Veils, Words & Values (4/5): Life, Art and Deus Absconditus

At this time, likewise, I most urgently request the friends of God to make every effort, as much as lieth within their competence, along these lines. The harder they strive to widen the scope of their knowledge, the better and more gratifying will be the result. Let the loved ones of God, whether young or old, whether male or female, each according to his capabilities, bestir themselves and spare no efforts to acquire the various current branches of knowledge, both spiritual and secular, and of the arts. Whensoever they gather in their meetings let their conversation be confined to learned subjects and to information on the knowledge of the day.

If they do thus, they will flood the world with the Manifest Light, and change this dusty earth into gardens of the Realm of Glory.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá  From a Tablet – translated from the Arabic)

Does this quotation prove that in some way my supposed fusion of the three skill sets, spirituality, arts and psychology, into one vocation, involving also a connectedness with other people, is delusional?

Well, I can’t prove it doesn’t. The dilemma as Yeats expressed it of there being a need to choose between perfecting the life and perfecting the art, a choice that too often seems to lead to a damaged life, may not be as inevitable as we have been induced to think. It’s impossible to prove either way.

In any case the choice I appeared to have made long ago but only recently consciously uncovered is not exactly the same. I fused the exploration of at least three different domains of value in order to better understand consciousness, both mine and other people’s, so as to enable us to enhance our experience and the mental models we apply to it. This inevitably involved reading, writing, reflection and consulting. Given that my 3Rs tend to be weighted in favour of solitary exploration it may look as though my introversion tipped me towards perfecting my art of understanding at the expense of my relationships. I can’t deny that this is possible and that people close to me have suffered in consequence. I also know with a high degree of certainty though that I have been enabled to help many other people deal more effectively with the problems in their lives, both in my profession as a clinical psychologist and in my personal life as well.

I am also clear that my fusion of art, spirituality and psychology lifted my game significantly in this respect.

I would never have been able to achieve as good an understanding of dreams and hallucinations without my long experience of delving into the hidden meanings behind poems and paintings, nor would I have been able to pass on skills relevant to constructively enhancing our models of reality without intensely practising the Bahá’í yoga of consultation over many years, nor would I have been able to assist people in the exploration of their inscape without all the various meditative practices I’d delved into over the years. All of those enriched my understanding of psychology which, of course, also enriched my understanding of them in return – a process of reciprocal creativity.

In a way my intense focus on those three domains was intended to enrich my life rather than demanding that I prefer them to life. Putting the SAP (Spirituality, Arts & Psychology) acronym into practice enriched my perspective by dissolving the veils and resolving the disputed values between them.

Life versus Art

T. S. Eliot was clearly in a different place altogether.

After years of waiting in the hope that, should Vivienne Eliot die, she and Eliot would marry, Emily Hale woke to a very different reality:[1] ‘Twelve days later, after Vivienne’s funeral, a second letter on 3 February, shows a change of mind. Over these days it came to [Eliot]: he could not bring himself to marry her.’ Instead of being a welcome event that cleared the way for future happiness it seems that ‘. . . his wife died too soon, because it brought on a problem he never intended to solve: marriage to Emily Hale.’ He faced a serious challenge:[2] ‘… Once Vivienne died obligations to Emily Hale erupted in his path.’

The situation was so different for Hale for whom ‘of course, marriage was the answer to the years of waiting. Imagine, then, her shock to receive Eliot’s letter of 3 February.’

The reason why he backed away from marrying her was classic textbook:[3]

The severance must be carried out whatever the consequences for Emily because he has to protect the solitude his gift must have if it is to flourish.

All the years he and Emily had shared seemed to count for nothing:[4]

This denies the reality of their shared moments and relegates Emily to a category that includes Vivienne, underlined by his claim not to be made for marriage.

In Eliot’s case his values clashed irreconcilably.

Much as Emily Hale had enriched his life, and no matter how many times in his letters to her over the years he had assured her of his love, it all counted for nothing in the end when he came to feel marriage to her would interfere with his poetry. Over many years this reality had been carefully hidden from Hale’s sight behind veil upon veil of words. The impact of his tearing down these veils was almost certainly traumatic, though we have no letters from that period to prove the point. He burnt them all. Ten years later she wrote:[5]

‘. . . something too personal, too obscurely emotional for me to understand, decided TSE against marrying again. This was both a shock and a sorrow, though looking back on the story, perhaps I could not have been the companion in marriage I hoped to be, perhaps the decision saved us both from great unhappiness – I cannot ever know.’

Sometimes for some of us, veils work in different ways that can make decisions about our exact values more difficult.

The Hidden God Problem

For Táhirih both the Twin Manifestations were still alive in her lifetime. Her problem therefore was not with the idea of a hidden God – it seemed more to do with why so few people seem to see what was obvious to her:[6]

From behind the veils of grandeur

the face of God is suddenly manifest!

O, believers, you need no longer heed:

‘You shall not see me!’

I have dealt elsewhere on this blog at some length with the idea of the brain as a filter as a way of explaining why it is so difficult to access any aspect of the transcendent. I don’t plan to go over that here but will be focusing on R. S. Thomas’s struggle with God’s inaccessibility and related issues.

R. S. Thomas there were three related problems starting with God as inaccessible:[7]

It is this great absence

that is like a presence, that compels

me to address it without hope

of a reply. It is a room I enter

From which someone has just

gone, the vestibule for the arrival

of one who has not yet come.

