ROBERT FROST “THE MOST OF IT”; MILOSZ ON SWEDENBORG; ELIZABETH BISHOP’S MOOSE

This is probably a bull moose — the closest I had to that “waterfalling.”
 
THE MOST OF IT

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush — and that was all.

~ Robert Frost

Here is Milosz’s response to the poem:

“[It shows] how very alone man is in relation to nature, which is absolutely indifferent to him, even though he wishes to receive some sign of understanding. Alone, not only in relation to nature, because each “I” is isolated from all others, as if it were the sole ruler of the universe and seeks love in vain, while what it takes to be a response is only the echo of his own hope.” (“Robert Frost” in Selected Essays).

When it comes to the first two-thirds or so of the poem, I am with both Milosz and Frost himself. “He thought he kept the universe alone” — such a thought never occurred to me, and it strikes me as masculine and “dominionist,” but we have to take the speaker — who seems similar to the speaker in Stevens’s “Snowman” — at face value. As Milosz himself observed elsewhere, man has a great sense of solitude as a species — there is no “soulmate” species anywhere else on earth.

Cats and dogs? They can respond to us emotionally, but not on an intellectual level. (Would we want them to? Can you imagine being criticized by your cat?)

The speaker yearns for a conversation. “He thought he kept the universe alone” can be interpreted not as an arrogant expression of dominion, but rather as a lament about being the most intelligent species with no equal with whom to carry on a conversation.

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.

All he gets is an echo. Personally I enjoy the phenomenon of the echo, and love to hear it. But if you live in the country and are used to the echo, maybe the magic of it wears off.

Rather than hearing an echo of his own voice, the speaker wants an “original response” he can’t predict:

Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.

Again, I am not sure I’d want the cliff to say something like, “A beautiful day, isn’t it?” Also, even if rocks had intelligence, the cliff would reply in its own rock language, with, I assume, hard, dense sounds. No, I'm not mocking the speaker, only trying to imagine the possibilities.

The speaker does not feel a union with nature; he feels separate, alone. And yet, doesn’t he love nature? Don’t we know it from Frost’s other poems? He is not indifferent to the beauty of the forest, for instance. But he wants “counter-love.” He apparently wants nature (or some being out there in nature) to love him back. Yet nature is notoriously indifferent and responds only with beauty. Worse, its indifference to the joy or suffering of living things (though living things also ARE nature, so there is a complication here) can show itself in blatant light: in this poem, the speaker cries out from “the boulder-broken beech.” A boulder fell and broke a tree — it happens.

Note how the triple alliteration — “boulder-broken beech” — calls attention to this image. Until the masculine “great buck” appears, that (feminine?) boulder-broken tree stands for life in nature, and the harm that nature casually inflicts (maybe the broken tree also stands for the speaker’s wife, but that’s a more remote connection).

So we have a love-hate relationship with nature. But later in the poem we learn that the speaker is actually thinking of a human counter-response. If nature can’t be humanized and remains indifferent, at least there could be another human out there, a lively companion.

But there is no Eve for this lonely Adam. Yet one time another being did emerge: a large deer swam in the speaker’s direction, and then disappeared in the brush:

Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush — and that was all.

Excuse me, Mr. Frost, I want to say. You watch a powerful buck swim toward you and come ashore, the water “pouring like a waterfall” from the antlers and the whole magnificent body — and your response is “And that was all”?

That’s it. That’s all. There ain’t no more. Atheists are forever being confused with nihilists because they don’t believe in the afterlife, the pie in the sky, a detachable immortal soul independent of the brain (never mind the brain no longer exists; the soul is brain-free). No, the atheists have the nerve to claim that when brain function ceases, consciousness ceases. It doesn’t “go” anywhere; it simply ceases the way flame doesn’t go anywhere, but ceases to be when the fuel that supported it is gone.

To atheists, this world and this life is indeed all there is — but then the universe seems more than enough. Just the earth is almost too much, overwhelming in its beauty and variety. Just the whirl of perceptions seems to be enough to make life worth living, out of simple curiosity. But to see a “great buck as it powerfully appeared” — the marvelous animal swimming, then climbing out, water pouring from his body” — that is more than enough. That is a feast.

 *

“As a great buck it powerfully appeared”

~ when I read the poem for the first time, for a moment I was confused. Was it a buck, or something like [“as”] a buck? But the lines that follow leave no doubt that it was a spectacular buck:

As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush

So yes, that noise was not a rock falling into the water, but a full-grown buck that swims across, then lands “pouring like a waterfall” — and the speaker feels no sense of wonder and delight? Instead, he’s disappointed: “And that was all.”

And yet, the contradiction: the magnificent poetic language used to describe the buck, e.g. “pushing the crumpled water up ahead,” belies the dismissive last phrase. And the more times I read those lines, the more I sense the concealed wonder. Should we take Frost at face value, or yield to the power of the poetic language? It seems to convey a message that is directly contrary to what the poem is ostensibly trying to say. 

In summary: Frost’s language and imagery contradict the explicit final statement. The language and the imagery — the “poetry” of the poem — reveal the grandeur of nature. And that, indeed, is all — but that is more than enough. It’s not possible to experience that grandeur and be disappointed.

Franz Marc, Deer in the Forest

 
*

But let’s try a psychological approach here. Of course if someone is used to seeing swimming bucks climb on shore, that sight might get to feel ordinary. But this seems to have happened only once. “And that was all”?

I have only one psychological guess to offer: the speaker is suffering from depression and can’t — or isn’t willing to — rise above bitterness. We need to take a look at Frost’s personal life. I do it with reluctance, since in college we were taught to stay away from biography and try to read the poem as a purely esthetic product, but here biography forces itself on us like a large boulder.

Frost’s father drank and bullied his wife. The biography in the Norton Anthology refers to “sporadic brutality.” The father died young, leaving his wife and children in financial hardship. Depression ran in Frost’s family. Both his mother and Frost himself suffered from it. His younger sister became mentally ill and had to be committed to a hospital. His wife Elinor also had bouts of depression and died relatively young. One son committed suicide; one daughter became mentally ill. Of the six children, only two outlived the poet.

Various business ventures, such as poultry farming, all failed (though Frost later secured a university teaching job and gained increasing fame). Elinor was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1937. A year later she died of heart failure. Frost began to drink heavily; the teaching job at Middlebury College seems to have rescued him.

At Middlebury, he appears to have had an affair with the wife of a faculty member, and to have proposed to her. But she refused to leave her husband, though she remained the poet’s confidante. Frost lived alone until his death in 1963.

Frost was intensely private, but we can safely say that he had an unhappy childhood and later an unhappy marriage. There is stoicism in his poems, and only sometimes bitterness or immense sadness. There is wisdom, as in all great poetry. There is lyricism (“the woods are lovely, dark and deep”). But a true sense of joy is rare.

Having said all this, I am still astounded that in the poem Frost does not celebrate seeing the buck. True, the poem sets out to develop a certain theme, that of complete human loneliness and not receiving a “counter-love, an original response.” Nevertheless, it’s still imaginable that even a short poem can make a turn from dejection to a sense of wonder and excitement. Wordsworth might start “lonely as a cloud,” but would certainly not dismiss seeing a magnificent buck with “and that was all.”

Only Stevens, perhaps, might be equally dismissive of the so-called “grandeur of nature.” Stevens too seemed to yearn for a soul-mate, but settled for an imaginary lover, an “interior paramour.” Stevens, who had a terrible marriage, perhaps the worst one on record as poets’ marriages go. When the marriage is bad, nothing can quite make up for it.

THE NOISY BUCK AND THE SILENCE OF GOD

All this, a reader might argue, is an evasion of the modern man’s despair at the silence and apparent absence of god. Frost was baptized in a Swedenborgian Church of New Jerusalem, but left it when he reached adulthood. No one would call Frost a religious poet.

