Poetry abuse

Billy Collins is one of my favorite modern poets although you should not infer from this that I am particularly conversant with the full spectrum of modern poets or their writings. I am reading his anthology, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and one of the poems caught my eye as relevant not only to art but also to my prior post. I want very much to post it here, but it is under copyright and connected to a living poet. It is short and, to my mind, quite worth a quick read. You can find it online at the Library of Congress under the title Introduction to Poetry.

Truth, consequences, and a new vocabulary

For the past several years, I have been on something of a spiritual journey. As I travelled, I discovered that the religious vocabulary familiar to me was inadequate to describe the new places, people, ideas, emotions, and stories that I encountered. I have found help with this language problem in many different places, some of them quite surprising. I have found that Zen and Taoist concepts caused me to see the life and teachings of Jesus with new eyes, for example. Once upon a time, I would have been afraid to even look into such things; but, as God grew larger to me, fear suddenly seemed a silly thing to adopt as a guide on this journey.

One source of help that I have mentioned on this blog before is the NPR program Speaking of Faith, hosted by Krista Tippett. When I found that Krista Tippett had written a book (also called Speaking of Faith), I immediately put it on the shortlist of books I wanted to read. I finally picked it up at Hastings yesterday, and I am finding it to be enormously helpful. The only bad thing is that I am devouring it so quickly I will not have time to post all of the quotes I like on my blog before I am done!

One issue that arose when I began to explore the world with less fear was the relationship between science and religion, a relationship that a very vocal minority on both sides would like us to believe must be oppositional, frightening, and even apocalyptic. The closer I looked, however, the less I believed that this antagonistic approach was necessary. Here is part of what Krista Tippett has to say about faith and reason in the chapter of her book entitled "Rethinking Religious Truth":

In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart is poetry. Music is a language of the spirit. The metier of religious ideas is parable, verse, and story. All of our names for God are metaphor--necessary license, approximation, and analogy.

...we can't compare faith flatly to reason and declare it intellectually inferior. Its territory is the drama of human life, where art is more precise than science, where ideas are lived and breathed. Our minds can be engaged in this realm as seriously as in the construction of argument or logic, but in a different way. Life and art both test the limits and landscape of argument and logic.

I think the debate about science or reason vs. religion is largely the result of confusion about what science and religion have to tell us. I'm aware that there are lots of people who disagree with me on this, but it seems to me that truth comes in more than one guise with more than one way to get at it. Science is one way. It uses tools like measurement and observation to explore truths that are measureable and observable. Those truths are defined, in fact, in terms of what is measured and observed. I agree with Krista Tippett that religion is more closely tied to art, using tools like metaphor and symbol to explore truths that are difficult to measure or observe, truths relating to mystery and emotion, humanity and God.

Of course, if we mistake one for the other, things can get confused. When we see the Bible, for example, as a book consisting only of literal historical truths, we tend to bump up against measurements and observations that suggest different conclusions about reality. Imagine someone trying to use Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall as a practical guide for stone masonry. Just because this is a bad idea does not mean that the poem contains no truth, just that the truth it contains is different from that being sought. On the other hand, the manual on masonry would likely have little to say on whether you should build the wall between you and your neighbor or why.

Krista Tippett expresses part of her perspective on the Bible below:

The Bible, as I read it now, is not a catalogue of absolutes, as its champions sometimes imply. Nor is it a document of fantasy, as its critics charge. It is an ancient record of an ongoing encounter with God in the darkness as well as the light of human experience. Like all sacred texts, it employs multiple forms of language to convey truth: poetry, narrative, legend, parable, echoing imagery, wordplay, prophecy, metaphor, didactics, wisdom saying.

I think our confusion about the kinds of truth we are dealing with can have serious ramifications. When we treat all of the Bible, including poetic imagery, as presenting literal facts (a tendency that is comparatively modern, by the way), we open our truth to legitimate criticism through measurement and observation. We then either have to believe something that does not match observable facts, and therefore marginalize ourselves, or we have to abandon our claim of truth and stop taking the Bible seriously. When, instead, we realize that religion is the caretaker of a different sort of truth, we can pursue that truth in concert with other kinds of truth in a kind of symbiotic dance, science and philosophy and religion and art all twirling and leaping together to the music of the universe, more closely unified, ironically, than if we perceived all our truths the same.

This realization is a part of the new vocabulary I am learning. It does not make God smaller to recognize truth wherever we find it. On the contrary! The small God is the one held captive to human understanding, to our limitations and the boundaries we draw to keep out those who make us uncomfortable. The Jesus I meet in the Bible seemed to be constantly crossing the boundaries drawn for him, confounding human understanding, and opening eyes to the limitless love of God. That's the Jesus I want to know, the one who opens my eyes to the far horizons, far beyond my understanding, my failures, and my comfort.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense.

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi - 13th century

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes...

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period.... I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.

--Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods

I am very much in agreement with Mr. Thoreau about avoiding enterprises that require new clothes, but I must confess that I am quite glad that he did not choose to direct his disdain towards those enterprises which require new notebooks and writing utensils (ie--all of them). Simplicity and common sense are all well and good, but one mustn't, after all, succumb to fanaticism. Prudence and careful consideration are important qualities to cultivate if only for their usefulness in diverting criticism from one's own faults to those that can be safely identified only in others.

Depression's good side?

