NIETZSCHE: A HANGMAN’S METAPHYSICS

Nietzsche: sculpture by Peter Lenk
 
NIETZSCHE: POSTCARDS FROM SWISS ALPS
   
I love the great despisers,
for they are great worshipers,
arrows of longing for the other shore.

Dearest Mother: 
Yesterday I walked into a cloud 
of newly hatched ladybugs,
the air insane with red,
hundreds of tiny bodies, tick-tick,
colliding with my straw hat.
I dine at The Alpine Rose,
make compresses for my eyes
with glacier water from the lake.
As for my sleep medicine,
don’t worry, I don’t go above
50 grams of chloroform.
Please send some sausages.

Dear Friend, 
please pardon my delay
due to my landlady’s powdered face,
her sweetish odor of valerian drops.
The geraniums on her balcony
trail after me, interrupting my thoughts.
What if I asked her point-blank,
“Madam, but suppose God
is an invention of the devil?”
Philosophers are such sadists.
We who think should present ourselves
for immediate execution.

Dear Fräulein,
thank you for the kind gift
of your Memoirs of an Idealist. 
Please stop complaining
that women are slaves.
That’s what makes civilization possible.

Dear Cosima, Dear Lou,
Dear Stranger on the Train:
love was the screaming of the nightingales.
Solitude is a dawn.
In the red silence I write bitter,
I mean better —
Yet if only at the mouth of the question,
outlined with a thread of light,
stood Ariadne —

Respected Colleagues and Illustrious Dead:
I want back
the coin under your tongue.
I climbed as high as I could.
On the ledge of heaven I saw
a swift’s nest, festooned with droppings.

Dear Sister: are we not
the fools of a dead god?
Through granite 
swirls of birth I shout:
There is no truth,
only perspectives,
the sacred word
is perhaps –
 
Dearest Sister:
are we not happy

~ Oriana © 2014

**

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth” and, even more so, “To kindle lightning, one must for a long time be a cloud” — and, of course, the most famous: “One must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star” — these aphorisms seem to glorify inner turbulence. But is “Dionysian philosophy” of passion and transience a contradiction in terms? Isn’t a philosopher a calm, resigned man? One who cultivates restraint, and not a wild mustache?

Wait. Let me not get Dionysian right away. My plan is to deliver the essay about Hangman’s Metaphysics first, and shamelessly indulge in Dionysian-Nietzschean intoxications later. Nietzsche teaches one to think in terms of no guilt, no punishment — self-trust. This time my self-trust counsels me to be coherent first.

THE GOD OF PUNISHMENT

By not rejecting the Old Testament, Christianity had to absorb an angry and cruel god (all ancient gods were cruel; mercy is fairly recent development). It was a tribal god, nameless and faceless (Moses was once allowed to see his backside) — a god of wrath who tried to drown the earth in a flood because he regretted the mistake of creation; in the main, a god of vengeance and punishment (GOP = "God of Punishment"). Joyce called him the Hangman God. He was probably inspired by Nietzsche’s “Christianity is a hangman’s metaphysics.” Let me quote a bit from “Twilight of the Idols”:

“We no longer have any sympathy today with the concept of “free will.” We know only too well what it is—the most infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind “accountable” in his sense of the word, that is to say for making mankind dependent on him. . .  The doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, of finding guilty. The entire old-style psychology, the psychology of will, was conditioned by the fact that its originators, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves THE RIGHT TO PUNISH—or wanted to create this right for God . . . MEN WERE CONSIDERED "FREE" SO THAT THEY MIGHT BE JUDGED AND PUNISHED — so that they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (whereby the most fundamental falsification was made into the very principle of psychology).”

Nietzsche argues that MOST COMMANDMENTS WERE MADE NOT TO BE OBEYED, BUT TO BE BROKEN, CREATING GUILT. Religion creates and exploits guilt. “Brothels were built with the bricks of religion,” William Blake observed. Some religious rules are so contrary to human psychology that they are virtually impossible to follow. Don’t even think about sex, young man! If you ever lust after a woman, it’s the same as committing adultery. Young woman, keep yourself pure. Don’t covet that pretty dress, much less fantasize about the Prince, you vile temptress under the curse of Eve!

Such commandments were made to be broken, so that people would feel perpetually guilty and deserving of punishment. It wasn’t just people’s actions that god spied on, but even more so their thoughts. One of the first ideas taught to children is that god can read their thoughts. No use hiding under the bed or in a closet; you are under constant surveillance. And whose thoughts can be always pure and holy? We know we have trespassed, and thus we feel constantly guilty.

“Religion is in the guilt-producing control business,” as Bishop Spong put it. It’s about controlling people. It keeps the poor from murdering the rich, as Napoleon shrewdly observed.  But Nietzsche is not interested in the social function of religion, but rather in its impact on the individual psyche. In Nietzsche’s eyes religion was anti-life; Christianity was a religion of death. “God degenerated to the contradiction of life instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes” (The Anti-Christ).

Ideally there’d be no guilt and no punishment, no gulf between man and a non-judging, all-accepting deity. Christianity took a step toward that radical doctrine, but quickly drew back. The god of punishment ruled more absolutely than ever, the vengeance complete with the doctrine of eternal damnation.

Here is Bishop Spong’s wonderful video on the invention of hell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF6I5VSZVqc

If god is dead, what about the fate of the immortal soul? Here is Nietzsche’s answer: ”The concepts “soul”, “spirit” and last of all the concept “immortal soul” were invented in order to despise the body, in order to make it sick — “holy” — in order to cultivate an attitude of appalling disrespect for all things in life which deserve to be treated seriously.” (Ecce Homo)

DO WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO PUNISH OUR PEERS?

Nietzsche on punishment: “A strange thing, our punishment! It does not cleanse the criminal, it is no atonement; on the contrary, it pollutes worse than the crime does.” (The Dawn)

Soon after my twentieth birthday, I had an insight that we have no right to punish others. It was an intuition that simply occurred to me, rather than something I reasoned out. And I didn’t mean criminal justice — obviously a serial killer should be locked up for the sake of public safety. Children — no corporal punishment, but “time out” seemed acceptable. My “no punishment” intuition concerned adults, and particularly relationship partners. What right do we have to set ourselves up as judge and executioner, and try to punish them for doing or saying something that displeases us? Do we ever have the right to be nasty in revenge for it?

By “punishment” I mean sarcastic remarks or other verbal abuse, or “the silent treatment,” or refusal of physical affection. “We don’t have the right to punish” occurred to me long before I read “heaven is a place where everyone is kind,” or essays on how we are moving away from an honor-and -vengeance based social code to a dignity-based code. I didn’t have a fully worked-out explanation, but somehow I managed to realize that we have to break the chain of unkindness leading to more unkindness — even if we feel “provoked.” 

It is unfortunate that Nietzsche became so famous for having said “god is dead.” For the broader public, this eclipsed everything else he said. His views on free will, guilt, and punishment are hardly known at all — a great loss, since this is one of the crucial issues of our time.


BUT WHAT ABOUT . . . REWARD?

But if the most radical message of the gospels is non-punishment or non-revenge, what about — reward? According to Nietzsche, the psychology of the gospels is not about punishment and reward. If we must use think in terms of "reward," then the reward for the no-punishment attitude is the kingdom of heaven not in the afterlife, but right now: “the kingdom of heaven is within you.”  

By abolishing punishment, we abolish the gulf between the human and the divine, thus entering “the kingdom.” Or, to secularize the language, by abolishing punishment, we abolish the gulf between the flawed, vengeful humanity and the more loving and compassionate humanity, thus entering heaven, a place where everyone is kind. Heaven is a state of mind; or, to use Nietzsche’s language, “a condition of the heart.” 

(True, scholars have come to question the "within you" translation, saying that it should be: The kingdom is among you — it refers to the person of the Messiah. The Messiah is already among you. But if so, then it ceases to be of interest to me. But I'm among those who claim the right to choose those stories, sayings, and interpretations that we find inspiring — that help us live. The scriptures are always read selectively, regardless. We might as well choose the best parts.)