According to Wynn Thomas this problem haunted R. S. Thomas for most of his life:[8] ‘Thomas’s great quarry was ever the deus absconditus to whom the mystics of the ages had paid their awed tribute.’

And haunted is a resonant word in this context:[9]

[For Ruth Bidgood the word] ‘haunted’ signifies an awareness of a dimension of life that, while omnipresent, remains tantalisingly evasive, unreachable and unknowable.

But even if Thomas could connect in some way with God, there is the second problem of language. He probably wouldn’t be able to find the words to describe it.

Wynn Thomas refers to a poem by R. S. Thomas whose roots lie in the life and work of Bishop William Morgan who translated the Bible into Welsh in 1588. He admired Morgan’s ‘serene prose.’ There was inevitably a catch however:[10]

As a fellow writer, he is also particularly aware of how deceptive such ‘serene prose’ actually is; how it offers not the slightest hint of the ‘intolerable wrestle with language’, as T. S, Eliot memorably put it… So he imagined Bishop Morgan’s mouth as filled with ‘rows of teeth/Broken on the unmanageable bone//Of language.’

Wynn Thomas goes on to quote part of the poem:[11]

 . . . ‘Language can be/like iron. Are we sure we can bend/the Absolute to our meaning?’ This, of course, is a question the troubled Thomas throughout his long writing life, and one he returned to time and again in his poems.

In spite of both these obstacles:[12]

[In 1972] recently settled in Aberdaron, despairing of both culture and politics,… he began to send out his distinctive verse probes into inner space.

Scanned from Collected Poems – page 388

A respected poet was impressed by the poems:

. . . [Seamus Heaney in Stepping Stones says] ‘What I loved then were those later poems about language, about God withdrawn and consciousness like a tilted satellite dish – full of potential to broadcast and receive, but still not quite operating.’

In spite of all these caveats:[13]

[Aled Jones Williams] insists that to accept the insufficiency of language is not to deny that nevertheless it can perform an invaluable service in bringing us into the presence of spiritual depths.

R. S. Thomas seems to buy into this optimism up to a point:[14]

                      Had I

the right words, it is the poem

that would announce you to

an amazed audience; . . .

In a later book Wynn Thomas captures what he feels is Thomas’s achievement as someone ‘writing the modern history of a soul’ in the following words:[15]

. . . This is the Thomas who seems to have fully discovered the natural idiom of his soul only late in his career, in his haunting religious poetry.

That just about summarises my response to R. S. Thomas’s achievement in this respect at least.

The third problem, theodicy, will have to wait until next time.

 

References

[1]. The Hyacinth Girl – page 290.

[2]. Op. cit. – page 291.

[3]. Op. cit. – page 292)

[4]. Op. cit. – page 293)

[5]. Op. cit. – Page 302)

[6]. The Poetry of Táhirih by John Hatcher & Amrollah Hemmat – page 95.

[7]. Collected Poems – page 361.

[8]. R. S. Thomas to Rowan Williams: The Spiritual Imagination in Modern Welsh Poetry – page 205.

[9]. Op. cit. – page 248.

[10]. Op. cit. – page 228.

[11]. Op. cit. – page 229.

[12]. Op. cit. – page 212.

[13]. Op. cit. – page 252.

[14]. No Truce with the Furies – page 58.

[15]. R. S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive – page 10.

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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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Veils, Words & Values (3/5): competing needs

O My servants! Be as resigned and submissive as the earth, that from the soil of your being there may blossom the fragrant, the holy and multicolored hyacinths of My knowledge. Be ablaze as the fire, that ye may burn away the veils of heedlessness and set aglow, through the quickening energies of the love of God, the chilled and wayward heart. Be light and untrammeled as the breeze, that ye may obtain admittance into the precincts of My court, My inviolable Sanctuary.

Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá-u-lláh — CLII

Authenticity

When I was confronting my challenges in the 1992 diary entry I quoted in the first post of this sequence, I asked myself ‘How am I to break this vicious circle? Do I risk losing the social ties and work I value? That’s what scares and deters me, stands between me and myself.’

I went on to explore this more deeply:

.  . . . My background programmed me to believe that the cost of being ‘myself’ in the face of disapproval would be some kind of ‘death’ or absolute loss. But is this true? Is it too late to turn this round and refuse to be self-traitor any longer? Can I not find the means to reflect and write within my various roles? . . . To do so I must dare to introduce my differences into my relationships rather than sinking them beyond recovery in a swamp of self-deception.

That scares me. It will also be extremely hard work. There will be no comfortable easy rides. Confrontations, the idea of which shrivels me up inside, will be frequent. I will have to discover my true response in positions where that will be dangerous. I have so far attributed my survival and ‘success’ to my evasion of all such situations. My roles seem to require a dedication to the kind of facts with which the world typically stones to death the metaphors and myths poetry values and relies on.

It’s perhaps worth clarifying that at this point I really didn’t know about the language of the heart and its importance. All I seemed to know was that ‘My life and sanity seem to depend on my finding a workable and sustainable solution.’

I was gifted my Hearth Dream in 1993, triggered by the quotation at the head of this post, and it seems clear now that it started me on my long road out of this impasse. What I didn’t even begin to realise in 1993 was that this priceless source of innumerable insights almost certainly came from my literal heart, and not just ‘heart’ in some metaphorical sense. That clinching insight, as readers of this blog will know by now, came decades later.

