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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Book Review – ‘Selected Poetry & Prose’ (4/5): Charlotte Mew – dramatic lyrics

. . . . joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were almost one.

(From 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.

We move now from the nature poems of the previous post in this sequence to Mew’s dramatic lyrics.

My taste for the dramatic monologue goes back a long way – at least to the fourth year at secondary school when Tommy Turner, the improbably charismatic teacher of English I described in a recent sequence, hooked me on Browning’s poetry.

It even clinched my sense that U A Fanthorpe was a decent poet worth reading when I got as far as her moving dramatic monologue in the voice of William Tyndale, whose early translations provide the foundations of the King James version of the Bible. Though elsewhere she mercilessly mocks superstitious and self-righteous piety along with other unappealing frailties, her ability to identify with deep and compassionate spirituality in even the most distant places is uncanny, as this poem proves.The words are spoken as he sits in his cold and candleless ‘palatial jail’ as ‘the Emperor’s guest’:[1]

But I watch too,
As once I stood on Nibley Knoll and looked
Out over moody Severn across the Forest
To the strangeness of Wales, Malvern’s blue bony hills,
And down on the dear preoccupied people
Inching along to Gloucester, the trows with their sopping decks
Running from Bristol with the weather behind them
And none of them knowing God’s meaning, what He said to them,
Save filtered through bookish lips that never learnt
To splice a rope or fill a bucket. So I watched,
And saw the souls on the road, the souls on the river,
Were the ones Jesus loved. I saw that. Now I see
The landscape of my life, and how that seeing
Has brought me to this place, and what comes after.

Because religious persecution is still part of our lived experience, this poem is deeply moving. The reinforcement of this priceless gem triggered this comment in the margin: ‘I almost gave up before I got to this magnificent sequence.’

Why so challenging?

Even given this familiarity with the dramatic monologue as a form of poetry that integrates consciousness, character, and narrative, this post is going to be the most challenging of this sequence for a number of reasons.

First of all, there is so much I could say, her dramatic monologues cover so much ground. Then there is the fact that I am not sure I can find words to convey the impact of her greatest poems, they work on so many levels. On top of that so many of her themes map onto the preoccupations of my lifetime – death, mental health issues, loss, and faith, or in my earlier days, the lack of it – just to name the obvious.

There’s an interesting caveat to share at this point, I feel. There is no poet anywhere who writes great poetry all the time, not even Shakespeare as Paterson’s commentary on his sonnets indicates. As Randall Jarrell put it, ‘a good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.’

I’ve tested this myself not just with the poems of Fanthorpe mentioned above but also with the likes of Yeats, Keats, Herbert, Marvell and Larkin. In each set of complete poems I only highlight a relatively small number. In Mew’s Selected Poetry and Prose I have highlighted 20 poems out of 50 (40%). Compare to this Larkin, for example, in whose Collected Poems I have so far highlighted 29 out of 244 (12%). Admittedly if Mew has written as much and I had the collected poems the figures would have been closer, but she’s clearly made a strong impression on me.

Perhaps one of the best ways of describing the impact that Mew’s dramatic monologues make is to say that she seems to do in poetry what Alice Neel did in her art. Her history of grief, loss and the stigma of a family with the taint of ‘insanity,’ along with her sense of always being an outsider, empowered her sense of empathy with the outcasts of society, just as Neel’s inscape helped her connect in a similar way with those society had in some way left behind. Empathy allied with a degree of projection fuelled the power of the poems. As Copus expresses it in her introduction to the Selected Poetry and Prose:[2] ‘It is no mistake that she wrote so many dramatic monologues: the genre is the perfect vehicle for the lonely cast of souls she brought into being.’ In her way she was a ‘collector of souls’ just as Neel was.

Reading Mew and feeling so drawn into the poems is making me realise that one of my favourite forms may in fact perhaps be better described as the dramatic lyric, as one critic terms the form she often uses. Dramatic monologues can sometimes lack the music that I also need along with the psychological insights and narrative element. Combining psychological interest, story and song makes this form of poetry perfect for me. I love many other forms of lyric as well, but this probably takes the prize. Mew is definitely in her unique way the Alice Neel of poetry.

What is also interesting, but perhaps not hugely significant is that, like Browning, as I pointed out in an earlier sequence, who had a public persona very different from the characters captured in his dramatic monologues, the same split was to some extent true of Charlotte Mew. Penelope Fitzgerald summarises it in her case by saying:[3] ‘There is pathos in this clinging to gentility by a free spirit, who seemed born to have nothing to do with it.’ After an uncomfortable trip to France it even extended to friends who were close to her:[4] ‘she was usually careful to present an edited version herself to those who were fond of her.’ I’m not arguing that such a split is necessary for a poet who wants to excel in the dramatic monologue, but in both Browning’s and Mew’s cases the hidden and possibly disreputable self seems to inspire the poems.

Which Poems?

So, which poems shall I choose to prove my point? ‘There’s the rub’, to borrow a phrase from the Bard.

