Book Review – ‘Collecting Souls’ (4/4): Alice Neel & Expressionism

Ginny, 1984 (scanned from Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life — page 219)

The sequence which partly focused on Táhirih caused me to think about other female artists who, while they did not suffer devaluation as a woman as she did, were also seriously underestimated for much of their lives. Alice Neal is one such artist. 

At the end of the previous post I indicated that I would be moving onto the Expressionist leanings of Neel’s art, primed by comments in Collecting souls. For example,[1] ‘[as] Alice withdrew increasingly into herself, her paintings exploded in expressiveness.’

She resisted what the Belchers term ‘abstract expressionism.’[2] They go on to explain why:

Alice remained committed to the human figure as the centre of her art. Her faithfulness to a belief in the importance of the human being stretched beyond an ideology of humanism. To Alice, artists have an obligation to history, not just to record, but to interpret the richness and complexity of the life of the period in which they live. She believed “that more is communicated about an area and its effect on people by a revealing portrait than in any other way.”

She persisted down this path even though she knew that ‘figures were not commercially viable.’

In Painter of Modern Life, Petra Gördüren in her chapter on Emotional Values lists her expressionist influences:[3]

The founding figures of modern art – Vincent Van Gough, Munch and Oscar Kokoschka – are primarily cited in this context, artists who, like Neel, understood painting as the expression of subjective sensations and did not hesitate to explore the depths of the human psyche.

Her expressionism seems to blend with her politics, into something I am tempted to label ‘social expressionism,’ as Gördüren seems to hint at when she writes (my emphasis):[4] ‘Neel established herself as a painter of the very personally felt social realism that dominated American painting of the late 1920s and the 1930s.’ Laura Stamps in her chapter, A Marxist girl on Capitalism, points very much in the same direction:[5] ‘She developed her characteristic style, tending on the one hand towards Expressionism, and yet also towards the documentary.’

Following up on my discussion in the previous post, this appears to be also linked with her tendency towards projection, as Stamps is strongly indicating: [6]

She wanted to capture her subjects psychologically and socially… Neel also deliberately projected her own desires and fears onto her subject. She in fact chose portraiture in order to enter into dialogue with “the other.”

The Belchers quote the words[7] ‘capturing of things essential’ to describe this quality in Neel’s work, and refer to[8] what seems to be ‘an unusual mingling of social commitment and subjective intensity.’ They attribute her motivation for this blending of personal and political to her being[9] ‘an individual who had suffered greatly’ so she therefore ‘painted pictures that communicated one of her core creeds, that “no one on earth should suffer.”’ A telling way to summarise this can be found in Laura Stamps A Marxist girl on Capitalism:[10]

She was working on something that, though it clearly concerned herself, also transcended the personal.

Closing Comments

In Painter of Modern Life, in the Catalogue of Works, we find an appropriate portrait on which to end this sequence: Ginny, 1984:[11]

Painted during the winter in Vermont, it depicts Ginny in mourning for her mother who died the previous year, and was painted at the time when Neel knew her number was up, for she had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. . . . It is clearly an expression of endings,… an image of such power and subtlety that it appeared to subsume the knowledge of a lifetime of painting.

A perfect example, in fact, of the empathic projection I have been attributing to her most emotionally powerful portraits.

I can’t quite avoid being triggered into reflections here about van Gogh. When I am confronted by his life and his greatest art I find myself asking, ‘How is it that we so often find such life-enhancing beauty flowering from the soil of such peace-destroying torment?’ It gives Dylan’s dictum that ‘behind every beautiful thing there’s some kind of pain,’ a strange relevance. Behind the obvious meaning that encounters with beauty create a fear of their loss, there lurks the idea that out of some kind of pain everything of beauty flowers.

With Neel, though, you almost always see the pain behind the beauty: not so with van Gogh’s greatest work, where the beauty often masks the pain.

With both van Gogh and Neel, of course, we need to be concerned at least as much by the pain they caused to others as by the pain of others they capture in paint.

Alice Neel, at least to a significant extent, saw herself as painting to draw attention to the costs of inequality and discrimination, and is now credited with having succeeded in doing so. From a Bahá’í point of view one of the main purposes of art is to enhance consciousness, not least in terms of raising our awareness of our interconnectedness with all humanity, in fact with all forms of life, as well as widening our compass of compassion. This seems to have been the main purpose of Neel in amassing this collection of souls. I am not sure she would have been aware that this title for her work had been in a way anticipated by a woman poet of the 19^th Century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning when she wrote in her narrative masterpiece Aurora Leigh (First Book – lines 1097-98):

. . . .paint a body well

You paint a soul by implication.

Does the extent to which she succeeded in doing so justify the pain she caused others by focusing on her art and neglecting them? Are we facing a Dickensian problem here – and I don’t mean the Jellybys in Bleak House – I am referring to the novelist’s total lack of care and consideration for his wife, the mother of his children, whom he demonised, and deprived of contact with them, while at the same time exploring Scroogian conversions to caring and compassion, and advocating the mantra that ‘humanity is our business.’

Maybe we all face dilemmas of this kind, for example when we try to balance the needs of work and family. In the process we all make mistakes, perhaps only realising too late that we have spent too little time with our children in pursuit of our career, because of what we saw as our vocation.

Getting the balance right is a difficult art in itself, from the mastery of which our devotion to what we see as our real work in life can permanently derail us.

So, I am not keen to leap to judgement against Alice Neel, and condemn her for the possibly negative impact of her art on those closest to her who needed her most. I don’t see her as being as ruthless and deliberate as Dickens was, in defaming his wife to disguise his own involvement with his end of life romance. She was, as we have seen, to some degree tormented by the conflict between her art and the needs of others. Possibly the damage she caused was more than compensated for by how the suffering she depicted may have lifted her contemporaries’ attitudes to the left-behind and deliberately excluded to a higher and more compassionate level.

The Belchers seem to think so:[12]

. . . . hundreds of canvases, a buried treasure trove, chronicled Alice’s America over forty years, and even if any one portrait was not enough to capture the attention of the new category of viewers, the ‘oeuvre’ as a whole was compelling. . . . One art historian wrote that Alice had made portraiture “something more generous, more democratic and more expressive than it had been before . . .”

I can only suggest that this is a judgement call we each will always have to make for ourselves, both about the balance of our own lives as well as that of any public figure we admire and respect, be they artist, politician, activist, philanthropist, parent, partner or whatever else.

Anyway, I am grateful to these books on Neel’s life and art for forcing me to confront this important issue in all its complexity. Both books are definitely worth reading carefully, and her paintings will reward equally close attention, I believe.