There were various other complicating factors at work during this challenging period, above and beyond the role strain and conflicting values. My introversion had been a long-standing contributor to my stress, as previous posts have explored in more detail. What I was probably not factoring in was something that was only clearly explained in a recent book. Adam Robarts in his moving exploration of how he and his wife coped with the premature death of their son touches on a theme which resonated strongly with me and concerned ‘authenticity,’ something that seemed a core quality deeply embedded in his son, Haydn’s, being.

He quotes research published in Scientific American by Jennifer Beer:[1]

Beer notes, “Authentic people behave in line with their unique values and qualities even if those idiosyncrasies may conflict with social conventions or other external influences. For example, introverted people are being authentic when they are quiet at a dinner party even if social convention dictates that guests should generate conversation.” The distinctive twist, however, is that “a number of studies have shown that people’s feelings of authenticity are often shaped by something other than their loyalty to their unique qualities. Paradoxically, feelings of authenticity seem to be related to a kind of social conformity.” Specifically, she notes that such conformity is usually applied to a particular set of socially approved qualities, such as being extroverted, emotionally stable, conscientious, intellectual, and agreeable.

I have grappled since my teenage years with the issue of reconciling my introverted temperament with the need to operate effectively in the social world. I still remember my decision in my mid-teens to fake sociability in order to get on in the world.

The insights Robarts quotes helped me see how the confusion of extraversion with authenticity had made authenticity difficult for me as an introvert.

A relevant Socratic question might be how do I square the value I attach to connectedness with my deep desire for so much solitude? The acting on the latter leaves me feeling guilty while acting on the former creates frustration and drains energy. I am therefore rarely content.

Competing Needs

Grounded in my values, there are competing needs within me, for connection on the one hand and for solitude on the other. The problem is I feel authentic when alone, which can trigger a need to withdraw from company: when alone, though, I feel guilty for neglecting people who value my company, even though I often feel inauthentic when I’m with them.

There is apparently therefore no escaping my need for solitary time most days and usually I can scrape enough of that together. What I consistently fail to do most of the time with most people is to be true to my real self (not my ego but my heart). Part of the reason for this is my sense that who I really am in certain respects would not fit well with “present company” – I might easily upset or anger someone. I’m not so bothered about angering others because, for example, my views or tastes differ, but I hate upsetting or offending anyone.

I have not so far been able to find any way out of this cage. This contributes to a sense of distance from or loneliness with others that feeds my need for the quietness of solitude.

I wonder whether the distinction made by Eliot in his poem, Burnt Norton, which Lyndall Gordon discusses, is a clue:[2]

. . . the end of March, then, was [Hale’s]’s first opportunity to take in the [Eliot’s] detachment from human love. It was certain to shake her trust that this was ‘our’ poem.

Next to the line ‘darkness to purify the soul’, Eliot gives Hale a clue in ink: ‘The Ascent of Mt Carmel’. And next to the passage beginning ‘Descend lower’, he writes, again in ink, ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’. The 16^th century treatises by the Spanish monk St John of the Cross preached a solitary discipline: to divest oneself of natural human affections so as to arrive at the love of God.

His poem’s swing from human love does not deny the validity of the rose-garden moment [they had shared together]. The rationale is that the ‘way up’ in the rose-garden and the ‘way down’ of the saint coexist, as in the epigraph from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: ‘The way up and the way down are the same’. These are alternative routes across the frontier of the timeless, and the poem does not lose sight of the route via natural love.

. . . So, for him to shun human love would have been more than expected; how could it not come as a shock and change her willing surrender to shame and disappointment? The first hint that he will turn away from pleasure comes in an otherwise intimate letter on 6 January when he writes that joy does not lie in the things of this world.

Basically, the theory goes that you can pierce the veils and access the timeless either upwards through connection with others or downwards through solitary introspection. Eliot ended up opting for the latter. I am torn between the two: the first seems an inescapable obligation, the latter an inexcusable indulgence. Pursuing either causes conflict and/or a sense of guilt.

My diary entries persistently track other aspects of this, for example, in an entry from Friday 17 June 2022:

Today I have experienced a crucially important epiphany. On the back of a fleeting comment I made recently that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book ‘The Matter with Things’, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a subordinate domain to science and religion – it is their equal. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

This realisation almost immediately created the acronym S.T.A.R. in my mind — a peak experience, in its way; certainly a lightbulb moment. If I am to provide true C.A.R.E [my acronym for consultation, action, reflection and experience] I must resolutely follow my S.T.A.R. It’s only taken me 79 years to realise this. In fact, only to by taking CARE and following my STAR will I really be able to achieve anything remotely close to my life’s purpose.

Star and Care

This moved me onto to a critical question:

Have I really at last reached a proper understanding of what I should be doing with the rest of my life — a question that’s been bugging me for ages?

After years of sometimes invisible struggle, I clearly thought I was coming close to ripping off a few of the veils obscuring my inner vision.

This is such a revelation. I can’t quite capture all its many meanings. This not only explains my mysterious and compelling sense of quest, a desperate search for elusive meaning — something that has driven me ever since my wakeup call in the mid-70s. It also gives me a far better sense of where and how I should be focusing my energy and attention. . . .

