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I had an idea tonight, an idea that startled me; it bothered my sleep, gave me an uncertain conscience. I thought, “Metaphor and metaphoric thinking have become outrageously distracting processes.” What an odd thought for a mythologist, psychotherapist and poet, whose stock in trade has always been, or so I imagined, metaphor: religious and spiritual metaphor, therapeutic metaphor, and literary metaphor. Strictly speaking, metaphor is language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects. In the simplest case, this takes the form: “The [first subject] is a [second subject].” More generally, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope that describes a first subject as being or equal to a second subject in some way. Thus, the first subject can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes from the second subject are used to enhance the description of the first (TheFreeDictionary.com). The example that constantly comes to mind is old, venerable, and often used to point to the differences between simile and metaphor. The poet famously wrote: “My love is like a red, red, rose.” This is simile; for it to be metaphor, the poet would have had to write instead, “My love is a red, red, rose.” Each is valuable, but claiming that love is a red, red rose removes any distance or dissimilarity the reader might feel between love and rose. It creates in us discomfort, it makes us wrestle with the impossible sameness of love and roses. If one says that love is like a red, red rose, there is not the same immersion, the same wrestling, in and with either the love or the rose. A comfortable emotional distance may be maintained.

But here is the problem. Metaphor is useful because of the precise reason for which I am now considering its rejection. It conflates the seemingly unrelated, and the shock of seeing a relationship where one might never before even imagined (imagining is in fact, metaphoring) one, can radically alter one’s perceptions and beliefs. But we now live in an increasingly histrionic society that seems to have an increasingly insatiable need to “create” conflicts and drama where there really aren’t any, and conversely, to ignore issues and problems that are in dire need of attention, and have reached crisis levels. (It is tempting to engage a critique of our current political season, but that should be a tragic farce all too obvious to anyone not in a coma to point out here.) Metaphor seems to have worn itself out.

Our culture is drowning in ennui, and we don’t have the will to look deeply into anything, let alone metaphor. (Dostoyevsky wrote, “…and it was all from ennui, gentlemen, all from ennui; inertia overcame me.”) We live in a post-modern culture that does not want to do the kind of thinking that post-modernity requires and the unadulterated meaning of the word metaphor is lost through an indiscriminate, lazy, and hysterical mingling of one thing or idea with everything else. I often have the feeling these days that we simply must, we just have to, say certain things–such as meaningless, insincere apologies for public misdeeds–in certain situations whether we mean them or not–all too often we do not. All that is being required of us is an effort at form, and any real substance is avoided. This phenomenon has never been articulated better than by W.B. Yeats in his poem, The Second Coming:

…everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

We need, all of us, to make a different kind of effort; to be a different kind of activist. The kind of activist who looks deeply into things. We need to see through things. We simply must stop worrying about needing to know things, as if true knowing is possible. Looking deeply into them is enough, seeing through them, more than enough. Moreover, it is just then, in the deep looking, that the world reveals itself to us. Wallace Stevens wrote, “It was when I said/”There is no such thing as the truth,”/That the grapes seemed fatter./The fox ran out of his hole.” A little, tiny piece of the Mysterium reveals itself to us.

David Miller put his finger on it when, in discussing the work of the marvelous Stanley Romain Hopper, he called such a view as I’m trying to articulate in this post, not metaphoric, but “…diaphoric. It is not a ‘carrying across’ of one thing onto another, but is a seeing through—diaphorically, diaphanously, diagnostically, diacritically. It not only means reading poetry. It means, especially, reading everything in life and work poetically. It does not mean stepping out of the depths through to anything else. Rather, it means walking through everything deeply, seeing through life deeply.” Walking through everything deeply, seeing through life deeply–seeing through ones own life; why, this is the mystic’s path, the mystic’s way of moving and seeing, is it not? I cannot think of a better form of activism, a better way of changing the world than by seeing through it. Coincidentally, this is exactly what a post-modern world and a post-modern sensibility demands of us: to look deeply off the beaten path, to see through the apparent “hard, cold, reality” and into the soft edged margins of the world to behold her treasures. Seeing through allows one to turn one’s life into art–to make a poem of one’s life–and bear witness to the eternal philosophy so beautifully articulated by Sri Aurobindo in one of his last letters: “In the way that one treads with the greater Light above, even every difficulty gives its help and Night itself carries in it the burden of the Light that has to be.” Existence is not like that, it is that.

