Given that a recent post makes reference to the three ideals mentioned in this post it seemed only appropriate to republish this short sequence. The second part comes out tomorrow.
Because just about every page of the book is crammed with valuable insights I’m going to focus on only three aspects of it: first, what he calls the ‘polemical introduction,’ a few quotes from and comments about which will convey the overall theme of the book; second, his chapter on Shakespeare, which argues a fascinating case for seeing the value-free Shakespeare I took for granted as being in reality the demolition expert who detonated explosions beneath the foundations of the towers of medieval idealism to clear the ground for our modern pragmatic commercialism; and finally, his chapter on Freud, which sees him as the reductionist par excellence, who crusaded against any residual ideals that might give meaning to our lives and effectively buried for whole generations the values which Edmundson argues Shakespeare had fatally wounded.
I may drag a few of my own hobbyhorses into this arena as I hobble along.
While I found his attack on Freud was music to my ears, his antidote to what he defines in effect as Shakespeare’s toxic effects was far harder to swallow, and I am gagging on that still. I’m not sure he was completely wrong, though, even so.
The Triumph of Self
This is the title Edmundson gives to his introduction. I was hooked from the very first page so I’ll quote from it:
It is no secret: culture in the West has become progressively more practical, materially oriented, and sceptical. When I look out at my students, about to graduate, I see people who are in the process of choosing a way to make money, a way to succeed, a strategy for getting on in life. . . . . It’s no news: we are more and more a worldly culture, a money-based culture geared to the life of getting and spending, trying and succeeding, and reaching for more and more. We are a pragmatic people. We do not seek perfection in thought or art, war or faith. The profound stories about heroes and saints are passing from our minds. We are anything but idealists. . . . . Unfettered capitalism runs amok; Nature is ravaged; the rich gorge: prisons are full to bursting; the poor cry out in their misery and no one seems to hear. Lust of Self rules the day.
He is not blind to the dark side of idealism though he is perhaps not as sensitive to it as, for example, Jonathan Haidt is, in his humane and compassionate book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis,’ when he 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.
What Haidt regards as central is this:
Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it . . . the belief that the ends justify the means.
Achilles and the Nereid Cymothoe: Attic red-figure kantharos from Volci (Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris). For source of image see link.
Heroism:
Haidt’s words were ringing in my ears as Edmundson begins to explain the three main ideals he wishes to focus upon. The first ideal he looks at is heroism. If the hook from the first page had not gone so deep, I might have swum away again at this point. I’m glad I didn’t.
That is not because I am now sold on the heroic as Edmundson first introduces it. The idea of Achilles still does not thrill me because he is a killer. He lights the way for Atilla, Genghis Khan, Napoleon and then for Hitler, Mao, Stalin and beyond.
None of those 20th Century examples are probably heroes in any Homeric sense of the word, but, with their roots in the betrayed idealism of the French Revolution, they have capitalised on similar perversions of idealism that have fuelled war, torture, mass prison camps and worse. I can’t shake off the influence of my formative years under the ominous shadow of the Second World War. I’m left with a powerful and indelible aversion to any warlike and violent kind of idealism, and any idolising of the heroic can seem far too close to that for comfort to me. In fact, high levels of intensity about any belief system sets warning bells ringing in my head. I’m not sure where to stand between the horns of the dilemma Yeats defined so clearly:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I’ve dealt with that at some length in a previous sequence of posts so I won’t revisit that in detail now.
A key point was one I borrowed from Eric Reitan’s measured and humane defence of religion against Richard Dawkin’s straw man attacks. One of his premises is that our concept of God, who is in essence entirely unknowable, needs to show Him as deserving of worship: any concept of God that does not fulfil that criterion should be regarded with suspicion. Our idealism, our ideology, would then be built on potentially totalitarian foundations. I am using the word God in a wider sense than the purely theological to stand for whatever we make the driving force of our lives: this could mistakenly be money, Marxism or the motherland.
I accept that, for the zealot of a destructive creed, his god is definitely worthy of worship, so much so he might kill me if I disagree: even so, Reitan’s point is a valid one. We should all take care, before we commit to a cause, to make sure that it is truly holy.
Plato: copy of portrait bust by Silanion (for source of image see link)
Contemplation:
In any case, it’s where Edmundson goes next that kept me happily hooked (pages 4-5):
The second great Western ideal emerges as an ambivalent attack on Homer and Homeric values. Plato repeatedly expresses his admiration for the Homeric poem; he seems to admire Homer above all literary artists. But to Plato there is a fundamental flaw at the core of Homer’s work: Homer values the warrior above all others. For Plato the pre-eminent individual is the thinker, and the best way to spend one’s life is not in the quest for glory but in the quest for Truth. Plato introduces the second of the great ideals in Western culture: the ideal of contemplation.
He goes onto explain that Plato is not interested in investigating how to ‘navigate practical difficulties.’ He seeks ‘a Truth that will be true for all time.’
In religious terms, as Daniel Batson describes them, I’m an example of some one who scores high on the Quest scale, where religion ‘involves an open-ended, responsive dialogue with existential questions raised by the contradictions and tragedies of life’ (Religion and the Individual – page 169). No surprise then that I was delighted to find that Edmundson was going to explore this kind of ideal at some length. He also makes it very clear later in the book that being true to the role of thinker requires its own form of heroism, as the life and death of Socrates demonstrates.
Edmundson reflects upon the fact (page 6) that the ‘average citizen now is a reflexive pragmatist.’ He continues:
The mind isn’t best used to seek eternal Truth: that is impractical, a waste of time. The mind is a compass to get bearings in life; a calculator to ascertain profit and lost; a computer to plan one’s next move in life’s chess match.
He adds that ‘Instrumental Reason rules the day.’
Compassion:
Last of all he comes to one of my other obsessions (page 7):
There is a third ideal that stands next to the heroic and the contemplative: the compassionate ideal. The ideal of compassion comes into the Western tradition definitively with the teachings of Jesus Christ. But the ideal of compassion is older than Jesus; it is manifest in the sacred texts of the Hindus, in the teachings of the Buddha and, less directly, in the reflections of Confucius.
The shift in consciousness between this and the heroic ideal is massive (page 8):
No longer is one a thrashing Self, fighting the war of each against all. Now one is part of everything and everyone: one merges with the spirit of all the lives. And perhaps this merger is heaven, or as close to heaven as we mortals can come.
