s just it . . . prayer never worked for me, at least not the mechanical prayer that I was taught. As for some kind of “conversation with god,” a ten-year-old girl doesn’t have much to say to god (who already knows it all anyway). I tried and tried to be attentive at prayer. Still, within minutes I always got drowsy. Nothing zombified me into stupor as effectively as praying the rosary.

Now it’s quite obvious: I’ve never been much interested in sedation. Mainly, I love learning new things. I don’t mind the muddle and murk at the frontiers of knowledge. Nietzsche was right: as soon as we look at anything deep enough, a new infinity opens up. There is simply no end to learning and unfolding. 


A boat ride on the River Styx, Mammoth Caves

CAVESIGHT

Everything here is blind:

white shoots of errant seeds,
transparent fish.
Salamanders thread eyeless sleep.
Embryo arms

reach out without hands;
unfinished dragons clot,
stretch bulbous heads
rowed with unopenable eyes.

A stream runs through me,
clear as absence.
You ask how it can flow,
reflecting no one –

my curtains of stone, where shadow
does not fall, but is;
balconies of dark overlooking dark,
unechoed shell of passages –

Don’t be deceived. I am a slow
hurricane of motion.
Everything lengthens, thickens, fuses.
Drop by drop, I meet myself.

~ Oriana © 2013

(One reason I chose this poem was Rabbi Finley’s remark that atheists don’t enjoy poetry; they can’t understand metaphor and symbolism.)
 

Krubera Cave, Western Caucasus

TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SELF

If the self doesn’t exist, why does it feel so good to “forget oneself” in the pursuit of anything intellectually stimulating? (This sounds like the “Jewish Zen” kind of question: if there is no self, then whose arthritis is this?) Even writing in the third person leads to a better mood than writing in the first person. Maybe distance is the secret not only of poetry, but of everything (but, as Sarah Luczaj pointed out the first time I made this remark, it has to be the right kind of distance; do I sense another infinity opening up?)

Obviously, not everyone is interested in pursuing learning. Even those who do have other access to being swept beyond the mundane into utter delight -- or, as I understand the term, transcendence. The most common portal is music. It affects the brain so quickly and profoundly that we find ourselves in another plane of experience without really trying. Tranströmer described this beautifully in the opening of “Schubertiana”:

Outside New York, a high place where with one glance you take in the
   houses were eight million human beings live.
The giant city is a long flimmery drift, a spiral galaxy seen from the side.
Inside the galaxy, coffee cups are being pushed across the desk, department
   store windows beg, a whirl of shoes that leave no trace behind.
Fire escapes climbing up, elevator doors that silently close, behind
   triple-locked doors a steady swell of voices.
Slumped-over bodies doze in subway cars, catacombs in motion.
I know also – statistics to the side – that at this instant in some room
   down there Schubert is being played, and for that person the notes
   are more real than all the rest.

(~ translated by Robert Bly)

First, we are given a description of New York seen from a “high place” outside the city. I love “a long flimmery drift, a spiral galaxy seen from the side.” “Flimmery” suggests “shimmering” and “glimmering” – but happily escapes the overuse of those “poetic” words, and deepens “drift.” Flimmery also makes me think of “flimsy.” And yes, a galaxy: nothing solid, just darkness and those moth lights flimmering there, and everything evanesces: “a whirl of shoes that leave no trace behind.” That too was my own experience: at night from the Empire State Building, Manhattan seemed unreal with its hovering verticals, a phantom city.

And yet in that phantom city, with its subway cars like “catacombs in motion,” with its “triple-locked doors” -- “somewhere down there Schubert is being played.” Let me quote the entire passage, my favorite lines in this poem full of marvelous lines:

I know also – statistics to the side – that at this instant in some room
   down there Schubert is being played, and for that person the notes
   are more real than all the rest. 
 
More real than everything else, and so capable of producing ecstasy is that many classical music lovers agree that music is the closest we can get to the divine; some have gone as far as to say that music IS god.

Ah, you may say, that’s the magic of intense focus. But something about great music simply forces the change of focus. We are “swept away.” Beautiful scenery can do the same. Those who engage in the kind of physical exercise where every movement requires great attention often report elation. Apparently anything to which we give total attention can be the ticket to transcendence.  

IT’S STILL EARLY AFTER THE DEATH OF GOD

And yet, as we read about religious mystics, who wouldn’t want to achieve that kind of transcendence? Does it take belief? Deep meditators say it doesn’t, but not all of us are capable of mastering meditation. Listening to my refrigerator works best for me, but it has taken me only so far. After all, it’s not just rapture we seek; we want a life-transforming vision, a beautiful sense of trust in the unfolding of existence.

As Ginette Paris points out in her excellent book, Wisdom of the Psyche, it’s still early after the death of god. This is still only the dawn of the post-religious era, and we are still working to develop effective secular life philosophy. Paris says, “Neither Voltaire, nor Nietzsche, nor Freud, nor Jung, nor Sartre, nor any of the modern philosophers of atheisms are completely free of the redemption myth. God may have been declared dead, but the mourning is not finished; it is too big a loss to be completed in just a few generations. Jung’s nostalgia for god resurfaces at times in his theory about about the Self.”

The idea of “individuation” never appealed to me; I felt I was individuated enough and didn’t care to spend my time micro-analyzing my dreams and fantasies, or endlessly journaling and “questing.” The self-centeredness and ultimate futility of those practices were blatantly obvious to me. With my introversion, I had a rich inner life without really trying. My need was for greater engagement with the world. That’s how I realized that the answer doesn’t lie within; for me, and I think for many others, the answer lies without, in the right kind of work or activity, in the right community and connection with others. Rather than draw dream-based mandalas, I prefer to read a good book, write something either lovely and/or blasphemous, give a lecture, swim with the dolphins.