Likewise, it’s imperative to be selective when it comes to Nietzsche; we must be careful to absorb only his best, and not, for instance, his contempt for the “herd.” I think “a hangman’s metaphysics” — the idea that religious rules were imposed not to be followed, but broken, thus making everyone feel guilty and living in dread of punishment — belongs among his most brilliant insights.  

“The greatest ideas are the greatest events,” Nietzsche claimed. To a lover of ideas, that is self-evident. There is a great idea buried in Christianity, and that is the idea of non-punishment. That idea was too radical not only for its time; it is too radical in our times as well, except for all but a handful of intellectuals who debate the existence of free will — a concept invented by priests to justify punishment. In Nietzsche’s words, “Religions are at bottom systems of cruelty.”
 

Sils-Maria, photo by Ivan Pastoukhov

**

AN ACTUAL POSTCARD FROM SWISS ALPS
 
I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect — but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, from a postcard to Franz Overbeck, Sils-Maria, 30 July 1881

(And my mother used to criticize me for writing overly long and complex postcards — but a postcard from Nietzsche, now THAT was a postcard!)

Overbeck was a German theologian and Nietzsche’s most loyal friend. Overbeck’s most important work is “How Christian is Our Present-Day Theology?” He argued that Christian theology, both the dogmatic and the liberal kind, had basically nothing to do with the radical ideas of Christ.

Indeed we can trace the beginnings of the death of god to medieval theologians, who argued that even god was subject to the laws of necessity and a priori concepts such as mathematics. The scholastic meditations on questions like, “Could god choose to do evil?” or “To whom was the ‘bloody ransom’ of the sacrifice on the cross paid?” —  such questioning undermined the concept of omnipotence and benevolence, and paved the way for the rationalistic biblical scholarship that, like Enlightenment before it, concluded that far from being the inerrant word of god, the bible was written by men.

 A view of the Upper Egandine, Switzerland. Sils is the lake farthest in the distance.

WHAT, NO FREE WILL?

Nietzsche was elated to discover that Spinoza did not believe in free will. God and nature were one, and mind and the body were two aspects of the same substance. Human beings, being a part of nature, are subject to the laws of necessity. Nietzsche introduces more complexity: in spite of being ruled by nature and causes of which he is not conscious, man wants to affirm himself, to feel that he is a powerful agent. “The first result of happiness is a sense of power,” Nietzsche asserts in Dawn. On the subjective level, a human being has no choice except to see himself as an agent, a doer who deliberately chooses one thing and not another. (As more than one person quipped, “I believe in free will. I have no choice but to believe in it.”)

And yet: “Artists have here perhaps a finer intuition; they who know only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything "arbitrarily," and everything of necessity, their feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches its climax — in short, that necessity and "freedom of will" are then the same thing with them” (Beyond Good and Evil). To put it simply, artists know that their best work arises from the unconscious.

“If ever I played dice with the gods at the divine table of the earth” — But here the poet is at play, not the philosopher. Ultimately Nietzsche is only struggling toward the understanding of the subjective experience of will. The foundations of the scientific worldview are not yet in place. The closest thing to determinism is the idea of “god’s plan” — forever causing confusion about predestination versus free will and thus guilt — “a hangman’s metaphysics” indeed!

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra comes down from the mountains to correct the concept of duality. Good and evil are intertwined, as well as freedom and necessity — artists learn that by experiencing the creative process. But then everything is intertwined. In Zarathustra’s words “Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored . . . ”

*

THE DOG WHO’S KNOWN NOTHING BUT LOVE

Not long ago in a park-like area where I tend to meet the neighborhood dog walkers, I met
Kayli, a beautiful German shepherd. I love the breed, and I also know a German shepherd is not a spaniel that you can start petting right away. But Kayli wanted to be petted practically right away. In fact pretty soon she was lying on her side, asking for her belly to be scratched. I was somewhat taken aback. German shepherds are police dogs and military dogs, and intelligence is only one reason they are chosen for such work. They are still close to the wolf, and when they attack, they are ferocious. Though exceptionally beautiful, they are also the “intimidator dog.” And here was Kayli on her back, asking to have her belly scratched by a stranger. I couldn’t imagine trying to train Kayli not to fawn on the terrorist suspect — sure, it could be done, but who’d want to?

And then I thought: “All this dog has ever known is love.”

Shouldn’t Christianity be about love rather than sin and guilt? A child who gets a lot of love grows up into a different adult than a child who’s constantly shamed and made to feel guilty. That great experiment is actually being performed; child rearing has become less and less harsh. This is particularly true of children of professionals, who strike observers as brighter, happier, and more affectionate than children in previous generations. When these children grow up, we can already guess that war and violence will have little appeal to them.

They are growing up without the nonstop surveillance of an omnipresent “eye in the sky” and the constant guilt induced by toxic religions. It’s hard to exaggerate the benefits of being treated with respect and love ever since you can remember. This is the basis of lifelong emotional security.

I asked myself: What if Nietzsche had known nothing but love and respect (it’s not that his mother wasn’t loving, but let’s not forget that he attended German schools at a time when adults believed children needed to be dominated into the ground)? In addition, what if he knew Zen and Daoism and got to practice serenity? What if he didn’t suffer as much as he did — would we then ever have The Birth of Tragedy? I wouldn't in the least mind the loss of Zarathustra, but I’d want The Birth of Tragedy at any cost. Lest we continue in rationalist slumbers, someone had to remind us that the word “tragedy” derives from tragos, he-goat. (But maybe life inevitably delivers sufficient hardship, without the need for people to torment one another.)

 

 A mask of Dionysus, Myrina, 2nd century BCE
 
But I’ve been changing my mind about the necessity of torment for creativity. Does it take an inner emotional storm to render passion on the page? Art requires distance — on that point all agree. Wordsworth said that art is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Philosophy should be tranquil — we take that for granted. But the invigorating energy in Nietzsche’s writing — could it have been born of tranquillity? Would his quarrel with Christianity been as intense?

“Emerson and Goethe were serene, almost as though they lacked superegos,” Harold Bloom states in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? The superego is the internalized punitive parent, the angry father, identified by some with conscience. But it’s the collective angry father, including social norms, peer pressure, and of course religion.

What happens if the parents are predominantly loving and the child grows up feeling secure rather than fearful? We’d expect this loved child to have an inner supportive parent and become a slow-to-anger, serene adult. Ah, the cheerful serenity that permeates much of classical art, the joyfulness that is supposed to be the daughter of Elysium and the essence of the immortals. Some might object that a serene person can’t be creative since art is trauma-driven. But does art have to be trauma-driven? Could anyone find Goethe or Emerson insufficiently creative? Or Goethe, in spite of his later rejection of Romanticism, incapable of rendering mystery, storm, and passion?

*

Continuing with Bloom, I came upon this:

~ Goethe was an instinctive pagan, believing in his own daemonic endowment and spontaneously manifesting the “joyful wisdom” that Nietzsche so desperately sought to attain . . . Originally a Unitarian minister, Emerson abandoned his post  because he knew only the God within, which he defined as the best and oldest part of his self. . . . I enjoy the thought of Eliot reading my favorite sentence in the essay “Self-Reliance”:

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

~ Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

*

The middle of the nineteenth century was by no means a time of tolerance. True, Darwin’s The Origin of Species (an act of intellectual courage on the order of Copernicus and Galileo — though Darwin did not have to fear for his life) was published in 1859, but it would be decades before its ideas became widely known and become a cornerstone of the scientific worldview that made a Creator unnecessary, an archaic relic. Emerson did not dispense with a Creator, but posited a “god within.” I think it was extremely brave of him to call prayers a disease of the will and religions a disease of the intellect. This meant that no university would employ him, but then, unlike Nietzsche, Emerson did not care to be a professor. His eloquence brought him a wide audience, his lectures and books supplying him with a secure income.

And it was also brave for Emily Brontë, a parson’s daughter, to write this stanza in “No Coward Soul Is Mine,” her most famous poem, one of the finest in the English language

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

(For more on Brontë and Emerson, please go to

http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2012/09/no-coward-soul-is-mine.html)

To call organized religions “worthless as withered weeds” was at least as radical then as it is now (not in contemporary Europe, but here in the US; the US is an anomaly in the developed world, being close to Mexico in religiosity). Of course Blake also had a rather Gnostic personal system, influenced by Swedenborg, whose concept of god was highly idiosyncratic and his theology unorthodox (e.g. he believed the Last Judgment had already taken place).