And staying true to that perception also requires great courage. The histories of the great religions testify to that, with their tales of martyrdom and persecution. It is sad though to reflect upon how often the persecuted faiths have later become persecutors themselves: it is not just the heroic ideal that has shed rivers of blood throughout history. Conviction, as I have exploredbefore on this blog, is a double-edged sword.
Three Ideals
So, then, we have it (page 9): ‘Courage, compassion, and serious thought: these are the great ideals of the ancient world.’
It would be impossible for me to do justice to the force and depth of his treatment of these three ideals. I am not even going to attempt it here. I can wholeheartedly recommend his entire book as a stimulating exploration of what we have come very close to losing.
In the next post I will simply home in on two relatively manageable implications of his main theme: his treatment of two key figures who, in his view, have helped misshape modern culture – Shakespeare and Freud.
The Sun of Reality is one Sun but it has different dawning-places, just as the phenomenal sun is one although it appears at various points of the horizon. During the time of spring the luminary of the physical world rises far to the north of the equinoctial; in summer it dawns midway and in winter it appears in the most southerly point of its zodiacal journey. These day springs or dawning-points differ widely but the sun is ever the same sun whether it be the phenomenal or spiritual luminary. Souls who focus their vision upon the Sun of Reality will be the recipients of light no matter from what point it rises, but those who are fettered by adoration of the dawning-point are deprived when it appears in a different station upon the spiritual horizon.
(‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Bahá’í World Faith page 255)
Some Background
It was disappointing to find that an exploration of perennialism (definition to follow in a minute) concluded that the organised religions have very little in common, and are not in fact in essence one. For me this ended up being another example of how science can miss the point about the value of religion, but there was none the less much of interest to be found in the line of argument.
I’ll start by briefly touching on some basic points, one of which came at the end of the previous post.
[P]anentheisms in general attempt to split the difference between classic theisms and pantheism, conceiving of an ultimate consciousness or God pervading or even constituting the manifest world, as in pantheism, but without something held in reserve, as in theism.
This maps fairly closely onto the distinction Nader Saiedi describes the Báb, the Forerunner of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, as making between God as Essence versus God as Emanation:[2]
The writings of the Báb, like those of Bahá-u-lláh, confirm that God is the divine Object of mystic devotion, while asserting that the realm of the unknowable Essence is above traditional conceptions of God.
. . . panentheism sees the relationship between God and the world as one not of strict separation and transcendence (as in classical theism), or of strict identity and immanence (as in classical pantheism), but of mutual coinherence and harmony between transcendence and immanence.
The Bahá’í Faith does not accept the idea of immanence but instead defines our sense of God in the world as the result of emanation, rather in the same way as the light of the sun that pervades our solar system is not the sun itself but what emanates from it.
On the most philosophical and speculative level, I came to see both these mystical experiences and these rogue paranormal phenomena as intentional signs of the fundamental inadequacy of the present Western worldview.
Consciousness, according to this model, may be[5] ‘a metaphysical “primitive,” as fundamental to the universe as space, time, energy, and gravity.’
Perennialism
This brings us on to perennialism, mostly in terms of Kripal’s perspective. Mystical experiences are to be found in most religions, and may be a result of connecting with some kind of ground of consciousness.
. . . perennialism (the position that the world religions share a common mystical core of metaphysical teachings) was a popular position among major intellectuals.
There is no such thing as the mystical experience. There are only mystical experiences. Difference was definitive again. Sameness was out again. In Marshall’s (2014) eloquently simple terms, mystical experience was [according to Katz] no longer seen as a ‘window’ into reality; it was now seen as a ‘mirror’ that mostly just reflected by the psyche, culture, and tradition of the experience.
… The perennialists were after the universal cosmic truth of everything. The contextualists were after, well, contexts.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá
The quotation from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at the head of this post suggests we need to be careful not to use humanity’s confusion of context with core as a reason to dismiss the basic commonality of faiths across the world.
At this point Kripal is closer to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá than to Katz:[8] ‘Further scholarship eventually challenged the Katzian position… on pure consciousness.’
I began to feel that he might really believe, as I do, in the fundamental oneness of all the great world religions:[9]
. . . I am often accused by colleagues, particularly senior ones, of advancing some form of perennialism; that is, I am accused of belonging to the Dark Side, against which such colleagues apparently believe they have to fight (remember, it is all “difference” now).
… The Dark Side that they perceive in my words comes down to my positing of some form of transcendent consciousness . . . that is potentially available in any human culture at any historical recoverable time; that there is, to put it simply, a nonhistorical presence being filtered by the historical filters; and, to speak in theological language for a moment, that our shared humanity often displays itself as a shared divinity.
. . . Perennialism is most commonly framed as the thesis that particular sets of teachings about some specific metaphysical absolute are the true “mystical core” and final goal of all world religions.
Then, to my shock and horror he attempts to torpedo the whole idea:[11]
Sacred scriptures, taken as wholes now, do not agree about much of anything. Religions are not the same. Not even close. Perennialism in this substantive or doctrinal sense (“what they teach”) is just wrong. It is false. It is bad comparison. We are not all journeying the same mountain by different paths. We are all journeying up different mountains.… That is why they (sic) are different communities and people and why there is so much religiously motivated violence in the world.
This is the point at which I step back from his perspective. ‘How dare he abuse the mountain idea in this way?’ I thought. I am far too attached to what John Donne, an Elizabethan poet-priest in Tudor England, wrote:
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.
He wrote those words, part of the third of his five satires, during what must have been an agonising period of his life, when he was deciding to abandon the Roman Catholic faith, for which members of his family had died, and become an ‘apostate’. By taking this step, he avoided torture and execution and gained a career at the possible cost, in his mind, of eternal damnation.
While the secular Western world feels it has moved on from such ferocious divisions, the same does not seem to be true everywhere, even within the West, as current conflicts make absolutely clear. Also, we should not perhaps feel we are completely free from milder variations of religious intolerance here either.
This means that Donne’s message is still relevant.
The most obvious implication of what he says here is that we have to work hard to find Truth.
However, there are other equally important implications, and one of them makes a core aspect of the Bahá’í path particularly relevant for us in our relations both between ourselves and with the wider community.