Not in the traditional sense. He was a poet of this world, but not quite in the sense of celebrating the world. He comes close to being the American Larkin, seeing darkness more often than light.

Still, when the speaker calls out and only the echo of his voice comes back to him, does it not sound like “calling out to god” to give some sign, even the slightest, of his existence and — dare we say it? — not just existence, but caring for the speaker? Some capacity for a personal relationship?

The Swedenborgian version of Christianity is Christ-centered. Yahweh has somehow disappeared. It’s Christ, the “human form divine,” who rules the universe. Swedenborgian heaven and hell reflect states of mind, and a soul in hell (which has no fire, but looks rather like a dilapidated section of town) is not doomed to remain there. Though Frost left the Swedenborgian church, it’s not likely that he found the doctrines emotionally and morally abhorrent — they simply aren’t.

If anything, the doctrines are emotionally appealing — just improbable. I suspect Frost left simply because he could find no evidence of a benevolent supra-personal ruler. Unlike Swedenborg with his mystical visions, Frost sensed no such presence. Nor could he perceive events such as his mother’s death or his sister’s insanity as simply a reflection of his own negative states of mind (not that Swedenborg is ever as extreme as some New Age writers).

Still, there is human love, and there is the beauty of nature. But the beauty of nature may not be enough if the failure of love goes deep enough. Can a bad marriage blot out even the Wow! response that the average person would have if a large buck suddenly climbed out not far from them, water not just dripping but pouring from his antlers and his body — “landed pouring like a waterfall”?

I am not entirely convinced. On the esthetic level, I realize that the poet wished to maintain a consistently bleak tone throughout. Whether he wants a deity or a human lover, and gets “only” a powerful buck, we must accept the disappointment of “And that was all.” No transcendentalism for Frost, no Wordsworthian Nature worship (Nature needs to be spelled with a capital N when mentioned in relation to Wordsworth). Wordsworth would find the buck sublime; Frost acknowledges that the buck is powerful, but — a deer is only a deer, and not a “dear” (groan, yes; well, I just had to). It is not “another self” that the speaker craves.

Are we to universalize from this poem and conclude that we are alone — and I mean really ALONE? Are we to ponder morosely how every person is an isolated individual, and nature can offer only the echo of our voice and, instead of soft, responsive lover, the brute roughness of a buck crashing through the underbrush (the buck “forces” the underbrush, as if a rape were involved)? That’s perhaps the “moral” of this poem, but we need not accept it.

I know depression well. It’s a rare human being who manages to live through life without “getting acquainted with the night,” to use another of Frost’s tropes. Depression can get so deep that all positive memories are blocked and thinking becomes downright delusional under the burden of sadness.

And yet a part of our consciousness (some select neural pathways, if we want to turn to brain function here) is not depressed. It’s a fascinating phenomenon, and I know I'm not the only one who’s experienced it. A part of you is never depressed, but simply watches the drama of spiraling down and down. I call that part of consciousness the Witness (by interesting coincidence, I came up with the name myself, before learning of the Buddhist terminology of the Witness).

The Witness knows all along that human love and caring exist, and life is worth living no matter what. The Witness could never dismiss the buck’s swimming and climbing out, “pouring like a waterfall,” as nothing remarkable — in fact a disappointment. But it cannot be a disappointment — it is a magnificent once-in-a-lifetime sight. Besides, most of us have at least some human love in our lives, so we can appreciate the non-human nature for what it is.

And yet I am still grateful to Frost for having described the incident. Thanks to the poem, the buck is now part of my psyche, along with all the actual deer I’ve enjoyed seeing. They can indeed be noisy moving through the underbrush, but does anyone mind that? And regardless of what the poem says, I am sure that the memory of that buck was special to Frost. He chose to cultivate a bleak persona. But to be a real poet, as Frost certainly was, you need to have a sense of enchantment. So I can pity Frost only so much. Rather, I admire his artistry and feel grateful for all that he gave us.


MILOSZ ON SWEDENBORG (A shameless digression)

Milosz, a public Catholic (after a period of atheism and disgust with the reactionary, anti-Semitic Polish Catholic right wing), was fascinated by all kinds of heresies, chiefly Gnosticism and the system dreamed up by Swedenborg — who is almost like Dante, traveling through heaven and hell, but without Dante’s literary genius.

Swedenborg, though regarded as an eminent geologist and naturalist, turned away from the scientific worldview and became preoccupied with his visions of the spirit world. Let me quote from Milosz’s essay, “Dostoyevski and Swedenborg” in Emperor of the Earth:

[According to Swedenbog], “man has withdraw himself from heaven by the love of self and love of the world.”

But the “world” that Swedenborg refers to is presumably not nature but civilization, and the negative aspects of civilization at that — not palaces and gardens, not art, music, and literature, but “worldly ambition,” greed, and deceit. Swedenborg had a religious orientation, and religions tend to focus exclusively on the negative aspects or the self and the world. They don’t find “the world” to be heaven the way so many solitary people do (Wordsworth, Rousseau, Thoreau), finding joy and companionship in nature.

Swedenborg and Blake humanized and hominized God and the universe to such an extent that everything, from the smallest particle of matter to planets and stars, was given but one goal: to serve as a fount of signs for human language. [Oriana: a large buck would be a very abundant fount — and indeed it becomes that for Frost. It’s just that instead of being thrilled to have received this occasion for poetry, he claims to be disappointed.]

Here is the really fascinating part:

“When [a man] dies, he finds himself in one of the innumerable heavens or hells which are nothing other than societies composed of people of the same inclination. Every heaven or hell is a precisely reproduction of the states of mind a given man experienced when on earth and it appears accordingly — as beautiful gardens, groves, or the slums of a big city. Thus everything on earth perceived by the five senses will accompany a man as a source of joy or suffering.”

This is certainly an interesting vision of the afterlife, but isn’t it essentially true of THIS life? A person in a negative state of mind is more likely to see ugliness rather than beauty, though the opposite also holds true: living in beautiful surroundings is more likely to result in a pleasant state of mind.

Finally, people also transform their surroundings. Put artists in abandoned industrial buildings, and watch a fantastic transformation. People can create their heaven and hell. It’s not completely under their control, no. Yet even during the war, a piece of heaven can be created. Here the Syrian artist Tammam Azzam painted Klimt's Kiss on a ruined buildling:


Frost’s bleak vision reflects reality as he sees it. Someone else in the same spot might experience thrill and joy.

THE SENSE OF ABSENCE
There seems to be a new argument for the existence of god, and that’s the argument from presence. According to some religious apologists, everyone senses god’s presence. Atheists only pretend not to sense it.

To me the only constant in regard to god has been his total and absolute absence. God didn’t exist for me before religion lessons, and I was quite happy and unaware that anything was missing. Then came the heavy Catholic indoctrination and the Invisible Man in the Sky acquired some degree of psychological reality.

I want to emphasize “some degree” — though, oddly enough, I seemed to have certainty as to the reality of hell. Otherwise, especially during prayer, experience constantly confronted me with the absence of that Invisible Man. I couldn’t help suspecting that I was talking to empty air. Looking up, I saw only clouds. Then, at fourteen, I stopped lying to myself under the pressure of the church,  and acknowledged that my true personal experience was that of absence of anyone up there or anywhere.

The Emperor had no clothes! Or rather, it could be argued, it was all clothes and no Emperor. No Emperor, King of Kings, Creator, the Almighty. No such being has ever existed except as one of the hundreds of fictional deities made up by humans over the millennia.

Though long in making, my final epiphany took essentially a moment. After some minutes of terror when I literally waited to be struck by lightning for daring to declare that god didn’t exist, I began to breathe freely and was no longer afraid to think for myself. Fuller recovery from the Big Lie (and the intricate web of related lies, e.g. suffering is good for you) has been the journey of a lifetime.