References:

[1]. Collecting souls – page 123

[2]. Ibid. – Page 201

[3]. Painter of Modern Life – page 31.

[4]. Ibid. – page 38.

[5]. Ibid. – page 41.

[6]. Ibid. — page 44.

[7]. Collecting souls – page 80.

[8]. Ibid. – page 172.

[9]. Ibid. – page 176.

[10]. Painter of Modern Life – page 42.

[11]. Ibid. – page 228.

[12] Collecting Souls – page 240.

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An Angle on Suffering (3/3): the nature of choice

Had the life and growth of the child in the womb been confined to that condition, then the existence of the child in the womb would have proved utterly abortive and unintelligible; as would the life of this world, were its deeds, actions and their results not to appear in the world to come.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Bahá’í World Faith: page 393)

The theme of this much earlier sequence of posts seems to anticipate the next new post’s revisiting of the theme of theodicy, and therefore warrants republishing now.

In the previous two posts, I have been looking at Dabrowski’s Theory of Personal Disintegration (TPD) most particularly for what it has to say about suffering.

Both TPD and a rich and interesting approach to psychotherapy – Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) – owe much to existentialism. Mendaglio acknowledges his debt in the last chapter of the book he edited on this subject (page 251):

However, there is a great deal of similarity between existential psychology and the theory of positive disintegration. Both emphasise similar key concepts such as values, autonomy, authenticity, and existential emotions such as anxiety and depression. A more fundamental similarity is seen in the philosophical underpinnings of TPD, which is in large measure existentialism.

In spite of my own immense debt to existentialist thinking, only rivalled by my debts to Buddhism and to the Bahá’í Faith, I have certain reservations about Dabrowski’s take on the degree of choice we are able to exercise.

Crucial Caveats

His take on suffering is truly inspiring. Care needs to be taken though that we do not adopt this view in a way that assumes that those who are crushed by their sufferings are somehow to blame.

It is true that his model presupposes that each of us will probably meet a challenging choice point sometime in our lives, where we can either cling to the familiar comfortable half-truths that have failed us or strive to rise about them to higher levels of understanding. It is also true that he feels that many of us are capable of choosing the second option, if we only would.

However, not everyone is so lucky. I include here a brief summary of the life history of Ian – the man whose interview I have quoted extensively in the first three posts on An Approach to Psychosis.

His history shows very clearly that he could only make the second choice at times and then meet the pain and work through it to alleviate his tormenting voices. At other times the voices were preferable to experiencing the guilt and he chose what we might call madness rather than lucidity. Given the horrors he had faced it was clear that he should not be thought a failure. I would probably have done the same had I gone through what he had experienced in his life, from his earliest days.

Dabrowski seems to feel that our capacity to choose is genetically determined. Mendaglio explains (page 250):

Dabrowski . . . . postulated the existence of a third factor of development, representing a powerful autonomous inner force which is rooted in the biological endowment of individuals.

It seems to me that it would have taken a truly exceptional individual to make the choice to experience Ian’s level of pain in order to progress. If that does not seem quite convincing, there is another case history I would like to share very briefly.

Among the sequence of posts related to mental health there is a poem called ‘Voices.’ The woman upon whose experiences that poem is based, was brutally abused by her father, sexually, and by her mother, physically, from her earliest years through her mid-teens.

She came to us to work on her father’s abuse. We developed a safe way of working which involved starting with 15 minutes exploring how things had been since we last met. Then we moved on to 15-20 minutes of carefully calibrated work on the abuse. Then the last half hour of the session was spent helping her regain her ordinary state after mind after the work on her early experiences had intensified her hallucinations.

After almost a year of this work things seemed to be going well. Then came the unexpected. She found herself in a building that closely resembled the building strongly connected with the worst episode of abuse she had experienced at the hands of her father. Just being there was more than she could cope with. She became retraumatised in a way we none of us could have anticipated or prevented. The next time we met she could not stop sobbing.

We discussed what she might do. There were two main options.

She could, if she wished, continue on her current low levels of medication and move into a social services hostel where she would be well supported while we continued our work together, or she could be admitted onto the ward and given higher levels of medication in order to tranquillise her out of all awareness of her pain.

She chose the second option and I could not blame her in any way for doing so. It would be a betrayal of the word’s meaning to suppose she had any real choice at that point but to remain psychotic while the medication kicked in rather than deal with the toxic emotions in which she felt herself to be drowning.

It is when I consider these kinds of situation at my current level of understanding of his theory, that I feel it could leave the door open to destructive attitudes.

He believes, if I have understood him correctly, that some people’s genetic endowment is so robust they will ultimately choose the harder option regardless of the environment in which they grew up. Most of us are in the middle and with an environment that is not too extreme we will do quite well. The endowment of some is so poor, he seems to be saying, that it requires an optimal environment if they are to choose to grow even in a modest way.

This approach, if I have got it right, has two problems. The first, which is less central to the theme of this post, is that it is perhaps unduly deterministic because of the power that is given to inherited ‘endowment’ to determine the life course of any individual. The second problem is more relevant to current considerations in this post, though related to the first point. By placing such a determining role upon heredity, the force of the environment may be unduly discounted.

I am not claiming that he attaches no importance to environment. In fact, education for example is much emphasised in his work and he is clearly aware that limited societies will be limiting most people’s development – and he would include the greedy materialism of Western cultures in that equation. I’m not sure where he would place the impact of natural disasters in his scheme of things.

He may though be minimising the crushing impact of such experiences as the two people I worked with had undergone, in the second case throughout almost all her formative years. Could a strong genetic endowment have endured such hardship and come through significantly less damaged? If you feel so, you may end up not so much thinking ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I!’ but more ‘They broke because they were weak.’ Empathy, which Dobrawski values so much, would be impaired because we can start to define people as essentially different from us, not quite part of the same superior species.

More Complexities

This is a truly complex area to consider though, and I will have to restrict myself at this point to a very brief examination of one approach to it which does justice to that complexity.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in his description of the various components of our character, suggests that what we inherit is a source of either strength or weakness (Some Answered Questions: page 213):

The variety of inherited qualities comes from strength and weakness of constitution—that is to say, when the two parents are weak, the children will be weak; if they are strong, the children will be robust. . . . . . For example, you see that children born from a weak and feeble father and mother will naturally have a feeble constitution and weak nerves; they will be afflicted and will have neither patience, nor endurance, nor resolution, nor perseverance, and will be hasty; for the children inherit the weakness and debility of their parents.

