Something Beyond the Poem (2/2)

In the previous post on this topic we ended with DH Maitreyabandhu‘s attempt to create a test of the value of a poem (The Further Reach – page 61, footnote):

In practice, it’s not always clear if our writing is the product of fancy or imagination. The test is how it leaves us (and hopefully our readers) feeling at the end ‑ enhanced and unified or enervated and distracted?

He moves on in the remainder of his article in the Poetry Society magazine, Poetry Review, to analyse this issue more deeply in terms of the contribution that imagination, as opposed to fancy, makes (page 65):

Imagination has within it this impulse to ascend to higher and higher levels of meaning and ‘revelation’. It is this ascending nature that accounts for the best of the best – writers, artists, composers etc., for whom the word ‘genius’ is needed to make a distinction between capacity, even great capacity, and imaginative gifts of quite another order. As the imagination ascends, there is a greater and greater sense of unity, discovery, aliveness and spontaneity. This is coupled with a deepening sense of pleasure as well as an intensifying revelation of meaning – a powerful and transforming satisfaction that is both aesthetic and cognitive.

I would want to make a distinction between ‘revelation’ and ‘genius’ for reasons that I have touched on in an earlier sequence of posts on Writing & Reality (see links below). At least, that is, if he means Revelation in the scriptural sense. If he is using ‘revelation’ more in the sense of ‘epiphany‘ as popularised by James Joyce or ‘peak experience‘ as Maslow would have it, then I have no quarrel with seeing it as heightened in works of genius.

What he says earlier suggests that this sense of ‘revelation’ is what he means (page 62):

John Keats (1819)

When we manage to write a successful poem there’s often the feeling that all along, beneath the effort of drafting and re-drafting, some greater thought, some more unified perception was trying to be expressed. You – the person who sits and writes and worries about publication – you could not have written it. This is what Keats was getting at in that famous letter to his brother: “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

From about this point his discussion takes what, for me, is an extremely interesting turn. He draws on Buddhist thought to make a distinction between two tendencies in human beings when confronted by the mysteries of experience (page 66).

Faced with the ungraspable mystery of experience – and our deep sense of insecurity in the face of that – we will tend to fix the mystery into the shape of God or into an unaided, ordinary human being. These two tendencies (really they are deep pre-conscious beliefs) are what Buddhism calls ‘eternalism’ and ‘nihilism.’ Buddhism is trying to suggest a third alternative-  beyond the polarisations of religion and science, beyond the Pope and Richard Dawkins.’

This, it could be said, is where I begin to lose my grip on his meaning but where I most want to grasp it fully. I want to grasp what he goes on to say because I believe – and not just because my religion says so – that religion and science are like the two wings of a bird. We need them both if we are to live wisely and well, but to use them properly we have to integrate our understanding of their different  approaches to the truth. Maybe there is a transcendent position, as Jung would say, that dissolves their apparent differences and from which we can see their essential unity. I’m not sure this is what Maitreyabandhu is getting at, but I hope so. Let’s see where he goes from here. I can already feel the rope of his meaning slipping through my fingers.

He explains that Buddhist thought defines two groupings of ‘conditioned processes’. (‘Conditioned’ here means basically the effects resulting from conditions.) Buddhaghosa, the fifth century Theravadin Buddhist scholar, wrote of them as follows (page 67):

He grouped all conditioned relationships into five different orders of regularities called the five niyamas. Put simply, the first three niyamas are those regularities discerned by the sciences: regularities that govern inorganic matter; organic life; and simple consciousness, including instincts. So for instance, we live in a world governed by the laws of gravity, by the processes of photosynthesis, and by the migratory instincts of swallows.

Buddhaghosa then goes on to innumerate two further levels of conditioned processes. Firstly, a patterning or regularity that governs the relationship between self-conscious agents (you and me) and the effects of our actions (kamma-niyama); and secondly the regularities governing the transcending, progressive potential within human consciousness, culminating in the emergence of a Buddha (dhamma-niyama).