But I don’t feel an iota poorer for not seeing a tree as a manifestation of the divine rather than a tree. Looking at a tree, I don’t generally think of it as a product of evolution, though of course it is that; rather, I respond to the tree’s beauty. I love it just for being a tree, and a deer for being a deer.

The enormous mental revolution of modernity has been precisely about loving the self and loving this world. Loving animals has been a part of this evolution.

(Loving children the way we moderns love them has been relatively recent. That is why we are so appalled that a mother nursing her baby daughter would choose to abandon the child in the most final of ways, that of dying for the promise of paradise as reward of killing the infidels. That a toxic theology could prove more powerful than the strongest of human bonds shakes us to the core.)

ELIZABETH BISHOP’S JOY AT SEEING A MOOSE

Frost’s poem is an anomaly. One of the best-known modern poems about a wild animal is Elizabeth Bishop’s The Moose. Let me quote the most memorable part of it:

—Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man’s voice assures us
“Perfectly harmless....”

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
“Sure are big creatures.”
“It’s awful plain.”
“Look! It’s a she!”

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

~ now this is the normal human response to seeing a large wild animal that does not represent a threat. Children tend to adore animals. Note that in this poems, the adult passengers become like children — as they should. An animal stands for innocence.

Also, there are no Christian, Jewish, or Muslim animals. Animals do not celebrate holidays because every day is a holiday — a feast of existence.



*

Finally, I can’t resist quoting my own poem about my most memorable encounter with a large male deer. Walking on forever is of course wishful thinking, but my sense of awe at the beauty of nature is not.

Hurricane Ridge is in Olympic National Park in the state of Washington. 

 HURRICANE RIDGE

The glaciers tongue me, cliffs of ice,
pools of polar green.
Across eternal snow, a deer
steps out on the trail.

His antlers hold the flame-blue sky,
his crown of shining branches.
He stares at me without fear,
then climbs straight up,

barely nudges the slippery scree.
How could I know it would be
neither a lover nor a holy sage,
but a deer in a tundra of clouds —

this messenger making me feel
one day I’ll walk forever —
when thirsty, eating snow,
when tired, leaning on the wind.

My shadow compassing late sun,
I want one wish granted to me:
to hike again along the crest
here on Hurricane Ridge,

and let a deer like that once more
step out before me on the path,
look at me calmly, and walk on.
Let the wind wave a branch.

~ Oriana © 2015

The joy at seeing a beautiful wild animal is no surprise. It’s part of the joy of being alive. Beauty is reason enough.

photo: Huib Peterson

MILOSZ: HUMAN SOLITUDE IN THE UNIVERSE; SHALLOWNESS OF MYSTICISM; ENTER, MEANING RETURN

 

THE FAR NORTH

It’s been snowing all night.
My mother and I take turns
pushing father’s wheelchair.
He dozes. He’s already part of the snow.

Mother remembers that he used to have
“an excellent sense of direction.”
No use now.
Only night and snow.

A ship is waiting in the harbor.
It could still be a hundred miles.
The stars look blurred, as if caught
in a long photographic exposure.

We don’t even notice the cold.

~ Oriana © 2015

This poem was inspired by a dream I had when my father was nearing the end. Parkinson's is a very cruel disease. It also tends to last a long time, so you get used to this new reality (“we don't even notice the cold”). When you are a caretaker, it may seem that the sick person will never die, even though there is progressive deterioration. Things will just keep on getting worse and worse, you’re trudging in the snow farther and farther north — but that’s just how it is and will be.

Now this poem reminds that “this too shall pass” — both the good and the bad shall end.

The phrase “far north” makes me think of Longfellow’s famous poem, “Ultima Thule” — referring to the northernmost region of the earth as imagined by ancient geographers.

ULTIMATE THULE

With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,
We sailed for the Hesperides,
The land where golden apples grow;
But that, ah! that was long ago.

How far, since then, the ocean streams
Have swept us from that land of dreams,
That land of fiction and of truth,
The lost Atlantis of our youth!

Whither, ah, whither? Are not these
The tempest-haunted Orcades,
Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,
And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?

Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!
Here in thy harbors for a while
We lower our sails; a while we rest
From the unending, endless quest.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Youth’s “land of dreams” versus finding yourself in Ultima Thule — yes, much has been written about that, and I'm not going to repeat it. What I repeat to myself in my mind is “Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!” It’s the sheer music of the words that enchants me, and obliterates the negative meaning.


MILOSZ AND OTHERS ON HUMAN SOLITUDE IN THE UNIVERSE

Milosz: “Our epoch began somewhere around the end of the eighteenth, the beginning of the nineteenth century, and should be viewed as a whole. It is distinguished by a central philosophical problem ripening slowly as a result of the criticism directed at traditional Christian beliefs and aristocratic institutions, monarchy chief among them. . . . The true revolutionaries were the poets and the artists, even the most ethereal and least bloodthirsty of them, because they cleared the way; that is, they acted as the organizers of the collective imagination in a new dimension, that of man’s solitude as a species.”

Milosz also says: “The common feature of the teachings of Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche is their portrayal of the stupefaction of man when he recognizes that BEYOND HIM THERE IS NOBODY IN THE UNIVERSE, and that he does not owe his attributes to any deity.” (“Speaking as a Mammal”)

Milosz may be overestimating the revolutionary role of the arts; economic and technological forces doubtless play a huge role in cultural evolution, and the failure (so far) of the SETI project to find intelligent extra-terrestrial life has no doubt had an impact (such life may exist, but so far away that communication is impossible). If anything, one could argue that it’s writers and artists (especially movie makers) who keep alive the yearning for meeting “someone out there.” But that “someone” is no longer imagined as a deity, but rather as an equal.

Indeed, in another essay Milosz does acknowledge the central role of technology in the process of secularization. But if I read Milosz correctly, he posits “man’s solitude as a species” as the central problem of modernity. He may be right; the explosion of science fiction, the most visionary branch of literature and film, seems to express a yearning for (and sometimes a fear of) intelligent extraterrestrial beings who could communicate with us. As angels and demons become increasingly implausible, ETs (wise as Yoda, or primitive as Chewbacca) rush into the mythological vacuum.

Yet all we have is science fiction (and the emphasis here should be on FICTION) and the notion that the universe is so vast that earthlike life is likely somewhere — but most likely too far away for contact.

From a recent article in The Guardian:

“In the very long run, as the sun gets hotter, the only way for humans or our successors to survive may be to move off-planet; it actually makes sense to start thinking about this now. Such a vision – "often implied but rarely acknowledged explicitly for fear of cynical ridicule" according to Billings – has guided space exploration since its inception when Konstantin Tsiolkovsky dreamed up the first space rockets in a remote log cabin in the late 19th century. It explicitly informs Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon, a recent volume in which distinguished scientists explore the feasibility of initiating interstellar travel by 2100.

In "The Light Years", one of the Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, the narrator sees with his telescope a sign on a galaxy a hundred million light years away that says "I saw you". Aghast, he checks his diary and finds that on that very day 200 million years before he had done something that he had always tried to hide. He casts around frantically for a response, contemplating "Let me explain" and "I'd like to have seen you in my place" before settling for "What of it?" A conversation unfolds between the narrator and his distant interlocutor, with even more remote observers pitching into an exchange in which each comment takes hundreds of millions of years to arrive.

Calvino was writing in the 1960s, shortly after the discovery of quasars and at a time when the nature of the universe as we now understand it was coming into view. He turned this to delightful comic effect. But speculation that life exists across huge distances inthe cosmos is not new. In the sixth century BC Anaximander suggested that other worlds were endlessly forming and disintegrating in a universe of infinite extent. A century later Democritus, the laughing philosopher, argued that the never-ending dance of atoms would inevitably lead to countless other worlds and other lives. In the 12th century AD, citing a verse in the Qur'an that describes Allah as Lord of the Worlds, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi wrote of a thousand thousand worlds.