However, this is not quite the end of the matter. He does not conclude from this that moral qualities, good or bad, stem directly from the inherited temperament of an individual (pages 214-215):

But this is not so, for capacity is of two kinds: natural capacity and acquired capacity. The first, which is the creation of God, is purely good—in the creation of God there is no evil; but the acquired capacity has become the cause of the appearance of evil. For example, God has created all men in such a manner and has given them such a constitution and such capacities that they are benefited by sugar and honey and harmed and destroyed by poison. This nature and constitution is innate, and God has given it equally to all mankind. But man begins little by little to accustom himself to poison by taking a small quantity each day, and gradually increasing it, until he reaches such a point that he cannot live without a gram of opium every day. The natural capacities are thus completely perverted. Observe how much the natural capacity and constitution can be changed, until by different habits and training they become entirely perverted. One does not criticize vicious people because of their innate capacities and nature, but rather for their acquired capacities and nature.

Our habits and choices have a crucial part to play. Due weight though has also to be given to the power of upbringing and the environment (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Sec. 95, pp. 124–25):

It is not, however, permissible to strike a child, or vilify him, for the child’s character will be totally perverted if he be subjected to blows or verbal abuse.

This theme is taken up most powerfully by the central body of the Bahá’í Faith ((Universal House of Justice: April 2000):

In the current state of society, children face a cruel fate. Millions and millions in country after country are dislocated socially. Children find themselves alienated by parents and other adults whether they live in conditions of wealth or poverty. This alienation has its roots in a selfishness that is born of materialism that is at the core of the godlessness seizing the hearts of people everywhere. The social dislocation of children in our time is a sure mark of a society in decline; this condition is not, however, confined to any race, class, nation or economic condition–it cuts across them all. It grieves our hearts to realise that in so many parts of the world children are employed as soldiers, exploited as labourers, sold into virtual slavery, forced into prostitution, made the objects of pornography, abandoned by parents centred on their own desires, and subjected to other forms of victimisation too numerous to mention. Many such horrors are inflicted by the parents themselves upon their own children. The spiritual and psychological damage defies estimation.

This position allows for the fact that we need to take responsibility for our own development while at the same time acknowledging that we may be too damaged by the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous’ upbringing to do so to any great extent without a huge amount of help from other people. And most of us are the other people who need to exert ourselves to protect all children and nurture every damaged adult who crosses our path to the very best of our ability. Maybe Dabrowski is also saying this, but I haven’t read it yet. Even so his thought-provoking message is well worth studying.

In the end though, as the quote at the beginning of this post suggests, any consideration of suffering that fails to include a reality beyond the material leaves us appalled at what would seem the pointless horror of the pain humanity endures not only from nature but also from its own hands. I may have to come back to this topic yet again. (I did in fact return to a deeper consideration of Dabrowski’s model in a sequence of posts focused on Jenny Wade’s theory of human consciousness: see embedded links.)

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An Angle on Suffering (2/3): Dabrowski’s Theory

‘Greed is Good’

The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment. His attitude in this world will be that of divine happiness. Man is, so to speak, unripe: the heat of the fire of suffering will mature him. Look back to the times past and you will find that the greatest men have suffered most.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Paris Talks page 184)

The theme of this much earlier sequence of posts seems to anticipate the next new post’s revisiting of the theme of theodicy, and therefore warrants republishing now.

The Role of Suffering in Personal Growth

After the first more general post on this issue, this one brings me onto a more detailed consideration of Sal Mendaglio’s book about Dabrowski’s Theory of Personal Disintegration (TPD).

I have to own up. I’ve not quite finished the book yet and it is rather uneven. Some of the chapters are excellent while others leave too many gaps in the thinking to do full justice to the aspect of his theory they are tackling. However, I am already convinced that this approach to the human predicament has a huge amount to offer – not least on the issue of suffering and a related issue, sacrifice.

I will have to summarise fairly brutally here if I am to avoid seriously over-inflating this series of posts.

Rather as in the British Psychological Society (BPS) article I quoted from last time, Dabrowski sees suffering as triggering a process that can move in either of two directions. In his terms, it can lead us either to negative disintegration, regression to ineffective ways of being, and even to possible illness, or to a positive disintegration, an unusual take on the world, conducive to higher development and growth.

Where he differs from the BPS article is in the way he privileges suffering, even when it is apparently close to mental illness, as a necessary and powerful means of personal and moral development. This is all closely allied to his model of human potential which is hierarchical. It hypothesises that there are levels which rise from the lowest, least conscious and least developed (biological & social), through the next highest level which is somewhat more conscious and conflicted but still too automated and blindly conformist, via two higher levels of inner conflict which are more autonomous, consciously choosing higher rather than lower values, to level five, where the highest ideals the person can envisage are chosen and enacted regardless of social disapproval and discouragement.

The diagram above is a very crude approximation of his model just to convey a general sense of it. Mendaglio explains that Level I (page 35):

. . . . is a cohesive mental organisation dedicated to gratifying an individual’s biological instincts, drives and needs, including social needs.

The social aspect is not ultimately beneficial (page 36):

. . . . some individuals characterised by primary integration are overly socialised; their way of being in the world is highly socially conforming.

Level II involves a challenge to this comfortable conformity which makes it distinctly uncomfortable (page 37):

Dabrowski postulated that when crises have the effect of loosening the integrated mental organisation of individuals, they have limited choices. Individuals return to the previous integrated state or they move to the next level. Remaining in Level II may lead to bad consequences such as psychoses or suicide.

At Level III (page 38):

Inner conflict arises from the individual’s growing awareness of the way personal and social phenomena ought to be is discrepant with the way they are. The ideal-real discrepancy intensifies as the individual becomes increasingly self-aware and aware of societal values.

Without the suffering that spurs a person to abandon lower levels of integration which involve biological urges and social conformity, there would be no growth to start with, and without the determination to pursue the higher path in spite of the suffering it can involve, there would be no final peace of mind as the person lives out their highest values.

When a person reaches Level IV something Dabrowski calls the ‘third factor’ comes into play (page 26):

. . . . It is described as the force by which individuals become more self-determined, controlling their behaviour through their inner voices and values.

Level IV is a distinct leap forward (page 38):

Whereas Level III is dominated by disintegrating dynamisms, Level IV sees the rise of developmental dynamisms such as autonomy, authenticity, self-education and autopsychotherapy, and the third factor. Under the direction of the third factor, individuals deliberately select higher values and courses of action, abandoning lower ones. In addition, individuals develop a strong sense of responsibility for self and others.

The diagonal line on the top surface of the diagram is meant to represent the idea that as dissolving dynamisms fade, developmental ones increase in power.