It makes clear that, in the second pairing, ’kamma-niyama processes are those laws that govern ethical life.’ He also makes the implications of that clear (pages 67-68):

Kamma-niyama processes mean that our states of mind broadly condition the kind of world we experience. Pratitya-samutpada is saying this is a law, like the law of gravity or thermodynamics – you can know about it or not, believe in it or not, but it’s operating just the same.

This still does not explain exactly what this has to do with the relationship between imagination and reality, though the clue is in the sentence: ‘our states of mind broadly condition the kind of world we experience.’

He then begins to tease this out (page 68):

Imagination is the mind working under the laws of kamma-niyama. As such, it always takes us a little way beyond ourselves into a richer dimension of experience. It is not the sole domain of artists and poets, though it’s typically discussed in reference to them. It informs the best of science and mathematics, the best in human endeavour. It is essentially ethical, a going beyond self-clinging.

The first part of that quote, up until the last sentence in fact, is not in the least problematic for me. It’s where humanity should be heading at least, though we’re not quite there yet – and that’s an English understatement in case anyone thinks I’ve completely lost the plot.

But he also realises the truth is more complex than that last sentence seems to be saying. He puts it so well I’ll quote him at some length (pages 68-69):

The main difference between spiritual life and the path of the poet is that the first is a self-conscious mind-training, while the second is more ad hoc – breakthroughs into a new modes of consciousness are accessible to the poet within the work, but they fall away outside it. (This accounts for the famous double life of poets – how they can oscillate between god-like creation and animal-like behaviour.) Imagination’s sudden uplifts are sustained by the laws of kamma-niyama. But as soon as we want something, as soon as the usual ‘me’ takes over – tries to be ‘poetic’ or clever or coarse -we’re back on the stony ground of self. Egoism in poetry, as in any other field of life, is always predictable, doomed to repetition and banality or destined to tedious self-aggrandisement.

What he says is true of the poet must also apply to the scientist. That’s why scientists as well as poets can end up serving very demonic purposes in their lives outside the laboratory/study and sometimes inside it as well, I think.

Interestingly he then leads us back to the very edges of revelation (page 69):

In our best readings of the best work, we sometimes feel intimations of an order of reality that completely transcends us, as if the work took us to the very edges of form and pointed beyond itself to some formless, timeless mystery.

And in the end he points up the link that I too feel is there between the best kinds of creativity in the arts and true compassion (ibid):

And transcendence is not vacancy or negation, but the complete fulfilment of everything – a breaking down of all boundaries. This mystery, this dhamma-niyama aspect of conditionality, finds its roots here and now, in every moment we go beyond ourselves, whether by acts of imagination or in our everyday kindness and generosity.

I still don’t feel I have completely understood all that he is trying to say but I do hope that I haven’t introduced too much distortion or dilution into my attempt to convey the tenor of his inspiring exploration of the nature of imagination and its role in poetry. I am looking forward to integrating his insights more deeply into both my practice of writing and my practice of compassion.

Related articles

• Writing & Reality (1): the mystery of revelation
• Writing & Reality (2): the role of lesser mortals
• Writing & Reality (3): look in your heart and write

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Memory (1/2): part self-protection racket

. . . the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. . . . .
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

(John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale)

What seems like years ago I promised my wife I’d work on all those VHS camcorder cassettes we had buried in shoe boxes and make them digital. This Christmas I finally got round to starting on the task. Little did I think I’d end up playing the ghost of Christmas past to my own Scrooge. I sat and watched these images of people who had died and images of selves that had passed away with such a strange mixture of emotions.

It’s not everyday you have to encounter yourself as though you were somebody else, but I’ve been doing rather a lot of that recently, forced by circumstance to meet my old selves in video or scribble form. This post is going to have faint echoes of Krapp’s Last Tape, but without the existential dread you’ll be relieved to know.