Ginette Paris argues that the myth of redemption has made it difficult for us to see that life is both terrible and wonderful, so let’s enjoy the wonderful part. (This view can also be found toward the ending of Ecclesiastes.) I whole-heartedly agree. Most people are not wretched sinners who deserve hell for eternity. They are decent human beings who do their best under the circumstances; rather than meditate on the five wounds of Christ, they want to be happy -- in this life, and not after they die. 



THE JOY OF BEING POSTHUMOUS 
 
When I was eighteen, my mother said to me, “The difference between you and me is that I am no longer waiting.” I was indeed waiting, which is excusable at eighteen. At some point during adolescence, we start waiting for everything to happen. And then, at some point when we are much older, we are no longer waiting. We are living for the present, not for the future. I call that being posthumous.

Ginette Paris writes from a posthumous state of mind. You can get there either by nearly dying or simply by growing older and being cornered by mortality. Goals, self-improvement, weight loss, striving to lay a foundation for the future -- all this becomes ridiculous. You realize that one day you will lose ALL your weight. As for everything you do being a stepping stone to something better -- or, as one woman put it, “your blog is your ticket to the future” -- that is simply a delusion. At long last you realize that just existing is an immense delight.

You can have this insight early in life, but it won’t necessarily “take hold.” I had an early encounter with mortality. At first it affected me profoundly -- for instance, I realized how trivial and inane most concerns were in the light of mortality. But I was simply to young to absorb the profound lessons and form clear priorities.

THE DAY I LEARNED MORTALITY

The surgeon said in a calm, controlled 
voice, “You should be able to lead
a normal life – ” he paused –
“for the rest of your life.”

I walked out of the arctic hospital.
I kept walking to the parking lot.
It was the fracture of that pause:
the silence rolled, uncontrolled –

I drove on the streets, the freeway.
Sunlight in streaks and spills
played tag along the tattered
eucalyptus groves. Wildfires

of bougainvilleas flickered,
flirting with the wind.
It was fluent paradise on fault lines.
A death sentence, but normal.

The palm-tree in front of my apartment
stood quiet, not clapping
its fronds, but waiting.
Not a twig fidgeted, not a cloud.

I kept walking. I kept climbing 
the echoing stairs.
But everything around me 
stopped.

Everything was staring, 
waiting,my shadow splayed in two
against the stucco wall.

 
~ Oriana, © 2013

The answer arrived many years later, in the form of the sayings of the “Jewish Buddha”: Be here now. Later you’ll be someplace else. Is that so complicated? 
 
 

Scott:

As usual, deep and thought provoking. The images you use are always beautiful. The newest one with the eclipse brought to mind an article online I read recently of A S Eddington, a famed British astronomer, contemporary of Einstein and devout Quaker. He was a profound man of science yet was awed by the unseen as well. I have long believed that simple men and women of faith have done perhaps more good, unseen by us, than we shall ever know. Guesses, as C S Lewis might say, but am sure the truth is much better. I am thankful for the bad example of Tolstoy and Melville; brilliant writers but miserable people....better Tolkien than Tolstoy, that's my motto and in my haven of 'New Nantucket' is where I'll reside, a isle full of birds, black coffee and books. Oh, have gotten some great Nantucku's, even one from Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon!

Oriana:

Nothing in all the mythologies and sacred texts awes me as much as the mysteries that science is grappling with, whether it’s astrophysics or biology. The world is so amazing! The more I learn -- and I don’t pretend to know even a fraction -- the more astonished I am by the intricate workings of nature, especially where chaos theory applies, and yet somehow we end up with something almost comprehensible. Scientists, like artists, have a sense of the sacred that goes hand-in-hand with questioning, rather than with blind obedience to authority (the greatest enemy of truth, as Einstein said).

I see the torment of great minds like Tolstoy and Melville as due in part to their having lived at a time when the archaic religious texts were already difficult to accept, but there wasn’t yet enough to take their place. And there  still isn’t quite enough, but at least we are further along the road. Scientific explanations of natural phenomena have helped, so earthquakes and diseases are not seen as “divine punishment.” Life has become less harsh thanks to scientific advances -- think of Jonas Salk and polio; can we ever be grateful enough? Globalization has also helped, making us familiar with other cultures and their wisdom, and less eager to consign their members to eternal damnation.

Nevertheless, as I point out in the blog, “it’s still early after the death of god,” and we are still struggling toward a planetary consciousness and the concept of human dignity that’s based simply on this: everyone is not just one isolated individual, but humanity -- a part of the human family. Everyone is unique and has value. Imagine the kindness that would prevail if this became an accepted principle. Respect -- for animals too, for nature in general. More than respect -- reverence.

A private paradise of birds, coffee and books -- I’m with you, even if I need to put milk into my coffee -- and coconut milk too, and vanilla extract. Paradise now! How lucky we are . . .  

Charles:

First totally awesome sentence, "Assuming that Jesus travels at the speed of light, after 2,000 years he still has not left our galaxy."

Love the way you contrast boring prayer with learning and unfolding.

I would say the Rabbi F can be accused of not understanding metaphor in poetry when he referred to St. John’s of the Cross “Dark Night of the Soul” and said it was not a love poem.

Even Rabbi F would agree that music is transcendent.

Of course I love the part about swimming with dolphins. Your writing is so inspiring.
 
Oriana:

Jesus lends himself to various uses. His activity as a healer serves as an argument against those who think suffering is good for us and we should not be seeking cures for various diseases. As I think I say somewhere, no church would ever donate money to medical research. Churches might not admit to it, but religion relies on suffering. People don’t turn to it for knowledge -- many believers would admit that the creation myth is not to be taken literally, nor Eve being made of Adam’s Rib, nor Noah’s Ark, and so on. But suffering is not metaphorical. The clergy know that illness and other hardship is what makes people pray. Religion thrives on fear and helplessness, offering a kind of Santa Claus in the sky (the jealous god of wrath is mostly in eclipse these days).