In Dabrowski’s model at Level V (page 39):

[individuals] conduct their lives by enacting the personality ideal, whereby behaviour is directed by their constructive hierarchy of values. Virtually no inner conflict is experienced, since the lower forms of motivation have been destroyed, and replaced by the higher forms of empathy, autonomy, and authenticity.

Chrysalis from Music of Nature

Where suffering can take us if we let it

There are certain issues to clarify here. For example, in Chapter 3 of the book, Piechowski makes an important point (page 75):

I feel that the Dabrowski extolled the virtues of inner conflict perhaps too much, as he believed in the ennobling value of suffering but failed to mention that the ennobling is possible only if one accepts the suffering as something to grow through. Acceptance is essential.

It may be possible in a later sequence of posts to explore the parallels and differences between this view and the position of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), an approach already explored in previous posts (see links) where the need to face pain in order to enact one’s values is central, but there seems little emphasis if any upon suffering as a primary spur. It may also be appropriate to bring in ideas from Jenny Wade‘s book ‘Changes of Mind‘ which also sees an hierarchical structure to our personality development. But more of that eventually maybe.

Tillier in Chapter 5 (page 119) quotes passages of great importance from Dabrowski’s own writing:

‘Crises are periods of increased insight into oneself, creativity, and personality development’ . . . . And: ‘Every authentic creative process consists of “loosening”, “splitting” or “smashing” the former reality. Every mental conflict is associated with destruction and pain; every step forward in the direction of authentic existence is combined with shocks, sorrows, suffering, and distress.’

This resonates with the view of spiritual traditions, including that of the Baha’i Faith, which place great emphasis upon the crucial importance of crises and ‘tests’ and the way we deal with them (Arabic Hidden Words: nos. 18 & 51):

O SON OF SPIRIT! Ask not of Me that which We desire not for thee, then be content with what We have ordained for thy sake, for this is that which profiteth thee, if therewith thou dost content thyself.

O SON OF MAN! My calamity is My providence, outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy. Hasten thereunto that thou mayest become an eternal light and an immortal spirit. This is My command unto thee, do thou observe it.

At the end of this path lies the highest development of the human personality. There are examples given of people who seem to have achieved this. The degree of empathy they have realised seems to make possible supreme acts of self-sacrifice, for example (page 99):

Janusz Korczak, physician, writer, and above all, educator. He was Polish and of Jewish origin. When the decision was made in the Second World War to burn in the crematorium at Treblinka all the children attending his school, he decided to go with them even though he had received an amnesty from the Nazis. . . . . The decision arose from the compassion and love he had for the children and his fidelity for them.

Or (pages 134-135):

Henri Bergson was born in France in 1859 and lived and taught there all his life. When, after the fall of France in 1940, the Vichy government introduced anti-Semitic measures based on the Nazi model, it was proposed, because of Bergson’s international reputation, that he be exempted from them. He refused to be treated differently, resigned his various honours, and, although at that time an enfeebled old man who had to be supported while standing in line, registered with the other Jews.

Part of this empathy seems to have derived, at least in some instances, from a strong sense of unity with all creation. Tillier quotes the Peace Pilgrim (page 62):

. . . . In the midst of the struggle came a wonderful mountain-top experience, and for the first time I knew what inner peace was like. I felt oneness – oneness with all my fellow human beings, oneness with all of creation. I have never felt really separate since.

Universal Values

There is a tricky issue lying behind this. Dabrowski places great importance on the value of autonomy. Suffering, in his view, spurs a person to discover what their highest values are in order to live by them. He also believes there are universal values and that some people, as a result of suffering, will autonomously choose to work towards these values. He is contemptuous of any education system that creates conformity. He trusts that we can and will choose these universal values, rather than be dogmatically forced towards them. Mróz explains this succinctly (page 231):

Dabrowski . . . . assumes the existence of absolute values prior to their experience by the individual. These values are only discovered in the process of disintegration and the discovery is associated with the achievement of advanced levels of development. . . . . . The values consciously selected and adopted by the individual . . . . become the building material for the personality ideal formed at these levels.

This raises various questions. A relativist, which Dabrowski is not, will ask, “Are there really any absolute values?” Someone with a strong sense that there are, if (s)he feels (s)he knows exactly what they are, might question whether it is safe to leave anyone free to decide for themselves what these values might be.

Interestingly, the Bahá’í Faith offers a way past this dilemma. On the one hand, it insists that people should be left free to investigate reality for themselves and come to their own conclusions. At the same time, it explains that, at this stage of human development, we must recognise the essential oneness of all humanity and the principles that can be derived from that recognition. If we do not, we risk taking, to paraphrase the Porter in Macbeth, ‘the primrose way to the . . . bonfire’ that destroys our whole civilisation. The principles we need to take on board include the detailed operational definitions of universal compassion and universal justice to be found in the Bahá’í Writings (see links to get started on that one!). So we can feel free, if we are so minded, to choose the destruction of all that mankind has created – no pressure there then.

Also this position leaves open the intriguing possibility that at a higher stage of human development we will be able to grasp even higher values. This in a way may be inherent in the Bahá’í concept of ‘progressive revelation.’

In the next post I will explore some further implications of Dabrowski’s view of suffering.

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The Currency of Suffering (2/2)

A chain like the one in the Siyah Chal

The theme of this much earlier sequence of posts seems to anticipate the next new post’s revisiting of the theme of theodicy, and therefore warrants republishing now.

At the end of the previous post on this topic there is the following challenging quote from Bahá’u’lláh’s Hidden Words:

51. O SON OF MAN! My calamity is My providence, outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy. Hasten thereunto that thou mayest become an eternal light and an immortal spirit. This is My command unto thee, do thou observe it.

No one can argue convincingly that Bahá’u’lláh did not know what suffering was like. That alone would give His words tremendous credibility. He was incarcerated in the Siyah Chal, a traumatic ordeal. His experience there was special in an altogether different and more positive way as well:

In the middle of the 19th century, one of the most notorious dungeons in the Near East was Tehran’s “Black Pit.” Once the underground reservoir for a public bath, its only outlet was a single passage down three steep flights of stone steps. Prisoners huddled in their own bodily wastes, languishing in the pit’s inky gloom, subterranean cold and stench-ridden atmosphere.

In this grim setting, the rarest and most cherished of religious events was once again played out: a mortal man, outwardly human in other respects, was summoned by God to bring to humanity a new religious revelation.

The year was 1852, and the man was a Persian nobleman, known today as Bahá’u’lláh. During His imprisonment, as He sat with his feet in stocks and a 100-pound iron chain around his neck, Bahá’u’lláh received a vision of God’s will for humanity.