We are all, in a sense, approaching Truth from different sides of this same mountain. Just because your path looks somewhat different from mine in some respects, it does not mean that, as long as you are moving upwards, yours is any less viable than mine as a way to arrive at the truth. Only when someone’s idea of God takes them downhill, perhaps killing others in His name, or at least hating them as misguided deviants, should we realize their God is not ‘worthy of worship,’ to use Eric Reitan’s phrase, and is not God at all. Theirs is not a true religion. All the great world religions are in essence one. It is only when we mistake the cultural trappings and rituals for the core that we think this is not true.
Donne clearly felt so at the time he wrote Satire III:
As women do in divers countries go
In divers habits, yet are still one kind,
So doth, so is Religion.’
It is true that idealisms of any kind, religious or secular, can be a breeding ground for intense prejudice and large scale atrocities, obliterating any sense of common humanity.
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:[12]
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.
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.
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.
That humanity perverts religion does not justify dumping God and organised religion along with Him. Haidt is aware that idealism, even with God, enhances life in some ways also:[14]
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.
We just have to be careful about what we choose to worship.
Kripal defines himself as an ‘intellectual gnostic’,[15] someone who ‘recognises the reality of direct immediate mystical knowledge (gnosis) of the soul, or what I would now call consciousness as such, [and] signals an erudite appreciation of how this immediate knowing has been preserved and passed on in the rich particularities and baroque mythology of the history of religions. It also in codes and accents how such a gnosis has been persecuted and for the most part rejected and actively suppressed by the religions, particularly by the Western monotheisms and now materialisms.’
He seems perhaps not quite so far off piste as I was beginning to think.
Challenges
Marshal summarises the challenges that face as we try to grasp the exact nature of this ultimate Reality:[16]
If it is supposed that consciousness does have a cosmic dimension, as an aspect of the universe or its basic nature, then the question arises as to whether this consciousness is fundamental or derivative of something ontologically prior to it, a ‘hypercosmic’ reality of some kind, perhaps a supreme consciousness, such as the source reality that pluralistic systems tend to posit in order to ground and link their multiple units of consciousness.
. . . Has God entered the picture as one or both of these transpersonal types of consciousnesses, and, if so, what kind of God – an evolving pantheistic God identified with the universe, an evolving panentheistic God that includes and yet exceeds the universe, or the immutable God of classical theism, involved in the creation but more distinct from it than the God of panentheism?
Why this is such a hard issue to resolve will have to wait for the final post in this sequence.
I was going to deal with the side issue of precognition at this point but have now decided to leave that till next time: it’ll probably fit better there in any case.
In between posts in the sequence exploring my journey to a hopefully deeper level of reflection I decided to interweave some poems which explore a key issue confronting us, even though it will involve repeating some recently republished poems. I have not so far tried to string these related ones closely together in a way that shows their roots in my childhood as well as my responses to key experiences now.
The world’s population currently consumes the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year, according to analysis by the Global Footprint Network. Photograph: NASA (For source see link)
We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.
(Shoghi Effendi, Letter to an individual Bahá’í, through his secretary, 17 February 1933.)
Given the current sequence focusing on Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight, her exploration of how she was jolted by a brain bleed into an altogether different experience of reality, made me feel it was worth republishing this long sequence from 2017.
Most of us are trapped in our simulations, created by early experience and powerful influences in the present. Reflecting as an individual and consulting as a community are harder to do than we would like to think and need courage and perseverance in equal measure, courage to risk this shift in processing in the first place and perseverance if we are to learn how to master the skills in each case.
For the impact of destructive processes within the individual there is a wealth of evidence, both social and clinical, which I look at straightaway. I will look at the impact on groups and communities later using the work of Zimbardo as a powerful example.
Processes such as the ones I am about to outline are simply examples of the kind of invisible obstacles we might have to deal with when we are trying to shift our perspectives to integrate experiences and evidence against the grain of our programming. Breaking out of our individual or collective trance is not easy. When the evidence is complex, as with climate change, or collides head on with prevailing dogma, as with the reality of the soul, it’s particularly difficult.
Culture and the Individual
First, let’s take a look at some of the negative influences that operate under the surface within the individual. These do overlap with aspects of the wider culture but are worth considering here given their impact upon every single one of us as an individual.
As adults we may often find ourselves behaving in completely counterproductive or even destructive ways in our everyday lives and haven’t a clue why we do so, or even sometimes that we are doing so.
There are all sorts of ways that our culture subliminally shapes our reactions in ways that would shock our conscious mind. A recent study, for example, looked at the reactions of Americans from all parts of the racial spectrum. One of the experiments involved determining how quickly subjects would shoot at a target person in a risk situation. Pictures of different people were flashed up on the screen, some from a white European heritage, some from a black African heritage. It was no surprise that white subjects would take less time to shoot a black person than a white one. What was shocking was that the same was true for black subjects, so deeply had the toxin of racism infected them as well. What none of the subjects would have been aware of was that they were behaving in this way.
Even prominent people within a culture, those with access to the most information and with the most power to change things, succumb to the insidious influences of their society. Many of the founding figures of the United States were slave owners. Their personal investment in slavery conflicted with their avowed principles such as the equality of all men. John Fitzgerald Medina in his excellent book Faith, Physics & Psychology quotes the explanation given by historian Richard Thomas (iBook page 280):
Since America was not about to abandon slave labor or its policy of dispossessing the native peoples of their land, the only real and practical choice was to minimise the nature of its sins: blacks and native peoples (Indians) were not to be considered on the same level of humanity as whites; blacks were heathen and amoral, next to the apes in the scale of evolution. . . .
The technical term for this is resolving cognitive dissonance, and is a process that I was tempted to include in my earlier discussion of disowning, but wasn’t sure it applied directly to climate change. As Saul McLeod explains:
Leon Festinger (1957) proposed cognitive dissonance theory, which states that a powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior.
According to Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement).
This of course only works if we can successfully blind ourselves to the fact that we are doing it.
It’s obvious now to most people that the Americans and the British, in terms of race, hoodwinked themselves with this self-deceptive but profitable ploy. What we may not all fully appreciate is how far the toxic ideology of racism that thus developed spread its poison, for how long, and with how much resulting damage.
When John Fitzgerald Medina claimed in his book that Hitler was influenced by American eugenicists to develop aspects of his genocidal agenda, I had to check this idea out further.
I read Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning in tandem with Ricard’s Altruism, quoted earlier in this sequence. He confirms the extent to which the Nazi vision of extermination to gain land was inspired by America (pages 15-16):
Racism was the idea that turned populated lands into potential colonies, and the source mythologies for racists arose from the recent colonisation of North America and Africa. . . .