It’s tempting to go with a safe bet like The Farmer’s Bride. While telling the story from the frustrated husband farmer’s point of view we still can empathise with his evasive bride. Copus again pins down one of the crucial qualities of this poem:[5] ‘[I]n her best known poem, The Farmer’s Bride, we encounter Mew’s uncanny facility for viewing both sides of a difficult situation with equal compassion, and for presenting them to us in such a way that simplistic notions of right and wrong become meaningless.’

My feeling, though, is to go with poems that are even less well-known.

The Quiet House was tempting. It combines, as her poems often do, simplicity with perplexity, so it would be good illustration in that sense. It opens very simply:

WHEN we were children old Nurse used to say,
The house was like an auction or a fair
Until the lot of us were safe in bed.
It has been quiet as the country-side
Since Ted and Janey and then Mother died
And Tom crossed Father and was sent away.
After the lawsuit he could not hold up his head,
Poor Father, and he does not care
For people here, or to go anywhere.

Only later in the poem do things become more puzzling, and continue so over several stanzas, of which I quote the shortest:

I think that my soul is red
Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower:
But when these are dead
They have had their hour.

I shall have had mine, too,
For from head to feet
I am burned and stabbed half through,
And the pain is deadly sweet.

The things that kill us seem
Blind to the death they give:
It is only in our dream
The things that kill us live.

Copus helps by explaining in the notes to this poem[6] that ‘the colour red is used throughout [her] poetry to denote passion and the fullness of life.’ Even more interestingly she adds: ‘Mew expresses the idea that there is a price to pay for profound sensory experience, and that joy is never entirely divorced from pain.’ For me this resonates so closely with Bob Dylan when he sings ‘Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain (from Not Dark Yet), and with the same quality I sensed in Alice Neel’s paintings.

In the end though, powerful as it is, it seemed too close to her own life to qualify as a perfect example of her use of the dramatic monologue. Family members are simply transpositions of her own family – for example, her father died not her mother, and the parallels are therefore very close.

Now for something much darker and more demanding in the next and final post.

Footnotes

[1]. Fanthorpe: New & Collected Poems – page  296.

[2]. Copus – page xxv.

[3]. Penelope Fitzgerald – page 45.

[4]. Page 77.

[5]. Copus – Page xxv.

[6]. Page 155.

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Book Review – ‘This Rare Spirit’ (2/5): Charlotte Mew – the impact of death

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.

(From 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.

In the previous post, after explaining how Julia Copus’ excellent biography of Charlotte Mew had opened my eyes to the power of a poet I had never heard of before, I tried to convey how death played a huge part in Mew’s life. Now I intend to look more closely at the meaning of death for Mew and its impact on her poetry, before moving on to at least beginning to consider the equally important issue of mental health.

Death and her Poetry

Copus points out that Mew[1] ‘would return to the staircase image over and over in her poems.’ It would often ‘denote a walkway to a longed-for silence; a hint, perhaps, at the respite that death might provide.’ In one of my favourite poems, Not for that City, for example, she writes:

. . . if for anything we greatly long,

It is for some remote and quiet stair

Which winds to silence and a space of sleep.

The image of the stair conveys also to me at least a sense of rising above the world.

Mew also toys with the question of whether consciousness survives death, and if so, in what way. The poem Requiescat[2]‘finishes by wondering whether the deceased might also… remember, in his or her turn, the things of the world; could it be that consciousness remains alive in the world, after the body has left?’ The closing stanza captures this vividly:

Beyond the line of naked trees

At the road’s end, your stretch of blue –

Strange if you should remember these

As we, ah! God! remember you!

There is, I feel, even more doubt about that possibility in Charlotte’s mind, than Copus’ wording suggests.

To someone who came to believe in survival after death after two decades of dogmatic disbelief, I don’t agree with Copus’ sense that what she calls Mew’s ‘central premise’ in the poem is strange. What’s so odd about entertaining the idea that:[3]‘consciousness might continue its daily existence after death, might remember physical experience – and even go on engaging in some way with the earth’s seasonal rhythms’? A sense of this appears in other poems as well. In Here Lies a Prisoner Mew describes the dead man as ‘listening still to the magpie chatter/Over his grave.’ There are though moments when the opposite seems to be implied as in the last line of The Quiet House: ‘I do not care; some day I shall not think; I shall not be!’ Mew’s article on Emily Brontë conveys a similar perspective:[4] ‘[Death] was not a problem, because it was the end problems.’

According to Copus, Mew does repeat[5] the ‘conviction’ that ‘in the natural world at least – after death comes renewal.’  More of that when I look at the nature poems.

In the end, Copus is clear in her own mind that Mew holds onto something almost the opposite of a force for life as not just a destination but a welcome escape:[6] In ‘Moorland Night’ the Thing that is found . . . ‘is the final, blissful cessation of all life’s human concerns, a melting away of boundaries, a yielding to the larger cycle of life.’ Our sense of a separate identity melts back into this cycle like drops of rain blend into a stream. For her, Copus feels[7]  ‘the only thing that mattered was the here and now.’ There is no gateway to an afterlife.