I think a lot more energy than I was aware of was struggling to bring this crucial insight to the surface of my mind through miles of labyrinthine potholes and passageways. CARE is largely ‘How?’ and STAR is largely ‘Why?’ and ‘What?’

Of course, I had to bring my bête noire of reductionism into the mix:

Any form of reductionism or potentially toxic over-simplification is to be avoided at all costs in all three domains. A destructive ‘science’, ‘art’ or ‘religion’ is neither art, science nor religion. I think with this model, if I am immersing myself in any kind of genuine manifestation of any one of those three domains, there is no need to feel guilty, or slag myself off for betraying the other two and wasting my time.

I must keep all three in balance though.  Different people will privilege different domains at different times and in different places: what is critical is that destructive dogmatism and fanaticism be avoided at all costs and ideally everyone should be open to information and experiences from all three domains, or risk descending into illusion at best or dangerous delusion at worst. If I hear anyone disparaging any of these domains as pointless I’ll know not to trust a word they say.

For me a more difficult task than avoiding reductionism, is keeping the three domains in balance.

I know I am not a polymath, but I really do need to keep all three in balance. Choosing psychology swung me away from the arts but the fire-in-the-car-engine dream helped me redress that imbalance. My conversion to the Bahá’í Faith derailed the arts again in favour of religion. The Writings talk so much about the harmony of religion and science as paths towards the truth, that even though they praise the role of the arts in expressing spirituality I failed to see that there is more to the arts than that.

I think these insights might help me shed the burden of guilt that has dispirited me so long and prevented my enjoying and learning from literature, painting and song in the way I used to. Maybe I again got too close to the position Iain McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in:

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him:[3]

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

I am determined to do everything I can not to make that same mistake again.

. . . Basically, I think I have come to a firm realisation that my path entails using an exploration of the arts, social sciences and spirituality to help me enhance my understanding of reality and ease my own existential pain as well as lift the understanding and ease the pain of others.

Recent reading, which I will touch on in the next post, suggests I need to keep my focus on arts and sciences that explore spirituality in some way, however indirectly. My recent heart insights showed me that, as all three in their highest form are valuable paths towards what is ultimately the same truth, my sense of their being in conflict was a completely misplaced veil blocking my ability to jettison my disabling guilt about following any of them at the imagined expense of the others.

Also, I wrote that I had been ruminating so long on what I was interested in — science, art, consciousness, spirituality etc. — without really looking at how to enact that (except in my blog). That was not enough. I need to use every interaction, every solitary action, to authentically express my deepest self in as constructive a way as possible, regardless of the criticism, and possible contempt it might trigger.

I am trying to hold on to these words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, translated from the Arabic:

Let the loved ones of God, whether young or old, whether male or female, each according to his capabilities, bestir themselves and spare no efforts to acquire the various current branches of knowledge, both spiritual and secular, and of the arts.

More on all this next time.

Explained at this link

References

[1]. Nineteen – page 36.
[2]. The Hyacinth Girl – pages 227-229.
[3]. The Matter with Things – page 619.

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Veils, Words & Values (2/5): Mostly about poets, poetry and mysticism

Delight not yourselves in the things of the world and its vain ornaments, neither set your hopes on them. Let your reliance be on the remembrance of God, the Most Exalted, the Most Great. He will, erelong, bring to naught all the things ye possess. Let Him be your fear, and forget not His covenant with you, and be not of them that are shut out as by a veil from Him.

(Bahá-u-lláh from The Summons of the Lord of Hosts – pages 202-03)

Role Clashes

The previous post made it clear that for women there was, and almost certainly still is, definitely a clash between the socially acceptable roles that they could inhabit without criticism and the ones of artistic creativity that were frowned upon.

It’s not just women of course who have a clash of this nature, but the burden does fall more heavily on them for sure. TS Eliot, as explained by Lyndall Gordon in The Hyacinth Girl, was in a similar situation:[1]

. . .[the] moral issue that will haunt him through the next phase of his life, turned on one question and one only: had The Waste Land proved him to be the great poet of his age, who, by virtue of that, must grant priority to his gift? Because Eliot’s conscience was so scrupulous and his sense of responsibility for Vivienne [his wife ] so strong, the issue could not be resolved in any simple manner…

In the end at this point, the Woolfs[2] ‘proposed Eliot as editor of the Nation’:

It was a top literary post, what Eliot had dreamt of when he came to England, and it carried a higher salary than he had at the bank. Early in 1923 this presented an agonising temptation because Eliot had to recognise that it wouldn’t do for his wife: despite the salary and literary prestige, the position did not offer the bank’s guarantees of security nor a widow’s pension.

. . .In the end, Eliot turned the Nation down…

As my previous post indicates I also have had experienced similar difficulties, though of a far less prestigious nature, which is perhaps why I am drawn to examining this issue in so much detail.

My hearth dream, as I will briefly explore later, seemed to help me transcend that darkness, but even after that the humorous exploration of my Parliament of Selves suggests the tension between subpersonalities, and related values and roles, was by no means over, rooted as it was in my pretending at age five or less to be a priest, using the kitchen doorstep as my altar, as well as my struggling to write poems in my teens, most of which were sickeningly saccharine, rather like the only one some of whose words I can still remember: ‘Like envied autumn swallows seeking spring/The hours pass by on wings of weeping gold/And seeking joys that cannot be we cling/In tender sorrowing to those of old.’