And what about Spinoza’s pantheism and his claim that the soul dies with the body? Yes, there were precursors . . .  Nietzsche wasn’t even the first one to say that god was dead — Hegel used the phrase in his works several times. But who reads Hegel? Nietzsche was the one who announced the death of god as the “greatest event of our times.” Churches and cathedrals — those were now the great tombs of a dead god.

Nietzsche knew that the news of god’s death would take a while to make itself fully known: “After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.— And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too!” (Joyful Wisdom)
 
Nietzsche and Marx as the killers of god
 
(A shameless digression: The missing figure among these “god killers” is of course Freud, who saw religion as an infantile projection of a parent in the sky.)

André Malraux said that the twentieth century century would belong either to Marx or Nietzsche. Marx prevailed, though he’d be horrified by Stalin’s Soviet Union and communism as the state religion. (By the way, did anyone notice that Putin starts his speeches by addressing his audience as “comrades”? The imperialist-communist dream is not over as long as Putin is in power.

While the omission of Freud is ridiculous, many might also see Darwin as belonging here. Darwin was the most reluctant of god's assassins. He was concerned about his wife Emma, who was devout. Could she live on if told that Adam and Eve were a myth? The 19th century, so astonishingly daring in many ways, also gave us the fragile "lady" who shouldn't roam too far from her fainting sofa.)
 

*

The recent progress in secularization would be incomplete without stating that some of the clergy no longer believe in god. Already in 1993, an article in The Independent yielded this juicy quotation about the Episcopalian non-belief:

'In the good old days (about ten years ago) it was enough to run off with a choirboy or the organist's wife to be unfrocked. But, having dismantled the liturgy of Cranmer, the [Anglican] Church is now so lazy about language that it allows blatant confusion between doubt (which any reasonable person experiences) and disbelief. So any friendly atheist who is above moral suspicion is welcome to stay on board and receive a salary and accommodation to the value of £20,000 a year’.

And I have personally met rabbis and liberal Protestant ministers who either openly admitted to agnosticism, or adopted Rabbi Kushner’s definition of god as a sum of human ideals. As for the Catholic left, it has embraced doubt. Doubt is no longer a sin; it is now officially a part of faith. As Catholicism goes, that is huge progress. The church is living dangerously!

*

This morning I pondered the name Yahweh: what an alien sound, how obviously an imported god! No wonder the generic names for “god” are preferred. In Hebrew, that name was EL (recognizable in Elohim). After all, it’s Isra-EL, and not Isra-yahweh. (Yes, of course I know that it was forbidden to pronounce Yah’s name, but I suspect there were reasons for this prohibition beyond mere “respect.”)

I checked Wikipedia: “The origins of the god [Yahweh] are unclear: an influential suggestion, although not universally accepted, is that the name originally formed part of a title of the Canaanite supreme deity El, el dū yahwī ṣaba’ôt, "El who creates the hosts", meaning the heavenly army accompanying El as he marched out beside the earthly armies of Israel; the alternative proposal connects it with a place-name south of Canaan mentioned in Egyptian records from the Late Bronze Age.”

What an image! Yahweh as the warrior god who leads the heavenly army marching beside the army of Israel! No wonder the name Yahweh is no longer used; that tribal god is truly dead, the pronunciation of that name forbidden so successfully that it got lost with the loss of the vowels. We are listening to the last echoes of the hollow gong. Even the Jehovah of Jehovah’s Witnesses is not the Bronze Age god.

ETERNAL VITALITY

What is of genuine importance is eternal vitality, not eternal life. ~ Nietzsche

To Nietzsche, what matters is not the eternal boredom of the feeble Christian heaven, but “living dangerously” (in Nietzsche’s case, it was rather the matter of thinking dangerously). “Eternal vitality” instantly reminded me of Blake’s “Energy is eternal delight.” And somehow that energy finds a venue for itself, the ideas and new areas of growth. It goes both ways: when a goal seizes the imagination, the energy will be found; and when energy is abundant, a goal will be found. Like a mountain river, the eternal vitality rushes on.

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendor . . .
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

~ Shelley, “Mont Blanc”



I started living when I fully and absolutely realized that there is a deadline. Only then I realized that I can choose to cope, or I can choose to "practice falling apart." Likewise, I can choose to be generous and adorable, or grumpy and miserable. But I won't cease to be outspoken for the sake of being adorable. It's enough that my friends and neighbors like me, and most people I interact with. The message "I value you as a human being" is included even in a brief chat.

Nietzsche was known as a kind man of impeccable manners. In his writings, alas, he shows himself filled with contempt for the great majority of humanity, the “herd.” This is a trap into which an intellectual can easily fall, especially if he is isolated from his peers: “I am separate, different, and superior.” Among philosophers, only Plato seems to have understood the value of kindness instead of judging and punishment. That’s the famous, Be kind

But Nietzsche understood at least in flashes the price for being judgmental:

"If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice: a judge, and even a gracious judge, is no object of love.” (The Joyful Wisdom)

It was the commandment to love god that caused me the most distress. I would go as far as to say that if we’d been given the freedom to hate god (to me god = Yahweh, god the father, the boss with real power; the son seemed subordinate), or at least not been coerced into pretending to love him, then who knows, I might have developed some affection for the lonely guy in the sky (I saw him as an “old bachelor,” a European label for an eccentric never-married man). True, vengeful and narcissistic, but I imagined he suffered too — not out of compassion, no, but due to isolation and boredom. The constant praises of angels sounded hellishly boring to me. “How can he stand it?” I asked myself when I was still a child, trying to imagine heaven: nothing but clouds and angels and the souls of the dead, all singing hymns 24/7. No respite for the night, since heaven was constant daylight. 

JUNG ON THE “CATACLYSMIC SHIFT”

Jung observed that “A cataclysmic spiritual shift had taken place, largely missed by the theologians, a shift from the God above to the God below [i.e. in the unconscious], from communal liturgy to private communion, from ritual observance to EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE (emphasis mine), from dogma to myth, from religion to psychology, from the conscious to the unconscious.” (Paul Stern, C.G. Jung: The Haunted Prophet, p. 253)

But that had been already said by Emily Brontë in her famous poem, “No Coward Soul Is Mine.” She was dismissing all religions as “worthlesss as withered weeds” and affirming the “god within.” But poetry is not taken seriously. Milosz also speaks of this shift, along with the disappearance of heaven and hell, as the greatest event of modern times.

I suspect it will take a few more decades before the full extent of the “cataclysmic event” is known. As Ginette Paris observed, “It’s still early after the death of god.”

THE MEANING OF “OVERMAN”:

According to Friedman in The Disappearance of God, the overman is not an individual or an ethnic group. It’s the collective human potential. It’s the ideal future humanity. The term expresses “a yearning to yield something happier, nobler, and wiser than ourselves.” (It’s instructive here to recall the Superior Man in Dao de Jing.

The attainment of this potential is tied to the death of god. It’s only after religion decays that humans can experience richer development, free from imaginary guilt. To repeat once more: the rules were meant to be broken, so that we’d feel guilty. In The Antichrist Nietzsche says: “The very word ‘Christianity’ is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”

What can this richer development lead to? Zarathustra declares: “I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth . . . Once the sin against God was the greatest sin, but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.”

This should not be taken as Nietzsche’s precocious environmentalism. “The earth” stands here for this earth, this life — this one and only life need not be a “vale of tears”; it can be a joy; it can be magnificent. Once, blasphemy and failure to pray and attend worship services were major sins. With the death of god these become irrelevant, ludicrous even. What matters is the growing human cooperation and the extension of human rights so that one small group doesn’t fatten off the exploitation of others. We may be still a long way from reaching this ideal, but at least there is an awareness of it.

Rilke stated that we were “building god.” Nietzsche saw the task as building humanity. Dostoyevski warned that man wants to become god, and the result can only be disastrous. In terms of the “new Soviet man,” Dostoyevski was right. But now globalization and the Internet are opening new perspectives. Nietzsche, that misunderstood anti-nihilist, that glorifier of humanity as it should become, really thought that we must become gods. Or, at the very least, move beyond the old heaven-and-hell mentality toward a full embrace of this life and this beautiful world.