I am not sure I quite buy into something as simplistic. There are powerful lines that complicate the picture. For example, these from The Call:

                The world is cold without

And dark and hedged about

With mystery and enmity and doubt,

But we must go

Though yet we do not know

Who called, or what marks we shall leave upon the snow.

There are certainly strong reasons for believing that, for Mew, what she most values is transient. In Moorland Night she calls this ‘the Thing,’ which she doesn’t define but explains ‘Perhaps the earth will hold it, or the wind, or that bird’s cry,/But it is not for long in any life I know.’

Penelope Fitzgerald[8] feels that Mew’s take on death is similar to that of Alfred Noyes’s who ‘finds he is beginning to doubt doubt and disbelieve in disbelief.’

Whatever her beliefs about an afterlife or some kind of continuing consciousness, there is no doubt that Mew’s familiarity with the pain of loss often crept into her poems. Take To a Child in Death as an example, written 30 years after two deaths in 1897. As Penelope Fitzgerald describes it in her biography,[9] Mew poses a ‘wretched question from the suddenly left alone – “What shall we do with this strange summer, meant for you?”’ She spoke of her childhood as ‘a time of intense, but lost, happiness.’

Mental Health:

Death was not the only source of distress and loss in her life. As she saw it, her family was tainted with the stigma of mental illness, something which impacted on her life in more ways than one.

Her brother, Henry[10] ‘was experiencing full blown delusions’ by June 1884. He was admitted[11]  to ‘London’s most notorious asylum,’ the New Bethlem Hospital on 14 June that same year. Copus is clear that Charlotte would have seen herself as also tainted with the same genetic flaw. The diagnosis he was given[12] was of ‘acute mania with excitement and impulsiveness’.

In those days a family such as hers would have not wished this to be known to anyone else. Charlotte would have gone to great lengths to keep it quiet. There is no reference to him[13] ‘in any of her surviving letters,’ though ‘his presence haunts her poetry.’ She was also plagued by ‘the fear that the same thing might happen to her and to her sisters.’ Copus[14] describes her as ‘standing sentinel to a secret that was not to be carried outside its walls at any cost.’

There were other costs to the family. Instead of generating income[15] Henry ‘had become a steady drain on the family coffers.’ Copus is clear that[16] the family ‘were resentful of the amount of money’ their father spent on Henry’s care, ‘or became so as the years passed.’ After he died, they took steps[17] to arrange for Henry to be ‘discharged “uncured” from Holloway Sanatorium and transferred to Peckham House Lunatic Asylum, which took in both paupers and private patients, for whom the institution advertised ‘moderate terms’.” Instead of sending their sister, Freda,[18] ‘back to London, arrangements were made for her admission to a local nursing home called The Limes, on the High Street in nearby Newport [Isle of Wight].’ After a suicide attempt in January 1899,[19] Freda ‘was admitted to the private wing of the nearby county asylum, Whitecroft Hospital.’ Freda[20] ‘never did recover her sanity’ and she remained ‘in the asylum for the rest of her long life.’

Sadly,[21] on 22 March 1901, ‘just three and a half years after entering Peckham House Lunatic Asylum, Henry Herne Mew died there, of tuberculosis.’ It is likely that Charlotte, in particular, may have felt guilty ‘over the fact that Henry had caught the infection since his move to Peckham House, which took in paupers alongside private patients.’

An additional emotionally damaging cost in the longer term was Charlotte’s, and her sister Anne’s resolve[22] ‘that the door of marriage should be closed to them: given the severity of Henry’s illness, they believed it would be irresponsible to bring children of their own into the world.’ They feared ‘passing on the mental taint that was in their heredity.’

Fitzgerald clarifies exactly why this was:[23]

As ill-fortune would have it, the breakdown first of Henry, and then of Freda, coincided with the years when the science or apparent science of eugenics first took the field… Eugenics… [set] out to show that transmission of this inheritance led to the gradual degeneration of the whole society.… if any member of your family was different, no matter in what way, you were morally bound not to reproduce.

This seems a good place to pause and, using a diagram, give some pointers to where the sequence will be going from here.

As I see it, the impact of deaths and mental health problems in the family combined to give Charlotte a high degree of empathy, particularly with those on the edges of society – outsiders and misfits – with whom she strongly identified. Her empathy clearly extended to nature, though the reasons for that are less clear.

The results are on the one hand to create poems, written in the form of a dramatic monologue, giving powerful voice to those who are all too often ignored, and on the other moving testimony to her strong identification with aspects of the natural world, even to the extent of capturing, at times, what she conveys as a kind of consciousness.

More of that next time.

References:

[1]. Page 151.

[2]. Copus – page 179.

[3]. Page 180.

[4]. Fitzgerald – page 94.

[5]. Copus – page 331.

[6]. Page 354.

[7]. Page 376.

[8]. Fitzgerald – page 100.

[9]. Page 10.

[10]. Copus – page 60.

[11]. Page 62.

[12]. Page 63.

[13]. Page 65.

[14]. Page 68.

[15]. Page 80.

[16]. Page 124.

[17]. Page 128.

[18]. Page 129.

[19]. Page 130.

[20]. Page 132.

[21]. Page 136.

[22]. Page 83.

