The Romance of the Rose

In the Rose Garden of changeless splendour a Flower hath begun to bloom, compared to which every other flower is but a thorn, and before the brightness of Whose glory the very essence of beauty must pale and wither.

Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u'lláh: CLI

The roses in our garden are extremely beautiful: if only the camera could have also captured their perfume, especially that of the white rose. The idea of a flower that is unimaginably more beautiful perfectly captures what heavenly beauty must be like.

Roses have always been a captivating symbol of the ultimately desirable. The poetry of mortal love has often drawn upon it. Burns sang:

My love is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June . . .

It has held intimations of immortality throughout the history of poetry. Annemarie Schimmel writes this of Rumi‘s imagery:

“It would be surprising if Rumi had not reserved the central place  in his garden lyrics for the rose. As much as he has described the various flowers – the rose is different; it is the most perfect manifestation of Divine Beauty in the garden. . . . Rumi’s poetry abounds in rose-poems, beginning with the famous ghazal:

Today is the day of joy, and this year is the year of the rose . . . .

“The smiling flower . . . . becomes the symbol of the happy soul:

Like a rose, I smile with my whole body, not only by way of the mouth,

For I am – without myself – alone with the king of the world.”

(The Triumphal Sun: pages 90-91)

Blake typically had a darker slant:

O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Schimmel does refer to Rumi’s awareness of the convention that saw the rose as ‘faithless’ because so short-lived. Burns was also aware of the thorns. In another of his poems, Ye Flowery Banks, we see a false lover leaving the pain of them with the woman he had abandoned:

Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’d a rose
Frae aff its thorny tree,
And my fause luver staw my rose,
But left the thorn wi’ me.

Because of the fleetingness of its beauty and the thorns it bears there is an ache of longing connected with the rose. Even when it symbolises the heavenly it reminds us of our distance from paradise at the same time as it gives us glimpses of what that garden might be like.

I couldn’t end this trip down a rose-strewn path without quoting Shakespeare (Sonnet 54):

O! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour, which doth in it live.

And so we’re back to the perfume that the pictures can never capture.

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A World in a Grain of Sand

Hints about the Infinite

It’s interesting how life keeps drawing our attention to a special theme sometimes. Images and eternity seems to be my theme of the moment and life won’t let me leave it alone. I felt about as powerful in the grip of this idea as a doll in the jaws of a dog. I decided to give in gracefully and write another post about it.

Some reminders came in response to the post on the subject so they perhaps don’t count, though one was very valuable: it concerned ‘Auguries of Innocence.’ For some reason I had completely forgotten the opening lines of this poem by William Blake, so central though they were to my theme:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Others were not prompted by me in that way though perhaps I sought them out unconsciously.

There was the television programme about the cracking of  the ‘Narnia Code.’ Life was reminding me again about imagery and its power, especially in the way that Michael Ward, whose doctorate was focused on this issue, was eloquent on screen about the way that every natural object in our world has mystical significance.

A.A. Gill reviewed the programme in the Culture section of the Sunday Times (19th April 2009). The discovery was that:

“the seven books of the [Narnia] cycle relate to the seven planets. The revelation posed three questions the programme didn’t quite answer. Why keep it a secret? Lewis was an unstoppable explainer and not a little pleased with his own cleverness, so why hide this bit?” (I won’t bother quoting the other two questions. They get worse.)

There is an explanation that would probably throw Gill into paroxysms of disbelief. Perhaps C. S. Lewis didn’t consciously know what he was doing. While this may seem far-fetched in this case, let’s not throw out this enthralling possibility because of one possibly bad example.

An author’s text and an author’s conscious intentions have a very uncertain relationship. People end up saying far more than they consciously mean. This is part of the power of art. Imagery contributes a huge amount to this effect. It’s why a great work of art means different things to us at different periods of our lives and to people in general at different points in human history. Put crudely, Shakespeare could never have anticipated that Richard III would be performed in modern military uniform as a comment on Fascism.

Another reminder came last week when I was sitting in a sunlit room in the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford with a group of people discussing chaplaincy. Philip Sutton is the head of the Chaplaincy Service there and, in the course of his comments on chaplaincy, he spoke of the power of natural objects like flowers to help people connect with the mystery of life, of how they can help move someone’s vision beyond the prison walls of their misery to a transcendent awareness of this mystery in a way that brings them some relief from their sorrow. (Another gem of his was to say that, when people are coping with terminal illness or bereavement, what they often need most is ‘a good listening to.’)

I was reminded of the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil . . . .
There lives the dear freshness deep down things.