“This I teach men: no longer to bury one’s head in the sand of heavenly things, but to bear it freely, an earthly head, which creates a meaning for the earth.” “Evil I call it, and misanthropic – all this teaching of the One and the Plenum and the Unmoved and the Sated and the Permanent. All the permanent – that is only a parable. And the poets lie too much.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Upon The Blessed Isles)

 


FREE WILL IS NOT AS IMPORTANT OR AS INTERESTING AS WHAT THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS PRODUCES

Charles:

This blog has more information than a good sized book.

My favorites quotes: "True, this is a very selective reading of the New Testament. But the scriptures are always read selectively, regardless. We may as well choose the best parts."

“I believe in free will. I have no choice but to believe in it.”
But free will is not as important or as interesting as what the unconsciousness produces.

"Doubt is no longer a sin; it is now officially a part of faith.”

Of course my favorite section is the one about Kayli. I love that you said this dog has known only love.

Oriana:

Creative people definitely learn about the importance of not interfering with the creative process, which is unconscious. The unconscious is the source of interesting, often surprising ideas or images. “Free will” is indeed not relevant here. That’s an excellent observation.

Darlene:

His atheism aside, I can easily see Nietzsche as a Christian writer trying to restore Jesus' ideas about no judgment and no punishment.

Oriana:

I agree. It’s just that he could see that god was dead, and he became the great announcer of the death of god. It was too late: Darwin’s theory of evolution was becoming known, and the geologists had established that the earth was much much older than 6,000 years. Nietzsche said that there was no longer any need to debate the existence of god. It was sufficient just to trace the evolution of the construct of god.

But Hangman’s Metaphysics can easily be seen as a radical critique of organized Christianity from the point of view of the revolutionary ideas of Jesus —  instead of punishment, forgiveness; the kingdom of heaven is within — a blissful and loving state of mind.

I think people are beginning to take more interest in the idea of no punishment. For one thing we are aware that violence is often associated with having been abused as a child. More cruelty toward a prisoner will not rehabilitate him. But letting him work with animals just might work, providing unconditional love. 


Darlene, you’ve hit on something huge here: the essence of Christianity. Now, when you ask people about the central message of Christianity, Protestants may say that we get to heaven by grace and not by deeds, but others (including the more liberal Protestants) will say the central message is compassion and forgiveness. If you equate that with “non-punishment,” then Nietzsche can indeed be regarded as a more Christian thinker than a lot of fundamentalists, for instance, who seem so preoccupied with who will burn in hell forever. Nietzsche as a radical Christian — there is something to be said for it. And hell, being a cruel and unusual punishment and the opposite of compassion and forgiveness, is the most anti-Christian concept there is.

Now if only god would exist . . .  

JUNG AND BUDDHA: SELF AND NO-SELF

ARCHAIC PENELOPE

It’s my waiting that creates you.
The tapestry I weave,
unraveling you in dreams,
is your secret map.

How you try
to read over my shoulder!
You are too close,
thinking you are too far.

Here’s a seaweed-dripping cave
and a sea-nymph’s bribe:
immortality, but nothing else
will ever happen in your life –

and you pick mortality,
that beautiful blood flower –
while above the ledge of bones,
the Sirens unriddle all.

At the cold mouth of the earth,
the dead greet you, arms of mist –
like an echo of the future
in their shroud of finished past.

Days slide off the loom of hours.
The moon sets, mottled with regrets
like a lamp with islands of dead moths.
Again you think of home.

Wreathed with horizons,
you want me
to stroke your neck,
stiff from looking ahead;

weary of women
opening like shores,
you want my body to lead
into the body of silence.

You beg to know
how the story ends –
and it is I
who tie you to the mast.

Oriana © 2014

**

THE INNER PENELOPE


What Penelope weaves in Homer is a shroud for the father of Odysseus. To me, that part always seemed unsatisfying. A shroud, yes, but it should be a shroud for Odysseus himself, and the weaving the story of his life? Weaving was often a metaphor for fate (and what is fate if not god stripped of personality? an “overmind” that designs your life, but couldn’t care less if you suffer or rejoice?)

Scholars suggest that Penelope was originally a fate-weaving goddess (as was Circe).  Assuming that there is such a thing as a personal CEO in charge of the sense of self and continuity of one’s life story, could the archaic Penelope be the Jungian “Self”? Spelled with the capital letter, the Self, like Being (not to be confused with being), has been defined in so many ways that Penelope the fate-weaving goddess, before she was demoted to Ideal Wife, could very well be the Self, the central organizer of memories and creator of a person’s sense of “this is what I am, this is what I stand for.”

Some Jungians have suggested that Jung wanted to say not Self, but God, an infinite consciousness (hence one of the definitions of Self as “the image of god within man), but was too cowardly to do so. After all, he wanted to be recognized as a scientist. And besides, Jung was always changing the definitions of his concepts. He may not have consciously recognized the Buddhist principle that there is no permanent self but rather a constant flow: each moment we are “born again” and vanish again into the emerging new now, but he behaved in a fluid, fluent way that points to a self (or selves — a person can have several) as a process.

I once mentioned Jung on Facebook. The response was “Jung? LOL!” Nevertheless, I find some Jungian cognitive gropings to be of value, at least in terms of leading to more discussion. “Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation,” Wallace Stevens observed — a statement that reminds me of Jung’s faith (some would say dogma) that nothing that happens is just an accident. “There are no accidents.” If so, then everything is connected with everything else — a perfectly acceptable idea that doesn’t violate our modern worldview. Jung’s theology of the Self tried to be the theory of everything. Perhaps we can find something of interest while exploring that black hole that seems to devour all definitions except that of flow: you can’t step into the same self twice. The self is a river that keeps on flowing.

Some think of the self (it seems rather silly to capitalize it; besides, in German all nouns are capitalized) in terms of memory. It’s that unreliable witness, memory, that gives us a sense of continuity. Odysseus constantly reinvented himself according to the listener, but a certain core of experience remained: adventures at sea. Lots of travel. A longing for home.

IF MEMORY IS WHERE WE LIVE . . .

But if memory is where we live, we must remember that memory evolves, a reconstruction involving things that never happened. People are known to steal from their other people’s stories, without realizing it. As we change over time, our memory changes; one can’t step into the same self twice. Furthermore, memory is contaminated by language, the explainer and confabulator.

Still, Jung’s definitions are so vague that we can stretch “self” to be an ongoing process that marries unconscious processing to consciousness. It’s a neural process, of course. Jung himself stated that the psychology of the future will be neither Jungian nor Freudian, but will stem primarily from brain research. At this point neuroscience recognizes the subjective sense of a continuous self that results from the activation of certain brain regions (“I sing the body electric”), but the whole question of consciousness remains murky. Some say we will never understand consciousness by using consciousness — the brain is just too complex to understand itself.

All we can say is that no convincing answers will come from either philosophy or theology (by the way, Freud used the word “Soul” — die Seele — all the time; Jung, embraced by New Age followers, reminded us of the Cosmic Soul, Anima Mundi). Ah, the soul! A lovely concept, formless, naked, totally elusive — still, a noun rather than a verb. Still, who doesn’t love Emperor Hadrian’s Animula, vagula, blandula? So we turn either poetry or religion for a “momentary stay against confusion” — illusory as it may be. 

bronze head of Emperor Hadrian, found in the Thames, now at the British Museum

We must patiently (Penelope again!) wait for the researchers to do their weaving and unweaving. Hallucinogenic drugs are being studied again, albeit on a small scale. But a lot of what we know about brain function comes from study of the impact of brain injuries — sadly, warfare and accidents can be counted on to produce much material. Brain diseases are another unfortunate source of clues. An Alzheimer’s victim living in an eternal now, knowing nothing of his or her former self; a schizophrenic who thinks he’s Jesus; a veteran whose brain injury makes him a stranger to his family — these damaged individuals make the need for brain research all the more urgent.