[23]. Fitzgerald – page  41.

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Book Review – ‘This Rare Spirit’ (1/4): Charlotte Mew – a bolt out of the blue

What can You know, what can You really see

                Of this dark ditch, the soul of me!

(From 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.  

This is not going to be a coolly objective consideration of Charlotte Mew as a poet. Far from it. The feeling I had as I read and re-read her best poems, after discovering them for the very first time barely three weeks before writing these words, was as intense and deep as when I discovered Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth in my adolescence. I’m afraid this is going to be more of an exploration of what it is about her poems that has triggered such a strong reaction.

I would say that she is probably the only English poet, writing in the 20^th Century, to produce such a powerful effect on me. There are many writers of English poetry of the modern period I have very much enjoyed and been moved by – Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Jennings and U. A. Fanthorpe to name but a few – and some who have intrigued me a great deal including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, R. S. and Dylan Thomas and Derek Walcott for example – but they did not stir me to the same depths as she is doing, with the possible exception of Thomas Hardy, who also admired her poetry.

So, why is that the case?

Apart from making clear that Julia Copus was such an eloquent advocate for the poet in her biography that there was never any doubt that I would immediately order a copy of Mew’s poems in the Faber 2019 edition, there are a number of other considerations, not least of which is that there are in that book a higher proportion of poems than usual that contain lines that touch me deeply. So much so that I am careful about reading them aloud to anyone as I tend to be drawn over the edge of tears as I do so. (Interestingly, this is not the case when I am alone, which suggests that I become more identified with what the poem is saying when I read it out loud to someone else.) Mew’s own assessment is intriguing here:[1] ‘All verse gains by being spoken, and mine particularly – I suppose because it’s rough.’

What else?

My first strong connection with Mew is through the themes she chooses to explore. There are three that map closely onto my constant preoccupations – I was going to say obsessions but decided that would be unnecessarily disparaging the intensity of my enduring interest in them.

The three themes are death, ‘mental illness’ (as she would have perhaps described it in contemporary terms that I am not entirely comfortable with, but more of that later) and the natural world. A quality she consistently exhibits, which gives her treatment of these themes a special power, is the depth of her empathy, her interest in and intense compassion not just for people, even those who are very different from her in what seems a challenging way, but for all forms of life.

Readers of my blog will be well aware of how often I have drawn on these themes myself. My childhood was stained with the dye of my sister’s death. My calling, after I discovered it in the mid-70s, was to work with those who had been labelled ‘mentally ill.’ And from childhood I had felt a deep connection with nature, especially trees.

The second strong attraction, which runs across all those themes, is her poetry as a combination of power, accessibility and music, through which she conveys her various perspectives (I use that term in the plural advisably – her use of the dramatic monologue makes that necessary).

Again I have emphasised and explored the importance for me of intelligible music as a key ingredient of a successful poem. So no surprise that Mew’s poems should resonate with me so strongly.

What I think I need to explore now is both the reason for her attraction to these themes and the power with which her poems convey aspects of her experience of them.

Let’s start with what looks more like an ending – death.

Death:

Death impacted early on her life, and far more directly than it ever did on mine, and this accounts for the relatively far greater intensity of her response to it:[2]  ‘By the age of seven, she had witnessed two deaths in the family, and was already learning to find solace in the world of words.’ She may not have seen the corpse of her brother, Richard, but ‘the shock of [his] death was to stay with her for life.’ His was ‘the first major trauma she encountered, and it set a pattern for life.’ These ‘absences’ may have helped induce ‘her growing detachment from the world.’

Decades later, as she put it, her mother’s death left her[3] ‘feeling . . . as useless as a “weed”, rooted out of the earth and tossed aside.’

Her father died of stomach cancer in the autumn of 1898 at the age of 65, just over four years after the probable start of his symptoms, which would have coincided with her first publication, a short story in The Yellow Book in the spring of 1894.[4] Penelope Fitzgerald flags up that[5] ‘[t]he certificate shows that Charlotte was with him at the end, and witnessed the death.’ It is almost certain that she would have been the family member to step into his shoes as the lynchpin of the household.[6]

For various reasons, which will become clearer when I begin to deal later with the mental health issues, this was going to be no easy task.

Suffice it to say at this point that, for long periods of time – in the case of her sister Freda many decades – there were two members of the family in two different asylums. Not long after her father’s death,[7] ‘[o]n Friday 22 March 1901, just three and a half years after entering Peckham House Lunatic Asylum, Henry Herne Mew died there [at the age of 36], of tuberculosis.’ A complicating factor for Charlotte may have been ‘some guilt over the fact that Henry had caught the infection since his move to Peckham House, which took in paupers alongside private patients,’ a move from his original more expensive asylum, that she and her family instigated to reduce the costs of his original care that her father had insisted on incurring since 1884.

The final group of deaths came much later, starting with her mother in May 1923: both daughters were with her when she died:[8] ‘Ma had been with Charlotte and Anne almost every day of their lives, and for all her faults, her daughters had loved her deeply, as she had loved them.’ The impact was considerable:[9]

Over the years she had devoted an increasing proportion of her time to caring for her mother and, relieved so suddenly of the responsibility, she felt not only uprooted but superfluous.