What has proved intriguing is that the various competing values that were apparently pulling me in different directions through seemingly different desired roles turned out not to be as much in conflict as I had originally thought, which may be a result of my grasping their deeper common grounding at the level of basic principles.

Poetry as Revealer

Before I move onto to explain that a bit more clearly in a later post, I have to clarify also that to assume that all poetry dispels veils, as I might have implied in the previous post, is not in fact completely true: we have to keep all our faculties on the alert to prevent our mistaking obfuscation for a supposedly enlightening poem.

TS Eliot gives us a perfect example of that.

While he argues for poems finding what he calls an ‘objective correlative,’ which is allied to a continual extinction of the personality’,[3] Lyndall Gordon makes clear in her exploration of the relationship between his life and his poetry, based on the recently released stash of his letters to Emily Hale, that[4] ‘Eliot slides confession into his poetry.’ In using the example of the ‘Cooking Egg’ poem, she writes:[5]

The emotions of this poem are buried even more deeply than usual below an obscuring surface, with glittering shards of narrative in the Modernist manner.

This is also true of what is regarded as his Modernist masterpiece:[6]

‘Tom’s autobiography – a melancholy one’ is the way Mary Hutchinson, one of the first to know the poem, described The Waste Land. She could discern the substratum beneath the Modernist manner. His mother was given to understand the same: ‘Tom wrote to me before it was published that he had put so much of his own life into it.’ Most telling of all, Eliot’s unveilings to Emily Hale make it clear how much this poet needed an actual pulse shaking the heart to authenticate the experience he opens up to us. Unless these unveilings in his letters were preserved, he told her, ‘my life and work will be misunderstood to the end of time.’

So, it would be a complete mistake to interpret, as too many critics did, poems such as The Waste Land as purely objective, impersonal and relating to the state of the world rather than Eliot’s mental state.

According to Seymour-Jones in her biography of Vivienne Eliot, Eliot did drop a massive hint about the personal significance of the poem:[7]

The poet had thrown down the gauntlet to researchers when he admitted that The Waste Land, far from being an expression of horror at the fate of Western civilisation, ‘was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life.’

So in fact:[8]

. . . the longer I worked, the more sure I became that it was justified to view T.S.Eliot’s poetry and drama, bedrock of the modernist canon, through the lens of his life with Vivienne; that the autobiographical and confessional element in Eliot’s texts had been greatly underestimated, due at least in part to a paucity of information.

My own attempts to grapple with the evasive mysteries of that poem came to rely on the heavily disguised confessional component to decode many of its puzzling elements.

Veils

On the issue of veils I need to begin with two contrasting poetical visions of connecting with God, one using a literal veil as a vehicle for conveying her perspective, and one who uses veils purely metaphorically.

The two poets concerned are R.S.Thomas and Táhirih.

De Bellaigue’s account of Táhirih, aka Qurrat al-Ayn, in his book The Islamic Enlightenment, begins[9] by claiming she is ‘one of the most remarkable characters in nineteenth century Iranian history. She is both a feminist icon and the mediaeval saint.’

He recounts her early life and then focuses on perhaps the most famous incident in her entire life apart from her leaving of it – her appearing unveiled at the conference of Badasht.[10]

Qurrat al-Ayn’s removal of the veil was a blatant rejection of the Prophet Muhammad’s command to his followers, set down in a famous hadith, that ‘when you ask of them [the wives of the Prophet] anything, ask it of them from behind a curtain.’

He then explains a crucial ambiguity:

‘Curtain’ and ‘veil’ are the same word in Arabic, and this ambiguous hadith is the basis on which the practice of veiling women has been sanctified.

I think it important to mention here that, while noting the intensity of her religious faith, de Bellaigue, for obvious reasons given the theme of his book, looks particularly at the political legacy and inspiration of Qurrat al-Ayn. There is another important aspect of her life that needs to be included if we are to achieve anything life a complete sense of her contribution to our culture.

This can be accessed not just from Bahá’í sources. There is a book I discovered in the rich seams of Hay-on-Wye’s book mines: Veils and Words: the emerging voices of Iranian women writers by Farzaneh Milani.

The book explains that she was a poet and writer of considerable power:[11] ‘Tahereh’s contribution to the history of women’s writing in Iran is invaluable: she proves that women could think, write, and reason like men – in public and for the public. Such actions set her apart from her contemporaries and confer upon her an inalienable precedence.’

Sadly, this view was not yet widely shared outside the Bahá’í community at the time of her writing in 1992, 140 years after Tahirih’s murder, which, coincidentally, was also the anniversary of the death of Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith:

Whether because she has been deemed too offensive, too dangerous, or too minor a literary personage, no article, let alone a full-length book, has been written either on work, or on her life as a struggle for gaining a public voice.

(That is no longer true as Hatcher’s book, from which I shall be drawing quotes shortly, has with his co-author created a compilation of her poems with detailed commentary and English translations.) Her poetry is also challenging, something else that might militate against its wider acceptance:[12]

Some of Tahereh’s poems are difficult to understand. Their language is rich in abstractions. She not only mixes Arabic with Persian but also makes repeated allusions to Bábí jargon and codes. Her religious convictions saturate her poetry and set her verse on fire. They glow in her poetry like a flame that burns every obstacle away.