And, amazingly enough, Jesus can even be used to illustrate astrophysics. Of course a large object, such as the human body, could not travel at the speed of light.

St. John of the Cross was inspired by the Song of Songs, which his poem imitates. But I am impressed that Rabbi F even knew the poem. He probably knows the gospels too. That he settled on the Kabbala and its strange myth of creation is somewhat mystifying. Maybe it’s a way to explain evil: the vessels that were to contain divine light shattered. God was not a good potter? In retrospect I love the way Rabbi F shockingly concluded that Tikkun Olam does not mean repairing the world but repairing god. For me the sense of absurdity is delicious: inventing a deity, and then concluding that imaginary being needs us to repair him.

Religions tie themselves in knots of their own making, be it the problem of evil or the question of rebirth: if there is no self, how can it be reborn? There are so many REAL problems that need solution that I’m tempted to say that wasting time on imaginary problems is a sin, a crime against reality.  

Hyacinth:

The line I remembered from the first reading is “cornered by mortality” -- that one line intrigued me. Food for thought, as is the whole blog. Also I  especially like the line “A stream runs through me, clear as absence.”

I think if we don't question everything we are not thinking creatures. There are so many miracles every day to consider and question, and one question leads to another like a space craft (Star Wars) lifting out of this planet into the universe. I like Whitman's  "a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels." Your photo of a snail is a miracle and
the night sky staggers me.

I like the cave poem: “Here everything is blind. . .” I have claustrophobia so going down into the salt caves in Salzburg was an experience -- all those blinding white walls of salt!  I forgot to be afraid, I was so awed. It dwarfed life and all I knew, the way the ocean puts things in perspective.

How little we really know of the world how little  of our brains we really use?

*

Oriana:

It’s a pernicious and persistent myth that we use only 10% of our brain. We are whole-brain users. Nor do some people think with their right brain while others use only the left brain. Might as well talk about those who think with their rear brain!

Trouble is that garbage in = garbage out. Endless misinformation. But then, compared with the horrific nonsense that people in the Middle Ages believed . . . I still find it hard to believe that Europe managed to survive the Middle Ages. And a nuclear holocaust, though it seems less likely now, is still not 100% averted. If anyone starts it, it will most likely be a dictator with a medieval mentality.

We still know only a small portion of all there is to know about the universe. There is a consensus that the unknowable will always be with us. Yes, a mouse is a miracle, but its genome has been decoded. Every year, a bit more knowledge -- that also awes me and cheers me up. So many discoveries have been made since my birth! One reason I’d love to live long is because I love to read about the new discoveries -- even though I know that all scientific knowledge is provisional, subject to revision as new evidence is presented. Can you imagine a religious leader saying to his “flock” (isn’t it something how people are equated with sheep?) that what he says about the afterlife is provisional, including the very existence of the afterlife? Yet cultural evolution takes place in religion also; liberal Judaism seems to be losing even the belief in a deity. And certain left-wing Catholics are influenced by the Eastern traditions and say things like, “We are all Christ” and “Your deepest self is Christ.” Talk about a contrast between that and “You are a sinner doomed to hell except for the redemption by Jesus.”

A slow progress toward more kindness and dignity. Why not atheism for everyone? Because there will probably always be those whose lives are so hard that they cannot manage without a super-parent in the sky. Nobody’s life should be that hard. Life should be a joy.

But back to transcendence and nature. The beauty of nature does seem miraculous to me in that it’s more extravagant than seems necessary. If engineers were designing flowers, would they ever come up with orchids? That extravagance of beauty, going beyond a functional minimalist design, is a mystery to me. I think of it with reverence and gratitude.

As for the image below, I considered one that says: Lose yourself in nature and you will find yourself. I'd revise it to: Lose yourself in nature and feel happy! All this stuff about finding yourself is well, too self-centered. The answer does not lie within; it lies outside, in the beauty and mystery of the world. It lies in self-forgetting and remembering the world.

THE LAUGHTER OF JOB

William Blake: Job Rebuked by His Friends

THE LAUGHTER OF JOB
   
“Not yet, my friend,”
said Job to a raven,
yellow pus crusting his thighs.
“I’m not carrion yet.

No happiness lasts,
but here on my dunghill
I have learned the blessing:
there’s no perfect unhappiness either.”

“If you can laugh,
you are never poor,”
said Job to his dour
comforters. “Look at my

jewelry of emerald flies!”
He patted his blistered
bald head: “See?
I have transcended my hair.”

“It’s already broken,”
said Job to a stranger,
lifting his potsherd
like a drinking cup.

“My friend, my friend,
let us not waste time
cursing the Nameless.
To life!”

*

“What fine camel droppings,”
said Job to a Levite.
“Who can say that I haven’t
weatherproofed my house?”

The Levite reproved him:
“Did you get an answer?”
“Yes,” Job chuckled, “but not
from the Voice in the Whirlwind.

It was the Adversary, walking
up and down, who winked:
Because you didn’t laugh,
meaning you were not free.

And Job began laughing,
and his sores were healed.
He got new sheep and she-asses,
new children by a new wife.

He’d doze during prayer;
when chided, he’d laugh,
“God loves us more
when we sleep.”

To a servant he’d point,
“Here, have this lamb” –
laughing softly,
knowing any moment

a messenger could come,
crying from afar:
“All you possessed is gone;
in an instant I saw it gone” –

and Job would reply,
“Naked I came,
naked I shall return.
Ah, I like to go naked.”

~ Oriana © 2013


*

Charles Sherman: The Laughter of Job

This sculpture is a tribute to Mitchell Shore, a friend who loved to joke. He died at 46 of acute leukemia, after stoically enduring repeated high-dose chemo. As the comforters of this Job, we basically used denial, speaking to him as if we didn't know he was doomed. He endured that too.
 