I have subjected the readers of this blog to several depressing posts about memory lane. For those who know the kind of thing that’s coming, this may be the moment to move on to something else. I’m afraid I’ve been ambling down the pathways of the past again, but from a different angle this time and over somewhat different terrain.

What made it spookier was that some of the memories, which had already been transferred from their camera cassettes by some ham-fisted professional, were held on an ordinary VHS cassette with some of the images so blurred and distorted they looked like hybrids of impressionist paintings and bizarre moments from a fading dream. I have included one of those images at the top of this post.

Other aspects of memory, in terms of what goes on in my head compared with what ends up on paper that I forget, have proved equally spooky though in a different way. The first situation I describe was just a bit weird: the second was something I’d rather ignore, but I can’t.

In the previous sequence of posts I talked of the way I used to interweave notes from my reading with scraps of information about my day.  When I wrote those posts I was trying to track down a page reference for the Koestenbaum quote (I still haven’t found it – there are pages and pages of notes from his book and I haven’t had the time to read through them all). On a scrap of paper at the very point where I began my search are the notes I made after throwing coins for a reading of the I-Ching on 30 August 1982. I wrote, as a gloss on Hexagram 45 Gathering Together, ‘religion as the basis of gathering together’ and ‘only collective moral force can unite the world’ (Richard Wilhelm: pages 616 and 175), alongside a quote from Sam Reifler, who calls the Hexagram Accord:

The path that is right for you has as its basis community devotion and a communal spiritual sympathy.

As an introverted atheist at the time I presumably felt all this was very wide of the mark, but wrote it down, as I was in the habit of doing, as a way of tracking the bibliomancy systematically in case it ever amounted to anything. Interestingly, as far as I can remember, I’ve never read those words again since I noted them down at the time. I never remembered writing them down until now. So much for the tracking theory of my motivation.

I also failed until now to register their uncanny prescience. I accept that it might have been the power of suggestion rather than of prophecy. Or it could be that the process of using the I-Ching did what it says on the tin – it resonates with and gives you information about the deeper levels of your being. Maybe it was just a coincidence: these ideas are central to the philosophy of the I-Ching and come up often. I used to throw the I-Ching a lot so some hits of this kind were bound to happen sooner or later. Anyway, it made for weird reading at this remove of time given that in December that same year I committed myself to exactly that kind of path with no clue in August that this was where I was heading, and I never threw the I-Ching again.

This rather added to the force of the surprise of discovering that I had read the Koestenbaum book in the month immediately before I realised I was a Bahá’í, rather than some years before, as I had always thought. Given that both the reading of his book and my committing to the Bahá’í path were events of great significance to me, it’s a bit deflating to realise that I had failed to retain how closely connected they were in time, and perhaps also in how the one paved the way for the other. That I transferred a lot of the Koestenbaum notes onto sheets of paper for some talks I was giving about a year or so later, didn’t seem to help me make the link, I’m afraid. It seems that my mind  sometimes, perhaps often, continues to believe what it wants to believe, until forced to do otherwise.

Which brings me onto the next example of how memory works. It involves a complete distortion and will pave the way for an even more disconcerting example in the next post. When anyone used to ask me to tell them about situations where my declaration as a Bahá’í brought me into conflict with the assumptions of my profession as a psychologist, I was a touch too happy to share the story of the time I went for an informal interview for a clinical post soon after I qualified. I was walking with the neuropsychologist, I would say, down towards her office. She was dressed in a white coat so she looked like a doctor from the back. The only thing missing was a stethoscope.

As we walked she cast a sideways glance at me and said: ‘Thank goodness Blackmore has finally put paid to the idea of God, don’t you agree?’

‘Not really,’ I distinctly remembered saying,’I have an idea about God that I believe in.’

She glared at me, as I vividly recalled it, and we walked the rest of the short way to her office in silence.