Her life and verse complemented and, in one way at least, seemingly contradicted each other:[13]

If self-assertion is a cardinal tenet of Tahereh’s life, self-denial and self-effacement are key elements of her poetry. The themes of love, union, and ecstasy relate to mystic and spiritual experience.

Táhirih’s unveiling was perhaps not just about the emancipation of women, though that is clearly a key part of its significance. It might also be symbolising the need for all of us, and perhaps men in particular, to face reality more fully. We live inextricably connected with an ecosystem while echo chambers interfere with our perception of that reality. As a minor illustration of that, on my walk the other day I felt guilty about leaving a distressed snail on the pavement rather than moving it to safety and comfort on the grass verge. As I walked on I noticed two lads walking by with ear phones on who clearly didn’t even see the snail.

The reality Táhirih was most concerned to connect with was mystical in character

And the translation on page 93 of Milani’s book of one of Táhirih’s poems gives a sense of her yearning for connection with the transcendent, though I suspect, as always, to translate a poem is to betray it (an old Italian saying about all translation goes: ‘Traduttore, traditore.’).

I would explain all my grief
Dot by dot, point by point
If heart to heart we talk
And face to face we meet.

To catch a glimpse of thee
I am wandering like a breeze
From house to house, door to door
Place to place, street to street.

In separation from thee
The blood of my heart gushes out of my eyes
In torrent after torrent, river after river
Wave after wave, stream after stream.

This afflicted heart of mine
Has woven your love
To the stuff of life
Strand by strand, thread to thread.

Hatcher, in his introduction to a collection of Táhirih’s poems quotes Shelley as saying, in A Defence of Poetry that[14]‘Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world…’

He goes on to say that[15] ‘Great poetry, poetry with lasting merit, takes us from our present state of awareness to some place else, some place we may not have ever been before, some level of understanding we did not formerly have.’

In his view:[16]’The poet, the good poet, is attempting something beyond description.’ He feels that this often collates with their being poets ‘who are not always easy to understand.’ With Táhirih’s poems for English readers there is the additional challenge of her use of figurative language which is based in a very different culture from our own.

Mysticism

One of her main focuses is on seeking to achieve a connection with divine power, something that a Welsh priest, R.S.Thomas is also frequently concerned with. This is something that has always strained language to its limits, as the NDE experiencer, quoted by Bruce Greyson, testified when they said that describing their experience was like trying to paint a smell.

It is not just the intensity of Táhirih’s faith that gives her a sense of greater closeness to the divine: she was also blessed to live at the same time as two Manifestations of God, the Báb and Bahá-u-lláh. This is what, I feel, enables her to write such lines as:[17]

From behind the veils of grandeur

The face of God is suddenly manifest!

O, believers, you need no longer heed:

‘You shall not see me!’

There are moments where the exact sense of her closeness is less clear, for example:[18]

My life derives not from my soul,

nor does my dying come from my death;

Union with you is my life,

and separation from you is my death.

 

At the moment of death you moved

your sweet lips to enquire about me,

so that I would remain a life newly fashioned

by the breath of God.

In his notes Hatcher explains:[19]

It is not clear whether she is here referring to her own death or to the death of the Báb (which precedes her own martyrdom by two years). Either makes sense, though since she is speaking of separation and the sorrow she feels at that separation, it would seem logical that her longing for nearness to her beloved (the Báb in this case) is coupled with her longing for death that she might once again attain that nearness.

As Hatcher puts it:[20]

The point is that writing poetry, like any art, is not easy or simple or a matter of an inherent gift, and … neither is the art of the reading of poetry… With almost any art, the audience must be trained to understand the depth of thought underlying the beguiling surface of expression.

R.S.Thomas is less challenging for the reader of English, but perhaps more challenging in terms of the frustration implicit in the experience he seeks to convey:[21]

The distinction he draws between ‘place’ and ‘state’ is crucial to understanding the difference between his quest and Táhirih’s. The focus of her yearning seems to be very much outside of herself: his focus seems to be part of what he calls ‘the best journey to make’, which is ‘inward’ into the ‘interior that calls.’[22]

This may relate to the distinction sometimes made between extroverted and introverted mysticism. Main quotes Walter Stace’s position:[1]

Stace identifies two main types of mystical experience: extrovertive (‘outward-turning’) and introvertive (‘inward-turning’). ‘The essential difference between them,’ he writes, ‘is that the extrovertive experience looks outward through the senses, while the introvert looks inward into the mind’ (page 61 [of Mysticism and Philosophy])

Thomas defines a key problem[24] as being ‘in everyday life/it is the plain facts and natural happenings that conceal God.’ Basically the ‘things of the world’ are too often our veil.

My own felt experience is more like his than Táhirih’s.

So how far have I got with dispelling my veils and accessing a deeper reality where discord is reduced if not eliminated? More on that next time.