The brain! All this bewildering buzzing activity, only to be buried in the mud. ~ Virginia Woolf

MULTIPLE SELVES?

Neuroscience also suggests that there is no single self, much less Self, but rather several selves (seen as patterns of activity), each with different needs and priorities. The Jungians like to think of “subpersonalities” as musicians, and the Self as an orchestra conductor. This immediately brings to my mind a number of distinguished silver-haired conductors.

But outside of the Jungian circles, the multiple selves, or competing neural networks, are seen more as squabbling committee members — or even as unruly children. As a Facebook friend wrote, those are not mature adult selves, but screaming two-year-olds; let’s try to construct a meta-self to bring them to order.

Kelly McGonigal explains multiple selves as follows:

We are a collection of selves that have different agendas, different personalities, different preferences, different priorities, and we shift back and forth among these different selves. You invoke a certain version of yourself through the quality of your attention.

There are these collections of neural networks that represent different aspects of the self. I think it's so fascinating to think that the self is a process—all these different processes we are good at make up the self we think we are. The mind is always generating, composing, or constructing music, let's say, like an ongoing symphony with themes that come into play; sometimes it's the same old themes that repeat, but the music keeps evolving in a new way. This generative ongoing process that in a way is always the same, yet also always new.

“No self” does not mean that there is nothing, rather everything is always changing. It isn't so much a denial, but to believe that some part of you is unchangeable or fixed would be particularly discouraged from a Buddhist point of view. I like that idea, and it's something you can work with scientifically. It's consistent with neuroplasticity and epigenetics: the idea that everything that happens to you influences what gets expressed.

THE SELF AS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER IN NARRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Narrative psychology is a school of thought of obvious interest to any writer. Writers realize how a narrative keeps changing as the creative process unfolds. It turns out that we are all “authors” when it comes to our life story. We construct that story to try to get at pattern and meaning, at who we are and what our life has been about. A narrative psychologist helps the client overcome the rigid vision that only one story could be written about the person’s life. The therapist reveals other perspectives, and richer, more complex stories. Even having the client write in the third rather than first person tends to change the tone of the story toward more compassion.

Nietzsche’s “There is no truth, only perspectives” could be changed here to “There is no self, only different plots.” It’s not what happened, but what we remember and how we choose to tell the story. The telling evolves anyway; the therapist tries to nudge this evolution toward a story that benefits the client.

NO-SELF, OR GOING WITH THE FLOW

I remember my bitter disappointment when I began to read books on Jungian psychology. I liked the valuing of the introvert dimension and attention to the second half of life. What disappointed me was the idea of “individuation” and the “Self,” as I first understood it (before I knew that late in life Jung was deeply influenced by the Eastern tradition). I felt I was “individuated” enough — perhaps even excessively individuated. What I craved was less self and a greater sense of connection with others. I wanted community, belonging.

At the same time, my most common recurrent dream was of being in a house or a large apartment where I was about to move in, along with a congenial family. I liked those people and their well-behaved children. I liked the beautiful dining room that promised pleasant meals together and family warmth. But as I kept on exploring the new house or apartment, to my joy I’d find a room somewhere to the side, isolated, apart, a room I’d instantly claim as my own private space. Usually, just before waking, I’d encounter a threat to my exclusive possession of this special room, and felt I'd do anything to keep it.

So I wanted — and still want — both a great deal of quiet solitude and just the amount of emotional and social connection that didn’t intrude on my privacy. I wanted the best conditions for creative work without becoming a recluse.

Since I felt so keenly the isolation of the self, I became fascinated with the Buddhist idea that there was no such thing. The separate, permanent self was a delusion. As I've already remarked, you can’t step into the same self twice. I loved it.

I’ve also always wondered about god’s reply to Moses: “I am who I am” (Sum qui sum — so compact in Latin). Neuroscience suggests that perhaps the answer anyone could give is “I'm becoming who I'm becoming.” I think that constant becoming fits with the Buddhist teachings. It’s the flow. 



BUDDHA: NO SELF, OR ANATMAN

By the way, for the sake of precision, let me quote something on no-self by the Buddhist author, psychologist and evolutionary biologist David Borash:

“Anatman (“not-self”), for example, means that no one has an internal self that is distinct and separate from the rest of the world. Similarly in ecology, organisms and environments are inextricably inter-connected. Also, Anitya (“impermanence”) refers to the fact that all things are temporary and eventually return to the non-living world. Anitya has parallels with evolution, in that not only is every individual organism’s time on earth temporary but also organisms ebb and flow across time.”

As for any predestined “meaning of life,” let me quote Borash again:

“Both Buddhism and biology (and also existentialism) teach that there is no inherent meaning to life. We simply are, and that “we” or “I” or “you” or “he” or “she” is merely a temporary aggregation of matter and energy, destined (or doomed) to collapse back into the stuff of the world. Therefore, if we want to make our lives meaningful, we should not look to some outside deity, but rather to our own actions. In the final chapter, I develop what I call “existential biobuddhism,” which adds existentialism to the convergence of biology and Buddhism, emphasizing that there is no such thing as “the meaning of life” outside of how we mindfully decide to live.”

TRUSTING THE UNCONSCIOUS COGNITIVE PROCESSING

The essence of heroism is self-trust. ~ Emerson
 
I was also becoming more and more familiar with the experience of the creative process. There was no denying that the best, most “inspired” writing came from the unconscious. You only needed to “seed” the process — maybe write just one sentence or one line of a poem. Then what worked best for me was to walk away from the project and engage in some mechanical activity like sewing or housework. Unbidden, the words would come.

I also came to see that a lot of what emerged this way wasn’t really anything I could call “original.” Much of it was collective knowledge: something I’d read or heard or witnessed. I wasn’t a strictly separate self: my mentality drew heavily on the collective psyche.

I don’t mean to set up an unbridgeable gulf between Jung’s “Self” and Buddha’s “No-Self.” Impatient reader, I hear you complain that I misunderstand what Jung meant by the Self. The definition that makes most sense to me is that the Self is the integrated psyche, including both the personal and the collective unconscious. That’s fine with me as long as we understand that we are talking not about a “thing,” but about an ever-evolving activity — multiple neural activities taking place simultaneously, changing over time.

The experience of the creative process taught me to trust the unconscious, to “go with the flow.” In poetry, that flow has often meant verbal music. The sound of the words led me.

ORPHEUS TAUGHT ME

the first rule of survival:
When lost, follow the music.
I walked in a great city
as in a rain of April light,

the streets and squares
dissolving into glass and gleam.
I walked along the riverbank,
my compass the idea

that if I follow the music,
I will remember the sea.
Springtime, the city in torn veils,
train whistles thin

harmonicas of mist,
I nudged the larval chestnut leaves,
carved eyelids of a chrysalis.
From sticky lips of lilacs

I sipped a fugue of rainbows.
I squandered splendors.
How could I have known
where I was going?

Only the music knew.
Across cloud-heavy continents,
under the fog
-unraveled bridges,

the river waits,
and I begin to flow.


~ Oriana © 2014

CAN WE AT LEAST PARTLY DIRECT THE FLOW?

I think I’m really not interested in the quest for the self anymore. Oh, I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that you really must make the self. It’s absolutely useless to look for it, you won’t find it, but it’s possible in some sense to make it. I don’t mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and to choose the self you want. ~ Mary McCarthy, The Art of Fiction No. 27

In youth we simply don't have enough control over our life -- we are too tossed by the hunger to be loved and valued. We are told to conceal that hunger because no one likes a needy person. As soon as we drop wanting anything from someone else we stop suffering — but we don’t yet know that principle. We don’t have enough money — youth is generally the time of lowest earnings. We are too insecure, not yet having any accomplishments to point to. What a privilege, to be able to grow older and wiser.

Still, let’s try to evaluate if Mary McCarthy is right. We can certainly increase valuable skills, and the increased self-confidence will create an “upward spiral” of benefits. Craftsmen are generally emotionally strong: they know they are good at something, and thus valued (not least by themselves) for something. And personality traits can be broken down to skills — or lack of them. Some people have learned to how to control anger, and some haven’t. Some are good at soothing themselves and staying cool in times of distress; others panic.