And hardly had I drawn breath when my plan to finish Wordsworth‘s Prelude after twenty years of trying brought another reminder right before my eyes:

. . . . . the very faculty of truth,
Which wanting, . . . . man, a creature great and good,
Seems but a pageant plaything with vile claws,
And this great frame of breathing elements
A senseless idol.

(Book Fourth: 1805, lines 298-304)

This is not one of Wordworth’s clearest passages on this insight, which is probably why he dropped it from his 1850 edition. It links though with the lines from his great poem composed above Tintern Abbey where he speaks of

. . . . . a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.’

(Lines 96-97)

But the Prelude passage also draws attention to the observer and his qualities.

While I was being reminded of what I had already said in my earlier post, I was also being reminded of what I had left unsaid. The natural world does not always seem such an uplifting experience.

Complicating Factors

Last week a group of us were sitting together looking at the Writings of Bahá’u'lláh:

O My Servants! Were ye to discover the hidden, the shoreless oceans of My incorruptible wealth, ye would, of a certainty, esteem as nothing the world, nay, the entire creation.

Gleanings: CLIII

That doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room for seeing the world as drenched in mystical meanings!

The same section of the Gleanings, which I looked at later, contains the following:

The world is but a show, vain and empty, a mere nothing, bearing the semblance of reality. Set not your affections upon it.  . . . . . Verily I say, the world is like the vapour in a desert, which the thirsty dreameth to be water and striveth after it with all his might, until when he cometh unto it, he findeth it to be mere illusion.

People have also struggled with the dark side of our experience of the world. Tennyson puts this very powerfully: he describes nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’ (In Memoriam: 56) and at moments experiences life as very bleak:

. . . when the sensuous frame
Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

(In Memoriam: 50)

Some poets, when they are not recoiling from its dark side, can see the world as having no meaning at all beyond the material reality of it: a crib-site has this to say about William Carlos Williams and says it far better than I could:

Citing Williams’s dictum, “No ideas but in things,” and such poems as “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Miller claims that–in contrast to the duality inherent in the idealism of the classical, romantic, or symbolist traditions, wherein the objects of the world signify transcendent “supernatural realities”–the objects of Williams’s poetry signify themselves and nothing more, existing “within a shallow space, like that created on the canvases of the American abstract expressionists”, exposing the poem not as a representation of an object, but as an object in itself. Miller finds in Williams’s verse “no symbolism, no depth, no reference to a world beyond the world, no pattern of imagery, no dialectical structure, no interaction of subject and object–just description”.

Picasso – ‘The Old Guitarist’ (for website see link)

Wallace Stevens even went so far as to make poetry a religion:

. . . . . . . . .  Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns.

(The Man with the Blue Guitar: Section v)

He seems to be making a god out of poetry rather than poems out of God.

So the world (and presumably poetry that celebrates it) is either a snare to delude us, a block in our path or simply the  trigger of brain activity shaped by evolution to help our bodies to survive, not a gateway to the spiritual after all?

A Way out of the Difficulty

Bahá’u'lláh also writes:

Every created thing in the whole universe is but a door leading into His knowledge, a sign of His sovereignty, a revelation of His names, a symbol of His majesty, a token of His power, a means of admittance into His straight Path. . . . . . . . As to thy question whether the physical world is subject to any limitations, know thou that the comprehension of this matter dependeth upon the observer himself. In one sense, it is limited; in another, it is exalted beyond all limitations.

(Gleanings: LXXXII)

And again:

Know ye that by “the world” is meant your unawareness of Him Who is your Maker, and your absorption in aught else but Him. . . . . Whatsoever deterreth you, in this Day, from loving God is nothing but the world. . . . .  Should a man wish to adorn himself with the ornaments of the earth, to wear its apparels, or partake of the benefits it can bestow, no harm can befall him, if he alloweth nothing whatever to intervene between him and God, for God hath ordained every good thing, whether created in the heavens or in the earth, for such of His servants as truly believe in Him.

(Gleanings: CXXVIII)

So, it depends upon the attitude of the person. If we are attached to the things of the world, if we want to exploit them for our own purposes, they will veil us from spiritual realities. If we are detached and dispassionate, every thing will speak to us of mysteries, of God as the ground of being, not of course as a bearded figure in the sky.

Which brings us back to Wordsworth’s observation that if we lack ‘the faculty of truth’ the world is drained of meaning. Looking back on his own experience, in one of the greatest poems ever written in English, he feels that, as an adult, he has since childhood lost much of this power to discern the glory of the world.