As a result her sister, Anne,[10] ‘in many ways, became the “significant other” in Charlotte’s life as the years rolled by and their shared cargo in griefs and privations accumulated.’

To have her sister die in 1927 at the age of 53, only four years after their mother, of cancer of the uterus and liver, left Charlotte[11] ‘inconsolable, unable to sleep.’ She had nursed her alone in what was effectively a bedsit. Copus explains its full impact, linked to what they had felt was their shameful secret that no one else must ever know (more of that later):

Perhaps most distressing of all, Charlotte had lost the last person in the world with whom she shared the full secret of Henry’s and Freda’s illnesses; the one person with whom she could speak openly about them, as often as she liked, without shame or fear of reproof.

It is completely understandable that life should have lost all its meaning for her at this desperate point. She was never married, for reasons I’ll be exploring more fully later, and therefore had no children. Her birth family was everything to her.

On the 24^th March 1928 she overdosed on Lysol, a commonly available disinfectant at the time, which had been used in 361 suicides in 1927.[12] At such a dark moment in her life suicide would almost certainly have made complete sense to her, given her perception of death as a friend who would bring her peace: her words to death in her poem Smile Death were, ‘Show me your face, why your eyes are kind!’

There was a bitterly ironic effect of the poison:[13]

One of the features of Lysol suicide that Charlotte would not have read about is that the inside of the mouth – the pharynx and the larynx – is eventually burnt away. For a writer whose poems speak with such unrestrained fluency, there is something particularly bleak about this final, physical silencing.

Next time I plan to look more closely at the meaning of death for Mew and its impact on her poetry, before moving on to consider the equally important issue of mental health.

References:

[1]. Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography of Charlotte Mew – page 126.

[2]. Copus – pages 16-17.

[3]. Copus – page 24.

[4]. Copus – page 93.

[5]. Fitzgerald – page 68.

[6]. Copus – page 125.

[7]. Copus – page 136.

[8]. Copus – pages 328-29.

[9]. Copus – page 333.

[10]. Copus – pages 345-46.

[11]. Copus – pages 363-69.

[12]. Copus – page 378.

[13]. Copus – page 379.

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Irreducible Mind – a review (3/3): the self & the Self

What is the dust which obscures the mirror? It is attachment to the world, avarice, envy, love of luxury and comfort, haughtiness and self-desire; this is the dust which prevents reflection of the rays of the Sun of Reality in the mirror. The natural emotions are blameworthy and are like rust which deprives the heart of the bounties of God.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Promulgation of Universal Peace – page 244)

Even though it’s barely a year since I last republished this sequence, it’s relevance to my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation is unmistakable, so here it comes again!

In the previous two posts I’ve been moaning about how I was robbed when my training in psychology steered me away from the work of thinkers such as FWH Myers as though they had the plague. What I probably need to do to redress the balance is mention how much I was influenced by thinkers who were deeply influenced by Myers. In one case I know that for certain because I still have Roberto Assagioli‘s introductory text on psychosynthesis, which I read in 1976 and which cites Myers in the list of references at the end of Chapter I. Another was a seminal book I borrowed but never bought, so it is impossible to say whether the influence was direct and acknowledged: this was Peter Koestenbaum’s New Images of the Person.

Assagioli explained in his book the importance of what he calls a ‘disidentification exercise’ (page 22):

After having discovered [various elements of our personality], we have to take possession of them and acquire control over them. The most effective method by which we can achieve this is that of disidentification. This is based on a fundamental psychological principle which may be formulated as follows:

We are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves.

(For the psychosynthesis disidentification exercise see the following link.)

Then, in another exciting moment, I came upon Koestenbaum’s ideas about reflection six years after I had read Assagioli. Reflection is the ‘capacity to separate consciousness from its contents’ (Koestenbaum: 1979). We can step back, inspect and think about our experiences. We become capable of changing our relationship with them and altering their meanings for us. It is like a mirror learning to see that it is not the same as what is reflected in it. So here was a writer in the existentialist tradition speaking in almost the same terms as psychosynthesis. I had practised Assagioli’s exercise for a long period after reading his book. Now I was triggered into resuming the practice again by what Koestenbaum had written.

I came across Koestenbaum’s book just before I discovered the existence of the Bahá’í Faith (for a fuller account see link). It helped me take what I had found in Assagioli and fuse it with what I had found in the Faith and create an experiential exercise to express that understanding in action in a way that helped me immensely to adjust to spiritual concepts which until that point had been completely alien to me for decades – all my adult life in fact. The Baha’i Writings talk about certain key powers of the soul: loving, knowing and willing as well as introducing me to the idea of the heart, the core of our being, as a mirror. I pulled this into my version of the exercise (see below). What I didn’t realise until later was that Assagioli had corresponded with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and had therefore to some degree been influenced by Bahá’í thought. (See Disidentification exercise for the final version that I used myself rather than this one I revised to share for the use of others).