In the late nineteenth century, Germans tended to see the fate of Native Americans as a natural precedent for the fate of native Africans under their control. . . . . For the German general who pursued these policies, the historical justice was self-evident. ‘The natives must give way,’ he said. ‘Look at America.’
. . . . When Hitler wrote in My Struggle that Germany’s only opportunity for colonisation was Europe, he discarded as impractical the possibility of a return to Africa. The search for racial inferiors to dominate required no long voyages by sea, since they were present in Eastern Europe as well.
Hitler saw the Soviet Union as a Jewish project and felt (page 20):
[a] second America could be created in Europe, after Germans learned to see other Europeans as they saw indigenous Americans or Africans, and learned to regard Europe’s largest state as a fragile Jewish colony.
It is deeply ironic therefore that the nation who saw themselves as liberators of Europe at the end of the Second World War should have been part of Hitler’s inspiration in the first place. So do destructive subliminal processes wreak havoc on a massive scale in our world, especially when potentiated by self-interest. Climate change denial should come as no surprise therefore, given the complexity of the issue and the power of the vested interests who would lose out if something really effective were ever done to address the problem.
It’s a moot point in both cases whether those pulling the levers of persuasion, the propagandists, are as unaware of their reality distortion as many of those who come to believe them.
There are many more examples of this kind to illustrate the way that culture warps and biases our perceptions to devastating effect and I won’t attempt to list them here. We’ll come back to the cultural scale later.
Trauma and the Individual
What is also true is that our personal history has a powerful subliminal effect on us as individuals and can wreck our lives and those of the people closest to us. Trauma is the easiest example to use to illustrate this.
We may be completely unaware of the still active impact of early trauma, to whose current significance we are almost completely blind even if we remember anything at all about it.
Many different models of therapy have developed way to explain how this works.
That there is such an effect and that it is relatively widespread can be demonstrated in many ways. In a study carried out in 2010 and quoted by Koenen et al in The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health & Disease: the Hidden Epidemic (page 13-15), out of a sample of 5692 English speaking Americans 2190 (38.48%) reported some kind of traumatic experience prior to the age of 13.
A recent sequence of posts on this blog looked at the work of a Jungian therapist, Joy Schaverian, with people who had been traumatised by their experiences at Boarding School. She graphically explores through case histories the damage that has been done as well as the repressive mechanisms, with their consequences, that had been mobilised to cope.
To give a brief example, Schaverian explains, when she discusses one of her patient’s difficulties dealing with the time a teacher hit him in the face with a cricket bat, how hard it was for him to fully accept what he was saying (page 57):
Theo first told of this incident early in analysis. Then, a few months later, he retold it, this time with more depth of feeling. It was as though he was at first incredulous but then, as I took it seriously, he began to believe himself and to take seriously how abusive this had been. As Theo recounted it for the second time the feelings associated with the event became live in the session. Theo went white; he felt sick; he had trouble breathing and physically regressed.… The emotional impact of this was fully present in the room. Theo was overwhelmed and speechless.
The benefits of revisiting traumatic events in this way , even when they have possibly been forgotten between sessions are priceless (page 118):
. . . if [traumatic events] can be told they are gradually detoxified, thus eventually accepted as part of the person’s personal history. It is then an accessible narrative and no longer unconsciously dominates their life. When there is no such witness the trauma may become embodied, leading to conversion symptoms such as digestive problems, migraines, chronic pain, poor energy and a large number of other physiological indicators. This may be because the event that caused it is remembered in an embodied sense, but not recalled cognitively and so it cannot be consigned to the past.
We’ll be coming back to the idea of embodied memories in a moment.
Other concepts from different traditions are scripts in Transactional Analysis, which I’ve explored elsewhere, archetypes from Jungian therapy, constructs from Personal Construct Therapy, schema etc. the formation and experience of all of which are shaped by early experience as well as culture.
The examples I want to focus on right now I’ve chosen both because they provide dramatic and detailed illustrations of the invisible impact of childhood trauma on adults and are part of my recent reading around trauma and psychosis.
A recent post includes a detailed example, from their 1991 book The Stormy Search for the Self, of what Christina and Stansislav Grof term a spiritual emergency. Those interested in knowing more detail should click the link above. Basically it explores how a traumatised person was helped through her crisis without standard psychiatric treatment and later in the book how what they call Holotropic Breathwork helps people gain access to embodied memories.
They feel that this approach unlocks blocks between our awareness and the contents of the unconscious (page 259):
. . . . It seems that the nonordinary state of consciousness induced by holotropic breathing is associated with biochemical changes in the brain that make it possible for the contents of the unconscious to surface, to be consciously experienced, and – if necessary – to be physically expressed. In our bodies and in our psyches we carry imprints of various traumatic events that we have not fully digested and assimilated psychologically. Holographic breathing makes them available, so that we can fully experience them and release the emotions that are associated with them.
I want to focus on a couple of examples from their earlier work – Realms of the Human Unconscious: observations from LSD research. The use of LSD in this way has come to seem controversial, so much so it was made illegal 1981, six years after this book was published. Some researchers are recently beginning to think more positively about its potential benefits, but we are a long way from repealing the laws that ban it.
Why the Grofs’ research is worth drawing on in this context is for what it seems to reveal about the accuracy with which inaccessible traumatic memories are stored in the brain. LSD helps a person regain lucid and detailed memories, which can then be integrated.
More than that, the Grofs developed a strong sense of the sequence in which such memories can be retrieved and the way they group into a mutually reinforcing layered networks which they call (page 46) ‘systems of condensed experience,’ COEX systems for short.
Both the detail and the interconnectedness of the memories go a long way to explain their power to shape our experience and behaviour in the present in spite of our routine oblivion to their existence. That such interconnected detail coexists with such intransigent forgetfulness explains the power the past experiences have to impact upon us outside our awareness. The examples I’m giving go a long way towards proving how much changing this impact depends upon bringing the whole network of experiences into consciousness.
The work they report on in this book was done in Prague in the decade leading up to 1965.