The problem of evil --“why do bad things happen to good people?” -- has been the subject of debate ever since Job’s friends tried to convince him that he or his children must have sinned to deserve such suffering because, after all, god is just. According to Job’s friends, to say otherwise is blasphemy, so if you don’t admit you’ve sinned, you are thereby accusing god of injustice and committing an even greater sin of blasphemy.

I was never especially interested in the problem of evil when I was growing up. Theodicy (trying to explain why an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good deity permits evil) was best left to theologians, just like the problem of free will versus pre-destination. Speaking of free will, that was the reasonably satisfying answer that the church gave: evil exists because god will not interfere with free will. (The question about violating the laws of nature came later and struck me as a lot more thorny.)

But in terms of the slaughter of the innocents and other kinds of suffering, given Poland’s history, there was no assumption that you had to have done something bad to bring on suffering. That millions suffered unspeakable horrors was an absolute fact at the center of the psyche: good people suffer. Good people go through hell right here on earth. There was even a pious-sounding saying: “God sends suffering to those he loves” (does anyone want to be loved as Job was loved?)   


Blake, Satan Smiting Job with Boils
 
Add to this all the saints who flagellated themselves to “mortify the flesh” -- as if life needed any help. So there was a complete acceptance of suffering that didn’t assume anyone deserved it: “that’s life.” Many, like my family, used humor as defense: I grew up familiar with several often-repeated jokes brought from Auschwitz and Radogoszcz (a little-known factory camp near Łódź). Yes, there was humor even in Auschwitz. And yes, some are capable of cracking a joke even on their death-bed. 

My father was one such joke-to-the-end kind of person. Admitted to the hospital during the final stage of Parkinson’s, when he lost the ability to swallow, he was told to take off all his clothes and put an a hospital gown. Of course he had to have help. “What! These beautiful young nurses are to look at a naked old geezer like me?” he replied with mock agitation. Six hours later he was dead.

*

There is a chart making its rounds on the Internet. I remember seeing the first version of what in Buddhism is called the “first noble truth” ten years ago, maybe even before then.



I especially enjoy the Hare Krishna addition. And yes, I more or less agree with the “I deserve it” statement about Catholicism. Humans are sinners by definition -- St. Augustine wrote much on that. I don’t know if this if the current practice, but “in my time,” even small children were told they were sinners. Still, suffering wasn’t necessarily seen as punishment. Rather, it was a kind of pre-Purgatory. It was good for you. Welcoming suffering by pretending it’s good for us is yet another way of coping with it. (I knew a woman who suffered from asthma; when I expressed hope that science will find a way to combat the disease, she said, “Oh no. I don’t think we should try to get rid of diseases; we need them for our spiritual development.”) 

But Job does not welcome suffering. He’s one of my role models because he does not debase himself. He does not beat his breast and make a false confession of being a sinner who deserves to be punished. In the end he sees that god is a dangerous megalomaniac who needs to be appeased. But at no point can Job be pressured to demean himself as a sinner just so that god could be seen as just. 

Blake Job’s Evil Dreams
With dreams upon my bed thou searest me and affrightest me with visions.
 
HAVING A “DEAL” WITH GOD

When I was in college, a psychology instructor regaled us with this sinister joke: a man spends a day in town doing business. Night falls while he is walking back to his village through a forest. He feels somewhat scared, but reassures himself: “I am a good person. If there is justice, nothing bad will happen to me.” Just then a deep male voice is heard: “There is no justice.”

The class sat in tense silence. Not the tiniest chuckle. The instructor seemed puzzled, so he repeated: “And this deep, godlike voice says, There is no justice.” Still no response from the shell-shocked students.

Thinking about it now, I am struck by two things: first, I never forgot this joke. It engraved itself on my mind forever. Second, those in their teens and early twenties haven’t yet lived long enough to comprehend the joke. They haven’t yet suffered enough to understand that suffering will happen even if  you are utterly blameless, angelic.

But regardless of age, some will always cling to the belief that being a good person will protect them from misfortune. It’s a common cognitive bias known as the “just-world hypothesis”: good is rewarded and evil is punished. Hence the tendency to blame the victim.

“I know why this happened”

Still, when a child (young or adult) dies of leukemia, nobody tells the parents that that’s what they deserved. It’s difficult to imagine anyone insensitive enough and so locked into an archaic reward-and-punishment mentality as to say to the parents, “I know why this happened. You stopped going to church. You had it coming.”

Nevertheless, the parents themselves may form some notion of wrong-doing to explain the suffering. When it became obvious that Mitchell would die, his mother said: “I know why this happened. We didn’t have him bar-mitzvah-ed.”

Apparently it didn’t occur to her that this explanation implies that god is a sadistic monster: “Let the kid die of leukemia. That will teach his parents a lesson!” She and Mitchell’s father both felt guilty. If only they had him bar-mitzva-ed, like his older brother! But with Mitchell, they got stingy (nor was Mitchell the least interested, seeing what his brother had to go through). And now this -- Mitchell’s death of leukemia (at the age of 46, but sometimes there’s a delay in divine punishment). The guilt must have been eating away at them: both parents died within 18 months of Mitchell’s death. The older brother, the one who got bar-mitzva-ed but quickly lost interest in Judaism, became an orthodox Jew.

I wonder: did he turn to orthodoxy as protection against the wrath of an unpredictable god? Jung, in his “Answer to Job,” suggested that instead of thinking of god in terms of Trinity, it would make sense to see a Quaternity, the fourth face of god being The Demonic, or the Shadow. After the speech from the whirlwind, even the initial boasting to Satan: “And have you seen my servant Job?” seems to come from a malignant narcissist who cares only about his glory. 