In the 17th century Johannes Kepler, Christiaan Huygens and others began to wonder if improvements to the recently invented telescope would one day enable humans to actually examine some of those other worlds. "There may be yet created several other helps for the eye," wrote Robert Hooke in 1665, "such as by which we may perhaps be able to discover living Creatures in the Moon, or other Planets.”

And yet in at least one respect we are no further along than Democritus or Hooke. We have found no trace of other life. This seems strange. Given the age of the universe and its vast number of stars, extraterrestrial beings should be common. As Enrico Fermi put it tersely in 1950: where the hell are they?

In Five Billion Years of Solitude, Lee Billings tells the stories of those who have tried and are trying to answer Fermi's question.”

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/21/five-billion-years-solitude-lee-billings-review

Why didn’t the atheist cross the road? — Because there is no other side. ~ Dan Barker

SPIRITUAL NO MORE: THE SHALLOWNESS OF MYSTICISM 

Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial. ~ Nietzsche

It still takes Nietzsche to say something as politically incorrect as this, and as exhilarating. Do we need “mystical” explanations of the universe? I think we can enjoy the mysterious without multiplying useless metaphysics.

I don't deny the interconnectedness of things, but see no reason to call it mysticism. Do we gain anything by using this word? We might as well call interconnectedness exactly what it is — “interconnectedness”—  and gain precision. It’s a perfectly natural phenomenon — no supernatural explanation is necessary.

Personally I have never found any depth or strength through religion, nor have I found religious people to radiate love and peace the way a profoundly happy person does — say, someone who is in love, or someone who is very deeply devoted to their work (which is like being in love, but much more lasting). All that talk about the afterlife was vague and abstract and ultimately a bunch of platitudes about something invisible for which there was no evidence — unlike a tree or an animal, or a a painting or a poem. I have found depth through art and simply hard work -- which taught me humility, patience, and all the other virtues that going to church never imparted. Fear of god only taught me to hate the invisible monster in the sky who spied on everyone's thoughts, beyond any Orwellian nightmare.

I appreciate the part of Ecclesiastes that says two things 1) whatever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might 2) at other times, put on nice clean clothes and enjoy life while there is still time. That's all the wisdom I learned from the bible, finding most of it insufferably boring and/or vicious and archaic, with lots of violence but little understanding of human psychology, esp child abuse which leads to so much aggression and suffering later. I've learned a bit from Buddhism -- but that bit about desire and suffering has been extremely important. The rest I learned from life itself and from grappling with something very difficult — poetry and challenging intellectual work in general.

I am thrilled that it's finally OK to reject mysticism and not provoke a storm by saying there is no soul nor the "beyond." When someone dies, he remains in the memory of others -- and that to me is an awe-inspiring neurobiological mystery. The inner world of our dreams is stranger and more fascinating than any idea of the afterlife.

This morning I had a dream vaguely set in Italy — an artist colony, perhaps. There is a dog ambling about, and I decide it’s “my dog” (I'm certainly going to pet it and spoil it). “I have an Italian dog,” I say to a man who happens to be standing there. “Her name is Correggio.” In the dream I believe that this mean courage. My Italian is imperfect, to put it mildly — the word for “courage” is “coraggio.” “Correggio” isn’t even a word, but seems to derive from the word for correcting. (Also, there was a Renaissance painter who was known by that name, after the small Italian town where he was born)

I could see it as a mystical dream — it takes courage to correct a mistake, right? A message from heaven, divine wisdom sent to guide me! To me, it’s simply my unconscious rearranging bits and pieces (I know where Italy came from, and the fantasy of having a dog; I know which act of courage I recently decided on, and another one which would actually be more difficult). And the startling fusion of the words? I’ve always loved languages, learning a word here, a phrase there, and know how easy it is to fuse and confuse.

We are hard-wired to seek patterns and meaning. On the whole this is a good thing, but it can result in the mistake of seeing a pattern where none exists, assuming that “everything happens for a reason,” and manufacturing supernatural explanations.

As Matt said, “Mysticism throws everything back in the formless cauldron so it can be endlessly prated about without logical restrictions.”

You may object that the shallowness I speak about is that of the commercialized “spiritual” movement which sells the trappings — crystals, incense, little altars — but of course can’t sell the alleged depth of the “holy men.” Many of them strike me as charlatans, pure and simple. As for monks and nuns, up close they turn out to be just ordinary human beings who happen to be dressed in strange clothes (which used to be ordinary street clothes in the Middle Ages) and who live in communes rather than in family or single households. Those who do well in communal living are extraverts rather than deep thinkers.

Yet once you delve into physics, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the true mystery is all around us. As Nietzsche also said, once you look at something in sufficient depth, an infinity opens up. And that infinity may be frightening to some, but a source of ecstatic joy to others.

One of my discoveries in life has been that it’s happy people who exude peace and love. The easiest way to be happy is to be in love. Now, that love need not be erotic. To me, the most important thing is to be in love with work. I mean not the work you do for a living, though in the luckiest cases there is an overlap, but what you feel is the true work of your life. Daily communion with such work leads to a sense of fulfillment and deep and lasting happiness.

Contrary to Nietzsche, I claim that happiness is the source of strength and virtues such as as kindness, humility, and serenity. How do we become happy? Freud gave the perfect answer: love and work. A gardener happy among flowers, a chef happy in her kitchen, a mother enjoying her child, a father shooting baskets with his youngsters, a scientist in his lab, an artists in his studio — these are the true benefactors of humanity, rather than preachers with their platitudes, or the so-called mystics with theirs.

Though my examples tend to be those of meaningful work, in a way, it all comes down to love: the work you love will usually lead you to people you love — and will make it easier to at least like others. In my experience, I like people best when I am able to do the work I love. My connection to my work gives me the foundation and security so that  I can also be spontaneously affectionate.

You may ask, “But what about those nuns who claim to be in love with Jesus?” Yes, a few among them, like Teresa of Avila, may even have hallucinations that make Jesus seem an actual man, and a handsome one at that. But an imaginary lover is just that — a rather limited and one-sided experience, a longing for a soul-mate that can find no outlet in a real person. An idealized imaginary lover has some advantages over a real lover, but — a real lover is always more interesting. Reality is richer. I pity those who, perhaps in order to survive deprivation, settle for the imaginary.

Falling in love in the usual meaning of the term? Yes please. It’s turbulent, scary, and difficult, but it can be ecstatic. At the very least, it’s always interesting. It’s not the same as a deep attachment to the right person, which takes years, but love in any form can be a source of happiness. Good things come from happiness.

As for the feeling of awe, which is supposed to be central to mysticism, again I say yes. Religion is not necessary for the feeling of awe. For me the beauty of nature is enough. A combination of the beauty of nature and the collective human genius is a source of inexhaustible awe for me. An great art and music, including sacred art and music. I am open to whatever poetry religion can offer, the esthetic-sensual aspect. The “holy hush” one can experience in beautiful churches when they are empty, yes. Anything that leads to a deep sense of happiness, the joy of being alive and experiencing all manner of perceptions.

Correggio: Jupiter and Io

THE VASTNESS OF THE UNIVERSE FEELS COMFORTABLE TO ME

Pascal complained that the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces” frightened him. I had the opposite reaction, even as a child. The hugeness of the universe pleased me immensely -- it was so clearly not about reward and punishment for using a profanity or spilling the soup (my idea of what "sin" meant).

The universe was so much bigger than all our petty struggles, or causes like nationalism. Nature simply was, without moral justification of any sort. When I looked at the night sky, I knew early on that this was beyond any naive biblical account written by men who had no idea where the sun went during the night.

To me the stars at night — my abbreviated image for “the universe” — just the world thrilled me — were nature that did not appear to need the existence of the god of punishment. Looking at the stars, I did not feel like a sinner, but like someone privileged to behold wonders. I did not feel judged.

This, by the way, was the advantage of the New Age movement over Christianity — its sundry teachings were non-judgmental. It was truly emotionally supportive. For some, it was the dream of a completely supportive religion come true. It was like liberal Protestantism, but without the burden of the Old Testament dragging it down. (To emphasize this, New Age spoke of the Spirit, or even The Holy Spirit; “Christ Consciousness” was occasionally mentioned and equated with “Buddha Consciousness”; Yahweh, however, was deleted, except for occasional short paragraphs of rage against the toxic old-time religion with its vengeful god.)

One touch of badness came during the years that the ruling motto was “You create your own reality” — meaning, if you got cancer, it wasn’t your genes and/or carcinogens or aging. It was your negative thinking. This kind of talk got profoundly trashed as the ultimate in “blaming the victim,” and faded relatively quickly. But if you didn’t “create your cancer” — or, “attracted cancer into your life” — then what about your ability to create good things in your life by having positive thoughts? Doubt crept in. The absurd, shallow side of this mysticism lay exposed — see the “Spiritual No More” section of this blog.

photo: Luigi Chiriaco

ENTER

I looked down at my keyboard and saw one key:
Enter, with its backward arrow.

Enter, meaning Return.

**

I'm not sure if I wrote this. I remember that a friend pointed out that the “Enter” key used to be called “Return” back in typewriter days. So arguably the other name of “Enter” is “Return.”

I'm content to let the author be the “collective psyche.”

**

It’s been true many times in my life: going back to something begun a long time ago has yielded rich “returns.” Every day I start something new, and almost every day I discover something seeded in the past. Often it’s mainly return: I rework an older piece of writing. It gives me joy to have all these riches to return to.

I know this won’t go on indefinitely. As Jane Kenyon put it, “One day it will be otherwise.” But if it could go on, I wouldn’t mind living like that for centuries.

And if there is a gate of paradise, I think it may have a sign over it that says RETURN.

**

You say returning is an illusion? “You can't go home again.” True. In another poem I say:

Odysseus only thought he returned.
By then, Ithaca
was another country.

But a partial return is possible, as to a favorite vacation spot — and if that's the best we can have, that's fine with me. Meanwhile we will always fantasize about those big and impossible returns — the thrill of the first love, for instance (never mind how it ended). It existed; it happened. The most important thing about love is simply that it happens.

IMMORTALITY = NO MEMORY: MAURA STANTON’S SIRENS

John William Waterhouse,  Siren, 1900

 
A VOICE FOR THE SIRENS

Oh they came, their eyes blank.
I pinned their souls under rocks
wanting only their shocked flesh
as the ships broke up, again, again . . .
Years now. Unlike the others I remember
a hand, some coarse hair against my cheek.
Now I stare at the sea all day
singing about strange events
for I’ve passed through their souls
inadvertently, thinking them shadows —
their souls were particles of odd happenings
or geography or touch,
tainting my immortality with memory.

As the sea roiled around him, one sailor
dreamed of his wife’s tomb,
the steep, sweating walls and dead pigs
killed to entice away the worms.
Another rubbed sea salt into his eyes
as if it were home, the desert;
while the one i murmured over, sweetly
dead in my young, implacable arms
saw his father turn in another sea.
In this fairyland, their strenuous lips
only blub loosely like the octopus
crossing my feet with lank, amorous
tentacles; their fingers dissolve
into the sharp, familiar bone.

Sometimes I hear mariners’ wives chanting
over the water, like us, forlorn;
I remember the charmed wedding nights,
and each man’s last embrace snow-
flake patterned into his soul, now mine.
Yet I keep singing, my dangerous voice
joined in sad irresponsibility with those
on this rock who forget why
each time until the next ship crashes.
Into the haunted music I weave my warning
carefully, as if my language were decipherable.

~ Maura Stanton

I love persona poems. I love the leap of the imagination it takes to dream oneself as precisely as possible into someone else who’s become part of our psyche. And once we know the tale of the Sirens, it’s with us forever.

Homer’s Sirens were part birds, part women. It’s later that the current image of the Siren, with a fish’s tail, became standard. But in classical Antiquity, the image of Sirens was found most often in cemeteries. The concept of the Siren evolved away from the Homeric femme fatale toward something more akin to our notion of an angel.  The wings stayed, as well as the attribute of music. The most striking piece of art in the whole show was a funerary Siren: sculpted in marble, a lovely woman with large wings, playing a kithara, a string instrument resembling a lyre. It turns out that Sirens were believed to accompany the dead to the Underworld, consoling them with music.

Ultimately, the Sirens, who could impart mystical wisdom, also became a symbol of the soul yearning for paradise. As I said in my blog post, “The Sirens Still Sing to Us,” we lose the world but gain the song.

This poem, however, takes us back to the Homeric sirens. There is no competing with The Odyssey. Few people know about the later “angelic” Sirens; millions are familiar with the myth of beautiful women’s voices luring sailors to their death. Stanton makes the Sirens basically innocent, unconscious. They mean no harm; immortal, have no memory, so they keep on singing, unaware of the consequences until the next ship crashes.

I read somewhere that the only way eternity would be endurable would be without memory. If in heaven there is no memory, then each moment repeats the wonder of seeing the place for the first time.

But one Siren mistakes the sailors souls for shadows, and something astonishing happens:

Now I stare at the sea all day
singing about strange events
for I’ve passed through their souls
inadvertently, thinking them shadows —
their souls were particles of odd happenings
or geography or touch,
tainting my immortality with memory.

“Tainting my immortality with memory” is my favorite line.

Now the “memory-tainted” Sirens is full of the sailors’ memories — their wedding nights, their parents, the landscapes they’d seen, the memories of touch (and, I assume, smell — those remain for a lifetime).  She identifies with the bereaved wives. She knows her voice is dangerous, but she can’t simply stop singing — apparently she’s “hard-wired” to sing. She tries to weave a warning into her song, but her language, alas, is not decipherable.

(A shameless digression: I’d love this poem to start with the second stanza — “in medias res.” Then it would be immediately compelling:

As the sea roiled around him, one sailor
dreamed of his wife’s tomb,
the steep, sweating walls and dead pigs
killed to entice away the worms.
Another rubbed sea salt into his eyes
as if it were home, the desert;
while the one i murmured over, sweetly
dead in my young, implacable arms
saw his father turn in another sea.

“Pigs killed to entice away the worms” — who knew? Wait, was that really done? Regardless, it’s irresistible detail.

The part about the Siren’s immortality becoming contaminated by memory could come later, in flashback.

But never mind. The poem is magical even if imperfect. It’s magical because it creates an alternate reality vividly enough.)

Absorbing the sailors’ memories is somewhat like eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. You cease to be an innocent being — “innocent” mainly in the sense of “ignorant.” Now you know you cause harm. Alas, in some circumstances you can’t help it — and you end up suffering too, as Stanton’s Siren feels the grief of the bereaved wives. In a fascinating twist, those women at least on the surface become like the Sirens, also singing over the waters, forlorn, but cut off from love except as memory and longing. 

 Siren, 7th century BC vase, Corinth, on an old Polish stamp

THE SIREN AS FEMME FATALE; HOMME FATAL

A “siren” has become pretty much a synonym for a “femme fatale.” Any woman can find herself in a femme fatale situation without really being a typical femme fatale: any relationship where she loves the partner less than she is loved puts her in the position of power — and she may be uncomfortable with it, and feel compassion for her partner. The poem certainly presents the case of “I know I am alluring to you, but you are not alluring to me.”

And what woman hasn’t dreamed, at least for a moment, of being a Siren, a beautiful Lorelei, a femme fatale? Ah, the power to inspire devotion while not making any sacrifices! A femme fatale illustrates the “Ben Franklin effect”: we love those for whom we’ve done favors, in whom we’ve invested time and energy. Since we’ve waited for them for hours while they were unconscionably late for a date, they must be worth that kind of waiting, right? The more they abuse us, the more difficult it becomes to break free — that’s the pathology of it.

And of course there is also the “homme fatal.” In fact I suspect that much more often it’s the man who remains aloof, solidifying his power over the woman helplessly in love with him — until, proverbially, she’s ready to “do anything for him.” It’s what I call “the boss and the secretary” game. She does most of the work he’s being paid for while he enjoys long “lunch meetings,” and covers up for his professional negligence. Usually he’s too smart to become an actual lover — that promise is forever dangling, never fulfilled. A physical love relationship usually comes to an end; an unrequited love, if unconsummated, can last for decades.

Whether it’s a man or a woman abusing someone else’s infatuation, it’s dreadful, pathological. A normal woman quickly snaps out of her Siren fantasies, realizing she would not be really happy being loved — even madly loved — by someone she doesn’t love. She returns to dreaming about the Prince. If the dream is intense, it too can be destructive, but on the whole a woman’s nurturing side prevails and she can love actual people with their flaws.

It would be going too far to say that the speaker in the poem is a femme fatale with a heart of gold. At most, she feels sorrow, she weaves warnings into her song. A heart of gold would require that she sacrifice her immortality in order to save a sailor’s life. But perhaps it’s not within her power to do that. The Greeks didn’t traffic in free will. There was Necessity, or Fate.

 

 The Goddess Ananke, or Necessity

THE SIRENS AS ART

By the way, in Homer the Sirens don't devour the bodies of the sailors. That’s a common misconception. Those sailors who survive the smashing against the rocks starve to death, listening to the enchanting song.

Clever reader, have you predicted that the phrase “starving artist” will come up next? And the word “compulsive”? Need I connect the dots?

Not for those readers who are familiar with the creative process. It is devouring. Most artists never “make it” in terms of worldly rewards. They pay a price not only in terms of poverty, but also in terms of guilt over not giving enough to their partners — since, you guessed the next eternal verity, they are “married to their art.”

The human beloved is doomed to being second in importance. “It’s a lonely life” — unless the artist’s mate has enough life of her own, enough of other sources of affection and satisfaction.

One time I asked fellow poets and writers, “Would you want your daughter to marry a writer?” The answer was an instant and unanimous No. In fact, it was a horrified shriek of No! Yet such a relationship can work well if it’s a relationship equals — usually both of them work in a creative field. Or, if only one does, then the partner manages to have a rich, satisfying life of his or her own.

 Cezanne, Kiss of the Muse, 1860

BACK TO IMMORTALITY AS LACK OF MEMORY

But Stanton’s poem appeals to me precisely because it’s not “about” the Siren as an ice-hearted femme fatale. The Sirens don’t lure the sailors because they are evil. Stanton posits that they ply their trade because they are immortal: hence they have no memory. Having no memory, they learn nothing about the consequences of their actions. They are surprised to see amorous fingers turn to sharp bone.

The idea that immortality requires no memory reminded me of a chapter in Einstein's Dreams, No memory means that everything keeps happening for the first time. Here one of the Sirens becomes accidentally "tainted" with memory, and now instead of her happy innocence she carries the psychic burden of the sailors' memories — especially, it seems, their memories of love.

Immortality as lack of memory is an interesting inversion of the usual understanding of immortality as everlasting memory. But who’s doing the remembering? Not the object of “immortality,” but those who remember him in some manner. Immortality as being remembered — usually with the aid of rituals such as commemorating anniversaries, writing reminiscences, talking about the person — and, in the case of a writer, reading and discussing his work — this kind of immortality is “done” by others. It’s not personal immortality, which I suspect might indeed be unbearable after a few centuries — and which might require absence of memory.

Being human, we are much less “programmed” than animals. I think this is as far as I want to go at present without stepping into the eternal debate over free will versus determinism. We are mortal and have memory. We can learn from noting the consequences. I will leave it at that.

Closing Image: Paul Delvaux (1897 - 1994), Dawn in the Village of the Sirens. Note that their lower bodies here resemble tree trunks and roots. The trunks can be a reference to the Maenads, the worshipers of Dionysus who got punished for tearing Orpheus into pieces by being changed into oaks. So the Maenads too represent destructive women. But I am not sure if Delvaux intended this reference. I think that he simply morphed the Sirens into this shape, perhaps to indicate that they are rooted, locked, imprisoned in their behavior. 

Charles:

The Siren painting is the perfect image for A VOICE FOR THE SIRENS. In fact all the pictures are perfect for this blog.

The Siren on the Polish postage stamp could be 20th century especially with the background so I wonder if the background was added.

Learned so much from Femme fatale section.

What is the Goddess Ananke or Necessity holding?

My favorite part of Paul Delvaux’s painting is the breast in the mirror. To me implies that the Sirens also love themselves and are narcissists without memory so they constantly have to remind themselves who they are by looking at the breast in the mirror. But that’s probably not what the artist intended. Maybe he just liked breasts. LOL
Oriana:

Insofar as there are three kinds of men, with painters it’s easy to figure out which kind they are: just note how they paint women.

This is hard at first with Picasso, but eventually it also shows


 
That’s a very good observation about the Sirens: they have no memory, so they can’t love anyone (not even themselves, but the main theory of narcissism holds that a narcissist lack true self love), and they need to have a mirror to remember who they are.

The Siren on the stamp: the shape is authentic, copied from a really ancient Greek vase. And very early art can look surprisingly modern — it doesn’t try to be realistic, but is strongly stylized.

I think the bright colors and the background are probably a contemporary invention, but it would take an art historian with a background in vases to know for sure.

Ananke is supposed to be be holding a spindle — anything to do with spinning and weaving indicated fate. But in this image what I see is most likely a torch. A more brutal interpretation would be that since is the Goddess Necessity, she’s holding a club with which she hits poor humans, to impart the lessons of the “School of Hard Knocks.”

Glad the part on femme fatale provides insight. It took me a lot of life experience to figure out some of those “relationship dynamics.”

Hyacinth:

Made me think of my old poem “Hell” a short one that says hell would be “every dream remembered.”
Oriana:

Yes, remembering everything would be sheer hell — not just dreams but everything that ever happened.

Happiness depends on selective forgetting. Fortunately that’s just how our memory works. I don’t mean that we easily forget the bad things — but we tend not to “rehearse” those memories, meaning that we don’t reconstruct them over and over. A person in good mental health prefers to dwell on positive memories, selectively strengthening them. “Practice makes perfect” also when it comes to recalling happy memories.

Conversely, depression blocks the access to happy memories, so only the negative stuff is remembered. If depression continues long enough, you may find you can’t remember a single good thing that ever happened to you, absurd as that sounds. Even after depression ends, it takes a while to regain that access.

But even if immortality meant only positive recall, imagine how tiresome that would get after a few centuries. Immortality as lack of memory makes sense — then everything would be fresh and interesting.

Some Alzheimer’s patients experience precisely that. There is the tormenting, paranoid Alzheimer’s, and the “beatific” kind, when the victim becomes happy, cherubic. 

SAUDI ARABIA: ISIS THAT MADE IT; MARK DOTY: ONLY THE DEVILS WERE ALLOWED TO LAUGH

photo: Channing Tatum

THE SIRENS

The Sirens sing a different
song to everyone.
True to Homer, they are
half-desire, half-birds,
dark and hidden like nightingales.

To a lover they trill,
“This at last is true love.”
To the ambitious they croon,
“You can have all. The gods
do not require sacrifice.”

To a mystic the Sirens
offer silence, that most
unanswerable of all songs.
Nothing contains everything,
the Sirens sing without a sound.

To a young man I loved they sang
about death’s country of light:
Why suffer in this valley of unfinished souls,
when you could stroll
in meadows of a happy afterlife?

To me the Sirens chant
through my dead lover’s mouth:
Remember only the beauty —
his skin, petal-smooth, when we dozed
in the gardens of dawn and dusk.

I’m not Odysseus; it’s not fame
the Sirens promise me at sunset —
Only the beautiful is real.
Come sing with us about
the marble palaces of clouds.

Evening falls, silhouettes in blue
the mirage of an island.
Copper glow fades from the cliffs.
Flowers gray to shadows of flowers.
Far off, still the ravishing voices.

~ Oriana © 2015


SAUDI ARABIA: ISIS THAT MADE IT

“Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia.

In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.

Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.

The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.

One might counter: Isn’t Saudi Arabia itself a possible target of Daesh? Yes, but to focus on that would be to overlook the strength of the ties between the reigning family and the clergy that accounts for its stability — and also, increasingly, for its precariousness. The Saudi royals are caught in a perfect trap: Weakened by succession laws that encourage turnover, they cling to ancestral ties between king and preacher. The Saudi clergy produces Islamism, which both threatens the country and gives legitimacy to the regime.

One has to live in the Muslim world to understand the immense transformative influence of religious television channels on society by accessing its weak links: households, women, rural areas. Islamist culture is widespread in many countries — Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania. There are thousands of Islamist newspapers and clergies that impose a unitary vision of the world, tradition and clothing on the public space, on the wording of the government’s laws and on the rituals of a society they deem to be contaminated.

It is worth reading certain Islamist newspapers to see their reactions to the attacks in Paris. The West is cast as a land of “infidels.” The attacks were the result of the onslaught against Islam. Muslims and Arabs have become the enemies of the secular and the Jews. The Palestinian question is invoked along with the rape of Iraq and the memory of colonial trauma, and packaged into a messianic discourse meant to seduce the masses. Such talk spreads in the social spaces below, while up above, political leaders send their condolences to France and denounce a crime against humanity. This totally schizophrenic situation parallels the West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia.

All of which leaves one skeptical of Western democracies’ thunderous declarations regarding the necessity of fighting terrorism. Their war can only be myopic, for it targets the effect rather than the cause. Since ISIS is first and foremost a culture, not a militia, how do you prevent future generations from turning to jihadism when the influence of Fatwa Valley and its clerics and its culture and its immense editorial industry remains intact?

Is curing the disease therefore a simple matter? Hardly. Saudi Arabia remains an ally of the West in the many chess games playing out in the Middle East. It is preferred to Iran, that gray Daesh. And there’s the trap. Denial creates the illusion of equilibrium. Jihadism is denounced as the scourge of the century but no consideration is given to what created it or supports it. This may allow saving face, but not saving lives.

Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.

The attacks in Paris have exposed this contradiction again, but as happened after 9/11, it risks being erased from our analyses and our consciousness.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/opinion/saudi-arabia-an-isis-that-has-made-it.html?_r=0

Oriana:

In my childhood I’ve experienced two kinds of propaganda: the Communist propaganda and the Catholic propaganda. It may come as a surprise to some readers to learn that the Catholic church had considerable freedom in Communist Poland — to the point, eventually, of religion classes in public schools. It had its printing press and its own degree-granting university.

At this point in history — an achievement of many centuries, the Reformation and above all the Enlightentenment — Catholicism is indeed a religion of peace. Medieval Catholicism can be compared to Wahhabist Islam (even then, the subjugation of women wasn’t as terrible), but not modern Catholicism. It is still fundamentalist in some ways, totalitarian, anti-human, anti-life and anti-democratic — but between a lunch with the most fire-breathing Catholics and a lunch with Islamists, there is no question which invitation a Westerner could accept without fear. My point is rather the power of propaganda.

Having experienced both kinds of propaganda, I state with zero hesitation that the Catholic propaganda was by far more powerful. When you claim to control eternity, when you can make people agonized with the fear of hell, while rewarding obedience with very attractive promises, how can the government compete with that? During my childhood and teens, the political repression in Poland was mild and nothing like the Stalinist rule during the thirties. The economic promises were shabby. The living standard, except for Party members, was the source of constant complaining. Meanwhile the church offered the splendor of its churches — never sparing money to make them beautiful  and full of flowers, even in winter — and the great organ music and the ornate rituals that made something like the May 1 parade look  . . .  again, “shabby” almost forces itself as the best description, along with “ridiculous.” 

As for the holy icons compared with portraits of Marx and Lenin, there was a certain similarity, but need I say which had a greater appeal? And there were of course ten thousand times (likely an underestimate) more statues of Mary, Jesus, and various saints than the statues of revolutionary leaders.

Among the publications, I remember especially the glossy Catholic Weekly. It concentrated on the attractive promises rather than hellfire. It presented a lovable Jesus, not the one who’s come to bring the sword, and who will come again to separate the saved from the damned. No, the Catholic Weekly dripped the heavy, sweet syrup of piety. It used a simple vocabulary and homey stories of ordinary families. It was produced by master manipulators, not clumsy government amateurs.

The church was — and is — very rich, but its wealth is nothing to compared to that of Saudi Arabia. Now there is a country that has almost unlimited resources to produce propaganda. It owns not just printing presses but radio and TV stations. I operates religious schools at every level, including countries all over the world. I shudder to think how far-reaching its propaganda is, spewing the poison of Wahhabism everywhere.

Cartoon by Peter Brookes

There is one more kind of very effective propaganda: commercial advertising. Unfortunately, it’s geared toward creating artificial demand, making us want to buy the toys and clothes we don’t really need. But imagine if that power were harnessed toward nobler goals.

To some extent that is so when we look at education — real education: an enterprise too complex to be called propaganda.

To detox, let’s enjoy this image of the beauty of THIS world. No need for pie in the sky when we can have this:

photo: Asen Asenov

WE HAVE TO DIE TO KNOW WE WERE HAPPY~ ARISTOTLE

The first, happy year with M, he said to me, “If I had to die right now, I wouldn't mind. I could just go anytime. “ I knew what he meant: life had finally granted him the fulfillment he wanted. He was so sated with happiness that he felt calm and accepting — and willing to let go of life with gratitude.

I knew, because even at a very unhappy time in my youth I experienced a similar serenity and a similar perception of being ready to die, even though I was only 28. Just before my most serious surgery, I realized (an unforgettable minute when it all flowed to me) that, for all the misery I’d also experienced, life had given me great gifts and blessings. I had known great love; I didn’t know motherhood, but I didn’t resent it because now I didn’t have to worry about leaving an orphan. I had had the best of literature, art, and music; I’d seen gorgeous scenery; my Polish summers were a paradise of nature, even the time I got chased by hissing geese that nipped my shins.

I felt reconciled to the possibility of dying, even though I hadn’t yet “done” anything to speak of. That was irrelevant somehow. I felt peaceful and accepting: life had been generous to me; I didn’t feel cheated.

Occasionally this theme appears in poetry: in Keats’s “Ode to the Nightingale” Sexton’s “Starry Night,” Hölderlin’s “To the Fates.” Hölderlin says he’ll enter the world of shadows content after he’s had his fill of singing: “Once I lived as the gods; more is not needed.” Keats and Sexton want to die sated with beauty: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die”; “Oh starry, starry night! This is how I want to die.”

And there is Jack Gilbert’s wonderful title: “We Have Already Lived In the Real Paradise.” It’s all in the title; more is not needed.

It’s not dying we dread, but not having lived.


“A FEAR OF CULTURAL ANNIHILATION MAY HELP FUEL TERRORIST SENTIMENTS, says psychologist and terrorism expert Fathali Moghaddam, of Georgetown University's department of psychology. In "How Globalization Spurs Terrorism: The Lopsided Benefits of One World and Why That Fuels Violence," Moghaddam argues that rapid globalization has forced disparate cultures into contact with one another and is threatening the domination or disappearance of some groups—a cultural version of "survival of the fittest." "You can interpret Islamic terrorism as one form of reaction to the perception that the fundamentalist way of life is under attack and is about to become extinct," he says.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201511/the-psychology-terrorism
 

The rest of the article is not especially new: the insecurity and vulnerability of male adolescents, their yearning for belonging, etc. But this part — the fear of cultural annihilation as other cultures show themselves to be more creative and attractive — has not been explored.

The solution, it seems to me, is cultural fusion: all cultures have something to contribute, whether cuisine or music (two realms where this fusion has already been most apparent). Anyone with sufficient intelligence can become a scientist, a medical worker, or a teacher, to name just a few professions, and be of great use to humanity at large.

As I see it, there is no need to cling to one’s particular culture. It would be ridiculous if I started wearing a Polish folk costume and otherwise demonstrating how Polish I am. I prefer to contribute to the culture at large. To make even a tiny contribution is a great privilege.

Here, tangentially, is a paragraph about nationalism:

“Do you know the saddest things that’s happened to the Kurdish people?” he asked. I shrugged; chemical bombings? Having their language banned and being denied a country? No. “We’ve lost all our love songs,” he said. When we got political, we changed all our the songs. Instead of ‘I love you’, ‘I want you’, we sing ‘I love you Kurdistan’, ‘I want you Kurdistan’. It’s impossible, he said, gazing at me, for a man to say to a woman, “I love you.” I thought he was doing fine. ~ Samantha Ellis, How to Be a Heroine

This is what I disliked most about the Polish literature of the Romantic era — Poles, like the Kurds, were fighting for statehood, and nationalism permeated the culture. When that meant Polish folk songs and dances as motifs in the music of Chopin, that was charming, it worked; in poetry, it got tiresome (at least for me).


WHAT, NO AUTHOR? “THAT MAKES IT EVEN MORE MAGICAL”

While driving I was listening to public radio, and ant and bee behaviors were discussed: how their behavior stems from interaction, the way neurons interact to produce thought (the phenomenon of EMERGENCE; bird migration is another frequent example). You can’t isolate a single neuron and expect to find a “fragment of a thought” inside it. It’s all in the interaction.

An older commentator said, “To me that implies an author.” A younger journalist replied, “You’ve just taken out the magic out of it.” The older man: “So the beautiful world you wake up to every morning has no meaning, no purpose? Are you comfortable with that?” The younger man: “Yes, I’m comfortable with that. That makes it even more magical.”

I agree. Without the invisible man in the sky, it’s even more awesome. We can stop being childlike and imagine that everything that happens is produced by some deity, the way primeval man thought that waves are produced by the god of the ocean, rather than the ocean itself, in interaction with the shape of the bottom (this is not a putdown of early humanity; before scientific investigation, how were they to know?). Of course early humans, seeing the world in terms of human emotions, saw a storm of the anger of a god. Of course it was Zeus or Yahweh tossing lightning, or angry Poseidon causing an earthquake by hitting his trident against the bottom of the sea.

Now that we understand more about the causes of natural phenomena, there is no need for an “author.” Note that I said “more” rather than “everything.” Of course there is still plenty of mystery, but the existence of yet unexplained (and phenomena that will perhaps never be explained) does not prove the existence of the prime mover.

I am so glad there is now an open discussion of these matters. As Ginette Paris said, “It’s still early after the death of god.” It’s still early in the transition to the post-religious world (at least in the West), and we are just beginning to shape a positive secular philosophy and a new understanding of the world.


ONLY THE DEVILS WERE ALLOWED TO LAUGH (Mark Doty on Milton and Blake)

“There is a further level to this eros, deeper than its contrast to angelic disembodiment. The devils of my childhood, on TV commercials and, weirdly, even in church scenes and religious iconography, laugh. In church, they're the only ones who do. You won't watch an angel cracking a joke or poking under the mantle of an assumed truth, but those in red are the very definition of "irreverent." They go unhobbled by piety, certainty or received truth. There is in the devilish an eros or élan of argument, a delight in undercutting the given, mocking the president or the professor or the priest.

Milton, famously, makes Satan a grand psychological antihero, whether he intends to or not; it's just that the devil's the most interesting character in the story, and there is nothing the Puritan poet can do about this except to honestly portray the glittering skin of the snake and the fiercely driven will of Lucifer. Even Milton (who William Blake, almost equally famously, said was of the Devil's party without knowing it) can't make an all-knowing God, for whom the fate of each of his subjects is a foregone conclusion, dramatic.

It was Blake himself, a century and a half or so later, who was the first poet to conceive of the infernal troupes as having less to do with good and evil than with states of mind. "All deities," he tells us, "reside in the human breast." It is a particularly modern intuition; he blurs the lines between the holy and the unholy by casting angels, prophets and demons as characters in the grand theatre of the human psyche. Here he is, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, early in his career but already causing problems for Christian orthodoxy:

A MEMORABLE FANCY

As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs; thinking that as sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell show the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings and garments. When I came home: on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, & read by them on earth:

How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

**

A great current of energy becomes available for poetry in that passage, and in the wildly brilliant proverbs that follow it, a new wind blowing off the revolutions of Europe and the further edges of the Enlightenment. It has nothing to do with evil, really, in the usual sense of the word, though it certainly represents a huge challenge to conventional morality and received thinking. It is the assertion of a temperament that favors inquiry and uncertainty, distrusts sanctimony of any sort, and piousness and rule-making. It expresses delight in instability and paradox, and favors the uncontainable, that which isn't readily circumscribed. What can be shut within the chapel is clearly not large enough to serve as a description of reality; what I will call, for convenience's sake, a diabolic perspective, prefers the unsettled, the disorder that leaks out of systems, the darkness that looms beneath the altar.

The Biblical and literary scholar Elaine Pagels writes that the Greek word diabolos — the origin of our devil — means "one who puts an obstacle in the path." The devilish, in this sense, confounds our expectations of ease, keeps us from going easily where we thought we were going, undercuts expectations. The diabolic eschews the straight path, the easy progression.

But to be halted, to be confounded, is to be instructed. In writing, as in living, isn't it the troublesome, knotty thing that winds up having the most of opportunity in it? A friend of mine is fond of quoting a provocative Zen proverb: "The obstacle in the path is the path." What gets in the way, in other words, is what there is to be done; we learn not from the way we thought we were going, but from the actual interruptions, frustrations, all that stops us short, refuses ready apprehension.

INFERNAL SYMPATHIES ~ Mark Doty, Lodestar Quarterly, Winter 2004

I want to call your attention especially to this part:

“Blake was the first poet to conceive of the infernal troupes as having less to do with good and evil than with states of mind. "All deities," he tells us, "reside in the human breast." It is a particularly modern intuition; he blurs the lines between the holy and the unholy by casting angels, prophets and demons as characters in the grand theater of the human psyche.”

Already Thomas Aquinas hinted that heaven and hell are not places. Pope JP2, on 21 July 1999, officially (I guess that means infallibly) stated that “Heaven is neither an abstraction not a physical place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity.”

The church certainly didn’t speak of a “personal relationship with the Holy Trinity” in my day! In fact, a direct, personal relationship with any person of the Trinity would be considered heretical. Only the saints were grudgingly granted the privilege. The church wanted obedience, not any fraternizing with the Trinity.

But times have changed. In place of “the Holy Trinity” one can of course insert whatever is the highest and most important in one’s life. For an artist, it’s art.

Detoxing with music (Rachmaninoff's Third)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mr8ipSKNO4