After I made the decision not to be depressed, I was so astonished by the results that I started casting around for what else I could decide that would significantly improve my life. After all, I had witnessed my own power to change — but not being depressed only brought me up to normalcy.  

(A shameless digression: I just remembered one of the steps that led me to drop depression. In a book, I came across the statement: “You can practice being strong, or you can practice falling apart.” I instantly chose to practice being strong. It was a life-changing choice — after decades of chronic depression alternating with more acute episodes.)

(shameless digression continued: Note that the statement in the book spoke about PRACTICING being strong. It didn’t treat being strong as a fixed trait: you either are and are not strong. Instead, it was a behavior. I always understood that a behavior could be learned.)

*
 
I was very impressed by the decision not to be angry made by both Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela. Obama noticed that young Afro-American men tended to be angry, sometimes to the point of making a kind of career out of anger. Since people don’t like to be around angry persons, that anger was an obstacle to success. Obama’s strategy was refuse to sound or act angry. He decided to speak in a controlled, rational tone. It reminded me of another man I knew, who said that all of his success in life followed his decision never to raise his voice.

And Mandela famously said that when he left the prison, he left behind all anger and resentment at having been imprisoned. Otherwise, he said, he’d always be in prison, always carrying the prison within.

But anger and raising my voice were not my problems. Resentment about having been cheated of the life I wanted disappeared when I made the decision not to be depressed. I had good impulse control, and could keep promises to myself. I wanted to become a calm person, but typical meditation like counting breaths didn’t work for me (I suspect that people who succeed are already calm — maybe genetically or maybe because they’ve had a secure childhood, or both).

And then I read something in my notebook which I must have read several times before, always delighted by it, but not otherwise affected:

“How did you cross the flood?
— Without delaying, friend, and without struggling did I cross the flood.
But how could you do so?
— When delaying, friend, I sank, and when struggling, I was swept away. So it is by not delaying and not struggling that I have crossed the flood.”

This time I wasn’t merely delighted. In my mind I exclaimed, “That’s it!” Not delaying and not struggling. Above all: not delaying. After all, the greater the delay, the greater the agony, since the undone is a thorn in the mind.

This time the meaning of the “flood” was personal: the whole practical side of life. “I resent anything that takes me away from my desk,” a friend said, and I instantly identified. Intellectual work is easy for me. It gives me pleasure. It’s what makes life worth living. But shopping, ordering online, driving to new places, making appointments, renewing prescriptions, filling out forms, paying the bills, doing the taxes — talk about resentment!

I even found myself developing a phobia about picking up mail: the unending  bills and demands. “I’ll open it in the morning,” I thought. But another day would come, with its own burden of mail, and the old envelopes still lay unopened. I realized that unless I acted I’d become one of those people who are too scared to open their mail, and let heaps of it accumulate, unopened, for months. So I decided to get rid of mail right away: either by recognizing it as advertising and instantly tossing it, or by opening it and paying the bill, or otherwise acting on it without delay.

And it turned out to be easy. By not delaying I wasn’t turning mere unopened envelopes into dragons. By taking action right away I didn’t have the thing hanging over me, intruding on my thoughts and draining my energy. If the task was large, not delaying also made it possible for me to divide it into smaller, more doable units. And if I learned to wipe away coffee spills with no difficulty, I could learn to wipe any spills in my wash-and-dry life.

As Mark Twain said, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” Once we’ve started, the flow takes over.

And yes, immediately there is resistance from within. After a lifetime of maintaining a self-image constructed around the contrast between the Intellectual Princess and the Nervous Immigrant, some backward region in the brain absolutely balks and asserts that this is the holy core of my “unique self” . . . It says the angst  dealing with a brutal medical receptionist is the “real me.” But that neural network will be transcended. Without delay. And by not struggling. By knowing that there is no “real me” — just a succession of me’s that have the power to change.


*

Leonard:

It’s my understanding that "I am that I am" can also be translated as "I will be what I will be.”

Oriana:

Yes, I've read that too -- I think the more liberal rabbis hold that view. Still, I could never quite get the gist of it, regardless of the tense. I know if I answered that way, in either the present or future tense, I'd be called a smartass. In any case, the Old Testament writers and editors were very clever here, refusing to have god label himself, keeping all options open. Too bad that the rest of the OT narrative doesn't live up to that level of sophistication (though I rather like the idea of angels coming down to mate with women and producing giants -- that kind of totally archaic level along with something more evolved, starting with the Tree of Knowledge, rather than simply the Tree of Life.)

Sandy:

In 12-step meetings, the chaos is often referred to as 'My Committee', and an attempt is made to develop a meta-personality to chair a meeting of screaming two-year-olds.
 
Oriana:

I like this a lot. A meta-self, yes, as a kind of ideal. The meta-self will be also be evolving with time, but once we drop the idea of IS in favor of EVOLUTION, of PRACTICING, life becomes easier. I experienced that when I dropped the idea of depression as a feeling, and saw it as a behavior -- and a behavior can be changed. Best of all, the desire to engage in this behavior was suddenly gone to the point of the behavior becoming impossible. I read a discussion of ending alcoholism in very similar terms -- the craving is no more.
 

 Tenthousandthings, Michael Divine

*

Michael:

The last year has been the first in memory when I haven't been obsessing over the Self, that pursuit toward knowing myself. And it occurred to me while reading your post why that is.

I have a slightly different take on what Jung meant by individuation--in my opinion having little or nothing to do with individualism but a settling into our place in humanity, where our connections, or tethers, are firmly attached. Thus, when individuated, we are more firmly part of, or participatory in, community, in family, in the processes of life. It's a coming home.

I'm home. Finally. And concerns about the Self have gone away I think, because I have arrived at Self. It's a beautiful place to be.

I'm glad you posted again. I hope you don't give up. I understand about low readership and that must be frustrating. If you do continue, please know that I appreciate your work and commitment to understanding and broadening our world.
 
Oriana:

I’ve given up on trying to pin down what Jung meant by either individuation or Self — he rarely defined anything clearly, and his views were constantly evolving. In his old age he even admitted that we are different psychological type at different stages of our lives. So we never step into the same river twice not only because it’s never the same river, but also because we’re never the same self. And by self I don’t mean just the ego, but the totality.

I suppose that you don’t mean: I have arrived at the Self, so now my personality is fixed, and ten-twenty years from now my habits, interests, values, my whole outlook, will remain exactly what they are now. But possibly you mean the kind of shift that I experienced regarding my poetry and poetic ambitions — how I came to see myself as posthumous, and that feels so much more peaceful. Obsessing about anything is awful, and while I used to call poetry “my glorious obsession,” the cost in terms of suffering and damage to health was too high. I don’t entirely preclude a return to poetry, but I know it’s unlikely. I'm quite happy with the essay.

I suppose that as with religion, people interpret Jung as they wish, some seeing community, others individualism, etc. I prefer not to conceptualize the self (capitalizing it seems at least slightly ridiculous) as a noun. If it exists at all, then only as a verb, a process. But that’s OK. I no longer have a need to claim that I am extremely introverted. I’ve come to realize that it depends on the context, and factors such as my energy level at the moment.

Will this blog continue? I’d rather not make predictions. I have another venue now, so my own need to continue the blog is not very strong. Now and then, a new blog post may happen, probably not as often as in the past.



FREUD AND BORGES: BEYOND THEISM?

Noah’s Ark, Edward Hicks, 1846

DARWIN, ONCE MEANT FOR THE CLERGY,
IMAGINES HIS SERMON ON NOAH

Too late, dear brethren, too late to believe
there never was a rainbow before the Flood –
or that the ark, three hundred cubits long,
could contain millions of species.
I won’t belabor the ark’s humble door
vis-à-vis a giraffe,
the whine of the two thousand
species of mosquito.

And the animals of the then-unknown
Australia and the New World?
Did they plunge into distant oceans,
two and two of all flesh,
and every thing that creepeth on the earth –
snails and slugs slithering for centuries.
As iron-dark clouds barred heaven,
did gorillas and polar bears parade
through a mud-brick Mesopotamian village?

And our fabled forefather, when the Lord
shut the door of the ark,
was six hundred years old.
The less believable it is,
the more enchanting it is.