Our culture has an interesting relationship with depression. Some pundits lament what they see as the overmedication of America. Eric Wilson wrote a book called Against Happiness, in which he talks about a vital need for sorrow as part of the human condition which we medicate away at our own peril. I have heard some people in religious communities refer to depression as a product of selfish thinking, a lack of faith, or simply a "trial" we must walk through. Depression has become the malady du jour for artists, writers, and thinkers. Somehow we think that the darkness that some people descend into holds important insights into the human condition. If they had not fallen into darkness, what would become of their works of genius? Sometimes I think it is an unwritten rule that only dark, depressing novels (paintings, songs, movies, et cetera) can be taken seriously as real art that has something to say.

Peter D. Kramer is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of several books on depression. I stumbled across a 2005 article he wrote for the New York Times magazine called There's Nothing Deep About Depression, in which he examines more closely this odd sort of reverence we seem to hold for the depressed state. Here is a little excerpt:

Audiences seemed to be aware of the medical perspective, even to endorse it -- but not to have adopted it as a habit of mind. To underscore this inconsistency, I began to pose a test question: We say that depression is a disease. Does that mean that we want to eradicate it as we have eradicated smallpox, so that no human being need ever suffer depression again? I made it clear that mere sadness was not at issue. Take major depression, however you define it. Are you content to be rid of that condition?

Always, the response was hedged: aren't we meant to be depressed? Are we talking about changing human nature?

I took those protective worries as expressions of what depression is to us. Asked whether we are content to eradicate arthritis, no one says, ''Well, the end-stage deformation, yes, but let's hang on to tennis elbow, housemaid's knee and the early stages of rheumatoid disease.'' Multiple sclerosis, acne, schizophrenia, psoriasis, bulimia, malaria -- there is no other disease we consider preserving. But eradicating depression calls out the caveats.

I have a bit of experience with depression, both personally and with family members. It isn't, so far as I've been able to tell, a mysterious fount of inspiration, but, rather, a debilitating disease. I sometimes wonder if, in our enchantment with the dazzlingly depressing in various art forms, we have mistaken despair for realism, sickness for courage, and darkness for insight. I suspect our fascination with the thoughts of the deeply depressed is just the most socially acceptable form of voyeurism available outside of reality TV.

Now, I don't deny sorrow a place in our lives. There is certainly a difference--however disputed the line may be--between clinical depression and sadness. Neither do I suggest we only allow happy endings (although I admit to being inordantly fond of them). Life can be brutal and horrific. Denying that suffering exists does nothing to alleviate it. But perhaps it is time to recognize that depression is not a higher state, a nirvana from which to bring back gems of truth, a normal thing for those of an "artistic temperament." Depression is a sickness every bit as real and every bit as dangerous as hypertension or diabetes, and I think we ought to take it seriously enough to separate it from the complex, brilliant creativity sometimes found in those who suffer from it.

What if this is as good as it gets?

We live in a society that encourages discontent as a path to happiness. "What? That's crazy," you say. Yes, it is. But think about it: we work 80 hour weeks and never see our children so we can have it good when we retire; we go into debt so we can have a little more now; we regularly buy things we didn't know we needed until we found them. Capitalism itself is based on supply and demand, or, to put it a little more forthrightly, creating demand for what you are supplying. Make enough people think they need something, and you can make a living selling it to them!

But what if right now is as good as it gets? What if it isn't going to get any better for me down the road? That thought can produce several possible responses in us. The first is denial. "Hah! I'll show you; I'll pull 90 hour weeks and get to my dream after all!" The second is to despair. "But I was pinning all my hopes on a better future; now I have nothing! I might as well give up."

Neither of these responses seems terribly helpful, but there is a third way. This third way, oddly enough, also involves a kind of giving up but without the despair of the second response. You see, if the past is over and cannot be changed and the future is uncertain and cannot be guaranteed, then all I ever really have is this moment. Right now. If I stop comparing the present moment to a made up, artificially enhanced, imaginary future, I can see that this moment, with all of its joy and sorrow, is a gift. I am alive in this moment, breathing in and out; and it is enough.

From every direction, I am bombarded with messages telling me what I need to be happy, whether it be a vacation on a secluded tropical beach, a home in a bigger town with more to do, a car that uses less motor oil than gasoline, a fancy electronic doodad, or a creative life as a professional novelist. The problem with all of these things, however, is that they are external and can bring only temporary pleasure, not lasting contentment. Contentment does not move from my outside to my inside. It begins in the only place it can: in me. It begins at the only time it can: right here, right now, in this moment.

I forget this a lot, but I am slowly learning to bring myself back from past recriminations or future fantasies to this present moment. This isn't fatalism. It doesn't mean not trying anything new or going anywhere new. It is freedom from the tyranny of the past, with both it's regrets and accomplishments; freedom from the tyranny of the imagined future, whether better or worse; and freedom to live fully in this present moment, the only moment I have.

Living in the moment could take a lot of forms. It might mean making do with less so I can spend more time with my children. It might mean leaving work to watch the sunset. It might mean I don't get to live in Hawaii and be a writer. It might mean not doing what everyone thinks I ought to do all the time. It might mean learning to give more than I take.

Whatever it means, living like this is as good as it gets isn't about circumstances. It's not about what I do or don't do. It's about living and sharing the gift of now right here, in the place of contentment.