The layering effect can be illustrated by Richard’s history (page 57-60). The first layer related to his expulsion from university because of his conflict with the communist orthodoxy of the time. A ‘deeper layer . . . . related to Richard’s experiences with his brutal, despotic, and autocratic father.’ Deeper still were earlier memories from childhood such as a strong electric shock at about age seven. A comically horrific encounter with a cow at about one year old was from the next level down. Finally (page 59), he encountered his birth trauma, which he concluded was ‘the fundamental prototype of all the situations in which he felt absolutely helpless and at the mercy of a destructive force.’
The Grofs later explain that, as a general rule, each more superficial level has to be explored before the deeper levels can be accessed (page 71):
The . . . . most important reason for thinking in terms of memory constellations rather than individual memories is based on the content analysis of consecutive sessions of a psycholytic series. Before the subject can approach and relive a traumatic memory from early childhood (core experience), he usually has to face and work through many situations in later life that have a similar theme and involve the same basic elements.
The final result of this LSD facilitated mental archaeology was positive in Richard’s case (page 60):
After the experiences of rebirth, positive ecstatic feelings of long duration occur in Richard’s sessions. They brought about a far-reaching improvement of the clinical condition. His depressions, anxieties, and psychosomatic symptoms completely disappeared and he felt full of activity and optimism.
The Grofs are keen to substantiate that most of these memories are rooted in reality. They quote case examples. For example, the mother of another patient, Dana, (pages 65-66) ‘was absolutely astonished by the accuracy of the account concerning the traumatic event as well as its physical setting. . . . . The description of the room was photographically accurate, even in the most minute detail, and its authenticity was unquestionable because of the very unusual character of some of the objects involved. . . In this case, there did not seem to exist a possibility that this information could have been transmitted by some other means. Before the patient was two years old, the family left this house; shortly afterward, it was condemned and torn down. . . . Dana’s mother gave away many of the things that formed the setting of the relived incident. There were no photographs of the room or of any of the described pieces, and the mother did not remember ever having mentioned any of the objects in front of the patient.’
So that’s what can happen to an individual.
Group Processes
It may seem a step too far to use examples of this kind, drawn from clinical work with individuals, and imply that group processes are similarly potentially pathological and operate all too often outside our awareness and conscious control.
One dramatic body of evidence will have to suffice for now to illustrate how this comparison might not be so far fetched. Philip Zimbardo provides the evidence in his brilliant analysis, The Lucifer Effect. His perspective is rooted in the study he initiated at Stanford University.
Student volunteers were divided randomly into two groups: prisoners and guards. It did not take long for the guards to descend into abusive behaviours that meant the study had to be halted before serious harm was done. From this, and after examining the behavior of American troops at Abu Ghraib, he came to disturbing conclusions about human behaviour in situations which steer us towards evil. He feels strongly that good people can do bad things not necessarily because they are bad apples who should bear full responsibility for their crimes, but because they are placed in a bad barrel that rots them. More than that, it is too simplistic to then blame the barrel for the whole problem. The barrel maker has to take his share of the responsibility. Corrupt systems can corrupt good people. Only the minority in his experience are able to resist.
Earlier work lends considerable weight to this latter point. For example, when I was studying psychology for the first time in the 1970s I came across the work of Thomas Pettigrew, which is still referred to even now.
To put one set of his findings very simply, whether you were a miner in segregated West Virginia or apartheid South Africa, the culture around you differed depending on whether you were above ground or below it. Below ground discrimination was potentially dangerous so the culture there frowned on it: above ground the culture was discriminatory. What was particularly interesting to me was that 20% of people discriminated all the time regardless of the culture and 20% refused to do so at all: 60% of people shifted from desegregation below ground to segregation above it (the percentages are approximate: the pattern is accurate).
What may seem baffling is how apparently decent people go along with toxic patterns of behavior. The forces that coerce conformity are astonishingly compelling. Haidt talks of the hive effect. In The Righteous Mind (page 247) he asks ‘Why do the students sing, chant, dance, sway, chop, and stomp so enthusiastically during the game?’ For him, ‘It flips the hive switch and makes people feel, for a few hours, that they are “simply a part of a whole.”’ Other experiments such as those by Solomon Asch, have shown how, when the majority in a group identify the wrong line as the matching one, the lone subject of the experiment tends to go long with the majority view at least some of the time: ‘To Asch’s surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects conformed themselves to the ‘obviously erroneous’ answers given by the other group members at least once, and 14 of them conformed on more than 6 of the ‘staged’ trials. When faced with a unanimous wrong answer by the other group members, the mean [ie average not stingy] subject conformed on 4 of the ‘staged’ trials.’
This video below by Melanie Joy conveys an attempt to unpack some of the detail about how this might work at a cultural level in a context meat eaters may find bizarre. As a vegetarian the validity of her explanation of how collusion is induced is compelling. Meat eaters may have to temporarily suspend their disbelief and step back from their investment in carnism in order to see how her explanation could easily be mapped onto such social toxins as racism and sexism.
Hopefully this helicopter survey of a vast field has done enough to convey clearly my sense that as individuals and communities we are locked into unconsciously determined and potentially destructive patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour, until, in my view, we are either painfully jolted out of our trance by a spiritual emergency or we painstakingly discover for ourselves the keys of reflection for individuals and consultation for groups. Only then do we have an opportunity to see what is working on our minds and change it.
In a complex world it is easy to hide from the wider but more distant impact of our individual and collective actions. Because the damage is potentially so great, so much greater than it ever was is the need now for our awareness to widen and embrace not just the daunting complexity within us but also that which stands between and outside us.
I have been considering the implications of this in the context of climate change and the afterlife but it also applies to many other areas of human behavior such as deregulation which removes safeguards in the interests of profit, extractivism that aggressively exploits the earth’s resources without sufficient care for the consequences, and a global economic system that harms not just the environment but the workforce to whose country cheaper production has been exported.
Where we might go next is dealt with slightly more briefly in the final two posts.
My replacement secondhand copy – found 22 April 2014
Having just come back to reflecting upon Middlemarchagain, it seemed worth reflagging this sequence, partly to help me avoid repeating myself again in the new sequence.
The previous post looked at Rebecca Mead’s engaging exploration of George Eliot’s greatest novel in her recent book The Road to Middlemarch. In that post, after lamenting the disintegration of my paperback copy, I ended up discussing narrative styles and wondering whether having the author speaking directly to us was now so old hat as to be completely off-putting and pointless. Mead feels that we should not necessarily dismiss Eliot’s use of that device as a weakness.