How amazing then to find Emily Kelly, in the book Irreducible Mind, quoting Myers quoting Thomas Reid, an 18th century philosopher (page 74):

The conviction which every man has of his identity . . . needs no aid of philosophy to strengthen it; and no philosophy can weaken it.… I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers. My thoughts and actions and feelings change every moment…; But that Self or I, to which they belong, is permanent…

What I regret therefore now is that the usefulness of this exercise did not make me trace it back to its source and find out more of what Myers thought about this and many other things of great importance to me. So, better late than never, that is what I am about to do now.

Myers’s the self and the Self

The disidentification exercise rattled the cage of my previous ideas about who I was in essence. While I didn’t quite buy into Assagioli’s other ideas about consciousness at that time I felt, both intuitively and from the experiences I was having, that his idea was completely right, that there is some form of pure consciousness underpinning our identity.

So, as good a place as any to pick up the thread of Myers’s thinking again is with his ideas of the self and the Self. There are some problems to grapple with before we can move on. Emily Kelly writes (page 83):

These ‘concepts central to his theory’ are undoubtedly difficult, but despite some inconsistency in his usage or spelling Myers was quite clear in his intent to distinguish between a subliminal ‘self’ (a personality alternate or in addition to the normal waking one) and a Subliminal ‘Self’ or ‘Individuality’ (which is his real ‘unifying theoretical principle’). In this book we will try to keep this distinction clear in our readers minds by using the term ‘subliminal consciousness’ to refer to any conscious psychological processes occurring outside ordinary awareness; the term “subliminal self” (lower case) to refer to ‘any chain of memory sufficiently continuous, and embracing sufficient particulars, to acquire what is popularly called a “character” of its own;’ and the term ‘Individuality’ or “’Subliminal Self” (upper case) to refer to the underlying larger Self.

Myers believed that the evidence in favour of transcendent experiences, used here by me in the sense of things that leak through the membrane from above, is strong enough to warrant serious consideration and he distinguishes between that and basic subliminal experiences that come, as it were, from underneath (page 87):

Supernormal processes such as telepathy do seem to occur more frequently while either the recipient or the agent (or both) is asleep, in the states between sleeping and waking, in a state of ill health, or dying; and subliminal functioning in general emerges more readily during altered states of consciousness such as hypnosis, hysteria, or even ordinary distraction.

He felt that we needed to find some way of reliably tapping into these levels of consciousness (page 91)

The primary methodological challenge to psychology, therefore, lies in developing methods, or ‘artifices,’ for extending observations of the contents or capacities of mind beyond the visible portion of the psychological spectrum, just as the physical sciences have developed artificial means of extending sensory perception beyond ordinary limits.

Midsummer Night’s Dream

Thin Partitions

He also has much that is interesting and valuable to say about the implications of a proper understanding of these upper and lower thresholds, especially when they are too porous, for both genius and mental health (page 98):

When there is ‘a lack of liminal stability, an excessive permeability, if I may say so, of the psychical diaphragm that separates the empirical [conscious] from the latent [subliminal: unconscious] faculties and man,’ then there may be either an expansion of consciousness (an ‘uprush’ of latent material from the subliminal into the supraliminal) or, conversely, a narrowing of consciousness (a ‘downdraught’ from the supraliminal into the subliminal). The former is genius, the latter is hysteria.

This is slightly confusing here but the main point is that genius expands what we are aware of, and more comes above the threshold, whereas hysteria narrows our experience so that less comes into consciousness. This is partly clarified by Kelly explaining (page 99):

In short, Myers believed that hysteria, when viewed as a psychological phenomenon, gives ‘striking’ support to ‘my own principal thesis’, namely, that all personality is a filtering or narrowing of the field of consciousness from a larger Self, the rest of which remains latent and capable of emerging only under the appropriate conditions.

Even the expanded consciousness of genius, in this view, is still filtering a lot out – in fact, it still leaves most of potential consciousness untapped.

There is in addition a common quality of excessive porousness which explains why, in Shakespeare’s phrase, the ‘lunatic . . . . . and the poet are of imagination all compact.’ Myers’s view is that (page 100):

Because genius and madness both involve similar psychological mechanisms – namely, a permeability of the psychological boundary – it is to be expected that they might frequently occur in the same person; but any nervous disorders that accompany genius signal, not dissolution, but a ‘perturbation which masks evolution.’

For Myers dreams, though they may indeed be common and frequently discounted, they are nonetheless important sources of data (pages 102-103):

Myers argued [that] dreams provide a readily available means of studying the ‘language’ of the subliminal, a language that may underlie other, less common forms of automatism or subliminal processes. . . . Myers’s model of mind predicts that that if sleep is a state of consciousness in which subliminal processes take over from supraliminal ones, then sleep should facilitate subliminal functioning, not only in the organic or ‘infrared’ region, but also in the “ultraviolet” range of the psychological spectrum, such as the emergence of telepathic impressions in dreams.

This has certainly been my own experience. A post I wrote two years ago will perhaps serve to illustrate that for those who are interested. My dream of the hearth, recounted there, was, incidentally, the only remembered dream I have ever noted in which I experienced the presence of God, another reason for my attaching such great importance to it.