Literary art appears to be a favorite method employed by the soul in order to inform one’s consciousness–to wake one up, as it were–and become aware of the archetypal leave-taking movement’s powerful demands for change and growth, for surrender and submission, and for a bold, adventurous exploration of one’s self and the world:

One of Emerson’s central motifs is that of a waterway, a kind of flow which we navigate in our engagement with art, and at times this image is richly corporeal, becoming no less than a bloodstream. In this vision, the capacious world of art can be seen as a living organism, so that the act of reading or seeing a painting or play or film can be understood as an arterial event, a cardiac composition, while remaining a nurturance that is as much spiritual as it is material. To see art in these terms is to get clear of several clichés that might clutter our minds. First, the arts are not esoteric or frills, not at a remove from reality, but quite the opposite: they are immediate, experiential, and life-expanding. Secondly, this view envisions art as not a private affair, supposedly cued to the artist’s personal world or even confined to your own personal sphere, but rather as an opening out, bidding to transport you (time-bound, land-locked you) to new times, new places, and ultimately new selves. (Arnold Weinstein A Scream Runs Through the House xxvi)

I am inclined to slightly modify Weinstein’s observation–that literary art is especially well suited to the task of grounding individuals in and heightening the awareness of their lives, while simultaneously expanding their understanding of the world–because literature and poetry are not bound to the existing world of appearances, and are therefore more able to conform to and reveal one’s inner world.

Weinstein suggests that art can be seen as a living organism, but in fact, the living organism beheld is oneself! Oneself is found embedded in art, and it is the (re)discovery of the beauty and the pathos of one’s own re-membered emotional experiences–experiences which the art recalls in all their force, horror, or sublimity–which are made so compelling that standing transfixed before a masterpiece for the better part of an hour, or reading spellbound, an entire novel or collection of poetry in one setting, is not in the least unusual.

One becomes so transfixed because reading poetry or literature allows one to “overhear” oneself, to participate in a riveting, auto-voyeuristic event (surely almost everyone can attest to the power of a voyeuristic moment, or People Magazine would not be one of the ten best selling magazines in America). Such an apperception of self-overhearing is startling, and it presents one with the opportunity to change, based upon what one has just overheard. Harold Bloom has argued that since this is such a powerful element of literature, that Shakespeare may be credited with effectively creating the modern human.

To overhear oneself while carefully reading, at first without the immediate awareness that it is oneself who is speaking (or thinking), presents one with the potential for transformation precisely because one cannot devote all one’s attention to a character or poem and not, at least for a little while, inhabit that character or even become that poem. It is as though I watch myself–or read myself–without being aware that it is myself whom I see. Initially the reader occupies a state of selflessness, or a lack of awareness of the self in relation to the contemplated work, and due to one’s continued immersion in the tale an awareness gradually develops that I am that character, that the plot I am following is my story, too. Once such a cognitive understanding is reached, one is free to change aspects of one’s life based on what I describe as a psycho-emotional cost-benefit analysis.

Reading poetry and literature is a powerful curative for the subjective condition of “selflessness.” Poetry and literature provide a long lens through which one may see oneself as an agent, as a participant, as well as the creative (or destructive) force in one’s own life. Without that long view, the peculiar responsibilities vying for attention, the singular demands upon one’s life, the surfeit of useless information press too closely against one’s face, as it were, and obliterate any possibility of comprehending a larger picture–life’s intertextuality, one might even say inter-contextuality. Life expresses larger patterns of organization and interdependence, and the interconnectedness of events and experiences in individual lives to other events, experiences and lives may be usefully conceptualized as non-random occurrences.

I accept that what I argue for in this post amounts to understanding literature, as Frank McConnell has referred to it, “the human testament, [and] however ambiguously, the means to secular salvation” (20). McConnell goes on to suggest that “we read poetry to save, or find our lives” (23). This is not to imply that literature has no other function. In fact, literature may have as many functions as it has readers, but my point is that for those who find no existential solace anywhere else, literature and poetry serve as powerful portals leading into the divine mysteries of the soul, the greatest of which is its changeable nature, its incessant demand to separate itself from the familiar, which when misunderstood is the source of much suffering.