Not all bad though
Mead feels that authorial intervention of the kind that Eliot makes does have a value (page 55): “By directly addressing us, Eliot draws us deeper inside her panorama. She makes Middlemarchers of us all.” There is more even than that (ibid): “Eliot does something in addition with those moments of authorial interjection. She insists that the reader look at the characters in the book from her own elevated viewpoint.”
Making use of this broader view, which is not locked into any particular perspective within characters, enables us to enlarge our sympathies in an important way, Mead feels. She quotes Eliot as stating (page 56): ‘the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.’
We are again moving among ideas that we are also finding important for us now, in the 21st Century. We are, almost to the last syllable, in the all-important territory of Robert Wright here in his thought-provoking book, The Evolution of God. In his consideration of the over-riding need for us to widen our compass of compassion, he states (page 428-429):
The moral imagination was ‘designed’ by natural selection . . . . . to help us cement fruitfully peaceful relations when they’re available.
He is aware that this sounds like a glorified pursuit of self-interest. He argues, though, that it leads beyond that.
The expansion of the moral imagination forces us to see the interior of more and more other people for what the interior of other people is – namely remarkably like our own interior.
This idea is clearly close to Eliot’s heart. Mead returns to this later in her book (page 158) quoting Eliot as writing in an essay published in 1856, called The Natural History of German Life, the following observation:
. . . the greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether a painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies… Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”
Eliot’s Creed
There’s more than this to Mead’s case for the novel being one for ‘grown-ups.’ Her chapters weave information from the book itself, Eliot’s own life and Mead’s personal experience into an engaging process of exploration. Each chapter has a theme. She says, towards the end of the one I have quoted from, almost by way of summary (page 72): “One of the things that makes Middlemarch a book for grown-ups – a book for adults, even – is Eliot’s insistence upon taking moral questions seriously, and considering them in their complexity.’
I don’t intend to go through every scene of every chapter in my attempt to demonstrate that the book is well worth reading. I shall just leap to a later point in the book and pick another illustration of particular significance to me and leave it to you to judge whether you want to buy the book and read it. The fact that I have enjoyed the book may not be a compelling reason for your making the same choice.
I struggled for many years to find a faith that would help me realise my desire to help others and to improve society. This was largely because the faith I eventually espoused had to sail most skilfully between two equal dangers: it had to avoid what sinks many an ideology, the rock of supposing that its ends justify almost any means that might achieve them, and to steer clear of what sucks most of the others to a watery grave, the whirlpool of being so determined to look harmless that they become of very little actual use in the real world.
Not surprisingly, both on my way towards discovering the Bahá’í Faith, in my view a ship of faith that steers successfully between the two hazards I’ve described, and also afterwards, George Eliot wrote a great deal that was helpful and it is fascinating to find that Mead also draws inspiration from this (page 221):
To the extent that she had a faith, it was in what she called ‘meliorism’ – the conviction that, through the small, beneficent actions and intentions of individuals, the world might gradually grow to be a better place.’
She unpacks further what George Eliot might have meant by that (page 223):
Her credo might be expressed this way: if I really care for you, if I try to think myself into your position and orientation – then the world is bettered by my effort at understanding and comprehension. If you respond to my effort by trying to extend the same sympathy and understanding to others in turn, then the betterment of the world has been minutely but significantly extended.’
With that, we are in Robert Wright’s territory still. Shortly we will find ourselves stepping across a border into Jonathan Haidt’s country (page 224):
. . . [I]n the last essay that she wrote for the Westminster Review Eliot gave as good an exposition of her moral code as she did anywhere. The essay is a scything indictment of Edward Young, the 18th century poet-cleric whom she had adored in her youth. By 1858… she had diagnosed a falsity in his theology and morality…
Young, she wrote, adheres to abstractions… ‘Religion coming down from the skies’ – while paying no attention to ‘virtue or religion as it really exists.’ Virtue as it really exists, she went on to say, can be found ‘in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life.’
Mead feels that, while Bulstrode in Middlemarch, exemplifies what happens when protestations of piety are betrayed in corrupt action, the Reverend Camden Farebrother is the touchstone of genuine religion and morality (page 227):
He delivers pithy sermons, which draw listeners from parishes other than his own, but his religion is shown in how he treats others, rather than how he preaches to them.
I heard echoes of my own faith tradition in those words. In the 20th Century Shoghi Effendiwrote: ‘it is not preaching and rules the world wants, but love and action…’
Mead argues that the roots of this insight go back much earlier in Eliot’s thinking (page 232):
In The Mill on the Floss, she warned against the “men of maxims”… the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.’
For these reasons, Eliot had little patience with Young’s (page 238) ‘unintermitting habit of pedagogic moralising.’ She feel this is a ‘moral deficit’ on Young’s part. Mead quotes Eliot’s explanation (ibid.):
In proportion as morality is emotional, i.e., has an affinity with Art, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule.’ Minds that are ‘primarily didactic,’ Eliot feels, ‘are deficient in sympathetic emotion.’
Jonathan Haidt is if anything even more scathing, though this is not perhaps surprising after the modern world has seen, in Auschwitz, the Gulags and the caves of Yenan, what blind ideology, mindless or terrorised obedience and the fanatical enactment of a creed can do. Under such circumstances even the most well meaning people can end up committing atrocities, especially if we come to accept an extremist regime’s propaganda, which uses dehumanising labels such cockroach (Rwanda) and sewer rat (Nazi) to switch off our compassion, and then it’s as though the people we are torturing and killing are suddenly a different and inferior species.
In his humane and compassionate book The Happiness Hypothesis Haidt 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.
One chilling sentence conveys all we need to know about the horrors that can result from such a scenario (Mao: the Uknown Story – Chang and Halliday; page 254):
At night, amid the quiet of the hills, from inside the rows of caves screams of lacerating pain travelled far and wide, within earshot of most who lived in Yenan.
It’s this kind of idealism that turns rules and ends into juggernauts under whose wheels multitudes are crushed, especially when the leaders are pathological narcissists, as seems all too often to be the case.
The difference between what Eliot is describing and what we have now seen is one of degree rather than kind. The French Revolution had already given a clear indication of where unbridled and self-righteous idealism could lead, when practised on the industrial scale to which we have now grown more accustomed. Eliot must surely have been aware of that. Frederick Karl, the one biographer of hers that I have read, suggests as much (George Eliot: a biography: page 95):
She had little but contempt for Louis Philippe, who, she knew, had to be overthrown if France was to enjoy the ‘Rights of Man’; but she also refused to see the revolution as some panacea for man’s ills or as a direction which would make a better life for the English if the revolution could be exported.