An important related topic he also addresses is that of ‘hallucinations.’ People tend to be quite closed minded on this topic, seeing visions and voices as the sign of a mind gone wrong. This is quite unhelpful. There is a mass of evidence that I may come back to some time to indicate that ‘hallucinations’ range from the darkly destructive to the life enhancing and it important to pay close attention to the details of them and the circumstances under which they occur before coming to any conclusion about them. Our society’s default position, the result of exactly the backward step under discussion here that both psychology and psychiatry took in the name of pseudo-science, is harmful rather than helpful quite often (I have explored a more positive approach on this blog – see the six links to An Approach to Psychosis). Pim van Lommel’s research into NDEs replicates the same kind of pattern in that patients whose families and friends were unsympathetic took much longer to integrate their experiences and found it a more painful process than those who were met with support and understanding. He summarises this (page 51):

When someone first tries to disclose the NDE, the other person’s reaction is absolutely crucial. If this initial reaction is negative or skeptical, the process of accepting and integrating the NDE typically presents far greater problems than if this initial reaction is positive, sympathetic, or neutral. Evidence has shown that positive responses facilitate and accelerate the integration process. In fact, without the possibility of communication, the process of coming to terms with the NDE often fails to get under way at all.

We tend to underestimate the frequency of ‘hallucinations’ in the ‘normal’ population, something the Myers was already aware of (page 108):

One of the most important accomplishments of Myers, Guerney, and their colleagues in psychical research was in demonstrating the previously suspected, but as it turns out not infrequent, occurrence of hallucinations in normal, healthy individuals.

Not all them should be dismissed as fantasy (page 109):

These studies and surveys also demonstrated that such hallucinations are not always purely subjective in origin. Some, in fact, are veridical – that is, they involve seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing some event happening at a physically remote location. . . . . Using their own figures for the frequency with which people recall having hallucinations in a waking, healthy state, together with statistics regarding the incidence of death in the United Kingdom, they concluded that hallucinations coinciding with a death happened too frequently to be attributable to chance.

All in all, Myers’s mould-breaking approach to the mind and to the problems of consciousness is refreshing to say the least, and maps onto my own long-standing interests in spirituality, creativity and ‘psychosis.’ It was icing on the cake to find what he said about science and religion, a point to savour and a good note to end this post on (page 113) :

On the one hand, . . . he believed that science could ‘prove the preamble of all religions’ – namely, that the universe extends far beyond the perceptible material world. On the other hand., religion could contribute to ‘the expansion of Science herself until she can satisfy those questions which the human heart will rightly ask, but to which Religion alone has thus far attempted an answer.’

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Science, Spirituality and Civilisation (1/4): Oneness of Religion and Science (a)

All Saints Church, Hereford

In the wake of my sequence on understanding the heart, I got steered onto a somewhat different track. Every month I meet up with a former psychology colleague and close friend for a coffee and deep conversation on topics close to both of our hearts.

The café we repair to is in All Saints church. We grab our drinks and nibbles and go up the curving stairs to a quieter, specially built part of the café, walk past a wooden risqué carving on the ceiling, which would be barely detectable at ground level, to sit, if possible, at the quiet far end on comfortable armchairs at a low table.

On a recent occasion, after I’d risked boring him to bits with my prolonged exploration of the heart theme, he shared with me a printed copy of the epilogue to Consciousness Unbound by Edward Kelly titled The Emerging Vision and Why It Matters, as downloaded from the Paradigm Explorer website, Kelly co-edited the book with Paul Marshall. A key quote, indicating the general direction of travel of this sequence reads:[1]

Our individual and collective human fates in these dangerous and difficult times – indeed, the fate of our precious planet and all of its passengers – may ultimately hinge on a wider recognition and more effective utilisation of the expanded states of being that are potentially available to us but largely ignored or even actively suppressed by our struggling post-modern civilisation with its warring tendencies toward self-aggrandising individualism and fundamentalist tribalism

As I had found the earlier book in what I came to realise is a sequence of three – Irreducible Mind – a compelling and illuminating read (see links for my blog sequence), there was no way I could resist getting hold of a copy as soon as humanly possible.

It took a few days for Waterstones to get hold of a copy for me, but, as soon as they did, I plunged right in. The reading experience, spread over several weeks, was a combination of pleasurable hope and unexpected disappointment, for reasons I am about to explore.

I’ll be going in some depth into three main themes: harmony of religion of science, the perennialism, and dissociation with a slight diversion into precognition. Before I do so, I just need to flag up two important ways in which I resonated to issues that are not the book’s main focus but were welcome side-alleys.

Heart

There is at least one faint echo of the heart theme in Faggin’s article. He describes a crucial wake up experience he had in these terms:[2]

I felt a powerful rush of energy-love emerge from my chest . . .

This feeling was clearly love, but a love so intense and so incredibly fulfilling that it surpassed any possible idea I had about what love is. Even more unbelievable was the fact that I was the source of this love. I perceived it as a broad beam of shimmering white light, alive and beatific, gushing for my heart with incredible strength.