For Bahá’ís therefore His words have an authority over and above the credence everyone would undoubtedly agree His sufferings accorded Him. I recognise that many do not see His Words as originating with God so it is necessary to pursue this exploration of the meaning of suffering much further and in more prosaic terms.

The Siyah Chal was not the end of His sufferings. Exile and further imprisonment followed, and in the prison in Acre he lost His youngest son, Mirza Mihdi:

He was pacing the roof of the barracks in the twilight, one evening, wrapped in his customary devotions, when he fell through the unguarded skylight onto a wooden crate, standing on the floor beneath, which pierced his ribs, and caused, twenty-two hours later, his death, on . . . . June 23, 1870.

(God Passes By: page 188)

Mirza Mihdi

So, He clearly knew from close personal experience what he was talking about. Also, if we have accepted that the improbability of the universe entails the existence of a God capable of creating it, and now that we have begun to comprehend the vastness, wonder and complexity of the universe, with its quantum foam and simultaneous interactions over vast distances that light would need decades to traverse, the idea of the spiritual reality of which He speaks begins to seem a little less preposterous.

This is fortunate because, as we have already seen in the previous post on this subject, there is no way we can get out of the impasse without making a further extrapolation from the existence of a God to the existence of a reality beyond the one accessible to our senses.

Eric Reitan, in his exemplary treatment of the whole question of the existence of God, takes a long look at the questions we are scrutinising now. His discussion is thorough and complex and I can only include the bare bones of it here. His concern in the passages I quote is the problem of evil, but it is easy to see how his comments apply to the closely related issue of suffering. On pages 196-197 he writes:

For any and all of these evils, the question of why God would permit them requires us to suppose that there are vistas of reality that transcend our understanding – vistas that may not just put evil into perspective but also the fact that it can seem so overwhelming. . . . .

If, within His vast ocean of understanding, God discerns a justifying reason for allowing evil to exist, the probability that this reason would also fall within our puddle of understanding is very low.

So, we can neither know the mind of God nor grasp the full nature of the spiritual reality which surrounds us, though it surely exists in some form. He draws on the cosmological argument, a variation of which I have already referred to briefly in the earlier post and mention again above, to conclude that (page 197) ‘it is reasonable to believe in a transcendent and essentially mysterious reality.’

It is perhaps important to mention that Reitan is not seeking to provide conclusive proof that would persuade everyone that God exists. That would be impossible for reasons I have explored elsewhere. He is simply demonstrating that it is as reasonable to believe in God as not, a truth that Darwinian reductionists find hard to swallow. (See Olinga Tahzib’s Ch4 broadcast for a clear explanation of the Baha’i viewpoint.)

Once you accept the possibility of a transcendent realm, aspects of that mysterious reality can be seen to have, potentially at least, a massively compensating function that provides a radically different context against which to measure both evil and suffering, a context which would make it possible to accept that the pain entailed in making moral choices, for example, and the agony incurred in unforeseen calamities are not inordinate and maybe even serve some higher purpose. Reitan himself points towards this very clearly (page 189):

Not long ago, the distracted negligence of a home daycare provider combined with plain bad luck to take the life of my friend’s 18-month-old son, a gentle boy fiercely loved by his parents. In the face of this tragedy, my friend and his wife have been sustained by a religious faith which promises that everything good and beautiful about their child has been embraced by the deepest reality in the universe.

Something else has helped me come to terms with even uninvited suffering, and helped me also get a more immediate sense of how the idea of a spiritual reality, over and above the purely physical world our senses are restricted to, can be of great help. This was the message that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote to bereaved parents who had contacted him in their despair, his keen awareness of the pain of their grief perhaps enhanced by the strong light cast by his own feelings from when his brother, Mirza Mihdi, died in the prison citadel of Acre. He uses a very homely and concrete image to embody the intuition Reitan describes, imagery which makes the possibility of a spiritual realm more vivid and brings it that much closer:

The death of that beloved youth and his separation from you have caused the utmost sorrow and grief; for he winged his flight in the flower of his age and the bloom of his youth to the heavenly nest. But he hath been freed from this sorrow-stricken shelter and hath turned his face toward the everlasting nest of the Kingdom, and, being delivered from a dark and narrow world, hath hastened to the sanctified realm of light; therein lieth the consolation of our hearts.

The inscrutable divine wisdom underlieth such heart-rending occurrences. It is as if a kind gardener transferreth a fresh and tender shrub from a confined place to a wide open area. This transfer is not the cause of the withering, the lessening or the destruction of that shrub; nay, on the contrary, it maketh it to grow and thrive, acquire freshness and delicacy, become green and bear fruit. This hidden secret is well known to the gardener, but those souls who are unaware of this bounty suppose that the gardener, in his anger and wrath, hath uprooted the shrub. Yet to those who are aware, this concealed fact is manifest, and this predestined decree is considered a bounty. Do not feel grieved or disconsolate, therefore, at the ascension of that bird of faithfulness; nay, under all circumstances pray for that youth, supplicating for him forgiveness and the elevation of his station.

(Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: 169)

Even though this loving and lovely metaphor of the gardener contributed to a resolution of my quandary, there was still an aspect that troubled me. All this has not only been ordained by God, but it also requires our acquiescence in some way. Bahá’u’lláh’s own expression of it in the Hidden Words is:

18. O SON OF SPIRIT! Ask not of Me that which We desire not for thee, then be content with what We have ordained for thy sake, for this is that which profiteth thee, if therewith thou dost content thyself.

I needed to make sense of this in terms of what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá described. Why might it be so important that I content myself with this state of reality?

An obvious partial answer is that, if we can accept the suffering, we will suffer less. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy regards suffering as what we add to the inevitable pain of existence, in part by our resistance to it and also by the language we use to ourselves to describe it. Which is not to say that we should not take practical steps to alleviate our own pain in other ways and to give solace to others, as well as, where possible, making sure that avoidable accidents do not add to the catalogue of human misery.

To go beyond that and probe more deeply into possible ways of learning to accept the apparently unacceptable is something each of us has to do in our own way, by prayer, reading, reflection and ‘right action,’ to use the Buddhist phrase. So, as a way of bringing these reflections to a close, I’d like to share in short hand form my own way of internalising this depiction of reality and of coming to terms with this injunction that we be content with whatever sorrow comes our way.

Heart Safe (for source of image see link)

When we suffer it’s as though we have been robbed of the comforts we have locked away in our hearts to keep them safe, convinced that they were the gold that would buy us our protection from the slings and arrows of ill-fortune, and have been left in their stead with bundles of flimsy paper covered in strange writing.

We simply do not understand the true nature of this paper and rage against our loss, not appreciating that the rage, which is making our heart a furnace, will turn the paper into ashes all too soon, wiping out its incalculable value before we can realise its worth. If we could only come to see our pain and loss as providing us, as a gift, with the currency we will need when we travel, as we all must at some unknown point in the future, to settle in the undiscovered land from whose borders no traveller returns, it would become possible to accept it gratefully rather than resist it pointlessly. We would not then unwittingly destroy it, much to our disadvantage later. Without this currency, when we die we will be like refugees, ill-equipped at first to deal with the challenges of our new homeland. If we were to realise this, not just with our heads but with our hearts as well, we could then do as Bahá’u’lláh advises us and greet calamity with the same peace of mind as we welcome all good fortune. That would be true wisdom and real wealth.

That, of course, is far easier said than done and will take most of us more than a lifetime to accomplish. That should not be a reason to give up, it seems to me. We will, after all, have the whole of eternity to finish off what we have begun locked in time down here, and the better the start we get, the less we’ll have to do later on. Another example of the compensating effect of taking the broader view offered by a spiritual perspective.

Perhaps there is no better way to close this pair of posts than by concluding with the most beautiful piece of music that I know of relating to this theme. (For more about Handel’s Messiah click the link.)

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The Currency of Suffering (1/2)

 

Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh at Bahji

The theme of this much earlier sequence of posts seems to anticipate the next new post’s revisiting of the theme of theodicy, and therefore warrants republishing now.

It’s nearly 4 a.m. On this day at about this time 119 years (now 131 years) ago, after four decades in prison and in exile, Bahá’u’lláh died near Acre, then an outpost of the Ottoman Empire, now a city in Israel. So on this holy day it seems fitting to begin some reflections upon the meaning of suffering, not just upon His sorrows but upon those of all who fall victim to what Shakespeare’s Hamlet described as the ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’

On 11 March this year, in the middle of the Bahá’í Fast which, in my experience at least, sensitises us more than usual to the sufferings of others, the BBC posted the following news bulletin:

Japan’s most powerful earthquake since records began has struck the north-east coast, triggering a massive tsunami. Cars, ships and buildings were swept away by a wall of water after the 8.9-magnitude tremor, which struck about 400km (250 miles) north-east of Tokyo. A state of emergency has been declared at a nuclear power plant, where pressure has exceeded normal levels.

Officials say 350 people are dead and about 500 missing, but it is feared the final death toll will be much higher. In one ward alone in Sendai, a port city in Miyagi prefecture, 200 to 300 bodies were found. In the centre of Tokyo many people are spending the night in their offices. But thousands, perhaps millions, chose to walk home. Train services were suspended.

Even after the most violent earthquake anyone could remember the crowds were orderly and calm. The devastation is further to the north, along the Pacific coast. There a tsunami triggered by the quake reached 10km (six miles) inland in places carrying houses, buildings, boats and cars with it. In the city of Sendai the police found up to 300 bodies in a single ward. Outside the city in a built-up area a fire blazed across several kilometres.

Japan’s ground self-defence forces have been deployed, and the government has asked the US military based in the country for help. The scale of destruction from the biggest quake ever recorded in Japan will become clear only at first light. The quake was the fifth-largest in the world since 1900 and nearly 8,000 times stronger than the one which devastated Christchurch, New Zealand, last month, said scientists.

For anyone who believes that an all-powerful and all-merciful God set up the world this way, such events have to pose a problem. Would it not have been possible to do it differently if God were truly all-powerful? If it were possible to do it differently and eliminate the need for suffering, and He did not, then He is not all-merciful. If He is all-merciful and yet set up the world to contain so much pain, he cannot be all-powerful. There is no fudging the issue and those of us with a belief in God, at some time in our lives, will have to confront it or live in a state of denial.

For a Darwinian materialist, of course, there’s not an issue: ‘This is how the universe works and that’s all there is to say.’

So, why don’t I take that option?

It would end the apparently irresolvable paradox and remove the dissonance at one stroke. This is where I’m going to have to short-hand things because proving the existence of God is not the purpose of this post and in any case cannot be done in a way that would convince everyone for reasons that this blog has already explored countless times (see for instance the comments on Reitan’s book in the post on moral imagination).

I can’t revert to the atheism I used to find so plausible because, even if the existence of a purely insentient universe were not a compelling consideration, the fact that there is both life and consciousness is for me completely compelling. Life without consciousness is so utterly improbable that this alone would be enough to convince me, though, in that case, there would be no me to convince. Consciousness clinches it. The conditions to bring that into being are so improbable that I simply cannot persuade myself that they were not created by an intelligence for some purpose.

Once I’m impaled upon the thorns of that conviction, and it does bring all sorts of uncomfortable consequences in its train, I am also on the rack of the dilemma I described. How come there’s suffering?

Evil, in the sense of pain caused by people to other living sentient beings, can be put down to free will, which is a necessary precondition of moral and spiritual development, another complex issue that must get short shrift here as it’s not the main focus for now. Pain that is inherent to the design of the universe, when, as it does, it contains life forms that can feel it, is another issue altogether and the one I turn to now.

It clearly needs a lot more unpacking before I can fairly expect others to accept that disasters, such as the one Japan has so recently confronted, are compatible with the concept of a compassionate creator God. I find it pretty tough to do so myself and I’ve had years of practice now.

Some mileage can be made out of reminding myself that physical pain is a protector. Congenital analgesia ‘is a rare condition in which there is an absence of pain sensation from birth without the loss of other sensations or demonstrable nerve pathology. This can result in the individual unintentionally harming him or herself.’ When our nervous system is intact and our state of mind undisturbed, it is because we feel pain that we do not harm ourselves. This may extend to some degree into the realm of emotional pain. Experience teaches us what social situations hurt us and we learn to avoid them.

Even so, this benign function of pain does not resolve the crucial question for us, because an omnipotent God could, we presume, have made a world where there was no danger of harm and therefore no need for pain as a warning to us about it.

Charles Tart

Pain as moral developer goes only so far towards resolving this. Clearly, where there is no fear or pain there’d be no need for heroes, and, where no one suffers, none of us would need to sacrifice our comfort to help them. Also pain has been described by Charles Tart as a ‘trance breaker’ that wakes us up to the deeper realities hiding behind matter. Again though, surely, an all-knowing deity could have worked round that one and made a world where moral growth could happen with no uncomfortable choices.

Even if it were possible to accept, for the reasons give, all those kinds of pain as compatible with a merciful creator, what are we to make of all the unavoidable and seemingly pointless ways painful injury and agonising death afflict us? The warning function of pain is of no use to the victim of an avalanche. There is no moral growth entailed for you when you drown in a tsunami. And trances could surely be broken by something less traumatic?

There is no way round the conclusion that the universe is set up the way it is because that’s the way God wants it, even if it makes no sense to us and tests our faith to breaking point. So, where can we go from here? Is there a way of reconciling the seemingly arbitrary pain of the world around us with a merciful creator?

Bahá’u’lláh forces our faith to confront all these issues when He writes in the Hidden Words:

51. O SON OF MAN! My calamity is My providence, outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy. Hasten thereunto that thou mayest become an eternal light and an immortal spirit. This is My command unto thee, do thou observe it.

When the outward is all we can apparently experience, this statement challenges us to change our frame of reference quite radically. So, we are at the beginning of a journey of understanding which will take us through some difficult terrain. We’re in the territory John Donne describes in Satire III:

On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so . . .

As traversing it will take some time, it needs the leisure of another post I fear.

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Book Review – ‘Selected Poetry & Prose’ (5/5): Charlotte Mew – ‘Madeleine in Church’

Given that my recent sequence includes references to the spiritual poetry of Táhirih, who wrote her mystical verse in 19th Century Persia, it seemed useful to republish this sequence on another woman poet. Though she was not a believer she struggled with deep spiritual issues in places.

Last time I decided not to focus on some of the more famous or possibly more accessible dramatic lyrics.

So, where next?

I think there is a bullet that I have to bite. There is one poem that, at this point in my reading of her work, seems to me her greatest and most challenging, confronting the reader with some of our most basic existential questions through what sounds like the authentic voice of a deeply troubled heart and soul.

There are other poems whose haunting beauty makes for an easier read and I love them in their way almost as much – The Forest Road for example. They would be much easier to write about, but to do so would be to cop out from the challenge of conveying here the greatness of what I really feel is her most powerful dramatic lyric of all, one which addresses her usual challenging issues of death, despair and exclusion, this time in a deeply spiritual context.

So, Madeleine in Church it’s going to have to be, heaven help me.

Copus describes it as[1] ‘the first dramatic monologue voiced by a fallen woman,’ and goes on to say[2] it is ‘a text in which a woman talks candidly to God about her tortured soul, her sensuality and her numerous past lovers, and the compositor would take no part in promulgating it’ apparently because he thought it was ‘blasphemous’.

Challenging Questions

It confronts me with the questions I’d like to think I’d answered completely convincingly for the rest of my days down here, but know deep down that such absolute certainty will always remain elusive in this mortal life, and conviction in the reality of an afterlife, for example, mostly evades reason’s grip and only rests securely in the hands of faith. It is not comfortable to be challenged by this poem’s fiercely passionate confrontation of such questions, but Mew’s use of this dramatic format (even if it does express exactly what she believed herself at times, and that is a matter of debate) allows me to identify with Madeleine’s painful questioning without feeling coerced into sharing the perspective into which it leads her.

What we find in the poem often contradicts what I believe that I believe – for example, its reductionism, an exact reversal of what I believe I know to be the truth. Madeleine explains ‘I think my body was my soul,’ and although that sounds slightly tentative she comes across later as more assertive: ‘ we are what we are: the spirit afterwards, but first the touch.’ Many posts on this blog are testimony to how far away from this position I stand.

So, why do I find myself feeling so positive about the poem?

Reading Madeleine in Church, for me, feels like walking into the unhappy house my spirit used to live in, bringing back memories of why it had to leave in search of somewhere better. Such a poem unsurprisingly would have felt ‘blasphemous’ to someone who still drew comfort from the walls and décor of that same house, but for me it speaks of a kindred spirit who, unlike me, never managed to find a better home in this life for their spirit.

The poem is also is one of those that has the effect I described in an earlier post. I read these words from Madeleine in Church to my wife in the All Saints café in Hereford city centre, a most appropriate location:

What can You know, what can You really see
Of this dark ditch, the soul of me!

A poem of hers had brought me to the edge of tears once more.

It’s almost impossible to pin down exactly why that should be, apart from the probability that those words echo a sense of unworthiness most of us share at one time or another. Its music echoes another moving poem I love, which reads, ‘What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?’ This is from the Bahá’í poet Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays.

Maybe also part of the power to move me, which those words have, comes from their close correspondence with a feeling I tried to capture in Labyrinth:

Mind aches in the silence
which could mean Presence
or absence.
Only reflections to go on
if we, like Perseus,
are not to turn to stone.

Anyway, Madeleine in Church is the poem of hers I’ve read and re-read more than any other. This is for at least two reasons, apart from the sheer satisfaction derived from immersing myself in her mind.

The first motivation is to try and understand why I find it so deeply satisfying, and the second to try and unravel the meaning of some of the more perplexing passages. I’ll be focusing further mainly on the first point.

I was also planning to expand on the stirring effects of the elastic lines and redolent imagery, but the stack of reflections I’ve already built up is towering so high I have decided to abandon that plan.

Its resonance for me

There is partly the fascinating correspondence between Madeleine’s sceptical reflections and my lapsed Catholic/Pre-Bahá’í period.

One moment in particular marks one of the earliest roots of my doubt. It was an experience in church when I was very young – maybe five years old or so. Everyone was bowing down at the same point in the Mass and I asked my mother in a whisper why they were doing this and she replied, in a way which she thought fitting for my age and degree of understanding, ‘Because it’s too beautiful to look at.’

This was a challenge too difficult to resist. Something that beautiful and I couldn’t look! This I must see.

And I looked up and I looked round everywhere. The only objects I could see were the same old altar, the same old pictures of the stations of the cross, the same old man in a funny dress standing in front of the altar.

The only difference was this big round golden thing he was holding above his head. This seemed to be the object everyone was bowing to, but I didn’t get it. It was quite pretty but definitely not too beautiful to look at.

In any event my faith was possibly not of the strongest, as I had not gone to a Catholic school, as was usually the case, perhaps because my parents were of different views about the wisdom of that, though I never really knew why my mother had departed from tradition in this way. So, it was not too difficult to undermine more or less permanently the ambivalent faith I had developed by this impressionable age.

So, when Mew puts these words into Madeleine’s mouth, ‘I, too, would ask Him to remember me/If there were any Paradise beyond this earth that I could see,’ I’m catapulted back to that earlier questioning state of mind, still mixed with a thirst for something to believe in. Her exploration of this  threads its way through the poem. About suffering she laments:

                                                               . . . . one cannot see
How it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity.
If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came.

And at the end of the poem the raw need for something to believe in still bleeds across the page, steeped in the pain of disbelief:

                        . . . . . . . . . .most of all in Holy Week
When there was no one else to see
I used to think it would not hurt me too, so terribly,
If He had ever seemed to notice me
Or, if, for once, He would only speak.

What I think also draws me to the thinker of these thoughts is that the inner sceptic and the earlier selves, who respond strongly to this poem, will never die, hence my daily prayer for firmness in the Faith. To deny this would be dangerous self-deception. In any case the sceptic has value, protecting me from too complacent a faith in all my tempting misunderstandings, memories and misinterpretations.

An equally interesting echo of my own journey comes when Madeleine comments that ‘It seems too funny all we other rips/Should have immortal souls.’ When I moved from atheism to faith on beginning to tread the Bahá’í path (I’m never comfortable asserting that ‘I became a Bahá’í’ – no one except ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has probably ever achieved that in this mortal world), I struggled with a sense of the improbability of souls: it was much easier to believe in a God (of some kind) rather than in our immortality. ‘How could beings such as us ever deserve such a blessing?’ I thought. It took many months of research at the time to almost convince my inner sceptic that this might in fact be possible.

Then there is Mew’s and my outsider syndrome. She is not writing as Madeleine from some kind of patronising distance. The Mew, who was hiding behind the shield of propriety I mentioned earlier, was unconventional, rebellious and a crusader for the downtrodden and misunderstood. She not only felt for Madeleine: there was also a level of her being, not too deep inside, at which she felt the same as her.

To some degree in some respects, I’m in the same boat. When I began working in mental health and went to see a Jungian psychotherapist, we decided that the epitaph engraved in big letters on my tombstone would be, ‘He died with his options open.’ I was very reluctant to make any kind of commitment. I had never joined any group, even when their aims mapped closely onto mine. I was very much what the socialists I used to mingle with called a ‘fellow traveller.’

Also I chose to work in mental health because I felt so strongly drawn to those who had been labelled ‘schizophrenic.’ I passionately believed, and still do, that they are not somehow fundamentally different from the rest of us, the victims of a meaningless madness. They are human beings, just like you and me, struggling to make sense of, and learn to live with experiences that would have broken most people into fragments of their former selves. Hence the title of my blog, really. Hence my sense that, in some way, I am singing very much from the same hymn sheet as Charlotte Mew.

Because of her direct experience of that same kind of brokenness, both in her family and potentially in herself, I think, Mew felt the same, and her way of expressing that was to step into the minds of those people, whom too many of us have rejected and despised. She felt for and spoke for them.

One of the most powerful stanzas in the whole poem speaks, I feel, to this:

.                     “Find rest in Him” One knows the parsons’ tags—
Back to the fold, across the evening fields, like any flock of baa-ing sheep:
Yes, it may be, when He has shorn, led us to slaughter, torn the bleating soul in us to rags,
For so He giveth His belovèd sleep.
Oh! He will take us stripped and done,
Driven into His heart. So we are won:
Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlasting wings—
I do not envy Him his victories, His arms are full of broken things.

Here we see described, in my view, a heart-felt response to the suffering of the world, which is so vividly present to the speaker it’s almost impossible to believe in a God of any kind, certainly a positive one. Mew herself almost certainly feels the same. Doubt, if not absolute denial, is a reasonable response.

Madeleine in Church, more than any other single poem of Mew’s, illustrates the extent of my resonance with her poetry.

The power of the poem for me is not diminished by its discrepancies with my perspective.

There is another magnetic quality in this poem that was harder to pin down and bring into consciousness, but which seems none the less a potentially important aspect of its attraction for me.

As I groped to pin this down more exactly I jotted down the idea that Mew is ‘mimicking thought’ in this and other poems. Then I found myself wondering whether in some respects it even achieved something that shifted towards a stream of consciousness, such as Virginia Woolf developed to such a high level. Was I back to the idea of capturing consciousness again, something I had located as the focus of the modern novel rather than poetry? I tried to define what criteria might be applied in this case, and felt that to fully qualify for a representation of the stream of consciousness the poem must at the very least need to feel more like inner rather than social speech. Given that many of the monologues are addressed to a listener who is not physically present, including God/Jesus, I came to feel that Madeleine in Church, as well as some of her other poems, meets this criterion at least in many places, if not all.  I came to feel that Madeleine in Church, as well as some of her other poems, meets this criterion at least in many places, if not all.  Take this short section, for example, with its associative flow:

                                              I could hardly bear
The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk,
The thick, close voice of musk,
The jessamine music on the thin night air,
Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere —
The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of my own hair,
Oh! there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the high seat
Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat
My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the street.

I think that it does, but I will need more time to be absolutely sure. I suspect this quality will prove to be part of her poetry’s attraction for me.

The process of composing this post has been intriguing – even as I thought it was finished, over and over again more ideas to include in it drip fed into my brain. It reminds me of Auden’s paraphrase of Valéry in 1965: ‘A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.’

There is so much more I could say, because there are so many themes she touches on that resonate so strongly for me. It would simply be impossible to cover them adequately right now. For a start this post is too long already. And perhaps most importantly I think I will need a lot more time to grasp more securely more of the implications of this richly evocative poem. Suffice it to say that I feel its psychological, narrative, spiritual and empathic depths warrant the attention of every discerning reader of poetry, whether they agree with what Mew seems to be saying or not. It captures so many of the key challenges and heart aches of the human condition.

I hope at least I have proved my point that she is a poet worthy of consideration. Whether I have or not, I am extremely grateful to Julia Copus for bringing Charlotte Mew to my attention, and also to Penelope Fitzgerald for further enhancing my understanding of her life.

When all the work on this sequence had been done, I decided, rather late in the day, to check my go-to reference about poetry – Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt – to see if he had written anything about Charlotte Mew. As I have never read his book from cover to cover, only using it as a reference when I want to check out a poet I don’t know, I had never read these words before, I swear, where he describes Madeleine in Church as ‘her largest achievement, uneven but powerful.’ I see that as a partial endorsement of my evaluation. I would be tempted, though, to substitute ‘greatest’ for ‘largest’!

So, what’s Schmidt’s final verdict overall? ‘Her originality,’ he writes, ‘of form and theme, her electrifying uniqueness, mean that one day she will find a constituency, without special pleading.’ Hopefully I’ve been some help in moving things forward to that end. Only time will tell.

References:

[1]. Copus – page 256.
[2]. Page 268.

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