Listen how tenderly it is said, But the dove
found no rest for the sole of her foot . . .
then he put forth his hand, and took her,
and pulled her in unto him into the ark –

The new theologians tell us the myth
is not even Hebrew, but primeval:
purification of the world by water.
Purification by science
is another Deluge.
Evolution is not crowned with a rainbow.

Brethren, I do not speak of Truth –
I offer evidence. I too carry
a heavy church in my heart.
The ship I sailed on for five years
was a kind of ark – I and Noah
on a long, crowded journey,
he with his salvaged animals,
I with my specimens in jars.

Brethren, behold the rainbow and rejoice
in the frail moment when the dove
alighted with a glistening olive leaf –
but how can we forget
the faces of the drowned –

Now the windows of heaven are shut;
all we have is stories.
Perhaps a future humanity will evolve
a kinder God, without wrath.
Today let us honor our father Noah,
drifting with the saved
seed of life toward Ararat.

~ Oriana © 2014

**

The problems with the traditional Judeo-Christian worldview did not begin with Darwin. As the Episcopalian Bishop Shelby Spong points out in his Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and as most educated people realize, the Copernican idea that the earth orbited the sun, combined with Galileo’s astronomical observations using the telescope (which showed, among many other wonders, that the moon had a crater-scarred landscape rather than being a perfectly smooth sphere -- oh no, an imperfection in a celestial body!), displaced the earth from the center of the universe. 

If the whole universe was created with us in mind, as the bible implied, so that we could worship the creator, then obviously the earth should not be just another planet orbiting the sun. Later astronomers created even more trouble, discovering that the sun was a rather average star in a provincial corner of our galaxy. And the cosmic distances were quite troubling. In modern times someone calculated that if Jesus moved with the speed of light (which is not possible, but let’s imagine), given the 2000 years since the Ascension, he still hasn’t left the galaxy.

(Sophisticated Reader, I realize that an answer to this is: let’s not be literal, only metaphorical. But the argument that in the past people used to read the bible in a metaphorical way and only in modern times we slid into weak-minded literalism doesn’t convince me. I just don’t see a medieval peasant grasping the Ascension as a metaphor for spiritual development, while we moderns devolved to the mentality of kindergarten.)

Galileo’s drawing of the moon

Darwin created a worse problem by far, and not only by making man a highly evolved animal with a more developed brain. Far more damaging was the very concept of evolution, soon adopted by other fields of knowledge. Thus, the earth evolved; the whole universe evolved and was still evolving. At the human level, cultures evolved and continues to evolve at an amazingly accelerated pace. Technology and knowledge have evolved. Art has evolved (some would say that starting with Impressionism, it devolved).

CHRIST TZAR

Religions too evolved and may now be dying -- or, if not, it will eventually be greatly transformed (into something more benign, we hope). The very concept of god evolved -- from a tribal warrior deity, the “Lord of Hosts” who fought against the enemies of his tiny chosen nation, to the sole and absolute ruler of the whole universe, the “king of kings” (absolute monarchy being dominant at the time; the sacred scriptures of humanity were written in the era of kings and emperors and warlords).

As Nietzsche observed, it’s not necessary to argue about the existence of god; it’s enough just to trace the evolution of the concept. 

Christ Tzar, a Russian icon, 1690

THE UNEMPLOYED GOD

Bishop Spong notes that the Christian churches resisted Darwin with vigor, but the pre-Reformation ecclesiastical power had already been broken, and the Church’s ability to threaten Darwin with execution as a heretic no longer existed. Besides, truth can never be deterred for long just because it is inconvenient. Spong observes that if man was an animal, then the concept of the soul and the afterlife, traditionally denied to animals, became questionable. Some have tried to cope with this by bestowing soul and afterlife on animals, especially dogs and cats, and maybe horses. Given their intelligence, maybe also elephants and dolphins. But where do we stop? Are frogs and fishes to be denied? (Milosz wanted even the insects to enjoy resurrection.)

Spong quotes Michael Goulder, an Episcopalian priest who renounced priesthood when he decided that the god of the past “no longer had any real work to do”:

The tasks assigned to this God by traditional wisdom, he suggested, have been slowly but surely stripped from the divine side. This God no longer fights wars and defeats enemies. This God no longer chooses a special people and works through them. This God no longer sends the storms, heals the sick, spares the dying, or even judges the sinner. This God no longer rewards goodness and punishes evil. Yet this virtually unemployed deity is still the primary object and substance of the Christian Church’s faith.

The theistic God has no work to do. The power once assigned to this God is now explained in countless other ways. The theistic God is all but unemployed.  . . . If there is no other possible understanding of God, then surely God has died.

Religion and personal and autobiographical. The theist deity always reflected the particular theologian, Spong maintains: “The fact is that the God of Thomas Aquinas looked and acted very much like Thomas Aquinas.” 

Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, 1467

**

But what about the emotional need for a protective deity, a parent in the sky? Even if science shows that god is not necessary for the function of the universe, it can’t do away with people’s longing for “invisible support.” This is where Spong is at his most interesting. He quotes an ancient Hebrew prophet:

With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will be Lord be pleased with thousands of rams; with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Mica 6:6-7

From the historical point of view, this is an interesting window on what used to constitute worship. But from where we stand, isn’t this simply disgusting?

Could it be that some people still don’t realize how archaic the bible is -- like all “holy scriptures,” a product of its times? Maybe they realize, but still cling to religion in the hope of emotional security.

Dead ideas continue to slow down our development. Many are afraid that the light of reason would force them to drop their security blanket. In Act 2 of Ghosts, Ibsen wrote:

I almost think we’re all of us Ghosts. ... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

FREUD’S “THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION”

In Judaism, god is “the Lord.” In Christianity he becomes “our father.” This  family analogy attracted the attention of Sigmund Freud, who duly noted the infantile character of much of the language of Christianity.

In his 1927 volume, The Future of an Illusion, Freud argued that humans were traumatized by the knowledge of their mortality. A psychological coping mechanism was needed. Spong writes:

Religion, Freud contended, was the coping mechanism, the human response to the trauma of self-consciousness, and it was designed above all to keep hysteria under control and to manage for these self-conscious creatures the shock of existence.

For Freud, the essence of an illusion is that it springs from a wish. We wish to be immortal the way a poor girl wishes to marry a prince. Man feels helpless, and thus wishes for an all-powerful protector(s). In Freud’s words: “The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcise  the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”

Nietzsche said that religion is “not wanting to know the truth.” And because religion is not a search for truth, but rather a part of a complex emotional defense system, it does not tolerate open debate and dissent. Its truths are “revealed” and thus can’t be questioned. And the hysteria that religion was meant to contain reveals itself in irrational hostility when dissent is encountered. I remember, a few months after I stopped going to church the priest who was shouting at me, sweating and red in the face, his black robe billowing in the spring wind; right in the middle of the sidewalk of one of the busiest streets in Warsaw, he was shouting at a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl. I now feel sorry for the man,  so threatened by a young girl’s disbelief.

Nevertheless, there are those who see the irrationality of religion as its greatest strength. Otherwise, the collective power of the human intellect would have disposed of it long ago. At his most optimistic, Freud maintained that the voice of the intellect is soft, but it will not rest until it’s been heard. 




RILKE: WE ARE BUILDING GOD

In 1900, when Rilke was twenty-five, he wrote in his diary:

There were times, earlier, when I believed: he [god] is in the wind, but for the most part I didn’t experience him as a unified personality at all. I knew only aspects of god. And many of those aspects were horrifying. For even death was only a component of his being. And he seemed to me unjust in the extreme. He tolerated unspeakable things, permitted cruelty and grief, and was massively indifferent . . .

I argued on his behalf. That his shortcomings, his injustice, and the deficiencies of his power were all matters of development. That he is not finished yet. When was there time for him to have become?

GOD IS NOT FINISHED YET. I can almost go along with it. 

God in the wind? It’s possible that Rilke refers to the Hebrew ruach, which literally means wind, but came to be interpreted as the breath (or spirit) of god. Originally, the same word meant wind and spirit, hinting at archaic animism: wind as a supernatural element, the breath of god. In Slavic languages the word for spirit is related to the word for breath, and inspire used to mean both “inhale” and “blow into” or “breathe into.”