Her detailed analysis of the situation and her reasons for reaching this conclusion as a young woman of 29, from which he quotes at length, leave much to be desired, but it is clear she was thinking about the issues from an early age.
Towards the end of her engaging and uplifting book, Mead adds one or two more pointers in this direction (page 265): ‘[Eliot] believed that growth depends upon complex connections and openness to others, and does not derive from a solitary swelling of the self. She became great because she recognised that she was small.’
Her Last Reach for a World-Embracing Vision
As a footnote, I would like to share my astonishment when I finally came to read her grossly under-rated final novel, Daniel Deronda published in 1876.
It strives to achieve an integration of two divergent cultures, of two distinct ways of life, of two sometimes seemingly contradictory world views – the Jewish and the Christian – into a transcendent pattern at a higher level than the component parts could achieve alone. I may be going too far in seeing in it glimpses, from an imperial island in the 19th Century, of what the world needs now in the 21st. I feel it is, if only partially realised, a truly admirable striving towards a more world embracing vision – another and greater example of the way her concerns so consistently anticipate ours.
It seems to me an amazing attempt to see where the world might be going. Frederick Karl expresses it intriguingly, unbiased as he is by any desire to read Bahá’í thought backwards into her text (though Tolstoy had heard of the Bahá’í Faith, there is no evidence Eliot had living so early as this in the Faith’s history – page 547):
The Jewish and Christian elements [of the novel] link as a historical, temporal unity. If we view the novel in this perspective, we can connect the two plot strands into a universal entity or into a generalised human struggle reaching for some transcendental level, a form of ultimate health.
He goes onto describe her as (ibid.) ‘reaching towards some cure for the Western world as for herself,’ and failing in the attempt. Most critics, perhaps rightly, also feel she has failed and the two threads of understanding expressed in the two plot lines fail to blend as she would have wished, and the novel is irremediably split.
On the other hand, what she was striving for needed to be attempted and, I feel, there is so much depth and vigour in what she has succeeded in expressing that the novel is a richly rewarding read. As such, it took my breath away when I read it only a few years ago. The unsympathetic assessment of the book by the critics had put me off, in the same way as I had been steered away from Mansfield Park, and I regret that.
While her last novel might have been a noble failure, her life and her art are an inspiration, and Mead’s book helped me to see more deeply into that than I had before. I think it’s a truly worthwhile read.
Given that my examination of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land drags me into déjà vu in terms of modernist fragmentation and obscurity, it seemed appropriate to share again the following sequence about Sylvia Plath.
Over summer I realised that I could not even begin to make any impression upon the problem Plath’s poetry poses for me without dragging at least two other poets into the mix. One is Robert Hayden some of whose various styles and powerful themes provide illuminating points of comparison with Plath, and the other is Charlotte Mew, to whose poetry I resonate strongly, more even than to Hayden’s, who was following the Bahá’í path as I am now, whereas she is at best a sceptic and often an unbeliever.
Both though appeal to me in ways that Plath simply does not for reasons which are rooted in Iain McGilchrist’s belief that the most important truths cannot be explained in prose, something which, as we will see over the next two posts, in my view places a heavy burden of responsibility on the poet to transcend a simplistic subjectivity. We will need carefully to consider how elevation (rising above purely material things) is not the same as escalation (being carried away by our reactions to things). Plath escalates: Hayden elevates.
The Purpose of Poetry
Hatcher’s sense of the purpose of poetry, derived in some measure from his study of the poetry of Robert Hayden, falls into two categories – a warning and an overriding goal.
The warning immediately resonates with the sense I have of Plath’s most powerful and widely read poems. It concerns what I have labelled haemorrhaging hurt. Hatcher is clear that[1] ‘. . . it was never Hayden’s purpose to use his poetry to bleed on his pages or to condemn others.’ He quotes Gwendolyn Brooks as defining two sorts of poets:[2]
one who ‘mixes with mud’ and writes in the midst of feeling, ‘his wounds like faucets above his page’, and a second sort of poet who ‘is amenable to a clarifying enchantment via the power of Art’, who has a ‘reverence for the word Art’, who, in effect, is more studied, more analytical. She goes on to say that while we need both sorts, Hayden is clearly the latter.
Maybe we do need both, but maybe they are not of equal value. More on that later. Back to haemorrhaging for now and how deal with painful issues more effectively.
The key point Hatcher emphasises is that[3] ‘Gwendolyn Brooks . . . rightly distinguished Hayden’s art from the “bare-fight boys”, poets who pour out raw emotion, their “wounds like faucets above his page.”’
In discussing Hayden’s poem The Lion Hatcher unpacks one important characteristic of successful pain management in poetry:[4]
. . . This poem distinguishes between the unconscious self, in its primitive anger and uncontrolled raw emotions, and the conscious artist who enters the cage of self to control and channel that raw emotion and insight into intelligible pattern and form.
We are back here somewhere in Myers territory and the handling of ‘subliminal uprush.’ Myers uses Blake as an example ‘of strong imagination insufficiently controlled by supraliminal discipline: “throughout all the work of William Blake we see the subliminal self flashing for moments into unity, then smouldering again in a lurid and scattered glow”.’
Hayden makes explicit reference, as Plath does, to the Holocaust but in a far more justifiable way, as Hatcher explains:[5]
[H]e sees in the concentration camp victims the faces of his childhood playmates and in the racism of South Africa’s apartheid and the violence of the Korean War evidence that the evils he has chronicled are neither finished nor peculiarly American.
Not only were the atrocities of slavery commensurate with the genocide of the death camps, but also, as John Fitzgerald Medina explores in Faith, Physics & Psychology the parallels between slavery and the Holocaust are not accidental because Hitler learned a great deal from the United States to help him launch his extermination campaigns. Linking them poetically is therefore, in my view, completely valid, in this case, but not in Plath’s, where her childhood experiences are not remotely comparable to either slavery or genocide.