(Pushing this to the extreme, I can imagine a scenario where god and Satan continue to amuse themselves by making bets. Perhaps the climax came when Satan said, “Sure, many still fast on Yom Kippur. But send them Holocaust, LOL, and see if they don’t curse you to your face.”)

(Speaking of Yom Kippur, that’s the opening of Rabbi Kushner’s justly famous best-seller, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The parents of a young woman who died of heart disease come to him and say, “We know why this happened. We didn’t fast on last Yom Kippur.”)
 
*

But let's turn more directly to "having a deal with god." In a lecture I recently attended, “The Otherness of God,” Rabbi Mordecai Finley (his true name, and he looks Irish too, down to being a red-head) quoted the example of a woman, a member of his congregation, who came to him wailing, “I’ve lived such a good life. I’ve donated so much to charity. How could this be happening me?” “This” was her discovery that had husband of thirty years had been unfaithful -- not once, but many times throughout the marriage.

Rabbi Finley was unsparing as he described to us this modern Ms. Job. She imagined she had a deal with god, he said. She’d do good things, she’d donate to charity, and in return nothing bad would touch her. In effect she was saying, “I’ve donated so much to charity, how could my husband turn out to be unfaithful?” The faulty logic is obvious and even ridiculous when we make it so blatant.

But there is something deeper to it, the Rabbi explained. Some people assume that they have a “deal with god.” The deal is, for instance, that they will stay faithful, and in return their spouse will be faithful also. They will rise early to make breakfast for their children, and in return none of their children will become alcoholics and/or drug addicts. They will perform various good deeds, and in return god will grant them financial success -- or whatever reward matters to the person.

So what happened to the wisdom contained in the saying, “Virtue is its own reward”? What about devotion to goodness because that’s a good thing in itself? Are you truly a good person if you do good not for its own sake, but because you expect a reward?

Not that anyone is entirely pure of heart -- but we should at least try not remain at the level of a young child without intrinsic moral values, guided by parental rewards and punishments. 

  Albrecht Dürer, Job on the Dunghill and His Wife

MINI-JOB IN THE NEW TESTAMENT: JOHN 9: 1-3

We know that the story of Job goes back thousands of years. We take it for granted that the sin-and-punishment mentality was prevalent in ancient times. The New Testament is indeed revolutionary; its stories often focus on compassion and forgiveness.

However, there is an unsettling (at least to me) story in the Gospel of John about a man blind from birth:

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.

And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?

Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

The logic of blaming the blind man escapes me: since he was blind from birth, when could he have sinned? Before birth, in the womb?

But never mind. This is not the only time that the disciples seem not very bright. Let’s assume that everyone blames the parents: they must have trespassed in a serious way to deserve this punishment of having a blind child. The parents are probably ostracized as sinners, while the child suffers due to being blind.

Jesus explains that in this case no one has sinned. The child was born blind and grew up blind simply to serve as showcase for god’s healing power. All this suffering so that a proper subject of a miracle should exist. Is the deity who wants to show off his “works” by any chance still the malignant narcissist who boasts of having created the Behemoth in front of miserable Job?
 
Blake: The Behemoth
 
 
FROM “PUNISHMENT” TO “IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT”

Most people would probably say that sometimes what happens to us is caused by something we did, and sometimes it’s just circumstances. There is malignant strand in New Age thought: “What did you do to ATTRACT the accident (disease, loss of a job, etc), with the answer usually given as “You were thinking negative thoughts.” But this particular view has had its heyday and has now fallen in disrepute. Even those who say “There are no accidents” are usually willing to admit that sometimes it’s nobody’s fault: it’s the circumstances. It’s really possible to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the opposite also holds true.

Most would also agree that life is not fair: some people are born with genes for good looks and high intelligence, while others come into this world with genes that predispose them to all kinds of bad things, including high odds of dying from cancer before the age of fifty. Some children are born to rich parents in prosperous countries; others are born to poor parents in a country particularly subject to famines and natural disasters. (“In their future lives, all Americans are born in Bangladesh,” I heard someone joke.)

As we learn more about the natural causes of various misfortunes, be it diseases or hurricanes, the less likely we are to assume that the victims somehow deserved their fates. Even assuming that the parents whose children died in the Sandyhook massacre were flawed in some way, it would be monstrous to say that those parents DESERVED their extreme suffering.   And it would be insane to say that the children deserved to die.

More and more people agree that natural events have no moral causes. True, there are still fundamentalist televangelists who propound the archaic worldview when they put forth explanations such as “This happened because there is no prayer in the public schools”; “The earthquake in Haiti was punishment for the belief in voodoo.” But such explanations now arouse increasing disapproval. And fortunately no one has said that the man whose legs were blown off during the Boston bombings must have done something to deserve it. To say it would be seen as obscene. We have morally progressed at least this far!

Blake: Job's Comforters

THE PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE

The more we learn about natural causes of events, the more likely we are to “grant innocence” to other people and ourselves. Even if we or they did, in fact, do something wrong, we know there are causes other than “some people are just genetically evil.” For instance, we know that child abuse can be perpetuated from generation to generation until someone breaks the chain. Breaking the chain is not just refusing to be a perpetrator of abuse, dealing out to others what has been dealt out to us. It’s also forgiving those who abused us once we understand what caused them to act that way.

We have no trouble granting innocence to animals and small children. The mentally handicapped are also seen as innocents and aren’t blamed, even if they somehow “misbehave.” But older children, adolescents, and adults -- the easiest path is to blame them. This presumption of guilt is based on ascribing a great deal of free will to those individuals. A more deterministic attitude sees the multiple causes, the context, the circumstances. It doesn’t leap into shame and blame. It grants innocence.

“Yes, but what about smokers who end up dying of lung cancer? Isn’t it their own fault?” Again, it’s so easy to speak in terms of “fault” for which the cancer is the just punishment. Addiction experts know that this is not a productive approach. First, you grant a person dignity and the presumption of innocence -- then you might have a chance to influence that person’s behavior.

You offer empathy.

You offer humility: If circumstances had been different, this could be me.

There is still a long way to go before, on the whole, we cease to be judgmental. But I think a lot of progress has been made, and it’s a “done deal” that we are moving toward a more comprehensive “presumption of innocence.”

We are finally accepting that a lot of suffering comes everyone’s way, and that life isn’t fair. It simply isn’t. There is no need to defend some imaginary justice, cosmic or divine. “There is no justice.” That’s how things are.

IF THERE IS NOT JUSTICE, THEN WHAT?

One interesting development is the emergence of a parallel: as life has grown less harsh (better health, longer life expectancy, a social safety net), the Western culture has grown less judgmental and more merciful. In his The Evolution of God, Robert Wright has developed this argument in relation to the concept of a ruthless or merciful god. Good times went hand in hand with the concept of mercy. The early deities were cruel; bad times tended to a regression toward a cruel deity.

In his review of Wright’s book, Paul Bloom says:

God has mellowed. The God that most Americans worship occasionally gets upset about abortion and gay marriage, but he is a softy compared with the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. That was a warrior God, savagely tribal, deeply insecure about his status and willing to commit mass murder to show off his powers. But at least Yahweh had strong moral views, occasionally enlightened ones, about how the Israelites should behave. His hunter-gatherer ancestors, by contrast, were doofus gods. Morally clueless, they were often yelled at by their people and tended toward quirky obsessions. One thunder god would get mad if people combed their hair during a storm or watched dogs mate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/books/review/Bloom-t.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

Cruel times, cruel gods; better times, more forgiving gods (“Our Softie, who are in heaven”?). Of course it’s we humans who have evolved and “mellowed.” It’s interesting that the view of god as a “softie” is more politically correct than the idea that humans have made moral progress, as Steven Pinker points out in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. The view that the concept of god has grown benevolent does not seem to jar readers; but the view that humans have grown less violent and more kind is widely regarded as controversial.

It’s no longer politically correct to pray that god smite our enemies. But it’s still not politically correct to admit that humans are basically good rather than evil; that evil is a pathology that develops under certain conditions, and those conditions can be changed. 

Blake: When the Morning Stars Sang Together


*
This has also been the time of religious decline, at least in the West. If god is a cognitive illusion and exists only subjectively, in the minds of believers, then where do we turn for consolation when “bad things happen to good people”?

The answer is practically contained in the question: we turn to good people. We turn to friends and kind strangers. And we turn to the knowledge that suffering is inescapable, but life is still full of goodness and beauty. It’s not to be disparaged just because it must end.

A lot of mystery remains. That’s why life is such a great adventure. Among Mitchell’s last words while he was still conscious were these: “Don’t be afraid to die.” This could also mean: “don’t be afraid to live.”

THE DOOR

He was delirious of course,
the Do Not Resuscitate code
taped over his bed. Suddenly he said,
“So how can I kill myself?”

Minutes later: “I wish every day
could be like this.”
I knew then he could now go –
was well-traveled in heaven and hell.

First chemo, his swollen lungs
scratched against his ribs,
the pain so searing that he
slipped into twilight and saw,

slightly ajar, a door 
lit with a warm amber glow.
It was the Door of Death –
behind it, “a friendly place.”

The Door of Life was shut;
behind it, “a place of hardship.”
He hesitated as he stood
before the door of light,

then turned toward the door
of darkness, meaning life –
back under the buzzing, prying
fluorescents of the cancer ward.

*

I wonder if he heard music –
as I did that night,
the year when every day
I thought of suicide.

I drove along dark empty streets,
meandered aimlessly for miles,
when on my car radio I heard
the slow movement of Mozart’s

Twenty Fifth piano concerto –
the music so loving, so calm,
that I went home, and slept
without crying myself to sleep.

I imagine that again he saw
the lit door when he did
walk through it. Maybe he heard
music calling him home –

a barely imagined love song,
like clouds you cannot tell
from distant peaks, or the slow
movement of a concerto

so pure it breaks and heals
your heart – and what for him
was the Door of Death,
for me was the Door of Life.

~ Oriana © 2013


Hyacinth:

Superb blog. Great depth. Digesting it now.

Oriana:

Thank you. The issues are huge. They have been debated for centuries. I am so grateful to be living at a time when we know a lot of natural causes for various kinds of adversity, and the tendency to be harsh and judgmental is growing less. As understanding grows, terms such as “sin” and “divine punishment” are dropping from common usage.

Charles:

I love this blog. So many different viewpoints on life and death, suffering and health. Love the way it all came together in the last sentence. I think Mitchell would love getting so much attention so many years after he died.

The Blake images are very expressive of Job.

”Rabbi Mordecai Finley (his true name, and he looks Irish too, down to being a red-head)" is politically incorrect but it's what a good writer says.
Oriana:

Mitchell is unforgettable. 

Since my blog posts are personal essays, and not, say, academic articles, I have the privilege of making it a more intimate conversation with the reader; poems also have an intimate tone; in fact lyrical poetry must have that "intimate whisper" to it in order to succeed.

Ursula:

I love that poem [“The Laughter of Job”]. I don't remember it being Biblical at all, but I endorse the message. It's the only way.

Particularly liked that the images were nasty and depressing but somehow the poem was humorous.

I don't mean funny because Job was laughing but funny because the poet thought them up.

It's rather like the Buddha had undertaken rewriting the rather harsh Old Testament.

Oriana:

The Old Testament is indeed “rather harsh.” Harsh times, harsh religion. We tend to regress and be more judgmental when under stress, in the state of fear. Yes, laughter is one of the best means of coping with adversity, possibly the best one.

Acceptance and moving on are almost among the best ways of coping. Having supportive friends is a great gift, not only during hardship, but especially during hardship. Receiving empathy from even one person can prevent “falling apart” and the beginning of healing.

BODY HEAT: THE NON-PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

Mary Dineen: Iris
 
“The question of the self: ‘who am I’ not in the sense of ‘who am I’ but rather ‘who is this ‘I’ that can say ‘who’? What is the ‘I,’ and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the ‘I’ trembles in secret?” ~ Jacques Derrida
 
All I’m willing to divulge is that certain events made the identity of my ‘I” tremble in secret. As did the reading about a dream I had a long time ago.

BODY HEAT

I browse through the journal I kept 

in 1988. Boring, my witty remarks,
my vivid writerly details;

a student essay I quote,
“The Underclothes at Hawthorne
Disaster Wing Thriftstore, Inc.”


I flip the pages, find
my “Los Angeles airport dream”: 
We stand at the window and wait

for the plane from New York.
It crashes into the terminal!
Woozy from the impact, I get up.

Robert is gone – vaporized.
Only his duffel bag is left.
I grope it, hoping it’s still warm

from his body. Moments later
I think, “I’ll call Andrew.”
In the journal I write,

What a marvelous dream!

Except I’d never exchange 

Robert for Andrew. Never.

*

Now I shudder. No jets had yet
plunged into buildings. Ignorant
dream, how could it not know

that Andrew was to be
my Disaster Wing?
My long letters to him,

stormy knots of clouds,
signed: “Love always.”
I still can't believe it:

to Robert I said,
“Andrew is my prince –
you are my reality.”

*

Only the body knows.
Only the hands make love.
My songless Orpheus

committed suicide.
The same autumn Robert
got married, a Catholic

convert, a metal crucifix
over his marriage bed.
I put away the journal.

One image lingers: in the void
of the demolished airport,
I touch my lover’s duffel bag.

I stroke the bag’s whole length, 

seeking the last trace

of someone lost – a ghost even

of his body heat –
That’s the sole detail
I have saved –

it’s what remains for me
of that year, not of Our Lord,

but of our groping blindness.

~ Oriana © 2013

The poem describes my experience quite accurately. In my twenties and thirties, I kept a journal on and off, mostly off.  Like a lot of people who journal, I never read it. One time I did try reading it, and found it boring -- all those forgotten, meaningless details that had nothing to do with my new “older and wiser” priorities! And all those attempts to be clever and funny -- who did I think I was writing for? Posterity?

And then it happened: browsing, I landed on the page that recorded my dream about a plane flying into the building of the Los Angeles airport. I was the sole survivor, touching my vaporized partner’s duffel bag all over, seeking some trace his body heat still clinging to the bag. I was thunder-struck. The dream came back as if I’d just had it, never mind the many years in between. How could I have forgotten one of the most powerful dreams I ever had?

Worse, how could I have made this cruel remark to the man who wasn’t my Prince, not the one I fantasized about every night? I still can’t believe it . . . except that the memory, once resurrected, would not go away. I can only plead that it was the innocent “cruelty of youth” -- not meaning to hurt another, but not having lived long enough to have acquired more compassion and understanding of life and love.

I’m horrified by what came out of my mouth in the guise of “honesty” -- back then honesty was on everyone’s lips, the highest value, far ahead of kindness. I plead I “wasn’t yet me”; that was my immature self, not my more enlightened later self, chastened by having experienced not only more personal suffering, but also by understanding how much others suffer.

Wiliam Blake: Job

*
 
THAT EMBARRASSING YOUNGER SELF 

Ray Carver has a poem about this dilemma of having to own one’s younger self:

THE AUTHOR OF HER MISFORTUNE

I’m not the man she claims.  But
this much is true: the past is
distant, a receding coastline,
and we’re all in the same boat,
a scrim of rain over the sea-lanes.
Still, I wish she wouldn’t keep on
saying those things about me!
Over the long course
everything but hope lets you go, then
even that loosens its grip.
There isn’t enough of anything
as long as we live. But at intervals
a sweetness appears and, given a chance,
prevails. It’s true I’m happy now.
And it’d nice if she
could hold her tongue. Stop
hating me for being happy.
Blaming me for her life. I’m afraid
I’m mixed up in her mind
with someone else.  A young man
of no character, living on dreams,
who swore he’d love her forever.
One who gave her a ring, and a bracelet.
Who said, Come with me. You can trust me.
Things to that effect.  I’m not that man.
She has me confused, as I said,
with someone else.

 ~ Ray Carver

*
I discussed this poem with my students. Half of them said, No, he is no longer that man. The other half kept saying, Yes he is. What a cad.

We concluded that he both is and isn’t the same person. Legal cases regularly bring up this paradox: Your Honor, yes, twenty years ago my client did commit a crime, but he is now a “changed man,” a pillar of the community, president of an important charity, a loving husband, father of three fine boys. What good would it serve to put him in prison?

I still don’t have an answer to that question.

*

TO BELIEVE AS THE HANDS BELIEVE

As for my poem, written the same day I found the dream in my journal, it too provoked a debate. Or rather, not so much a debate as a round of condemnation from friends, with me as the sole defense attorney. Now, my friends were not saying, Your younger self is morally despicable. They were saying that this is a bad poem. It’s badly written: the two men create confusion. “Why don’t you remove the other man from the poem and make it a beautiful love poem?” my most romantic friend suggested. Others seconded that.

It would have been easy to transform this darkly realistic poem into an idealistic one: my one true love, even beyond death. I knew that from a purely esthetic point of view, a shorter poem would have worked: I browse through the journal, find the dream but omit any mention of the idolized “Andrew,” leave out further developments concerning Robert and Andrew, and quickly proceed to the ending. Everyone praised the ending.