The more interesting part is the positing of god’s incomplete consciousness, also pointed out by Jung in Answer to Job. By developing our consciousness, we are helping god become more conscious, more ethical. God is a projection of human ideals, but in some mysterious way a real being as well. Thanks to human progress, god is in a constant process of becoming. We are building god.

This is called Process Theology. (Are there any Process Theologians in the trenches?) 
An abandoned locomotive in a former Siberian gulag

WE ARE NOT BUILDING GOD; WE ARE BUILDING HUMANITY

It’s not god’s consciousness that needs fuller development; it’s the collective human psyche. We are coming closer and closer to realizing how amazing it is to be human. And we are beginning to acknowledge that we are interconnected with other humans, and with all of life.

In The Sirens of Titan, one of my favorite science-fiction novels, Kurt Vonnegut described the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. But obviously we don’t want an indifferent god, even though logically that seems to be the only possible deity. Fortunately concern for us exists: we receive it from other human beings. It makes sense to be kind and cultivate friendships.

(Disappointed Reader: I hear you saying: “other human beings” -- is that all? Isn’t it time we came to hold human beings in higher esteem? Because, aside from dogs, that’s our only source of love and help.)

CAN WE REALLY IMAGINE A NON-THEIST GOD?

Spong and many others who want to salvage the divine have suggested that god is not a being; it (this seems the appropriate pronoun) is some transcendent force field, intelligent cosmic energy, or even the “Ground of Being.” Spong prefers the “Ground of Being.” We exist in god as fish live in water, but in a more mysterious way than can be expressed.

Alas, this is so abstract that it makes no sense to me. It seems like desperate  clinging to the concept of god when we don’t need this hypothesis. The universe simply IS. We ARE. We are a part of the universe, or, to make it sound more affectionate, we are the children of the universe. The universe itself is our “ground of being.” Isn’t that enough?

But what about the non-theistic religions of Buddhism and Taoism? They have become tremendously popular -- finally an alternative to a personal god, obviously created by man. Yet those who’ve traveled to East Asia claim that in practice Buddhism and Taoism are theistic and based in ritual and magic; only in pure doctrine can they be said not to be “pure” non-theism.

(I won’t get here into allegation of sex abuse in the Buddhist monasteries. But we do know that as soon as religion becomes institutionalized, it becomes corrupt.)

I am selectively attracted to the Eastern wisdom. I see “being posthumous” as a state of bliss. To me, being posthumous means that my life has already happened -- or at least the essence of that life: writing and teaching -- poems, publications, jobs, anything else that typically goes on a resumé -- as well as great love, dancing with the Prince etc. Now I can enjoy simply being. I don't need to prove anything, achieve anything. Nor am I waiting for the Prince. All that anguish is over.

It’s pretty much the Eastern wisdom,  but with my own personal angle. Now I finally write for pleasure. Imagine! Writing for pleasure, without the torture of trying to publish. Until this stage, writing was a joy only when I was a beginner -- how amazing to have come full circle, though of course at a different level and even different kind of writing.

Actually someone upbraided me once: “You have a duty to publish! You have so much to say. The world needs to hear this. You can’t just write for your own pleasure!” -- not realizing that at the time I wasn’t writing for pleasure; I was writing to prove that I was not a failure, or at least not a TOTAL failure, even if I had little luck publishing.

Such ironies often happen in life: I gained an international audience (India! Saudi Arabia!) only  when I started writing for pleasure (here I remember another person chiming in, when I emailed her I was starting my blog e-dress, “As long as you enjoy doing it; pleasure is the only thing you’ll ever get out of it.”) And it has indeed been an avalanche of pleasure! Not just the pleasure of writing, but also the pleasure of having an audience and getting feedback, and the pleasure of publishing on my own terms.

Arabian sand cat

CLIMBING A VERTICAL MOUNTAIN

Once -- many years before my “posthumous” insight -- I had a dream in which I was climbing an almost vertical mountain. I had the right technique: I knew that if I never rested and if I kept climbing quickly enough, I would not fall off the sheer wall with practically no foothold. To my left was my grandmother Veronika. I didn’t see her face, but I recognized her leather slippers. She was climbing the impossible steepness in parallel with me.

At the same time I could see a beautiful wide road with a pine forest on one side and the sea on the other (my memories of the Baltic). People were walking down that road. I strongly suspected -- in fact I knew! -- that the road led to the same place as the virtually impossible climb up the mountain, but I did not dare stop my struggle. When I was at the top, on the large plateau, I saw that the easy and beautiful road did indeed lead to the same place, and that’s how other people arrived there. Some in fact drove in in large cars! I assumed they had to be Americans.

When I told the dream to a friend, she asked what my grandmother and I had in common. I answered, “A lot of hardship in life.” The dream was transparent in its message. Still, it took me more than a decade to accept the idea that taking the beautiful and easy road was the right choice, rather than persisting in an agonizing effort, akin perhaps to “dying with honor.”

Compounding the problem was having grown up with the Catholic cult of suffering. Suffering was good for you. It was the way to heaven. I am not sure if anyone stated this to me in so many words, or if it was just a conclusion I drew based on reading the lives of the saints. Fortunately I never tried self-flagellating (one of my cousins did). But enough digression!

The point seems to have been by Eastern sages many centuries ago: stop striving and just be. Let happiness happen. The root of “happiness” is “hap” -- luck, or chance, or whatever happens.

In The Idiot, Dostoyevski asks, through the mouth of Prince Myshkin, “Can anyone be unhappy, really?” To the Prince, as to Dostoyevski, just to be alive was miraculous. 

Cezanne Mt. Victoire

BORGES AND IMMORTALITY

Still, I’m quick to concede that Dostoyevski regarded the belief in immortality as a vital part of human culture. True, he was torn with doubt; on Tuesday morning he believed in god and the afterlife; by Wednesday he didn’t. But probably all would agree that the chief attraction of theistic religion is the promise of life everlasting.

Borges has an answer to this in what is perhaps his most extraordinary poem:

INSCRIPTION ON ANY TOMB

Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breach of omnipotent oblivion,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass beads are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men may not.

The essentials of the dead man’s life --
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain,
the wonder of sensual delight --
will abide forever.

Blindly the willful soul asks for length of days
when its survival is assured by the lives of others.
You yourself are the embodied continuance
of those who did not live into your time
and others who will be (and are) your immortality on earth.

~ Jorge Luis Borges, tr. W.S. Merwin

 

Borges was such a “singular” man (I mean it in the sense of unusual, exceptional -- but the word insists on its most common meaning) that it’s striking how he doesn’t buy “individualism.” He does not insist on his “exceptionalism.” Simply because we are human, we are not isolated individuals; we are humanity. We pass as the water in the river passes, but the river remains.

This realization may have come to Borges in part from his life among books. He realized that his mind is a tapestry of the endless volumes he’s read, influences he’d absorbed. From there it’s only a step to seeing oneself as part of the larger human community across time, and of the human continuum.

His acceptance of the collective mind set Borges apart from those writers in his generation who insisted on the cult of the artist as completely separate and alienated. But Borges communed with great writers across time, and knew he was part of a continuum.

This is not to deny the uniqueness of each of us, something we bring to the universe only once. “There will never be another you.” In the Western culture in particular, everyone has had at least moments of feeling so different from others that loneliness threatens to overwhelm: no one really knows me, so how can they love the “real me.” Never mind that the “real me” is so elusive, so . . . unreal. Even our memories are not fully ours, but a collage of we absorbed in all kinds of ways, including books and movies.

If we were words, each person would be an oxymoron: a collective individual. A single individual has no meaning apart from his social context. As Christian Wiman said, “Experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others.”

As Borges reminds us: others are and will be our immortality, here on earth.

RILKE: BEAUTY AND TERROR

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

~ Rilke, First Duino Elegy

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

Then who can we turn to?

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

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

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

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
























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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

~ Rilke, The Book of Hours

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

Again and again, though we know the landscape of love

and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,

and the frightening silent abyss into which the others

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

under the ancient trees, lie down again and again

among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

~ Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell