The Goddess as Active Listener (Part 4)
Editor’s Note: The full text of this work comes in ten parts, which we are releasing in three installments over three consecutive weeks. For Installment 1: Parts 1–3, click here. Below we present Installment 2: Part 4.
4
“Gnothi Seauton” or “Know Thyself”—attributed to Socrates
But also to Chilon of Sparta, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Solon of Athens, and Thales of Miletus. Juvenal, in his 11th Satire, claimed that the precept actually descended “de caelo”—directly out of heaven.
When I met Sue Castigliano, my speech teacher during senior year at Doherty Memorial High School, it was not at first apparent that she would one day change my life. I had never before had a teacher who had any sense of who I was, of the hole in my heart or the blockage in my psyche. She was from the Midwest, not obviously countercultural—I would find out otherwise—and her most noticeable virtues were such things as calmness, openness, acceptance, and curiosity. She dressed simply. She wore very little jewelry. She was not at all theatrical, and she certainly did not announce that our speech class would be about so many things other than speech. Gently pushing aside my defenses, she reached out and down through the soul to touch me on the most elemental level. Even now, looking back from a distance of more than 40 years, and far removed from the melodrama of that period, it is hard for me to imagine who, what, or where I would be if that meeting had never taken place. Again, I exhale a sigh of relief.
It is said that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. Luckily, the teacher may also choose to appear when the student is not at all ready. She drags him, if need be kicking and screaming, into a new, more direct, but also more paradoxical relationship with the self. Socrates’ injunction, “Gnothi Seauton” or “Know Thyself,” which, according to Pausanias, was inscribed on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, is far more demanding than it has any right to be. It is a simple statement, composed of only two small words. The injunction becomes more demanding, not less, as we attempt to translate our all-too-often inflated insights into action. Who, exactly, is doing the knowing? What is the nature of the self that presents itself to be known? Perhaps what we see is the illuminated crescent at the edge of an—almost—unimaginable sphere. As with the subtle but subversive presence of the teacher, this crescent becomes more visible as we are forced to grapple with the limits of our vision, until, quite suddenly perhaps, we are led into the dark. To begin to grasp the “what” of what we are, we must let go of the fixed version of the “who.”
Is the ego the knower of the self, or is the self the knower of the ego? Perhaps the soul is itself a mask, soon to morph into a different form with the astronomical rotation of the fashion industry. Although, as a matter of convenience, I use it here, I do not like the word “ego.” Over the past six years or so, I have tended to use it less and less. I have just as little use for or patience with the all too popular term “seeker.” I far prefer Picasso’s formulation. He states—somewhat arrogantly, perhaps—“I do not seek; I find.” The term “teacher” I like more, but this term, if casually used, has problems of its own. Too many students of famous gurus, for example, can’t seem to wait to give away all of their own intuitive authority to the teacher. It can be difficult for the teacher to be idolized, either spiritually or intellectually, and many are tempted to want to turn their students into small, submissive versions of themselves. This can be as true in a PhD program in archeology as in an ashram.
Clearly, good teachers are needed to transmit information, to help students to discover themselves, and to model certain skills. We cannot do without them. Even the most abstract of knowledge is not abstract; at least in the first stages, it must come attached to a living body. In this essay, however, it is the more primal concept of “teacher”—the teacher as spiritual catalyst—that I am attempting to explore. If such teachers are, in a different way, essential, they may sometimes tend to hold themselves to a lower standard than their students: They may stamp the void with their brand; they may speak highly of their total unimportance; in an energetic contest with Joe Average, they may judge themselves the victor; they may take themselves as seriously as their most obedient followers; they may believe that the light has more to teach them than the darkness; they may take as much as they give; they may have the power to catalytically intervene but be unwilling to let go.
It is not that such teachers lack the knowledge that they claim; they may very well possess it, but they do not give it freely. They do not prefer to overflow. Rather, they choose to portion this knowledge out, and, in the process, they can come to believe their own P.R. How easy it is for the once enlightened teacher—accidentally on purpose—to be sucked into the vortex of his own charisma! Power intoxicates, and the gods do like to drink. The student may then become sadomasochistically attached to his own childhood, to the deadness of his feet and the blockage in his spine. He will not make of his heart a meeting place or expect that his head will click open like an aperture. He will see his mind as an electrochemical databank, as an empty space to be filled up with the teacher’s big ideas. He will not learn how to leap from a great height, to move into and beyond death, or to hatch the universe from an egg. He will not dare to trust that his energy is a kind of self-existent vehicle.
I think that seekers often fixate on the “shattering of the ego” as a way to prove to themselves that they actually do exist; if they do not possess any breadth of cosmic vision, they are nonetheless experts in the role from which they are trying to escape. It is far more problematic for the seeker to accept that he is where he is supposed to be, even if he has no memory at all of when this choice was made. This is not to say that he should not speak truth to power, or take action against injustice, or withhold his empathy from a person in a dead-end situation because supposedly this person has “created his own reality”; no, I say only that he should challenge himself to grasp the larger shape of his life-story, to intuit how daimon and persona fit together. The real challenge is not to be elsewhere; it is to be, more fully, here. And that, of course, is the question: just what do we mean by here?
Once, we lived in a city that we loved, a city in which humans mixed freely with the gods. That city would seem to have long ago disappeared, and yet it calls to us from the depths of the horizon. Our hand rests on the doorknob of the house where we came of age. Driven by implanted memories, the human genome dreams of a real voyage to the stars.
It is 1971. And, as my hunt for occult wealth intensifies, I am attempting to round up my predecessors. I would determine, first of all, if there was ever anyone else like me who had existed on the Earth. Arrogance and Insecurity, my twin ravens, have returned with a few drops of mercury for my cup. I have set up Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, and Giorgio de Chirico as my makeshift Holy Trinity. At midnight, periodically, a black pyramid will descend to crush my skull. This is less fun than it sounds.
In a manuscript from 1913, Giorgio de Chirico writes
To live in the world as in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious multi-colored toys which change their appearance, which, like little children, we sometimes break to see how they are made on the inside, and, disappointed, realize they are empty.1
As if to prove that my potential genius is a toy, and indifferent to the scale of my embarrassment, not de Chirico but de Chirico’s daimon seems to reach inside my head, whose contents he then removes to view them from odd angles. O infinite extension of the Argonaut! The daimon’s arrogance is breathtaking. It is clear that he feels no obligation to put the original contents back, so that de Chirico, the 1913 version, from his squalid studio in the rue Compagne-Premiere, somehow stares out of my eyes. In the end, I can barely recognize my mother, who begins to look suspiciously like a manikin, so that I jump when she suddenly appears, with a plate of sardines, at my door.
“The first man must have seen auguries everywhere,” writes de Chirico, “He must have trembled at each step that he took.”2 It is 1917. The end of the Vietnam War is at hand, and, disoriented that it is not his shrapnel wound but the flu that has carried off Apollinaire, I am recovering from a bout of nervous exhaustion in Ferrara. “Stone engineers, though silent,” I shout, “please WASH UP ON THE BEACH. Give praise to Hygenia, the Muse.” Depositing treasures, a wave lifts me, and I can hear my floorboards creak like tectonic plates. It is 1971, the year of the industrial-strength slaughter at Verdun, and I struggle to understand why I am hovering six feet above my body. My head looks fine, so why can’t I get in? Luckily, the luminous acorn of my genius is intact. Depositing treasures, a wave lifts me, and I can hear my floorboards creak like tectonic plates. When I turn, the door’s frame is the only thing that stands.
Between 1954, the year of my birth, and 1973, 4.6 million tons of explosives are dropped on North Vietnam. Eggs of jellied fire do not play favorites with the pawns of geopolitics. Napalm burns both actors and observers to the bone, and then keeps on burning, in the souls of US citizens as well. Agent Orange defoliates at least 11,969 square miles of the land that is said to be “beloved by snakes.” I am shocked by the infinitely ballooning shadow of my country, and yet, and yet, this shadow is familiar. At my feet, an abyss opens, and I stare into its depths. “How noble are your objectives!” a voice calls from below. “You have stamped your tiny foot against the Empire! You have raged against the war machine!” My innocence sticks in my throat, and I find that I cannot breathe.
Suitably chastened, I bit by bit withdraw my energies from the stage of social justice to refocus them on a more pragmatic goal, on my slapstick perfection of the role of poete maudit. My anger then prompts the transvaluation of all values. Revolution by night prompts the achievement of omnipotence, that is, of a hollow, toy-sized version thereof, which is nonetheless somewhat satisfying. Following in the sacred footsteps of Rimbaud, I do my best to practice the “systematic derangement of the senses”—as though my senses had not so far been adequately deranged, as though I had not lost some 98 percent of them at birth. I begin to wear a beret and smoke a historically-accurate clay pipe. The grand rhetorical gesture is supreme, as in this passage from A Season in Hell, in which Rimbaud reminisces that “Disaster was my god. I called to my executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. Spring brought to me the idiot’s terrifying laughter.”3
“Je est un autre,” “I is an other.”4 As was specified by Breton, true beauty should be convulsive. Nietzsche is a better friend than Jesus, who had followers, who were Christians, who in their current versions are far less likeable than when they had volunteered to be martyrs. What a nerve to have chickened out on the Apocalypse, the one in 72 AD. An experience of the “Eternal Return” is triggered by the turning pedals of my bicycle. It is almost certain that, any day now, Parmenides will provide me with the key to perpetual motion. A dragonfly landing on a milkweed pod is somehow taken for a prophesy. Yogic breathing exercises will yet give birth to a race of cyborg Ubermenchen. Always, the entire visible world is about to pass out of existence.
If I, as “Brian George,” now exist in more than one location, you must place the blame squarely on the other one, the other Brian, who is dead. As the bird-chirps of the Underworld echo in my ears, I can feel the hand of a goddess still resting on my shoulder.
The process of self-discovery is a paradoxical one, as I have said, which for most of us demands the steady hand of a guide, of a living person who is fated to perform the role of the psychopomp. His or her magnetic power draws us into the orbit of the self. The teacher confronts us with an inexplicable presence, a presence which, as we torture our minds to demystify its movements, we understand less and less. There is no way to encircle the motives of such a presence in advance. They cannot be grasped from the outside in, or as a matter of theory. They are always more and other than they were. For each clear purpose, there is always an unmediated shadow, within which a far vaster purpose breathes. Given the importance of this role—the fact that billions of bits of information may not add up to real knowledge, and that knowledge, left to its own devices, is no substitute for vision—it is shocking that students can go from k-1 through grade 12 without ever meeting a teacher who might serve in this capacity. But then again, a public school is probably the last place that one should expect to find such guidance, and the tarred and feathered pyschopomp would most often be run out of town on a rail.
What would have happened to me if I had not met this particular teacher when I did, if she had travelled to some city other than Worcester from Ohio, if she had made use of the more typical “one-size-fits-all” approach, if the snakes from Minos had not wrapped around her arms? I might have eventually become more or less who or what I am—assuming that I did not slip and fall into psychosis—but I would lack a sense of trust in the origin of things, a sense of confidence equal to my desire for self-realization. As self-determined as I like to believe myself to be, so much of what and who I am is the result of the well-timed intervention of others, in this case Sue Castigliano, who so generously gave what I could not provide for myself.
Through the years of adolescent angst, I had grown away from childhood without making any progress towards adulthood. My parents had divorced when I was four years old, and my mother never quite recovered from the experience. From the time of their divorce until the day he died, my mother spoke less than a hundred words to my father. His name had gone into her black book of real and imagined wrongs. She did not forgive. It would not be taken out. As though out of nowhere, the happy nuclear family had exploded. I remember the shock of being evicted from the garden, at whose gate a fiery sword revolved. I remember how, in the short period before this, I would get into fistfights for no particular reason, from a sheer excess of energy, for the joy of it. I would wake up singing with the birds without even being aware that I was singing. How I treasure those few early years as an extrovert.
At the age of five, I had been unofficially appointed to serve as a kind of surrogate parent for my mother. As though she and not I were in need, I would sometimes rock her as she sobbed, uncontrollably, in my arms. I had to pretend to be strong enough for both of us.
I was left with an unacknowledged sense of abandonment. Distantly aware of being angry, perhaps a bit more aware of having lost my sense of trust, of the ache in my heart, I knew these emotions only through their symptoms. I did not choose to confront my reflection in the mirror, for fear of falling through. I no longer enjoyed getting into fistfights; it had become a chore, not a pleasure. Instead, I got into arguments, in which I would go to any lengths to prove the dolt-like nature of my opponents. Somewhat later, starting in my senior year of high school—at the same time, curiously, that I took my first literary baby steps—I would often be very hesitant to drift off into sleep, for fear that I would not know who I was when I woke up, of not being sane. Planets would taunt me with their superior musical ability. I could barely play the recorder. I went through a long period of being terrified of perspective. I saw distance as a threat. I would not allow my eyes to drift down the converging lines of Main Street, for fear that I might be sucked out of my skin, for fear that the horizon would eat me. I was careful to focus only on signs and objects in the foreground.
Black magic had turned the too conscientious child into a headless plastic doll. “What a stupid place the world is,” it thought. “Let me share my new-found freedom.” Where the self should be, there were atoms, clashing. There were voids inside of voids. Used to being around adults, I could camouflage my thoughts in articulate form. On a good day, I could pass for a responsible young revolutionary. In due course, my comrades would overthrow the government. The industrial age would spontaneously combust. Chants would levitate the Pentagon. An urban gorilla at 17, I could strip and reassemble my attitude like an AK 47. Bourgeois robots would creak and beg for oil on a forced march to the amber fields of grain. A part of me was still very much a child, hurt and confused, who had no desire to expose his vulnerabilities to others. I wanted to disappear into the branches of my favorite apple tree, to daydream for hours as the clouds changed shape, to feel the Earth darken as the afternoon wore on. I would watch in secret as smoke billowed from a factory, beneath whose stacks the ant-sized workers crawled.
I cannot say exactly how Sue Castigliano changed me. I can only say that through and because of her a change took place. Stepping from the cave-mouth of a dream, the Goddess of Active Listening took my hand. By the end of the year, my concept of strength had been dissolved and reconfigured. I was less afraid of fear. Without yet knowing how to access what I knew, I had begun to see my wounds as so much raw material, the dark matter with which an alchemist might one day create wealth. It is as though my teacher had said, “What you see before you is now yours for the asking. The world is no longer a vast and anonymous space. It is a book that waits to be opened. Here, open it, and read.”
Notes
- Giorgio de Chirico, “Manuscript from the Collection of Paul Eluard,” from Giorgio de Chirico, James Thrall Soby, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966, page 246 ↩︎
- Giorgio de Chirico, “Manuscript from the Collection of Paul Eluard,” from Giorgio de Chirico, James Thrall Soby, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966, page 248 ↩︎
- Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, translated by Wallace Fowlie, The University of Chicago Press, 1966, page 173 ↩︎
- Letter to Paul Demeny, Charleville, 15 May 1871 ↩︎
Lit from behind, she shines darkly.
“You are neither here nor there,
a hurry through which known and strange things pass…
and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”
S. Heaney
Hi Brian:
This second installment of your piece more humanizes the content under consideration. The part where you mention the divorce of your parents and how that left you feeling moves me to sympathy. I can see you there in the past as a youth bursting with potential and possibility, and because of it, when not acting impulsively and crackling with arrogance, overcome with fear and anxiety, and in your troubled disorientation rendered incredibly awkward, at times behaving truly bizarre to the concern of the guardian adults around you.
This I see is where Sue Castigliano, your speech teacher during your senior year at Doherty Memorial High School, proved to be a saving grace to you. I can’t say I was lucky enough to have that kind of encounter at that age. I have a gift for slipping through the cracks and staying under the radar. At any rate, I do remember with warm fondness a teacher I had in elementary school named Mrs. Seahigh, who made learning exciting and fun, but I didn’t experience my encounter with her at the time as if I was in the presence of an incarnation of the Goddess.
Maybe I’m a reminder, one of the many living cautionary tales around you, of what might have become of you if you had never met Sue Castigliano. I know I can be maddeningly oblique. I have this hard underlying skepticism which gets me crawling around in the dark hidden places and taking a saw to the stilts of those who rise up, wobbling around, talking above the heads of others as if they are so exceptional and magnificent. I know my sarcasm and tendency to satire to be a stimulant and corrective always teetering on the edge of backfiring and turning into an irritant.
In my youth and in my own high school years when not argumentative and a smartass I turned terribly shy and introverted. One thing I did in my attempt to overcome those two poles and escape the prison of myself was turn clownish. I think I still retain the tendency. I wonder to what extent, deep down, we really change.
That being said, my encounter and relationship with you has been very important to me. Though sometimes it might not seem like it, I have great respect for you, for your overall serene temper, for your sensitivity and patience, and the highest admiration for you for your work ethic, the work through the years you have stayed with even in the deepest isolation and brought as near to completion as possible. You have not broken in frustration and shattered in rage the containers entrusted to you by the Goddess, but filled them to the brim and now leave them to be raised to the lips of others. The irony now, however, may be that they are placed in a temple on a mountain, and one must trek and climb quite a way to get to them, and even then, if one arrives, one needs help from a team of others or through the use of a crane or other machinery tipping one of them to drink from it. These containers of yours are enormous. If one of them tips over and falls, a river would rage and roar out of the opening.
I think you have moved from being a kind of fatherly figure to me to being more like a brother now. I think this is a testament to the kind of teacher you have turned out to be. I do think for the most part you practice what you preach as described in this installment of your piece. God forbid I become like you - Ha! But as made clear in your piece, you wouldn’t want me to be.
I sincerely love you for this, Brian.
P. S. I came across the following quote a couple months ago and thought of you:
Michel Carrouges, Andre Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism (1974):
“Poems are really disorientation maps. They violently cast a gleam of irrationality, a disintegrating and subversive light over the breadth of this world, a light which bursts upon the poet and is reflected on the reader. The point of a poem is not to gather together a museum of poetic expressions that one has only to admire passively, but to put into circulation mental explosives destined to blow up the walls of habit and inertia.”
P. P. S. This is beautiful, Maia: “Lit from behind, she shines darkly.” It makes me think of the hidden alchemy and slow, often agonizing transformation which takes place between a youth and a student and an elder and a teacher, how Sue Castigliano first appeared to Brian George in his youth and how he might regard her now that he has achieved the age she was when he first encountered her. One thinks of both a lunar and a solar eclipse.
A very generous reply, generous in sharing yourself and toward Brian and his work.
I find myself mostly speechless after reading Goddess as Active Listener, and so I believe as Brian has said, if there is silence in response, respond with silence. In that silence, a few words might surface and so I offered those few. (To be honest, I do still feel inhibitions in speaking about my personal life here on line, still somewhat too public for me.) Another thing is that, in a way, my response to Goddess is the same response I had to Autumnal Fallout, a kind of praise that isn’t so much about the specific sentences or images, because there are too many and they are nearly worlds in themselves, but about the inspirational ramifications and revelations that are aroused as I— reader/writer-- take them in and live with them.
Thanks, Maia
Hi Maia:
Totally understand your reservations if not inhibition sharing more personal details about your life online. I myself grow uneasy, sometimes frankly disgusted, at some of the self-indulgent displays of intoxicated subjectivity I have witnessed. If one engages with that, one can end up feeling held captive by another’s public working out of unresolved personal business, that projecting and superimposing of what haunts from the past ensnaring those who unwittingly step into the trap, and suddenly one can find oneself being cornered and badgered into playing a role that one didn’t sign up for.
I’m not certain from some familiarity now with Brian’s work that this broader overall effect it has of straining out the few more serious readers from the many and of those few tending to test them to the point of reducing even them to silence, or to the point of arresting or freezing their ability to speak, is ultimately good or a virtue. For all the richness and greatness of his lines set against an epic or cosmic backdrop, something in what he has so impressively accomplished is also perpetually self-undermining. He goes from leading one to bask in the glory of the absolute and all to, in the blink of an eye, reducing all back to null and void. He has admitted to creating trapdoors.
The serpent swallows its own tail, and while it does this with an instinct for infinity, in the giant circle or rather ellipse it has formed as it slithers around and around, which expands and contracts uncannily in synch with Brian’s breathing, is where the chest of wisdom is kept with lid tauntingly and teasingly flung open. We the readers stand back and from a safe distance see the jewels and rare objects subtly and brilliantly gleaming in the shadowed cavity, but instead of leaping over the scales of the serpent slithering around and around with its tail deep in its throat, and going to touch and handle what is there at the center and seeming to be under protection, we rather, frozen to the spot, look on in fascination and dread and with an impending sense of danger. One hesitates and wonders if that particular wisdom is worth dying for. One does wonder if what can be seen there is only an illusion, is Fools’ Gold, or if the whole setup may be a series of incredibly clever and artfully conceived sleights and feigns and deliberate delays and misdirections aimed to wear one down and lead one into a trap, or to extinction. Maybe the ultimate aim of Brian’s work is precisely gradual exhaustion through an increasingly complicated and elaborate series of disillusionments, preparing one finally to awaken and to blossom when the rod of the Master is brought down, striking one hard at the exact moment the fruit is ripe and ready to fall.
In another way it’s like Brian has constructed highly unusual but compellingly unique architecture which one might like to visit, but never actually live in. I don’t personally feel at home in his vast rooms of architecture hammered out and constructed from the biggest and hardest lines imaginable. The atmosphere at least in the outer rooms of that labyrinthine piece of architecture is not warm and inviting but intensely cold and oppressive. That of course may be by design. I stand back in horror thinking that if I get too involved with his work, if I get lost in it, I may end up having the bones of my skeleton decorating the frame of a doorway and my skull mounted on a wall of one of those spacious and echoey outer rooms I’ve taken a wrong turn in before!
I much appreciate you making your presence felt here, Maia. Maybe we could huddle together in this cold and cavernous darkness and with two good dry twigs or by striking two flinty stones together over shreds of newspaper and straw tugged out of an old broom try to start a little fire.
Hi Maya,
You wrote, “Lit from behind, she shines darkly.” This anticipates a sentence from part five—"When I remember her, I think of a face that encompasses multitudes, whose each component is distinct, the dark face of the goddess, projected against lowering clouds.”
Hi John,
You wrote, “I can see you there in the past as a youth bursting with potential and possibility, and because of it, when not acting impulsively and crackling with arrogance, overcome with fear and anxiety, and in your troubled disorientation rendered incredibly awkward, at times behaving truly bizarre to the concern of the guardian adults around you.” Adults were at times concerned about me, not necessarily for the right reasons. Like you, I tended to "slip between the cracks” of the one-size-fits-all educational system of the time. There was, in general, a much more laissez faire approach to raising children. “Have fun! Don’t get killed! Come back for supper!” We would scamper off to climb a wrought-iron railroad bridge and swing above a train.
In addition, although I did not engage in any criminal activity, I was really very sneaky. For example, there was an 80-year-old man who lived in a large house on our street. My friends and I set up a clubhouse in his basement. It took him six months to discover us and kick us out. (Well, I guess that might be criminal.) If I wanted to hitchhike with my girlfriend to a folk concert or whatever, I would simply tell my mother, “Off to a religious conference for the weekend!” (I was a member of LRY, a countercultural Unitarian church group, made up of 90 percent non-Unitarians.) This always worked.
During my last two years of high school, I probably could have used some psychological help, although finding a Jungian therapist in Worcester at the time would have been a challenge. Such well-meaning interventions as did occur were of the ridiculous sort. During “parents night” at the start of my junior year, my poetry teacher, Mr. George—no relation—informed my mother that he was quite concerned about my unhealthy interest in Edgar Allen Poe. Who knew where such preoccupations might lead? A year later, the head librarian, “Eagle Claw Kiley,” would hover by the library door, waiting for me to pass. Her eagle claw would then latch onto my arm and I would be dragged into her office. There, she would lecture me on the dangerousness of Nietzsche and the evils of French Existentialism. I am sure she meant well, but it was hard to see what was going on behind all of the flying spit. One reason that Sue Castigliano had such an impact on me is that no one had ever really noticed me at all—not, at least, in terms of seeing into me, of calling attention to talents I didn’t know I had, and of catalyzing some dormant aspect of my soul.
__
Absolutely fantastic quote from “Michel Carrouges, Andre Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism (1974)” I was not familiar with it, and I will have to find out more.
“I never tire of burning, Lord; I wonder if I am a moth. I do not care what happens to me; I wonder if I am mad.”—Nuri
“Come, lovers, come! Our destination is not far off…I take hold of my teacher’s skirt as if it were my mother’s waist.”—Yunus Emre
“Life is brutal, and full of traps.”—a humorous Polish proverb
“Do not sing, nightingale, for my garden is desolate; O Friend, because of your pain I am on fire…”—Pir Sultan Abdal
Hi Maia and John,
Let me address a question posed by your responses: Is my writing full of traps—or trap doors—or is it designed to be of use? The answer, as you might very well expect, is “both/and.” I do not see these options as being mutually exclusive. The traps to which I referred in an earlier comment are traps that are woven into the visionary space itself. In such a space, false certainty is a threat—far more of a threat than the mischievous nature of the poet—in that the intellect is not prepared to confront its underpinnings or to move with the mercurial responsiveness that is needed. In Egyptian cosmology, according to Schwaller de Lubicz, life is a kind of reversal; “styptic fire” prompts the sea of primordial oneness to contract. Death or illumination is then the “reversal of a reversal.” On the level of aesthetics, a trap can also serve as the reversal of a reversal, as a poke—playful or otherwise—to remind the reader that things may not be as they seem. The reader should, perhaps, look past the details to take in the bigger picture, or he should find the significant detail in the otherwise too grand spectacle. Each correct response may come with an equally suspect motive.
In Yoga, there are often said to be four states, which are defined as “Jagrat,” or waking; “Svapna,” or dreaming, “Susupti,” or deep sleep, and a fourth state, called “Turiya,” which perhaps can be defined as “other” or “prior” or “post.” Of Turiya, verse seven of the Mandukua Upanishad says that it is “not cognitive, not non-cognitive, unseen, with which there can be no dealing, ungraspable, having no distinctive mark, non-thinkable, that cannot be designated, the essence of assurance…” If it is the goal of a yogi to reach towards such a state, to then stabilize his energies and seat himself within it, the role of the visionary poet is less linear, less traditionally acceptable, perhaps, and more peculiar. He/she must come and go. He must not defined by an attachment to the heights. She must not be governed by a fear of the abyss. Familiar with all spaces but at home in none, he/she must improvise an asymmetric discipline. With each turn, they must test the intelligence of the wind.
There are those who argue that no actions can take place in Turiya, that its mode of expression is not to speak at all, that it has jettisoned the three other states like the stages of a rocket. I would argue that it permeates and supports the other three; being prior to them, it succeeds them. Since these three states of expression follow from the fourth, Turiya is not bound by a particular location. With its eyes closed, it can see. Without hands, it can reach into the center of an atom. If it has no role that is specific to itself, this does not mean that it has no urge to play. While I am far from this fourth state in my daily interactions, while I should probably make no claim to even guessing what it is, when I write, I do feel pulled towards a mode of awareness that is other than waking or dreaming. Not pausing to explain itself, a call rises from the depths. I have no desire to beat up the reader with demands. These demands—which do exist, and which may lead some to accuse me of pointless complexity or coldness—have more to do with the demands that I put upon myself, or, from a different angle, with the demands that are imposed upon me by some alternate version of the self.
It has been almost 48 years now—with Year One the period in which this essay is set, when I was 16 and a senior at Doherty High—since I first made contact with what I have called here the “alternate version of the self,” although to call this mystery a “self” at all is no doubt to mistake its boundaries. Viewed one way, this self is a “treasure that is waiting to be known,” a potential to be called from hiding through the presence of the Beloved. (We, like the luminous seed of the first beings, have a tendency to wait, to belatedly discover what we had cast down from the stars.) Viewed a different way, this self is a pattern—at least partially present before birth—that must be activated by the intervention of the Daimon, though a series of gifts and lessons that often take the form of ordeals. To begin to intuit the agenda of this self is to see that the trials to which it subjects one are not personal.
There were certainly periods—during the mid-1990s, say—when my work was truly inaccessible, and not in a good way, when it was ecstatic but utterly arcane, when it and the person who produced it had lost touch with most normal day to day experience. During this period of transition, when I was trying to integrate my earlier avant-garde objectives with a new-found spiritual scope, I showed my work to almost no one. This was before I started to write prose. By the end of that decade, happily married and with a child, I found that I could not continue on this path. Since then, I have done my best to make my language as clear as it is challenging. I have no desire to make unreasonable demands, however these might be defined; rather, I would like to invite the reader to come with me on a voyage. Most writers want to be read. I also want to be read, but, more importantly, it is my hope that my work will be of use. Here, a second question could perhaps be posed. Q: “Do you really think that your work is user-friendly?” A: “It is far more user-friendly than before.”
Illustration: Max Ernst, “Surrealism and Painting”
Not the gardener, not the garden, I’m
a hazelnut in the trickster’s pocket, stolen
from my grove—bound now in a clay pot
bare and silent—
until he throws the bones, and loses —
I never see it coming—
birdsong, green lightning! leaps
along the hidden spring
The above is from the last section of Still Life, in which I was attempting to speak of, let’s say, the “marvelous trapdoor”, mirror image of the one John and others find and fear in your writing. There are many trapdoors, not all of them terrifying, none of them mapped or avoidable. Your “demands” as writer are, to me, not demanding, they are not even invitations, but gifts. A real gift is one neither you nor the recipient have any hold on. It can be taken in or discarded. Though not given back. “You” as writer are not the same you as the one before happily marrying and becoming a father. Did you choose to write differently, or did that other you write from himself discovering its difference? Does it matter?
The question of “user friendly” writing is not a simple one, it’s one I wrestle with every day, and there is no resolution because the answer is always changing and is, as you remind us, like reality itself, “not as it seems”.
I empathize with anyone who recoils from a universe that feels malign or even indifferent. But it’s not that simple, the universe I experience if I am whole is always changing and always flowing as Heraclitus insists. It’s a trickster, it’s …the more ancient version of the tale of Medusa in which she is a breath-takingly beautiful being who wants not to be pursued for beauty’s sake, but…for all of herself…and so she wears over her beauty, a fright mask of horror—her snake-hair reveals how much has already been lost from the world when the serpent of wisdom and transformation has become “merely” frightening in the eyes of men who believe they’ve tamed like a horse, the sword that loves to cut head from tail. Seeing her, they see themselves. Which is unbearable. They are turned to stone. And that’s where the story pauses. Until later when the warrior-hero is dragged into the story and with his polished shield looks on her without terror. And what is his first act? To approach and find her mask removed? Is it to speak, to ask the eternal questions? How to “reach into the center” of a drop of water? How to sing the blood into motion again? No. His first act is to repeat himself, to cut off her head and wear its image as a trophy. To miss who she is forever. Or until the Fates take pity on him and… but that’s another story.
What I am trying to say so circuitously (this loop through Medusa was unpremeditated)
can only be said, circuitously.
Which is to say, Brian, I find your reply to John’s comment to be accurate. I say this not because I know, but because the universe you evoke resembles the one I live in.
You wrote: " it’s like Brian has constructed highly unusual but compellingly unique architecture which one might like to visit, but never actually live in. "
As I wrote in response to Brian below, I empathize with anyone who descerns the terror or hellish aspects of the universe/world. And with anyone who discerns her other aspects and takes only one to be the true one. Separated, they are unbearable. On the one hand, because for a human being, an ordinary self, the beautiful comes to an end. On the other, because the terrifying is also true. Where is there any comfort or consolation? Only in the Whole. In whole moments. The two together, As when poisonous gases and caustic metals come to gether to create Water and Salt. But there is never more than a rest, as at the end of a piece of music, there come pauses. When I am lost in the cold windowless hallways, the smallest kindness is the greatest blessing. When I am found with a friend (or not) among the trees listening to mockingbird hidden in the leaves, it’s still all true—the smallest kindness is bliss.
“Maybe the ultimate aim of Brian’s work is precisely gradual exhaustion through an increasingly complicated and elaborate series of disillusionments, preparing one finally to awaken and to blossom when the rod of the Master is brought down, striking one hard at the exact moment the fruit is ripe and ready to fall.”
I don’t think this is the aim of Brian’s writing, don’t think any aim would describe it. It’s a meander through certain veins, translucent ones, which go where they go. Along the way, terrors and wonders. Yes, in life, nothing feels so real as “the Master…striking one hard” ---- except when we see he is no master at all, and that the falling fruit is falling, indeed, and we will never know why or where. Or never for long. Or fully. And that this small blaze in the heart, this ripeness, this kindness, is warmth enough.
Hi Brian and Maia:
I’m glad I could be a productive goad. Such excellent responses from both of you. There is so much good content to contemplate here, and I feel gratitude. I love your spontaneous, intuitive way of responding, Maia. You appear to be more in touch with the spirit world than I am. I absolutely welcome, and as “man the unfruitful animal” need, what you do and offer. I hope you continue to give where you see fit, where you see branches are drooping and where water and sunlight is needed. And Brian, of course I knew all that was in you, and that there is much more where that came from. One must make you into a piñata sometimes and with a blindfold on take a good whack at you with a stick, if one is to get any of the gifts which are hidden inside.
I still think the silence your work generally induces when left to itself is not a good sign. Question the wind all you want, it will only keep doing what it does and blow wave upon wave of sand against your work, until it is not only covered but buried and possibly forgotten forever.
This leads me to ask (with a glint in my eye and a mischievous smile on my face): Who have you hired to be your groundskeepers and your gardeners? Who have you hired to do the housekeeping in that immense labyrinthine architecture you have constructed? It may be that a newly hired housekeeper, part of a whole team of them, wanders off alone, turns down a corridor, and then another and another, twisting and turning down more and more corridors and getting lost, and then in a panic climbs down through a trapdoor, and discovers at the foot of a shattered mirror the mortal remains of a previous housekeeper which needs to be cleaned up!
The cry cannot be heard through all the maze of walls and ceilings and floors:
“Ariadne, help! Where are you? Where is your thread to help guide me back out?”
Hi John,
As you so often insist, silence is sometimes the best response.
There is a very ancient saying that when silence falls, it means that Hermes- (seen or unseen) has come into the room
Hi Brian:
Thank you for emailing to me this essay “Writing” by W.H. Auden. Thoroughly invigorating! As you wrote: “ I came across this terrific essay by W.H. Auden that I thought you might enjoy. It is something of a masterpiece of incisive wit and observations. I only agree with maybe 60-70 percent of what he says, but this is of no account. Auden’s poems from the 30s and early 40s hold up incredibly well. Not too much afterwards, he began to second-guess himself. His later cuts to these early poems are invariably off the mark, and, in spite of continued technical virtuosity, he seems to have become increasingly timid and more conventional with age. He was a genuinely original and peculiar character, though, and this change in attitude really only affected the adventurousness of the poetry. In essays and interviews, he never ceased to be a hoot.”
For anyone who chances upon this thread and wants to read Auden’s essay here’s the link :
Auden himself has something of an answer to my last comment to you wondering about groundskeepers, gardeners and housekeepers for the upkeep and maintenance around and inside such labyrinthine pieces of architecture you have created which embody and reflect the world:
“To keep his errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.”
Hi Maia,
In a recent email, you had asked if I was familiar with the Latin maxim “Vulnerant omnes; ultima necat.” I was not, but I looked it up. I was just about to send my response when I realized that it tied into certain aspects of “The Goddess as Active Listener,” so I thought that I would post it here in the forum. This response also touches on John’s critique of the “coldness” of my perspective. It is not really up to me to accept or deny the charge of coldness; this is John’s perfectly reasonable response to the spaces that I open up. My own perspective grows from attitudes that perhaps are not too generally shared. From an early age—from the period in which this essay is set—I have been preoccupied with a number of questions, among which are the following:
Is there a hard and fast boundary between life and death?
Is it possible to journey back and forth?
Is what we are able to grasp during life a small fragment of a vastly larger data bank, and is there some way to gain access to this field of interconnections, if only for a few moments at a stretch?
Although some large percentage of our identity perhaps falls away after death, is there some part of who or what we are that persists, in spite of any breaks or interruptions?
Is there some sort of multi-incarnational project in which we have chosen to play a role, and how would this change our attitude towards the trials of the moment?
What, exactly, is a teacher, and what role does the teacher play in the shaping of this drama?
Does this relationship also last for eons, however it might wax and wane?
How and when should the teacher intervene, and when should he/she let the student make mistakes?
This is a small meditation on the Latin maxim in question:
“Vulnerant omnes; ultima necat”—“All hours wound; the last one kills.” If you start with the intuition or perception that the human body/mind is an image of the cosmos, life itself is a kind of wound. The image of the “cleft” is everywhere apparent in Mesoamerican mythology—the idea that any act of creation is simultaneously an act of division, which, on the level of human experience, can also be perceived as an act of destruction. Teotihuacan is built at the base of the cleft mountain Cerro Gordo. The heads of many Olmec sculptures are cleft or in other ways draw attention to a division at the top center of the skull. In the highest reaches of the Aztec sky, you have Ometeotl, a god who is also a pair of gods, Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, the Lord and Lady of Duality. Between 2002 and 2004, I did a series of heads that also shared this preoccupation with the natal cleft. This sense that creation and destruction are aspects of each other is, of course, present in many other traditions as well. The Kabbalistic concept of Zimzum, or primordial contraction, has had a great impact on my way of thinking—the idea that g-d, being everywhere, had to contract in order to create a somewhere, a space for individual beings to exist and grow. Again, this act of creation was also an act of destruction, or, more specifically, obscuration. On the level of human history, this stage-space was projected away from the origin and into time, which resulted in the experience of exile.
I am not so sure that it is actually the last hour that kills. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, which changed drastically between the time that I got out of high school, in 1972, and the time that my mother sold the family house, in 1998. From at least the time of the WW2 until the early 1970s, Worcester was regarded as the industrial heart of New England. When my mother was growing up during the war, the city would have black out alerts due to fear of Nazi bombers. Then, starting in the 1960s, bit by bit at first and then faster and faster, the factories started to close. Of the perhaps 120 factories that were there when I was growing up, I think that two are left. The removal of the industrial base brought with it a wrenching but, for the most part, only partially acknowledged sense of nihilism and despair. This went beyond the simple fact that people need jobs to support themselves and their families. As unsatisfying as the majority of jobs tend to be, they also provide structure, some approximation of meaning.
By 1972, Worcester was known less for its industrial production than for serving as the hub of the East Coast heroin trade. Although, in retrospect, Main South Worcester was not a bad place to grow up, I sometimes wonder how much of the growing despair and alienation I could pick up on as a high school student. I remember reading Cesar Vallejo as a senior. “You people are dead, but what a strange manner of being dead; anyone might say that you were not.” “Yes!” I thought. This attitude was, of course, partly just a question of my own adolescent arrogance, but could it also have been a perception of the shape of things to come? I remember visiting my mother and my grandmother in the 1980s, and, everywhere I looked, there were people in their early 30s who looked like they were closer to 60. By their early 30s, these people had already done whatever it was they knew how to do. There were no points on the horizon that might help to organize their energies. They cared for little beyond the fact of their existence. Just in the house next door, there was a mother who would send out her son to play in the street, hoping that he would be hit by a car so that they would be able to collect the insurance. They were able to collect three times. There was another family—seemingly a transplant from the Appalachians although they were born in Worcester—who would sit on their front porch drinking and getting into fights for about 16 hours out of every 24. At one point they bought a megaphone, and they would take turns yelling about the various sex acts they wanted to engage in with each other. Incest as a favorite subject, and it was not theoretical. I remember thinking on these visits home, “Perhaps I was not that far off in high school. There are many ways to die, and many people die before their time; they die while they are still alive.”
This critique of working class—well, I guess not “working class” but perhaps “ex-working-class”—bad habits no doubt sounds more critical than I intend. If you are living in a materialistic culture and the material base is suddenly yanked away, it does not leave any solid ground beneath your feet, any belief system to fall back on, any cosmology to explain the meaning of your exile. If you feel that life does not present you with any choices, if there is no larger context that gives meaning to your wounds, it is certainly possible to become a “hungry ghost” long before your physical death. On the other hand, if you regard your physical death as just another form of transition, an opportunity for growth, if you spend the decades leading up to it in focused preparation, then the moment of death may be a wound that turns into a door. The last hour may have “killed” you, yes, but only in a slightly different way than the ones that came before it. In passing, you take note of the closing of a door.
Illustrations:
Brian, thank you for this wonderful essay-response to my Latin phrase.
Sometime during my meditation training with an ex-monk/science geek, I found myself revisiting an experience called “Dissolution” (Bhanga : Sanskrit, something like knowledge of dissolution) in which you see and experience death everywhere, everyone is a walking skeleton, the birds are singing dead avian arias, and so on. It was also true, he used to say, that we die with every breath. And that every death we choose, teaches us what we need to know, where we need to go. That the two primordial creative forces are: Strewing and Gathering, Expanding and Contracting… the names continue on…two being the original creating/ severing, or as others say, the emptying that fills the world.
When my life=partner died, I experienced his death as an ongoing supernova in which “he” simultaneously flew outward in all directions and contracted to a point. “He” gave away everything and more as the imploding/exploding star gives away its elements coalescing into planets and moons, water and water bears, zebras and zebra finches, every ash a cloud-seed. Not my first experience of death, but the one that most transformed my relationship to it. Is still transforming…
“I put unbearable pain into cold water
which sits on the backs of desolate clouds…”
(David Oliveira)
The wound becomes a door, is left ajar
Maia
PS: Your Split Head is an amazing piece of work!
What you hold to be the case is certainly unconventional, Brian. A kiss from death isn’t necessarily conducive to warming the cockles of the heart. Just ask any maiden. In traveling between the worlds of life and death, leaving behind life and spending some time where a ribcage is played like a xylophone, it goes without saying that some of what might be attributable to death, decomposition and stripping away and getting down to rock and bone, if internalized, does rub off on one, and does, touching one, send a chill down the spine and in turn can make one feel by one’s touch that one can instantly wither flowers, or dry up the milk in the breasts of a mother. Moses came down from the mountain with his hair and beard snowy white. Pushing into the marrow of the bone, and pushing beyond into the hubris of imagination, nibbling on food perhaps not meant for humans, it could give one for a time, reaching out from the warm-blooded mammals we actually are, the belief, or I would say delusion, that we ourselves have actually crossed to the other side and in the Otherness become deities with special powers. The shaman may place himself on the threshold between life and death and turn himself into a door, giving us a glimpse of what might be on the other side, but I maintain there is a limit to what such a vision can show us. I don’t think we can literally pass through the door and ever come back.
I suspect deep down our darkest visions of death are still woven into the tapestry of life. I think Maia’s way of wording it is accurate, casting it in terms of an ever-changing relationship to it. But once it is fully embodied, Atropos, one of the three fates, cuts the thread, the flame goes out, the curtain drops, and that is the end.
Though clearly I’m inclined to skepticism, this is definitely an interesting question you pose: “Although some large percentage of our identity perhaps falls away after death, is there some part of who or what we are that persists, in spite of any breaks or interruptions?”
On a personal level, reading that death is a door kind of takes me aback. I understand your meaning envisioning it that way, I understand it symbolically, but having witnessed in loved ones death up close and burrowing into the flesh, taking over the body and one by one snapping the cords connecting it to life, death’s rattle waiting in the end to sound in the throat, I have come to believe that it would be of small comfort to tell that to someone who is actually dying. If you told me death is a door on my deathbed and tried to convince me of it, with full and pregnant irony I’d feel like calling for the nurse to have you escorted out of the door.
But I wouldn’t actually do that, or it would take quite a while to bring me to that point, because I like you too much. The sparks we create together would warm me and bring me back to life! I’d probably reply to you with a wry look on my face, “Tell me more, Brian, and don’t spare me all the details which fall like grains of sand through the hourglass: once I pass away I’ll have all the time in the world.”
“Vulnerant omnes; ultima necat”—“All hours wound; the last one kills.”
Looking back over this I see how this might lead into a semantic exploration of what death is and what it means. There’s a way that you worded your comment, Brian, that I don’t necessarily disagree with. The moment of death may begin long before it actually happens.
I recall in a previous comment Maia mentioned the self as being perhaps an illusion. The “I” is perhaps an illusion. But it’s an illusion I’d say all bound up and entwined with our mortality. I thus have a sense of self. I feel there is a John Dockus as distinct from a Brian George and a Maia and so forth. I feel there are individualities. But we have an excruciatingly hard time untangling and extracting ourselves from this illusion. The stress-and-tension filled points of contact and the collisions between what is finite and will come to an end which we subjectively experience, the “death” of the self, the aging and deterioration and eventual “ending-of-the-functioning” of the body, and what will continue to live can either cause us incredible and unspeakable pain and agony and sorrow, or if reversed and there is some success in untangling and extracting, can lead I suppose to a release into boundless joy and energy in recognition that Thou art That. I can’t say I’m quite there yet. (It’s obvious by my comments and by what a pain in the ass I can be, ha ha.) It could be said, I suppose, in some higher sphere of understanding, that there is no such thing as death, that there are only transitions which take place in what seems to be an infinite continuum.
I just want to add this, because the last thing I want to do is to kill this conversation.
Hi John,
I must admit that I have been taken aback by the harsh and accusatory tone of a number of your recent comments. The majority of your arguments seem designed to put me on the defensive, to force me to defend and justify my style of writing, my way of thinking, my spiritual method, and my vision. This gets old very quickly. The framing of issues in this way does not seem likely to foster an open exchange of experiences or to lead to a productive discussion. I am very glad that you added your most recent comment, which helps to open things up again.
The list of questions that I posed in my comment to Maia were also written with you in mind. I was hoping that they might help to shed some light on the context of my explorations. Much of what I have written in “The Goddess as Active Listener” will not make any sense to a reader wo believes that life begins and ends with a single lifetime, that the personal self does not exist in a state of tension with some larger self, and that consciousness is produced by and limited to the electrochemical activity of the brain. Clearly, these questions are presented as questions, as prompts for active imagination. They are not designed to be answers. And if these questions are not investigated with some degree of psychic freedom, if the reader is not willing to question his own automatic responses, then they will only lead in a circle back to that person’s existing beliefs.
In responding to your last two comments, I want to be mindful of the fact that your father has recently passed away. I have enormous respect for the fact that you took care of him through his illness and that you were with him when he passed away. The emotions stirred up by these experiences were, I am sure, complex and overwhelming. I do not want to say anything that might disturb the way you have chosen to process them. It is not my intention here or elsewhere to tell anyone else what they should feel or think or do. I will only say that I have also lost relatives and friends, and that my attitude towards death is somewhat different. It is not only different from your own attitude, it is also different in different contexts and different from one moment to the next.
I think that your closeness to your father during the long process of his illness has perhaps kept the physical details of illness and death at the forefront of your mind. My earliest memory of death is physical in this way. When I was eight years old, I used to stop by to visit an elderly woman, Mrs. Marble, who lived about ten houses away from me on our street. She had a little dog, a Scottie, that I loved, and we used to talk over milk and cookies. One day, when I knocked, she did not answer the door. I went back off and on for the better part of a week. At times, I could hear the dog barking. Finally, I asked my family what we should do, and they notified the police. I was there when they found Mrs. Marble and took her out of the house. Her body was swollen and almost black, and the sight of it haunted me for months. Much more recently, in 2004, my friend Harlan Welsh passed away. This happened in June, and his body was not in good shape when it was finally discovered by our mutual friend Kosta. Harlan was my age, so I was certainly upset that he had passed before his time. We had been very close for years and then drifted out of touch and/or had a parting of the ways in the mid-90s. I had always assumed that there would be a reconnection, a renewal of our rapport. I still feel a wrenching sense of loss when I think of him, due both to his untimely death and to the impossibility of taking action on our distance. There is a wound that will not be healed, at least in this dimension.
There have been other friends and relatives who have died before their time, or in some way that seems undignified or unjust. Two years back, my cousin John—who was ten years younger than me—died from a staff infection, after what should have been a routine operation. (Without antibiotics, I might have died this way myself, from a scratch on the wrist that spun out of control.) In 1998, my father died unexpectedly, killed by his doctors. He had been given three medications that never should have been taken together. When he went to the emergency room, they assured him that the pain was due to indigestion. I talked to him on New Year’s Eve. His was dead the next day. For a year afterwards, I would go to call him on the phone, shocked each time anew that he was not available. I won’t elaborate any further in this direction. There are certain deaths that have left me outraged or incredulous, others that have left me with a lingering sense of disquiet. In all of these situations, however, I am talking more about my own emotions than about the current state of my relatives or friends.
I can say that there are people whom I loved or cared for who have “passed before their time.” Since I do not possess any supernatural powers of divination, there is no way I can know this. I can only say that I was unprepared, that I was left to pick up broken pieces, that I was not, in the immediate aftermath of their passing, prepared to deal with their absence. I can also say, with an equal degree of certainly—for whatever this is worth—that there were others who passed in a very different way, when they had acted out the whole of the cycle of their life, when they had reached a natural limit, when the fullness of the hour had come. I will offer the two most immediate examples, that of my grandparents. (My mother and father got divorced when I was four, and my grandparents were really closer to being parents.) My grandfather, Jack, passed away in 1980. He was the seventh son and only intellectual in a first-generation family of Irish brawlers. To survive, he had to learn how to box. Up through his mid-70s, he was very physically self-possessed. If he gained two pounds, he would adjust his diet. In his late 60s, he dug out half a hillside to build a walled cove for the family car. He was not pleased when he lost his strength. By his late 70s, increasingly ill, he spent much of the day laying on the couch. Then, several weeks before his death, he began to have long conversations with dead relatives, who seemed to have come to reassure him, to guide him to the other side. Jack was not in any way senile. If he tended to ramble, it was not due to incoherence; it was usually to give long and detailed lectures on US history. According to my grandmother, the house felt electrically charged, and you could almost touch the presences who were hovering in the room. When the time came, Jack informed my grandmother that the time had come, and he thanked her for their wonderful life together. He then went into the bathroom, put his head on his knees, and passed away a few minutes later.
My grandmother, Helen, lived for another 16 years and passed away in 1996. For years before this, she had gone out of her way to prepare me and my mother. “I’m tired, and you’re going to have to learn to do without me.” In her late 70s, she began to drift into the chaotic fog of Alzheimer’s, and her behavior became more and more unpredictable. She would hide hundreds of dollars in obscure parts of the house and wander into the street at 3:00 AM. This came as a shock, and it took us years to fully realize what was happening. Up until she retired at the age of 68, my grandmother would walk several miles each day to the school where she taught. When I was in high school and friends would call the house, they would often assume that they were talking to my sister. She was incredibly sharp and funny and intuitive and full of natural authority and able to cut down bullies with a caustic offhand comment. My father, a tough-minded businessman, could never speak of her—even decades after they last met—without referring to her as “that stern Irish matriarch.” Then he would shiver a bit and act like a guilty kid who had been caught. If a vicious dog came running up to her, she would stare at it and it would yelp and run in the other direction. But by 1996, she was, as she had frequently informed us, very tired.
On the night of my wedding to my second wife, Deni, my grandmother fell and broke her hip. After a hip replacement, she had to be transferred to a nursing home. The timing of this fall seemed odd; it was almost as though she were waiting to make sure that I was happy. Once again, this time starting perhaps six weeks before her passing, long conversations with dead relatives seemed to be taking place. The anxiety and anger and stormy mood shifts brought on by Alzheimer’s seemed to have faded away, like clouds into an empty sky. When my mother and Deni and I visited, we would find my grandmother grinning and looking off towards some distant landscape, whispering to various presences whom she was pleased to see again. I thought that I had heard all of her stories at least a half-dozen times, but she mentioned things to Deni that I had never heard before. There was one particularly strange story about neo-pagan rites in a small town in Northern Massachusetts in the 1920s, during her first year of teaching in a one-room school house. During these visits, a calm and luminous field seemed to spread around us through the room. As my grandmother became weaker, my mother would visit every day. Then, on the one day that she didn’t come, my grandmother choked on a piece of food and passed away. Countless friends have told similar stories of a loved one passing on the day that they didn’t come, at the moment that they stepped out of the room to get a cup of coffee. When someone is preparing to move on, it seems that a bit of breathing space may be needed.
__
From Plato’s Phaedo :
SOCRATES: Now for you, my jury. I want to explain to you how it seems to me natural that a man who has really devoted his life to philosophy should be cheerful in the face of death, and confident of finding the greatest blessing in the next world when his life is finished. I will try to make clear to you, Simmias and Cebes, how this can be so.
Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward.
SIMMIAS: Simmias laughed and said, Upon my word, Socrates, you have made me laugh, though I was not at all in the mood for it. I am sure that if they heard what you said, most people would think—and our fellow countrymen would heartily agree—that it was a very good hit at the philosophers to say that they are half dead already, and that they, the normal people, are quite aware that death would serve the philosophers right.
__
John, you wrote, “A kiss from death isn’t necessarily conducive to warming the cockles of the heart. Just ask any maiden. In traveling between the worlds of life and death, leaving behind life and spending some time where a ribcage is played like a xylophone, it goes without saying that some of what might be attributable to death, decomposition and stripping away and getting down to rock and bone, if internalized, does rub off on one, and does, touching one, send a chill down the spine and in turn can make one feel by one’s touch that one can instantly wither flowers, or dry up the milk in the breasts of a mother.”
The contemplation of transience and of death is central to a great many spiritual disciplines, and I do not in any way accept your characterization of my relationship to it. For example, if I had to pick a Renaissance painting that reflects my attitude towards death, it would not be Baldung-Grien’s “Death and the Maiden.” It would be something more along the lines of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” or “La Primavera.” In both of these paintings, there is an aching sense of the fragility of life and of the evanescence of beauty. I think that the Renaissance as a whole cannot be understood without remembering that the bubonic plaque swept off 30 to 50 percent of the population of Europe. This peculiar relationship between transience and beauty is at the heart of the annual Japanese cherry blossom festival. If these blossoms were plastic, who would celebrate them? In a letter, Mozart wrote that, from the age of eight—when his mother died—there was not a day that passed when he didn’t contemplate his death. Few classical music listeners would accuse Mozart of morbidity. A number of years back, I went to a “Sema” enacted by the Whirling Dervishes of Konya, a group founded by the poet/seer Rumi. Starting perhaps ten hours before the ritual, I could sense their energetic presence in the city, building like a wave. That night, the wave broke over me, and I have seldom experienced such a clear and generous and ecstatic sense of transport. The cloaks worn by the Dervishes are meant to symbolize a grave, and their conical hats are the tombstones. In Tantric Buddhism, there are human thighbone trumpets, skulls that are used as drinking cups, and many images of dancing skeletons. It is possible that Christians, who worship a tortured figure on a cross, might see these as demonic implements and symbols. Their purpose, however, is not to tempt the practitioner to revel in destruction and decay; rather, they are props to be utilized in the shattering of appearance.
On one level, it is certainly true to say that “self” is different from “other,” just as “life” is separate from “death.” On the level of spiritual practice, however, all terms must be reconsidered if any progress is to be made. You write, “The shaman may place himself on the threshold between life and death and turn himself into a door, giving us a glimpse of what might be on the other side, but I maintain there is a limit to what such a vision can show us. I don’t think we can literally pass through the door and ever come back.” Over the past 30 years, the term “shaman” has been far too casually thrown around, and I am hesitant to even use the word. Who knows if the Urban Shaman is fooling himself or others, if he is just putting on an act? In a traditional society, though, a shaman who had not been dismembered and reconstituted would never be taken seriously. If his vision is inaccurate, if his reporting is garbled or misleading, is this so different from an English poet who writes a travelogue about Rome? He can tell you what he saw; it may or may not be of use.
__
Here is a poem by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks:
Light Breeze
As regards feeling pain, like a hand cut in battle,
consider the body a robe
you wear. When you meet someone you love, do you kiss their clothes? Search out
who’s inside. Union with God is sweeter than body comforts.
We have hands and feet
different from these. Sometimes in dream we see them.
That is not
illusion. It’s seeing truly. You do have a spirit body;
don’t dread leaving the
physical one. Sometimes someone feels this truth so strongly
that he or she can live in
mountain solitude totally refreshed. The worried, heroic
doings of men and women seem weary
and futile to dervishes enjoying the light breeze of spirit.
Hi Brian:
Much thanks for the elaboration of your response. I totally accept the tone you have taken here with me. I think it is appropriate. I’m glad I could open back up the discussion. I’m quite aware that much of what is testy and disruptive originates in myself.
I think how all this has unfolded also points to or highlights the relationship in reality between a teacher and a novice and student, not merely a theoretical or idealized one. I think that many novices and students who would dare to break their silence would in one way or another come crashing in, or be crude and rough around the edges, embarrassing themselves and others, or would stumble around blindly to some extent, knocking over or at least rattling on the pedestals what is so valuable. It is the very nature of a novice and student to be such. How a teacher handles him or herself however in relation to their students is also very telling and instructive. I suppose there is always a sort of shit testing going on. How much deep and durable truth and wisdom does a teacher really have if he or she is easily rattled and offended and shuts down during critical moments? What kind of a teacher unconsciously expects his or her students to come ready-made, perfected in the understanding of what is being taught or instructed?
(Pardon my irrepressibility, but I feel like breaking into the song, “Wouldn’t it be Loverly?” from My Fair Lady.)
This is the perfect opportunity to ask you more about the inspiration behind your piece, The Goddess as Active Listener, your former teacher Sue Castigliano. How do you imagine she would have dealt with a difficult subject like myself if she was in your shoes and on the receiving end of my words? Would she have sent me to the corner with a dunce cap on my head? How would she have dealt with me? I assume when you first arrived to her you weren’t a smooth and polished aesthete with perfect manners and etiquette, but were unkempt and unruly and unpredictable in your boundless curiosity about what actually makes things and people tick down in their hidden mechanisms and operations.
What really distinguished her from other teachers you had?
Also, this is another question which comes to mind I really want to ask you: Do you think there are teachers more suitable to an individual and his or her development than others? A chemistry that must pre-exist for the relationship ultimately to yield benefits and fruit for both student and teacher? In what way did you give back to Sue Castigliano and help her in her own development for becoming an even better teacher for those who came after you? I wonder what kind of encounters she had with students, what were her own formative experiences, before you arrived and I assume, being somewhat wild and rough around the edges, first gave her a hard time.
Hi John,
In sections five through ten of the essay—to be posted sometime over the next week, when Marco is finished with a technical upgrade of the site—I address a number of the issues that you raise, so much of this discussion might be better left for then. You write, “I assume when you first arrived to her you weren’t a smooth and polished aesthete with perfect manners and etiquette, but were unkempt and unruly and unpredictable in your boundless curiosity about what actually makes things and people tick down in their hidden mechanisms and operations.” I was definitely very badly behaved as a teenager, in equal parts arrogant and insecure, brimming with anger towards the injustices of society, contemptuous of the complacent, pointlessly insulting, eager to mix things up at the drop of a hat. In the same semester, my grades might range from A to D. I am sure that I was quite a trial for the majority of my teachers, in those cases where I chose to say anything at all.
When I did want to participate, I was sometimes kicked in the head. I took one literature course with a teacher who fascinated me. He had written several novels and had a Hemingwayesque persona. I wanted to know more, and I relentlessly peppered him with questions. Like Hemingway, alcohol seemed to be a major factor in his life, and, in retrospect, I can see that he had burnt out years before I met him. He wanted to do nothing more than to show slides and film strips and then hand out multiple-choice quizzes. With all of the best intentions, I refused to let him get away with this. Then, one day, he took me by the arm and pulled me out into the hallway. “Read the books on the list,” he said, “and turn in a few essays. I will give you a B. Whatever you do, though, don’t come back into this class again.” This type of attitude was more typical of teachers in my earlier school experience. Doherty High, to which I had just transferred after getting kicked out of St. Peter’s, was actually an excellent school. There were any number of good teachers there. I just was not prepared to meet most of them half-way.
You write, “What really distinguished (Sue Castigliano) from other teachers you had? Also, this is another question which comes to mind I really want to ask you: Do you think there are teachers more suitable to an individual and his or her development than others?” These two things are really aspects of one question. Sue was exactly the right teacher for me at this particular time. She may very well have been for other students also. I couldn’t say. I was far too self-centered during this period to ever stop to notice. So, what qualities defined her? First, she listened, to what was said and to what was not said. Second, she saw, intuitively and in depth, in a way that felt both reassuring and invasive, in a way that mysteriously showed me to myself. No one else had ever done this; no one had ever tried. And third, she was far less interested in teaching a subject than in communicating on some level of direct presence. For this reason, I think of her as my first real spiritual teacher. You write, “The Goddess as Active Listener, your former teacher Sue Castigliano. How do you imagine she would have dealt with a difficult subject like myself if she was in your shoes and on the receiving end of my words? Would she have sent me to the corner with a dunce cap on my head?” The short answer is “Yes.” If I made too many demands, if I treated a classmate badly, for obscure reasons known only to herself or for no reason at all, she would sometimes act as if I wasn’t even there. Then, at some unpredictable moment, she would give me her full attention.
You ask, “In what way did you give back to Sue Castigliano and help her in her own development for becoming an even better teacher for those who came after you?” I wish that I could answer that. Up until I met her, I had not had many teachers who were in any way on my wavelength. I would like to think that my enthusiasm provided some degree of repayment. In addition, she was going through struggles of her own at the time. Even the worst of her problems seemed magical to me. I had just discovered that I had the ability to listen, and we would talk at considerable length. I don’t think, though, that I ever did specifically say “Thank you,” however much she might have inferred it from my actions. By the end of my senior year, exactly at the point when I was starting to grow up, Sue moved back to Ohio with her husband and three children. I was left to process any lessons learned in silence.
Hi Brian -
Finally got a chance to read this in full more closely. Incredibly generous of you to expose yourself in this way, giving a glimpse in poignant abbreviated form what you experienced and how you felt during periods leading up to or when you learned of the deaths of individuals very dear to you. Thank you for sharing this. It really hits home. I don’t think anyone could read it without having stirred the remembrance of family and friends they themselves have lost. For sure not one of us escapes the experience of such loss and each of us also will have our turn being ferried across the River Styx.
In the exchange between Socrates and Simmias as recorded by Plato, the deep acceptance of the inevitably of death and the lifetime of preparation for it which is the practice of philosophy, and the beautifully serene quality of that humor shared between them, is not lost on me.
I also appreciate the sort of short essay you wrote and added to the second part of your comment. I really don’t disagree with you, and feel because I didn’t first develop the overall context I’m responsible for an assumption about where my own thinking is on this topic, and my intended humor missed the mark. If I was on my deathbed and you hired a quartet to set up around me and play Mozart, I would dissolve in bliss. If you hired a troupe of mimes to dress up as skeletons and do a slapstick Danse Macabre for me, I’d be in stitches. If however you pulled up a chair and started academically elaborating on a metaphor for what I was going through, you yourself not in my body and going through it, and I was in unspeakable agony and totally fatigued, I’d feel like calling for the nurse to escort you out of the door. It’s just the way it is, buddy. I’d also have escorted out any priestly person who started to preach God and tell me of a great journey as if he himself had died and gone to heaven and came back and was now here to tell me about it. I’d probably start thrashing around on my bed. If you were in the area, Brian, I’d love for you to burst into the room dressed as a priest, squirt me in the face with a seltzer bottle, and shout, “The power of the Christ compels you!” I’d laugh so hard I’d probably die of a heart attack.
P. S. My dear Pops was a big ole’ mixed bag of a man. He could shout profanities with the best of them, he could be quite heated and prickly and opinionated, but deep down he had a soft and sentimental heart. Passionately and unabashedly blue-collar, a champion of the Everyman, he was also a sports fan. It was always great fun watching games with him. I have no doubt that our banter and mock-insults and repartee was often funny for onlookers to witness, and probably eyebrow-raising too. We could get under each other’s skin to where it could turn really ugly or just be hilarious.
He liked his martini a particular way, with a specific brand and crushed ice in a separate glass and a lemon wedge on the side, to where I joked that he should have instructions written on an index card for bartenders, waiters and waitresses. In certain establishments he became known for how he liked his martini. I read W. H. Auden was a martini enthusiast who liked his a particular way. But in the midst of this cruder matter, shall we say, and seeing the great painting you posted, Brian, here is a surprising fact about my dear Dad: He absolutely loved Botticelli. Botticelli was one if not his absolute favorite artist. How sweet it is when a gruff man is moved by sublime beauty.
Hi Maia,
You write, “It was also true, he used to say, that we die with every breath. And that every death we choose, teaches us what we need to know, where we need to go. That the two primordial creative forces are: Strewing and Gathering, Expanding and Contracting…” I would add to these oppositions Exile and Return. It has been perhaps 30 years since I have read it, but I think that Heidegger asks, near the start of Being and Time , “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He then proceeds to not quite answer the question for 500 or so pages. I would not presume to answer the question either, at least not intellectually, but it is one that I have wrestled with for most of my adult life. For me, this question is also tied up with the mystery of evil and the linear movement known as “history.” If the cosmos is whole, in what way can it be broken? Is such a break an accident, the result of some malicious act, a form of play, or is it one phase in a larger pattern of necessity?
The Yoruba say, “It takes a little bit of everything to make the world.” For something to exist, everything must exist, in the same way that you cannot experience true joy if you refuse to allow yourself to feel sorrow. However much it does not free us from the experience of evil, we can perhaps intuit a kind of commerce—let’s say, a sacrificial commerce—between Strewing and Gathering, Expanding and Contracting, Exile and Return. In my piece “The Ocean and its Attendants,” I write, “There were those who believed that the ocean was not once as red as blood, or “wine dark,” as the poet would prefer. A wave had once shattered every symbol on the coast, taking with it, as it withdrew, the occult history of our race. In our hearts was a catastrophe; we would pour them out. We drunken sailors did not have any choice but to gather up wealth from the four corners of the world.”
Illustration: Adolph Gottlieb, “Flotsam at Noon”
“…because the last thing I want to do is to kill this conversation.” John, these words of yours made me I laugh at the image they created in my mind! But, also, seriously, I 've been wanting to say to you and Brian how very much I appreciate the chance to have such deep and wide conversation, here, so rare and rich…
I believe that there are, as you say, teachers who are right for you and those who are not. One of my teachers (in the formal sense of the world), had just changed his overall approach to teaching before I met him. His own teacher had been a very “tough” Zen master who provoked and challenged unpredictably, so my teacher, let’s call him S. tried to do the same. But after several years, he realized that it was a “role” and that yes, it worked well for some people, but with others it drove them away or bruised their spirits and did not seem to be of help. S. began to spontaneously teach with skillful means of a gentler sort, also revealing his own weaknesses when appropriate, and allowing himself to come down from the “role” into a more natural being who was devoted to “what works” for each student, and encouraging them to approach their own practice in that spirit as well. As he told the story of this change, how and why it had come about, I immediately replied (which I never did, especially in groups, being very shy) that if he had not changed, I would not be there, and if he ever changed back, I’d be gone! He smiled cryptically and nodded. But then after the class he came up to me and said, “Don’t worry, I’m actually very shy and this way of teaching suits me”. I broke tradition, hugged him and we laughed.
I always thought that a major reason he was such a good match for me was because I was bullied and physically abused in my family. Any sort of tough Zen master style would have been both “nothing” compared to what I’d experienced, and exactly wrong for me. And yet, I saw too, that he was strong enough for the “teaching” to go both ways, so to speak, which after all these years is still what I do believe: all meaningful teaching is a two-way gift.
S. worked a lot with dying people, in fact, he specialized in it and made himself available at any hour if someone should need his help. He took the general approach of finding out what they wanted, and then suggesting ways to go with that , with his encouragment. He said it was nearly always clearly helpful, and often joyful/peaceful. At retreats, we would practice doing exactly this, either with him, or on our own, so that a kind of deep familiarity with “minimal self” could be evoked by a certain kind of attention and intention coming together. When a you are able to trust this “place”, even pain and fear is minimized and the experience almost always turns into gratitude/peace/quiet joy or at times, bliss. This is still my main approach to practice.
At times when I am very ill again, or in other way things appear to be seriously falling apart, I lose that trust awhile and have to rediscover it. (How long? Sometimes minutes sometimes months) A losing and finding rhythm seems to be built in to the natural world/life, as far as I can tell, and so “losing” (Like contracting, exile, scattering) does not signal “something wrong” though the smaller self always takes it that way, at first. At first, I say, because evnentually—and the story goes differently every time----eventually, concord/gratitude/embracing returns.
When I do worry that I won’t be “up to it” when death comes, fear comes in this form: I’ll be so miserable/in pain, etc etc that I’ll forget how to make my way to embracing/being found, and I’ll die while “lost”. (I don’t fear afterward, though.) I accept that this worry is simply part of being human and that I can know nothing ultimately except that death may be the greatest teacher of all, ripening us and freeing us as human beings, enough to become helpers of the others—human and more than human.
"I would add to these oppositions Exile and Return. It has been perhaps 30 years since I have read it, but I think that Heidegger asks, near the start of Being and Time , “Why is there something rather than nothing?” "
Yes! I believe this is, in my reply to John today, what I refer to as the rhythm of Finding and Losing which is built into the universe. Philosophy/History of Religion was my focus in college and I remember Being and Time electrifying my mind, as though experiencing the dynamic hydrologics of things and being.
“It takes a little bit of everything to make the world” is embodied, for me, too, in the Native American “all our relations” which expands the meaning of “relations” to include stones, stars, wind and water and all the rest, vividly and in the round, so to speak, in the living present.
I love “sacrificial commerce”… which, if I understand your meaning, can go a very long way toward reconciling us with our personal deaths, as well as the death of every other in the universe. We are all relations in this way, too. Always dying and always being born.
How can I see The Ocean and its Attendants?
Hi Maia,
I will send you a copy of “The Ocean and its Attendants.”
Here is a paragraph form my essay “Ashe, the First Artist” that speaks to the idea of commerce:
The Yoruba say that the other world is our home but that this world is the marketplace. The marketplace is where all the action is, and it is a desirable place to be. This attitude has always struck me as a remnant from a previous world age, when humans consciously chose the role they were to play in the project of creation, when the goal was full embodiment rather than transcendence. A traditional Yoruba community was organized in the shape of a large wheel, and so great was the importance of the marketplace that they put it right at the center, just next to the palace. The relation between the circumference and the center of the wheel could be seen as the relation between the Ipori and the Ori, or between the almost disconnected pieces of the first and current versions of the human.
Thinking about the idea of exile in relation to the Goddess, I remembered this double sestina by Phillip Sidney. The mode of address and the cosmology, I think, point straight back to the troubadours of Provence. It is a strange and haunting piece and is one of my favorite poems from the Elizabethan period.
A DOUBLE SESTINA / Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
Strephon:
Ye goatherd-gods, that love the grassy mountains;
Ye nymphs, which haunt the springs in pleasant valleys;
Ye satyrs, joyed with free and quiet forests;
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music,
Which to my woes gives still an early morning,
And draws the dolor on till weary evening.
Klaius:
O Mercury, forgoer to the evening;
O heavenly huntress of the savage mountains;
O lovely star, entitled of the morning;
While that my voice doth fill these woeful valleys,
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music,
Which oft hath Echo tired in secret forests.
Strephon:
I, that was once free burgess of the forests,
Where shade from sun and sport I sought in evening;
I, that was once esteemed for pleasant music,
Am banished now among the monstrous mountains
Of huge despair, and foul affliction’s valleys;
Am grown a screech owl to myself each morning.
Klaius:
I, that was once delighted every morning,
Hunting the wild inhabiters of forests;
I, that was once the music of these valleys,
So darkened am that all my day is evening;
Heartbroken so that molehills seem high mountains,
And fill the vales with cries instead of music.
Strephon:
Long since, alas, my deadly swannish music
Hath made itself a crier of the morning,
And hath with wailing strength climbed highest mountains;
Long since my thoughts more desert be than forests;
Long since I see my joys come to their evening,
And state thrown down to over-trodden valleys.
Klaius:
Long since the happy dwellers of these valleys
Have prayed me leave my strange exclaiming music,
Which troubles their day’s work and joys of evening;
Long since I hate the night, more hate the morning;
Long since my thoughts chase me like beasts in forests,
And make me wish myself laid under mountains.
Strephon:
Meseems I see the high and stately mountains
Transform themselves to low dejected valleys;
Meseems I hear in these ill-changed forests,
The nightingales do learn of owls their music;
Meseems I feel the comfort of the morning
Turned to the mortal serene of an evening.
Klaius:
Meseems I see a filthy cloudy evening
As soon as sun begins to climb the mountains;
Meseems I feel a noisome scent, the morning,
When I do smell the flowers of these valleys;
Meseems I hear, when I do hear sweet music,
The dreadful cries of murdered men in forests.
Strephon:
I wish to fire the trees of all these forests;
I give the sun a last farewell each evening;
I curse the fiddling finders-out of music;
With envy I do hate the lofty mountains,
And with despite despise the humble valleys;
I do detest night, evening, day, and morning.
Klaius:
Curse to myself my prayer is, the morning;
My fire is more than can be made with forests,
My state more base than are the basest valleys;
I wish no evenings more to see, each evening;
Shamed, I hate myself in sight of mountains,
And stop mine ears, lest I grow mad with music.
Strephon:
For she whose parts maintained a perfect music,
Whose beauties shined more than the blushing morning;
Who much did pass in state the stately mountains,
In straightness past the cedars of the forests,
Hath cast me, wretch, into eternal evening,
By taking her two suns from these dark valleys.
Klaius:
For she, with whom compared, the Alps are valleys;
She, whose least word brings from the spheres their music;
At whose approach the sun rose in the evening;
Who where she went bore in her forehead morning,
Is gone, is gone, from these our spoiled forests,
Turning to deserts our best pastured mountains.
Strephon:
These mountains witness shall, so shall these valleys;
Klaius:
These forests eke, made wretched by our music;
[Both:]
Our morning hymn is this, and song at evening.
Hi Maia:
Your presence and spirit in these comment sections is a welcome relief and I think with your fluid gentleness and quiet nurturing has been essential for helping bring us to this point. Thank you so much for what you are contributing! I think if you leave two men alone long enough in a confined space or an isolated situation they will exercise civility up to a certain point but eventually will start taking runs at each other and butting heads.
It’s just the nature of the beast.
What is primal in both men and women needs vent and expression too, and if this is denied and suppressed too long, or forced to play by too many rules in a parlor room game of etiquette, it will only gather more force and fury in the shadows and eventually blow the bars and roof off of its cage and perhaps do more damage than it would have done otherwise if it was let out to exercise every now and then and allowed to share in the air we breathe.
Every dog needs a bone and some space to run around in, and it wouldn’t hurt to give the cat a ball of yarn and if used sparingly and responsibly some catnip sometimes.
I’m deeply sympathetic that you suffered abuse in the past. I could say that I did too. So did my two sisters, though on the whole I don’t believe it was intentional. I can think of other family members too who have been through a helluva lot. I think this sort of thing impacts and affects each of us in highly individual ways. What can crush and destroy one individual can actually end up fortifying and strengthening the character of another. The great intangible is resilience and guts and heart. Some come out of incredibly abusive backgrounds filled with rage and hardened in hate, looking to get revenge, while others, even because they carry wounds, become extraordinarily compassionate and loving human beings. The whole idea of the wounded healer is fascinating to me, and I wonder to what extent I might be one of these.
Certainly to become more skilled and able to produce better results I need more practice. Evidence is here in my previous comments and elsewhere in my personal life how far I have yet to go. When it comes to the art of the wounded healer I know I am nowhere near to being a fully realized and wise practitioner, that I am definitely not a master, and there is a good chance I never become one. I wouldn’t even presume to call myself a teacher, but more of a bumbling and rough and tumble child trying things out by instinct and by trial and error. You could say I leave the mystic rose where others will come away from it with a thorn or two stuck in their ass!
P. S. I love your account of your teacher who abandoned the tough and severe method of instruction he had adopted from his former teacher, realizing he was only playing a role, and finally moving into a way of relating and teaching more in living and breathing harmony with his actual nature. I totally agree with you that the student and teacher relation is a two way gift. Sometimes it is the student who provides the wake-up call and reminder to the teacher of where the attention needs to be, where the watering needs to be done. It’s like Brian said of his former teacher Sue Castigliano: she knew when to be attentive and how really to listen to him. She appears to have been one of those teachers who not only gave the lessons that she was paid to give but also was accessible as a human being and really open to learning from her students. I can’t help but to think that she also must have been a wonderful mother. I’d be curious to know how her three children turned out.