I come out of that version of events reasonably well and believed, until late last month, that this was exactly what happened, not that I’ve had cause to tell that story in recent years. I believed it until, that is, I read my journal of that period looking for the page reference. Imagine my feelings when I discovered, in my own hand-writing, an almost completely different version of events. First of all it happened in September. I didn’t hear about the Bahá’í Faith until November. First hole below the waterline. I wrote:

She wore a white coat [at least I got that right] with her name written on a badge. My revulsion against psychologists who wish to masquerade as doctors was barely containable. And when I heard her mouthing with obvious contempt such things as ‘. . . .people who don’t realise that the mind is not separate from the brain’ I did not know what to say. . . . .

All I could say was ‘I haven’t thought about it a lot.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that . . . very sorry . . . I’m very sorry to hear that indeed.’

Quite why I couldn’t fight back I don’t know. Perhaps my feelings were running too high – they were certainly strong by this time. I just wanted to get out, I think.

According to my journal I mumbled some jargon strewn with impressive names but basically ducked the point. I believed the mind was not reducible to the brain but couldn’t say so. So, it was nothing to do with God and I copped out anyway. Memory’s junk sunk.

These two accounts, though they have a kernel of common truth, couldn’t be more different. When I had become a Bahá’í I did speak out but definitely not then and not in the way I convinced myself it had happened. I clearly didn’t want to remember my craven evasion so I backdated my eventual moral courage and believed my own propaganda.

I now believe that my journals will be littered with ego deflating realities I have chosen to remember differently. I’m also pretty convinced that, without the protection of a strong value system to inoculate us, we will all chronically succumb to the virus of self-serving self-deception. I also have to recognise the probability that many other entries in my journal will have gone through a self-serving filter long before the ink hit the page.

Of course, it is also quite possible that none of these versions of reality is to be trusted; maybe all of them are distorted in their various ways and the truth is to be found somewhere completely different.

I think I’ll leave that possibility alone for now. I’m beginning to feel quite dizzy as though my view of the world is swirling and blurred in a heat haze. The last example I want to look at will have to wait till next time. It was for me the most stunning example I have ever experienced of the smoke and mirrors side of memory. In the meantime I’ll sit down and wait for the vertigo to pass.

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The Business of Bees

It has been sad to see the number of bees dwindling over recent years with no widely accepted explanation that would provide a clear remedy. Honeybees have not only become essential to our food chain but have also been an inspiration to poets over centuries from Virgil’s Georgics to the present day with Sylvia Plath‘s witty ambivalence about the arrival of the bee box.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can’t keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

Herbert predictably looks at them from spiritual angle.

Bees work for man, and yet they never bruise
Their Master’s flower, but leave it having done,
As fair as ever and as fit to use;
So both the flower doth stay and honey run.

George Herbert, Providence, lines 65-68

So, it’s not surprising I’m glad to say that our garden boasts far more bees this year than last so I’m posting these pictures and the various poems to celebrate.

There’s no better place to pick up the thread of poetry again than with the contagious admiration of Dickinson.

The Pedigree of Honey

Does not concern the Bee -

A Clover, any time, to him

Is Aristocracy -

(Emily Dickinson- 1650: R. W. Franklin Edition 1999)

His Labor is a Chant -
His Idleness – a Tune -
Oh, for a Bee’s experience
Of Clovers and of Noon!

(Emily Dickinson, 979 Franklin Edition)

As you would expect Shakespeare had a fair bit to say about bees and spelt out some possible implications for the way we see ourselves and our society.

. . . [S]o work the honey-bees;
Creatures, by a rule in nature teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad,
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds;
Which pillage they, with merry march, bring home,
To the tent royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in,
The sad-ey’d justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.

(Shakespeare, Henry V, Act I, Scene 2, lines 190-207, RSC Edition.)

The line about ‘singing masons building roofs of gold’ is particularly resonant for Bahá’ís, I think, because of the distinctive golden dome above the Shrine of the Báb in Haifa. It is even more relevant because work is currently being done to refurbish the roof of the dome.

Perhaps one of the most famous poems to include a reference to bees is John Keats‘ Ode to Autumn.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

(John Keats: Ode to Autumn.)

Their greater audibility as well as visibility this year offsets the more gloomy feelings I was experiencing before, which the poem below perhaps manages to capture.

An unsteady bee poisoned with autumn
settles on a pink leaf. The cold wind swings
the hanging stem. I move. The bee is gone.
Still my pen continues its black scribblings.

I just hope the more positive feelings are based in reality and that the current bee population is on the road to recovery. If not, perhaps the native black honeybee will prove the best answer.

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Appearance, Reality and the Choices We Make

David Tennant's Hamlet

When I was away over Christmas I couldn’t watch Dr Who — sorry David Tennant — playing Hamlet at the time of its showing.  I’ve only just got round to watching my recording of this Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production now in the middle of this second big freeze of the winter — its power took me by surprise. At the same time I’m in the middle of reading Peter Taylor’s demanding but rewarding book Chill. Much to my surprise these experiences are for me connected, each echoes the other.

Perhaps I need to clarify from the off that it’s not the ‘bitter cold’ referred to in the first ten lines of Hamlet that I’m thinking about here though it is a strongly common element. It’s to do with seeming, actuality and action. Both Hamlet and Chill at their core share a concern with the relationship between appearance and reality and the implications of that for both understanding what is likely to happen and deciding what to do. In both works there is a political dimension to complicate the way things work themselves out.

I realise of course that there are a small number of trivial differences. The Danish court that Hamlet experiences as a prison is not wracked by angst about its carbon emissions or living in fear of a rising sea disrupting its conspiracies: regicide trumps CO2 for them. Similarly, Chill is not written in blank verse, there are no kings and queens, no ghosts appear and no one, not even the Chair of the IPCC, is poisoned in an orchard while asleep. So, am I forcing the point here a bit?

I don’t think so.

On page 200 of his book Taylor writes:

. . . we need to be clear that it is the duty of science to state clearly the boundary conditions of its knowledge and to draw attention to what currently lies upon the fringe – the place where breaking knowledge will inevitably appear and transform the current view. If science strays from this duty, it becomes a tool of the political or religious order of the day.

In Hamlet, the eponymous hero is confronted with a stark choice: to kill Claudius or not. Whether he does so depends upon what view of appearances he takes. Is the apparition that discloses his father’s murder to him really the ghost of his father or is it the devil come to tempt him to destruction? The wheels of the first two acts of the play revolve around this axle.  After his encounter with the players at the end of Act II and his decision to have them stage a representation of his father’s alleged murder, he knows he has set up an experiment of a kind to determine if at all possible where the truth lies (I’ve always found that those last two words have an interesting double meaning in our language).

. .  . . The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil, and the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds
More relative than this; the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

(Act II, Scene 2: lines 530-537)

The word ‘relative’ here is used more in the sense of ‘relevant.’

It is interesting to note that it is through a play, not through a controlled scientific experiment, that Hamlet proposes to test for the truth. Jonathan Bate, in his introduction to Hamlet in the carefully researched and beautifully presented RSC edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, points this up very clearly (page 1920):

[Hamlet] comes to the truth through a ‘fiction’ and a ‘dream of passion.’ In this he can only be regarded as an apologist for the art of his creator.

Is there no hard distinction then between imagination and reality? Perhaps it is not as absolute as we would like.

Chris Frith (The Psychologist: October 2009: page 843) reminds us of some fascinating points about the reality/perception issue:

This Helmholtz/Bayes framework had a number of interesting implications, and I suspected that many people might be quite shocked by them.

