At this time, likewise, I most urgently request the friends of God to make every effort, as much as lieth within their competence, along these lines. The harder they strive to widen the scope of their knowledge, the better and more gratifying will be the result. Let the loved ones of God, whether young or old, whether male or female, each according to his capabilities, bestir themselves and spare no efforts to acquire the various current branches of knowledge, both spiritual and secular, and of the arts. Whensoever they gather in their meetings let their conversation be confined to learned subjects and to information on the knowledge of the day.
If they do thus, they will flood the world with the Manifest Light, and change this dusty earth into gardens of the Realm of Glory.
(‘Abdu’l-Bahá From a Tablet – translated from the Arabic)
Does this quotation prove that in some way my supposed fusion of the three skill sets, spirituality, arts and psychology, into one vocation, involving also a connectedness with other people, is delusional?
Well, I can’t prove it doesn’t. The dilemma as Yeats expressed it of there being a need to choose between perfecting the life and perfecting the art, a choice that too often seems to lead to a damaged life, may not be as inevitable as we have been induced to think. It’s impossible to prove either way.
In any case the choice I appeared to have made long ago but only recently consciously uncovered is not exactly the same. I fused the exploration of at least three different domains of value in order to better understand consciousness, both mine and other people’s, so as to enable us to enhance our experience and the mental models we apply to it. This inevitably involved reading, writing, reflection and consulting. Given that my 3Rs tend to be weighted in favour of solitary exploration it may look as though my introversion tipped me towards perfecting my art of understanding at the expense of my relationships. I can’t deny that this is possible and that people close to me have suffered in consequence. I also know with a high degree of certainty though that I have been enabled to help many other people deal more effectively with the problems in their lives, both in my profession as a clinical psychologist and in my personal life as well.
I am also clear that my fusion of art, spirituality and psychology lifted my game significantly in this respect.
I would never have been able to achieve as good an understanding of dreams and hallucinations without my long experience of delving into the hidden meanings behind poems and paintings, nor would I have been able to pass on skills relevant to constructively enhancing our models of reality without intensely practising the Bahá’í yoga of consultation over many years, nor would I have been able to assist people in the exploration of their inscape without all the various meditative practices I’d delved into over the years. All of those enriched my understanding of psychology which, of course, also enriched my understanding of them in return – a process of reciprocal creativity.
In a way my intense focus on those three domains was intended to enrich my life rather than demanding that I prefer them to life. Putting the SAP (Spirituality, Arts & Psychology) acronym into practice enriched my perspective by dissolving the veils and resolving the disputed values between them.
Life versus Art
T. S. Eliot was clearly in a different place altogether.
After years of waiting in the hope that, should Vivienne Eliot die, she and Eliot would marry, Emily Hale woke to a very different reality:[1] ‘Twelve days later, after Vivienne’s funeral, a second letter on 3 February, shows a change of mind. Over these days it came to [Eliot]: he could not bring himself to marry her.’ Instead of being a welcome event that cleared the way for future happiness it seems that ‘. . . his wife died too soon, because it brought on a problem he never intended to solve: marriage to Emily Hale.’ He faced a serious challenge:[2] ‘… Once Vivienne died obligations to Emily Hale erupted in his path.’
The situation was so different for Hale for whom ‘of course, marriage was the answer to the years of waiting. Imagine, then, her shock to receive Eliot’s letter of 3 February.’
The reason why he backed away from marrying her was classic textbook:[3]
The severance must be carried out whatever the consequences for Emily because he has to protect the solitude his gift must have if it is to flourish.
All the years he and Emily had shared seemed to count for nothing:[4]
This denies the reality of their shared moments and relegates Emily to a category that includes Vivienne, underlined by his claim not to be made for marriage.
In Eliot’s case his values clashed irreconcilably.
Much as Emily Hale had enriched his life, and no matter how many times in his letters to her over the years he had assured her of his love, it all counted for nothing in the end when he came to feel marriage to her would interfere with his poetry. Over many years this reality had been carefully hidden from Hale’s sight behind veil upon veil of words. The impact of his tearing down these veils was almost certainly traumatic, though we have no letters from that period to prove the point. He burnt them all. Ten years later she wrote:[5]
‘. . . something too personal, too obscurely emotional for me to understand, decided TSE against marrying again. This was both a shock and a sorrow, though looking back on the story, perhaps I could not have been the companion in marriage I hoped to be, perhaps the decision saved us both from great unhappiness – I cannot ever know.’