Whereas at one time everything seemed ‘apparelled in celestial light’ now there has ‘passed away a glory from the earth.’ He asks:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

He sees adulthood as robbing us of this direct vision. In contrast with the child,

At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

He sees something that helps offset this:

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

And in the end, speaking of the ‘faith that looks through death’ and in awareness of human suffering, he can write:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Perhaps Blake was right after all — heaven is to be found in a wild flower. It depends on how you look at it. Maybe this topic will now ease its grip on me. Maybe not. Time will tell.

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The Terror of Conviction (1/3)

Cruelty has a Human Heart,

And Jealousy a Human Face;

Terror the Human Form Divine,

And Secrecy the Human Dress.

William Blake: Songs of Experience Additional Poem

Terror and the Human Form

The situation in Iran would be enough to set me thinking about intolerance and extremism. Family members of good friends of mine are being persecuted because of their beliefs. Because of my shared beliefs I also feel strongly linked even to those with whom I have no other connection.  The current perilous situation of the seven Bahá’ís who have been arrested reinforces that feeling.(See ‘Breaking News/Impending Trial’ on this blog.)

The Seven Bahá’ís in Prison

I have other experiences that spur me on in the same direction.

I was born just before the end of World War Two. I grew up with images of Belsen and Dachau. My childhood nightmares were of being pursued by the Gestapo.  I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War. (As a child I wouldn’t stand and watch a carnival go past because I was frightened of the uniforms and drums.) I therefore have good reasons to feel deeply concerned about the roots of prejudice, fanaticism and intolerance.

I also had reasons to suspect they might have something to do with our ideas of the divine given that most of my father’s family disowned him when he married a Roman Catholic.

Skating on Thin Ice

I am not qualified to explain the political and social roots of the human face of terror. I have of course noticed that having been oppressed is no guarantee that I will not be an oppressor in my turn if I get the chance. That was clear right from the French Revolution (See Michael Burleigh‘s ‘Earthly Powers‘) and nothing that has happened since causes me to think that anything is different now. I have also seen how injustice and inequity breed enmity, as can extremes of wealth and poverty in close proximity (See Amy Chua‘s ‘World on Fire‘ for example). Philip Zimbardo looks at the disturbing way group and organisational processes foster evil doing and explains ways of effectively counteracting that (‘The Lucifer Effect‘). Michael McCullough looks surprisingly hopefully on the problem from an evolutionary perspective in his recent book ‘Beyond Revenge‘. Marc Hauser‘s examination of morality, ‘Moral Minds,’ comes at the issue primarily from a developmental angle.

I do not feel competent to add anything to their positions.

They all make it very clear that tolerance in any society is a very thin ice and is all the more precious for that. Blunden’s poem, ‘The Midnight Skaters’ captures that precarious feeling as the skaters dance across the deep and frozen pond:

. . . .  not the tallest there, ’tis said,
Could fathom to this pond’s black bed.

Then is not death at watch
Within those secret waters?
. . . .  With but a crystal parapet
Between, he has his engines set.

. . . . Court him, elude him, reel and pass,
And let him hate you through the glass.

(Edmund Blunden: ‘The Midnight Skaters‘ – for an interesting critique see Poetry Scene News)

The Horns of a Dilemma

I do though feel that the spiritual perspective informed by psychology and psychotherapy complements those views and fills an important gap they leave.

Jonathan Haidt in his humane and compassionate book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis‘ indicates that, in his view, idealism has caused more violence in human history than almost any other single thing (page 75).

The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism. . . . Threatened self-esteem accounts for a large portion of violence at the individual level, but to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism — the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end.

Richard Holloway sees it much the same way:

More misery and disillusionment has been visited on humanity by its search for the perfect society and the perfect faith than by any other cause.

(‘Between the Monster and the Saint‘: page 136)

Both Haidt and Holloway emphasise that not all such ideals are by any means religious. Haidt, for instance,  also quotes the attempt to create utopias as well as the defence of the homeland or tribe as frequently implicated.  Also, when Hitler’s probably narcissistic self-esteem successfully cloaked itself in the rhetoric of idealistic nationalism, mixed with scapegoating anti-semitism, we all know what happened next: narcissism and idealism make a highly toxic and devastatingly deadly combination.

What Haidt regards as central is this:

Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it . . . the belief that the ends justify the means.

He is aware though that idealism enhances life in some ways also (page 211):

Liberalism and the ethic of autonomy are great protectors against . . . injustices. I believe it is dangerous for an ethic of divinity to supercede the ethic of autonomy in the governance of a diverse modern democracy. However, I also believe that life in a society that entirely ignored the ethic of divinity would be ugly and unsatisfying.

How are we not to throw out the precious and in fact indestructible baby of idealism with the bathwater of zealotry, fanaticism and intolerance? This feels like an issue well worth exploring further. It will lead us to considering, in the next post, how three ids interact: idealism, ideology and identity.

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