Then suddenly that light exploded and filled the room and then expanded to embrace the entire universe with the same white brilliance. I knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was the “substance” of which all that exists is made.

Inscape

In words which open with ones almost the same as those used by one of my favourite poets, R. S. Thomas, he adds:[3]

A little of the time, I began to realise that the truly important journey is the inner one…

I realised that I had almost always repressed my true feelings… I had convinced myself that I was strong, when all I did was estrange myself from my own heart by pretending that everything was fine.

. . . the inner world of meaning must also be an irreducible property of all that exists from the very beginning. Meaning and matter must be like the two faces of the same coin.

R. S. Thomas

Thomas has it this way:[4]

The best journey to make

is inward. It is the interior

that calls. Eliot heard it.

Wordsworth turned from the great hills

of the north to the precipice

of his own mind, and let himself

down for the poetry stranded

on the bare ledges.

Mental Health

Mental Health is another topic which the book occasionally addresses with strong resonance for me. Presti is quite scathing about our culture’s standard approach when he discusses the use of medications in mental health:[5]

. . there are compelling reductionist narratives underlying the understanding of these conditions and their associated clinical interventions.

. . . Something shared among all… non-Western medical traditions is that health and illness are viewed in a strong psychophysical manner. Mind is understood to very much influence bodily processes – there is no schism between body and mind.

. . . In the case of psychiatric medications, reliance on neurobiological research to reveal mechanisms of and interventions for mental distress has led to little progress in understanding mechanisms and designing better treatments. Furthermore, it has contributed to a pharmaceutical industry of design and marketing of medications to address mental distress based on poorly supported mechanistic narratives, with little to show for all this beyond billions of dollars in research expenditures (funded largely by taxpayers) and billions of dollars of corporate profits from the sale of pharmaceuticals to treat mental distress.

My hymn-sheet exactly.

Kripal describes a telling example to counteract this reductionist narrative:[6]

Further scholarship eventually challenged the Katzian position… on pure consciousness.

… [Rachel Peterson’s experience ] she tells the story of how her clinical depression was effectively addressed through an encounter with ultimate reality on psilocybin… The psilocybin did not just ease her of her clinical depression; it also cured her of her atheism. After all, she could not deny her own experience, and she had known, directly and immediately, “an abiding force that permeated all existence – something that felt conscious, vast, benevolent, eternal, peaceful, and furiously important.”

Materialistic Heart Attack

Kripal also expresses a related take on humanism:[7]

. . . this . . . materialism has been so destructive of the humanities, mostly by rendering the human literally non-existent, and certainly irrelevant in the technological world of objects and things.

… Most humanists, like most scientists, assume the same metaphysics. They assume some kind of physicalism or materialism.

. . . In the materialist or physicalist metaphysics, the humanities are the practices of something that is not real, studying other things that are not really real. The humanities are nothing studying nothing.

… The materialist metaphysics of modernity is our intellectual heart attack.

This brings me onto my first detailed focus: the need for us to recognise, as the Bahá’í Faith does explicitly, that there is a fundamental harmony between religion.

Even so, after finishing the book I was left feeling that I needed to do Consciousness Unbound justice but that it was also important, given my caveats, not to exaggerate its value, perhaps also because all the contributors are men.

This first section covers one of its most encouraging lines of argument.

Oneness of religion and Science

Hopefully their case compellingly suggests how the current conflict between science and spirituality can be transcended: they avoid the word ‘religion’ for reasons Kelly makes clear:[8]

We believe that the single most important task confronting all of modernity is that of meaningful reconciliation of science and spirituality.

. . . we believe that emerging developments within science itself are leading inexorably toward an enlarged conception of nature, one that can accommodate realities of a spiritual sort while rejecting rationally untenable “overbeliefs” of the sorts routinely targeted by critics of the world’s institutional religions.

This, in his view, requires that[9] ‘[b]oth science and religion . . . must evolve.’ For him this is a tricky path to tread in the book because ‘most of us are scientifically minded adults… sceptical of the currently dominant physicalist worldview but equally wary of uncritical embrace of any of the world’s major faiths with their often conflicting beliefs and decidedly mixed historical records.’ I’ll be dealing with these caveats about religion in more detail in a later post in this sequence

The rewards of succeeding are potentially immense:[10]

This synoptic vision seems to us to harbour tremendous practical implications… in terms of providing humanity, individually and collectively, with an ethos that is fundamentally life affirming and optimistic, profoundly ecumenical in character, and potentially capable of addressing the multitude of societal ills and threats to a planet that can be seen as flowing directly or indirectly from the currently dominant physicalism.

Basically, the properly recognised harmony between these two approaches to reality could lift our civilisation to a far higher level.

So, what does such an approach mean in practice?

There is so much to say on that, it will have to wait until next time.

References

[1]. Consciousness Unbound. – pages 286-87.
[2]. Op. cit. – pages 284-85
[3]. Op. cit. – page 286.
[4]. Groping from Collected Poems – page 328.
[5]. Consciousness Unbound – page 345-47.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 388.
[7]. Op. cit.— pages 374-76.
[8]. Op. cit.— page 2.
[9]. Op. cit.— page 3.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 8.

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