Sometimes for some of us, veils work in different ways that can make decisions about our exact values more difficult.
The Hidden God Problem
For Táhirih both the Twin Manifestations were still alive in her lifetime. Her problem therefore was not with the idea of a hidden God – it seemed more to do with why so few people seem to see what was obvious to her:[6]
From behind the veils of grandeur
the face of God is suddenly manifest!
O, believers, you need no longer heed:
‘You shall not see me!’
I have dealt elsewhere on this blog at some length with the idea of the brain as a filter as a way of explaining why it is so difficult to access any aspect of the transcendent. I don’t plan to go over that here but will be focusing on R. S. Thomas’s struggle with God’s inaccessibility and related issues.
R. S. Thomas there were three related problems starting with God as inaccessible:[7]
It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter
From which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
According to Wynn Thomas this problem haunted R. S. Thomas for most of his life:[8] ‘Thomas’s great quarry was ever the deus absconditus to whom the mystics of the ages had paid their awed tribute.’
And haunted is a resonant word in this context:[9]
[For Ruth Bidgood the word] ‘haunted’ signifies an awareness of a dimension of life that, while omnipresent, remains tantalisingly evasive, unreachable and unknowable.
But even if Thomas could connect in some way with God, there is the second problem of language. He probably wouldn’t be able to find the words to describe it.
Wynn Thomas refers to a poem by R. S. Thomas whose roots lie in the life and work of Bishop William Morgan who translated the Bible into Welsh in 1588. He admired Morgan’s ‘serene prose.’ There was inevitably a catch however:[10]
As a fellow writer, he is also particularly aware of how deceptive such ‘serene prose’ actually is; how it offers not the slightest hint of the ‘intolerable wrestle with language’, as T. S, Eliot memorably put it… So he imagined Bishop Morgan’s mouth as filled with ‘rows of teeth/Broken on the unmanageable bone//Of language.’
Wynn Thomas goes on to quote part of the poem:[11]
. . . ‘Language can be/like iron. Are we sure we can bend/the Absolute to our meaning?’ This, of course, is a question the troubled Thomas throughout his long writing life, and one he returned to time and again in his poems.
In spite of both these obstacles:[12]
[In 1972] recently settled in Aberdaron, despairing of both culture and politics,… he began to send out his distinctive verse probes into inner space.
A respected poet was impressed by the poems:
. . . [Seamus Heaney in Stepping Stones says] ‘What I loved then were those later poems about language, about God withdrawn and consciousness like a tilted satellite dish – full of potential to broadcast and receive, but still not quite operating.’
In spite of all these caveats:[13]
[Aled Jones Williams] insists that to accept the insufficiency of language is not to deny that nevertheless it can perform an invaluable service in bringing us into the presence of spiritual depths.
R. S. Thomas seems to buy into this optimism up to a point:[14]
Had I
the right words, it is the poem
that would announce you to
an amazed audience; . . .
In a later book Wynn Thomas captures what he feels is Thomas’s achievement as someone ‘writing the modern history of a soul’ in the following words:[15]
. . . This is the Thomas who seems to have fully discovered the natural idiom of his soul only late in his career, in his haunting religious poetry.
That just about summarises my response to R. S. Thomas’s achievement in this respect at least.
The third problem, theodicy, will have to wait until next time.
References
[1]. The Hyacinth Girl – page 290.
[2]. Op. cit. – page 291.
[3]. Op. cit. – page 292)
[4]. Op. cit. – page 293)
[5]. Op. cit. – Page 302)
[6]. The Poetry of Táhirih by John Hatcher & Amrollah Hemmat – page 95.
[7]. Collected Poems – page 361.
[8]. R. S. Thomas to Rowan Williams: The Spiritual Imagination in Modern Welsh Poetry – page 205.
[9]. Op. cit. – page 248.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 228.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 229.
[12]. Op. cit. – page 212.
[13]. Op. cit. – page 252.
[14]. No Truce with the Furies – page 58.
[15]. R. S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive – page 10.
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