*Our experience of having a direct perception of the world is an illusion. This illusion is created by our lack of awareness of the inferences being made by our brain.
*There is no qualitative difference between perceptions and beliefs. A perception is a belief about the world that we hold to have extremely high probability.
*Perceptions are created by combining bottom-up, sensory signals with top-down, prior beliefs.
*Our perceptions are an estimate of the state of the world and never the true state of the world. However, we can constantly improve our estimate by making and testing predictions. For survival it is more important to be able to predict the state of the world than to have a very good estimate of what it was in the past. Furthermore, for survival all that matters is that our model of the world makes useful predictions.

But this issue of prediction is a tricky one when we are dealing with complex global phenomena like climate change. Taylor argues (page 220):

We have to ask the question whether there is any value in prediction when the science is so uncertain. In my view the answer is no. In fact, any pretence at prediction may proffer an unreliable knowledge upon which quite counter-productive policies could be based.

But that does not mean we are powerless to act.

. . . it is better to assume no knowledge of the future climate, but to examine current vulnerability to change in any direction. This is the concept of resilience or robustness that ecologists apply to ecosystems. We need to know what a robust human support system looks like. We certainly do not have one now . . .

In terms of possibly counter-productive policy, Taylor feels that there is a high probability that we are in for a period of global cooling which will, for example, have a massive impact on food production exacerbated by such measures as the extensive use of land for the production of bio-fuel. He explains this at some length in the following YouTube video along with the sociopolitical dynamics that in his view are perpetuating the probably erroneous opposite view (more fascinating footage can be found at this link):

There is at least as much at stake here for us as a collective as there was for Hamlet as an individual. Much will depend upon the choices we make as a society. Claudius’ murder of a king who was his brother and Hamlet’s reaction to that crime cost Polonius (Laertes’ father killed by Hamlet, who by that act became as culpable in Laertes’ eyes as Claudius was in his), Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother who married his father’s killer), Claudius, Laertes and Hamlet their lives, and Ophelia (Polonius’ daughter) her sanity as well as her life. The personal scale of these consequences plays to the strengths of our way of processing experience and assessing risk (see Gardner’s excellent book for a full analysis of this).

The havoc we could wreak by responding wrongly to the rise in global temperature experienced in the final two decades of the 20th Century (and Taylor does not dispute that there was such a rise — he simply does not accept the case as proven that CO2 played more than a very minor role in that rise) would dwarf the ‘havoc’ (i.e. mound of bodies) confronting Fortinbras in the final moments of the play (not in the TV version sadly). If so much damage can be done when the situation is basically confined within a court and our stone-age brains are well adapted to calculating the risks involved, just think what we can do when the whole world is our stage and we don’t really have a clue what’s going on.

At this point it is hard to be absolutely sure who is right but the next few years will tell. What I am clear about is that, in confronting the choices we have to make, we need to remain as open-minded as possible. Keats defined an attitude

John Keats

of mind that is very relevant to this. To describe this quality, Keats used the term “negative capability” in a letter to his brother dated Sunday, 21 December 1817. He says:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Bahá’u'lláh reminds us in the Arabic Hidden Words that our capacity to understand has limits:

O SON OF BEAUTY! By My spirit and by My favor! By My mercy and by My beauty! All that I have revealed unto thee with the tongue of power, and have written for thee with the pen of might, hath been in accordance with thy capacity and understanding, not with My state and the melody of My voice.

(Number 67)

However, as other posts on this blog have attempted to describe (see the link for an example), our understandings are enhanceable by dispassionate and principled consultation, the difficult art of spiritual conference whose usefulness extends to all realms of human discourse including that of science, especially when such consultation is conducted in the light of experience.

So, here we stand at a crucial choice point. Perhaps we can empathise with Hamlet when he groans:

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

(Act I, Scene 5: lines 205-206)

Fortunately, we are not bound by the conventions of a Revenge Tragedy and do not have to murder anyone to solve this problem. We just have to do the best we can to make sure that as few people as possible lose their lives as a result of our making a bad situation worse, and making this bad situation situation worse is what we will do if we end up combining a failure to recognise the extent of our ignorance with that most dangerous fuel of all with which to power the juggernaut of human action – an absolute conviction born of panic.

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