Whereas Plath was described at times as a ‘confessional poet,’ a label that might seem to justify more than a touch of self-dramatisation, Hatcher makes it clear that such a description does not apply to Hayden.[6] Though ‘he is an artist watching himself, gauging those emotions, studying how his own grief relates to a grieving age’ as ‘John Wright observed . . . even here Hayden was not a confessional poet,’ in that ‘with words at least, he wore the mask, and won in wearing it the detached control and objectivity without which poetic marvels like his most widely acclaimed poem, “Middle Passage”, would not have been possible.’ Hayden recognised[7] a ‘need [for the poet] to distance himself from emotionality in order to deal with the emotion itself’ and quotes Hayden to demonstrate the point:
At first, I was emotionally involved with my subject, but as I continued working I began to feel detached. I might very well have produced nothing but sentimental twaddle otherwise. . . . [T]he expression of a strong emotion becomes the means of release from that emotion.
He also refers to T. S. Eliot who stated, ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.’
This is the opposite of what Plath seems to be doing. I will be looking more closely at specific poems in due course but feel it important to explain in some detail how Robert Hayden has helped me develop a barometer by which I feel I have been able effectively to test the weather of at least one of Plath’s most famous and powerful poems.
An important point comes from Hatcher’s quotation from Wilburn Williams, Jr.’s study of Angle of Ascent:[8] Hayden had the capacity to ‘Objectivise his own subjectivity. His private anguish never locks him into the sterile dead-end of solipsism; it impels him outward into the world.’
He marshals a statistic in support of his case:[9]
It is appropriate, therefore, that while in over twenty poems Hayden used an image of night or darkness to represent this period [in human history], in only two is there no light, no glimmer of hope.
So, we now need to move onto the second category of the overriding goal:[10]
Hayden affirmed the essential relationship between poetry and man’s desire for transcendence: ‘if there exists a “poetry of despair” and rejection, there is also a poetry that affirms the humane and spiritual.’
We will need to address the question at some point of whether a poetry of pure despair is of equal value to a more affirmative form. For now though I need to examine in more detail how poetry and transcendence can be related.
Robert Hayden
Poetry and Transcendence
This is where things get somewhat more complicated, but, given that some of Plath’s poetry is allusive to the point of relative obscurity, it seems important to explore some criteria to help us determine whether all the effort expended in mining for meaning in a poem is justified by the level of significance.
At the simplest level it suggests that, to clear this hurdle, a poem will need to transcend the superficially obvious and merely subjective. But what might that mean in practice?
Hatcher’s analysis of this problem hinges around the matter of metaphor and symbol. In reference to Hayden’s poetry he feels that[11] ‘as symbolic pieces they often reach far beyond the sometimes beguilingly accessible surfaces,’ ‘courageously’ probing[12] ‘his innermost being,’ and conferring upon the reader ‘the obligation . . . to infer meaning through the algebraic process of working through poetic images.’
That would not be enough in itself, though, to fully meet his criterion[13] as he explains that Hayden does not indulge in ‘some of the solipsistic modes so evident in much of post-modern poetry in which the self is the centre of the universe around which all other realities orbit . . . always the focus of Hayden’s work is outward, expansive, examining the larger implications of even the most personal events.’
When we look later at how Plath suborns larger events of great significance to her own narrower subjective purpose we can see the distance between them.
Hatcher argues that Hayden, according to Watkins, is trying to reach for[14] ‘the meaning behind the surfaces of events, of people, of nature itself,’ and, according to Gene Olson, as with other writers, needing ‘to live twice, to “complete” the experience by distilling it on paper.’
Basically, perhaps in the best summary, Hayden’s output resists reduction:[15]
Auden’s notion of poetry as a process of solving for the unknown is something that Hayden will inevitably mention as an essential key to his poetics. . . . ‘You are trying to say what cannot be said any other way – and, in some poems, you are trying to say what really cannot be said at all.’ . . . Instead of telling the reader what to think, he employed symbols, metaphors, imagery, the persona and other devices to create an intimate relationship between the poem and the reader.
Moreover, in a way that eludes Plath, I feel, ‘He wished to be considered and adjudged as a poet, not a Black poet, not a Bahá’í poet, simply a poet,’ whereas Plath may have harboured ideas of herself as a victim, somehow principally representing women rather than humanity. That is in itself a valuable aim, but risks diminishing the reach and depth of the poetry, something I hope to come back to in due course.
There is a complex question hovering in the background, part of which I have touched on in previous posts, such as the ones discussing the work of Samuel Beckett.
Beckett’s view of the world of existence in his work is steeped in a meaningless bleakness which seems irremediable because he believes that’s all there is. There are no compensating forces.
Portrayed in other writers’ works, Conrad perhaps in Heart of Darkness for example, is a depth of darkness so warped the writer clearly believes it is totally unacceptable, even if effective remedies are not obvious within the text.
Jocelyn Baines, in his biography of Conrad, puts it well:[16]
[Heart of Darkness] shows how deeply he was an affected emotionally by the sight of such human baseness and degradation; . . . his Congo experience devastatingly exposes cleavage between human pretensions and practice, a consciousness which underlies Conrad’s philosophy of life.
Conrad was quite explicit that[17] what was happening in such places was ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human consciousness and geographical exploration.’
In the narrator, Marlowe’s words in the book itself, we find:[18]
They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
There is a disturbing caveat there: ‘as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.’ The implication is that, although the behaviour of the Europeans is savage, the ‘darkness’ of Africa might be some kind of justification. The ‘wilderness’ is corrupting, the story seems to imply, and[19] in ‘a corrupt world one is bound to commit a corrupt act.’ The footnote Baines quotes from a letter in French expresses Conrad’s view at that point in time:
L’homme est un animal méchant. Le crime est une condition nécessaire de l’existence organisée. La societé est essentiellement criminelle. [Man is a wicked animal. Crime is an necessary condition of organised existence. Society is is essentially criminal.’]
As we can see from this, such a deep level of abhorrence for the evil of which humanity can be capable reduced even Conrad to Beckett’s level of bleak despair at times.
So, there may be an inevitable trap somewhere between the two where a writer is so convinced at the time of writing that the intense darkness of their subjective vision, rooted in their personal experience, is absolutely true, even if not for everyone, that it can still create a destructive climate of despair in the minds of others. The dark side of existence becomes all there is and even basic decency seems to disappear.
Plath seems to fall into the latter category.
The question is what is the relative value of works of art of this nature as against those such as Hayden’s that do not shirk the darkness but also have a clearer sense that there is light, given that it seems crucial that we do not lapse into despair in the face of all the challenges we currently have to meet.
That’s where we may be going next, if I do not get derailed in the attempt.
Everybody Means Something 