References

[1]. The Hyacinth Girl – page 103.
[2]. Op. cit. – page 105.
[3]. The Waste Land: a Biography of a Poem – page 130.
[4]. The Hyacinth Girl – page 88.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 85.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 92.
[7]. Painted Shadow – page xix.
[8]. Op. cit. – page xviii.
[9]. The Islamic Enlightenment – page 147.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 151.
[11]. Veils and Words – page 90.
[12]. Op. cit. – page 91.
[13]. Op. cit. – page 93.
[14]. The Poetry of Táhirih – page 16.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 16.
[16]. Op. cit. – page 17.
[17]. Op. cit. – page 95.
[18]. Op. cit. – page 105.
[19]. Op. cit. – page 268.
[20]. Op. cit. – page 18.
[21]. No Truce with the Furies – page 26.
[22]. Collected Poems: 1945-1990 – page 328.
[23]. Consciousness Unbound – page 145
[24]. Op. cit. – page 355.

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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)

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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The Value of ‘Middlemarch’ (3/3): Connections and Beliefs

The depth and range of Eliot’s reading was formidable, as therefore was her research into Romola and Daniel Deronda for example. By comparison, with my butterfly mind, I’m more like a pally moth rather than a polymath. So, all told it’s a bit of a cheek my daring to explain why I find her masterpiece, Middlemarch, so strongly appealing. But I’ll carry on regardless.

Empathic Connectedness

I’ve mentioned in the previous post how the idea of interconnection, as in what Carlisle refers to in Daniel Deronda as[1]‘an ensemble of interconnected selves,’ is important to me.

Her contempt for egotism, as strong as that implied by Tom Oliver’s book title – The Self Delusion – is powerfully captured by her words quoted by Mead:[2] ‘We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: . . .’ Her view was that:[3] ‘I know no speck so troublesome as self.’

Development demands that we transcend these crippling limitations:[4]

She 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 climb to this level of awareness had not been straightforward. In the light of reading Thomas à Kempis:[5]

[I]t flashed through her ‘that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure, as if that were the central necessity of the universe’. . . . That shift from centre to circumference, in reappraisal of what was part and what was whole, was vital to the achievement of adulthood. . . . but to recognise one’s own self-centredness was also to imagine the equivalent centre within others simultaneously, and to know better how little one could count for in their eyes.

There was a particularly interesting dynamic at work here:[6]

One of the simple but fundamental shifts of experience for Mary Ann Evans was that move from her own point of view to her imagination of the point of view of others, particularly some other whom she had hurt. This became a terrible repetitive pattern for her.

This was a key motivator for her. Davis quotes Adam Bede:[7]

 ‘Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy – the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.

She felt that the role of the novelist was important here[8] as ‘Only the novelist could still hear the cries on the other side of silence.’

The Comtean perspective, which Eliot valued, sees the role of women as a key to changing society in a way that resonates with the Bahá’í perspective:[9]

It was crucial to Comte in his utopian vision for the progress of society that women should be the influential guardians of a fundamental felt reality in life, the active re-callers of a human caring prior to the development of the world of business or the work of mental abstraction.

So much then already to which my perspective resonates strongly.

Beliefs

Now we move on to what is perhaps for me the key to why Eliot appeals so powerfully. She does not bounce back into a religion as both T. S. Eliot and I did, but I have more respect for her perspective than I do for his, at least in terms of The Waste Land. She does not capitulate to meaninglessness in the same way as I feel he almost irrevocably does in that supposed masterpiece.

She did have a kind of faith, what Mead flags up as[10] as ‘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.’

For me faith needs not only to be a private matter of belief but also a life-enhancing creed. I feel Mead captured its essence when she wrote:[11]

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.

Her lack of religious faith created a problem though:[12]

. . . She felt sure that there was in her a ‘real self’ that could regain its place, but how to be it more consistently, or at least to activate it at the right time rather than too late, was her predicament. . . . what she needed against the psychological pressure was the old religious language of practice and discipline – a language which, ever increasingly, was becoming unavailable to her.

Bahá’í bells ring when we find Davis referring to Robert William MacKay’s The Progress of the Intellect as stating that[13] ‘each race had a faith and a symbolism suited to its need and its stage of development.’

Moreover:[14]

‘Progress’ in its further future ‘development’ lay in the project of distinguishing the ossified forms of past belief from that underlying human content which, trapped alive within them, needed the rescue of expression in new terms.

Fiction, Eliot felt, was crucial to this process[15] and ‘some richer, warmer way of being in the world was made possible by the work of fiction. And this warmer way need not constitute a sacrifice of mental rigour. These were the underlying emotional concerns of the woman who was to become a fictionaliser in realism.’

Davis tries to pin down an element of transcendence in Eliot’s thinking starting with the quote from Middlemarch (chapter 42) that Mead had used:[16] ‘ I know no speck so troublesome as self.’

He also examines how the ego could be transcended:

There had to be for humans too a recognition of the necessary, difficult movement from centre to circumference – without any corresponding loss of purpose. What was loss for the ego might be precisely what created another level, a level of further developed thinking which began to see the world from outside ego’s limits, where the creature no longer had to fight for its own assertion of life in abrasive relation to others.

This seems to lead on to a mention of God with reference to Spinoza and Einstein:[17]

To unite through thinking with what was permanent in the universe was, for its thinker, to become part of what was permanent, regardless of personal mortality. It was to become one of the modes through which ‘it’, the immanent system called God or Nature, thought of itself by means of some part of it.

In the end, Davis concludes, citing Hutton,[18] ‘George Eliot was the great representative test-case of the nineteenth-century turn to modern secularisation, in its struggle to retain idealism without a divine mandate.’

And echoes the sense we have already encountered that:[19]

she made her life, said Hutton, ‘one long strain’ . . . in the effort to make through art, human feeling, human kindness, and human morality serve as substitutes for the function of a religion.