But I wanted to retain the duality. For me the poem was about that duality, including the duality of past and present, and the older self’s new understanding of the dream in the light of a more mature understanding of love. No, I was no longer that ruthlessly “honest” young woman, and could now say with Tony Hoagland:

What we’ve learned is mostly
not to be so smart --

to believe
as the hands believe,
in only what they hold. 

**

The other matter that interests me is the strangeness of memory. If I hadn’t written down the dream, and then rediscovered the description years later, the dream, which I now see as one of the most powerful dreams I’ve ever had, would be forgotten with the rest of the details. The poem would not exist. The unexpected vehement condemnation that the poem drew further burned it into my memory. “This is the worst poem of yours that I’ve seen,” one person said.

On a dare, I decided to read the poem in public the next chance I got. But in the last minute I lost my nerve. In any case, “you have the right to remain silent.” But the emotional storm assured that I’d never forget the once-forgotten dream or the circumstances in which the “bad” poem was born.

**

I’ve often reflected that I wrote my “Polish poems” just in time, when my childhood memories were still relatively fresh, and those full-throated Carpathian roosters were crowing, casting splendid echoes. The negative side of communing with the past through poetry was that this selective recall perhaps became more important than it should be. Accused of having created an unreal and folkloric Poland, I could not deny the charge. The Polish countryside had become a holy land to me. Any lost homeland becomes that.

I had poems about Warsaw as well, presenting it as a magical city. When I was in my teens, it really was a magical city to me, but I also knew the other side that my older self fully remembered as well. My most perceptive readers picked up the darker undertones anyway (not to mention that the darkness was at times in full view, since my maternal grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor). They also assured me that the poems “go beyond the country”: those rooster-crowed villages, the wheat fields and the old farmer turning into an oracle, telling me I’d never go crazy, had an element of the eternal.

But there was yet another aspect to having written those poems: sometimes I felt I carried too much of the past with me. Because of the poems, I wasn’t able to forget, and forgetting may be memory’s wisest gift. We daily step into Lethe so we may be free of the old life and ready for the new. Or, as another dream told me, “Every three years I burn my diaries / to make room for new books.”

*





THE CLOUDS ARE NOT ALONE

Yet just recently I had an experience that confirmed that not even writing a poem is guaranteed to preserve an experience or insight: it’s perfectly common to forget having written a particular poem, even a good one. Some poets say that it’s best to put away a new poem until you no longer remember it, so a year later you can read it, astonished: This is good!  I wrote this? Me of little worth and no account? (the Book of Job has a way of coming to my mind when poetry and po-biz intrude on my field of being)

I’ve learned to look at the “used” side of my recycled paper: now and then I find a poem I entirely forgot I ever wrote, and decide to keep it. But the last time I did that, I knew the striking and beautiful poem was not my own. The author’s name wasn’t on the page. I instantly emailed the poem to my Salon, with the question, “Does anyone know who wrote this poem?”

The same night, the author was found. It was one of the members of the Salon. She emailed me: “OMG, this is my poem!” She was astonished, and admitted to having recognized the piece not right away, but only half-way through it. She had entirely forgotten having written it, just as I had forgotten having read it. Here it is:

THE CLOUDS ARE NOT ALONE

A Navaho man said the rain is our ancestors
Our bodies, with so much water when we die

evaporate generation after generation
into clouds made of ancestors raining down

all those evaporating beings farther and farther back
through the dinosaurs and more

Everyone who came before rains on me
The tides from the moon are in all of us

with our waters pulling each other closer and farther
while the stars smash away, create worlds

Poems travel at the speed of light
from the page to my eye

from scraps of language written down
Sappho’s love pulses across centuries

~ Janet Baker © 2013

**

How could she forget having written such a fine poem? How could I forget having read it?

It’s not that mysterious. Apparently neither of us took the time to properly encode the memory. Not reinforced through deep attention, strong emotion, and/or repetition, the memory became inaccessible.  Life rushes on, and both of us simply . . . forgot. The poem would be lost utterly if not for the lucky accident of the recycler rescue.

The chance nature of this incident creates a sense of both adventure and peril. Hooray, a poem that deserves to live is now resurrected. But how many excellent pieces have gotten lost? Legion.

Here was a poem that celebrated the idea that the ancestors are still linked to us, nourishing us. I remembered Rabbi Steve at the Interfaith Panel on the Afterlife (http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/12/immortality-of-influence.html), saying that before life ends, a person needs to shed all the love s/he has received so it can be recycled. But the same could be claimed for knowledge and wisdom. All, all must be recycled. As Janet’s poem claims, “Everyone who came before rains on me.” 

Jaded reader, you may shrug and say that this has no doubt been said before in some other way; aren’t there too many poems out there already? The sites that offer a “poem of the day” choke with unending material; the Internet overflows with hundreds of thousands of poems. True, but how many of those poems are worth reading? Let’s be generous: maybe ten percent. At the same time, for various reasons, many truly excellent poems never find an audience. They slide into oblivion without a sigh, sometimes forgotten even by their author.

This is sad because poetry can be more powerful than any other kind of writing. I wouldn’t  have this belief if not for the repeated experience of someone from the audience approaching me after a reading, deeply moved, thanking me for having made him or her see something in their life in a new light. All good poets seem to have those tales of being thanked by tearful strangers; it’s what keeps poets from feeling useless.

Whenever I do a reading, I imagine that in the audience there is one person for whom a certain poem is meant. I can’t predict which poem and which listener, but experience has tended to confirm my belief that at least one person will be touched in a special way. And that’s also what makes the fickleness of memory and the loss of good poems so sad: the gift is not given, and the person who’d be ready to receive it remains untouched.

Not long ago I happened to be that person in need of a gift. Browsing at random through a book I received from a stranger, I came across these famous lines:

Loafe with me on the grass . . . Loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want . . . not custom
       or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

This was not trendy in Whitman’s time, and he had to self-publish. Imagine if it had been lost.