She seems in a way to me to be struggling towards something that shares a thread in common with the Bahá’í perspective on the oneness of humanity, something akin to the spirit of the age:[20]

Eliot is quick to establish what she means by a new stage of religion, not so far from what positives were asking for:

‘I believe that religion to has to be modified – developed, according to the dominant phrase – and that a religion more perfect than any yet prevalent must express less care for personal consolation, and a more deeply-awing sense of responsibility to men, springing from sympathy with that which of all things is most certainly known to us, the difficulty of the human lot.’

Her view also stretched to include Emmanuel Deutsch’s concern for:[21] ‘the rapprochement of religions, not only Judaism and Christianity, but also Islam.’ It seems that ‘George Eliot would be touched intellectually and ideologically by this desire for conciliation.’

Another challenge for Eliot is nicely defined by Mead:[22]

The loss of faith that she underwent in Coventry was the beginning of a lifelong intellectual process of separating morality from religion – of determining how to be a good person in the absence of the Christian God.

Fletcher adds some interesting thoughts into the mix:[23]

Eliot’s own doctrine of social affection, [was] summarised by her as: ‘Love excludes gratitude.’ Love was true affection between equals; gratitude was the grovelling appreciation of a lowly mortal life for his immortal Lord.

. . . The healing power of gratitude is weakened by feelings of dependence or inferiority. These feelings return their brain’s negative gaze to to itself, re-triggering our worry circuits, and dragging us back into the self-gnaw of rumination.

. . . This glitch seemed irreparable. Since the very same feature of the creator-god – the god’s immense power – generated both the gratitude boost of wonder, and the gratitude diminisher of inferiority…

For him this makes humanism, Eliot’s chosen path, seem a better option. In the context of [Feuerbach] he writes:[24]

Humanism acknowledged that God was a literary myth, but denied that the sacred virtues of God – vast love, vast kindness, vast creativity – were also myths. Those virtues really existed in us, the human species. This upside downing of traditional religion amazed George Eliot.

By inspiring wonder at the vast gifts of humanity, it preserved the gratitude augmenter of 1 Thessalonians while removing the gratitude limiter of the creator-god…

It often frustrates me that there is so much carefully researched but frequently ignored evidence of transcendence, including a Universal Mind, making this kind of fix not only inadequate but effectively unsupported, though this amount of evidence was not available to Eliot and the evidence that did exist was vitiated by its pervasive fakery.

I accept that the frequently occurring Lord/King kind of imagery in Christian/Islamic/Bahá’í Writings will prove testing for many, but it is only one of several metaphors drawn on by Bahá-u-lláh to convey the nature of our relationship with the creative force underlying existence. ‘The Great Being’ is one I particularly resonate to. One prayer I pray often uses expressions such as ‘Source of my being’ and ‘Companion.’ We are also assured that if we turned our sight inwards, in the right spirit, we would find God standing within us. This emanation of a divine presence is often compared to the rays of the sun: while too close a proximity to the sun itself would destroy us, we could not survive without its warmth. NDEs are illuminating in this respect also. The Being of Light, redolent of compassion, often enables the experiencer to review his life through the lens of love; they are not judged by this Power, but come to judge themselves for the good they have failed to do or the wrongs they have perpetrated. It is a life-changing experience compassionately facilitated by this powerful presence.

Fletcher goes on to explore how this humanist perspective could best be conveyed and makes the persuasive point that[25] literature would go beyond doctrinal prose to ‘create new works that inspired us to give thanks to humanity. Those new works could multiply our natural gratitude with wonder for a greater human goodness, and because the multiplier would be a fictional tale instead of a theological tract, it wouldn’t require us to alter our religious beliefs.’

Ultimately, novels such as Middlemarch constitute:[26]

the humanism of Feuerbach, fashioned into literary experience… At the same time that this revelation infuses our brain with a feeling of equal togetherness, the togetherness is flung outward into the world-spanning gratitude for ‘the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.’

My Conclusions

While it is clear that I do not join Eliot in her conviction that humanism is the best available belief system, I also am on very much the same page when it comes to her moral compass. What is more she does not repel me as a reader by preaching, but draws me into her exploration by creating a deeply shared narrative reality that leads me to ask the same questions she asks and consider the possibility of the same solutions as she indirectly proposes. And Middlemarch is her undoubted masterpiece.

References

[1]. The Marriage Question – page 244.
[2]. The Road to Middlemarch – page 218.
[3]. Op. cit – page 420.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 265.
[5]. The Transferred Life of George Eliot – page 53.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 69.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 238.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 254.
[9]. Op. cit. – page 312.
[10]. The Road to Middlemarch – page 221.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 223.
[12]. The Transferred Life of George Eliot – page 70.
[13]. Op. cit. – page 85.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 86.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 92.
[16]. Op. cit. – page 114.
[17]. Op. cit. – page 116.
[18]. Op. cit. – page 209.
[19]. Op. cit – pages 209-10.
[20]. George Eliot: a biography – page 456.
[21]. Op. cit. – page 475.
[22]. The Road to Middlemarch – page 72.
[23]. Wonderworks – page 232.
[24]. Op. cit. – page 233.
[25]. Op. cit. – page 234.
[26]. Op. cit. – page 239.

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