I am arguing that poetry and literature serve as mirrors in which readers see themselves and their own human nature reflected. Hamlet says that the purpose of the dramatic literary arts, “both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as’t were, the mirror up to nature” (Hamlet Act III, Scene II). Readers become conscious of themselves–their own natures–and the archetypes flowing through them by gazing into their own reflections as they appear on the written page. But, and this is a crucial point, such an awareness does not come from careless, light reading; one must read archetypally in order to apprehend the archetypes. One must read psychologically in order to understand one’s psychology. And one must read mythically in order for the myth to emerge and be apprehended in one’s life. When one commits to a work of literary art in this manner, the eye that is in the art simultaneously reads the reader. In such a symbiosis of art and observer, knowledge of oneself is received which has heretofore been kept secret from him. The disclosure of such secrets serves soulfully to unite the psychically split individual and create a significant sense of wholeness; seeing oneself thus reflected fills in the blanks.

This John Ciardi poem was first published in 1964. I fell in love with it the first time I heard it, and I have grown to love it even more over the years. Its significance grows deeper and more profound as its whimsy makes my smile grow wider as I read it. It is a powerful teaching, but ’nuff said; enjoy. (This poem is written in couplets, four lines to a stanza, but this blog would not allow me to format it that way. Sorry.)

One Long Ago in a Far Away

Beginning “By the Sea”

In, of course, a Kingdom, One Fine Day

With (why not?) a Lark in a tree.

(Yes, all the poems I ever see

Put all their larks in the air.

Such poor tired larks! “Let one rest in my tree,”

I thought. So I put it there.)

–So there was a Lark. In, as I say,

The tree I put there to be

Part of that Long Ago Far Away

Kingdom, of course, by the Sea.

A (naturally) Princess in (yes) a Tower

Was listening to (what else?) the Lark.

And a Ho-Hum Giant was smelling a flower

In the shade by the brook in the park.

The King was thinking of counting his gold

But went to sleep instead.

The Queen was hungry, but had a cold

And hadn’t got out of bed.

It was never as peaceful as this before

In any fable I’ve read.

But in came a Hero.–At least he wore

A helmet all over his head.

And he looked like a Hero (a very hard look),

And he made a heroic noise.

And he clattered at every step he took

(Which impressed the stable boys.)

All over his head was his helmet and in

His head was, of course, a fight.

And he came decked out in a suit of tin

To prove that he was right.

He scared the Lark.

He woke the King.

The Princess began to cry.

The Queen got up and began to ring

For milk and an aspirin pie.

“Where is your Giant?” the Hero cried.

“I have come to slay him in two!”

The Giant jumped up and ran off to hide

In a closet. Wouldn’t you?

“Where is you Giant?” the Hero roared.

“I have come to do some slaying,

And save the Kingdom!” The King looked bored;

“He’s around here somewhere, playing.”

“And now, if you please, be still,” said the King.

“We run a peaceful Kingdom.

If you must be heard, and if you can sing

Some new songs, why then sing some.

“But stop that noise, young man, or I

Shall toss you in that ocean

I always build my Kingdoms by.

I don’t like such commotion!”

But the Hero stood his stand.

“Where is you Giant?” roared he.

“I have come to slay him and win the hand

Of your daughter by setting you free!”

The Queen came in with a cold in her head

And a cold in her nose, and her eyes

All sort of yellow and bleary red–

Perhaps from the aspirin pies.

The Queen cam in and she swayed a bit–

Perhaps from the milk. “Tut! tut!”

She said to the Hero. “You’re having a fit!

You’ll set us free?–Of what?”

“I have come,” said the Hero, “to set you free

Of the Giant there always is

In every Kingdom By the Sea

In such Long Ago days as this.

“And to win the hand of your daughter dear,

And Half the Kingdom to boot!”

“What?” roared the King. “Get out of here,

Or I’ll tell my guards to shoot!”

“I have come,” said the Hero, “a very long way,

Over rivers, fields, and fences.

“I have been on the road six years and a day–

Just think of my expenses.

“I’ve used twenty pounds of solder alone

(Plus nuts and bolts and wire)

To mend my suit. And costs have grown

Incalculably higher

“For sharpening swords, and for oats and hay,

And heroes have to sip

A little something along the way

–To guard against the grippe.

“I am not at all sure I can pay what I owe

Out of half a Kingdom so small.

But Giants get scarcer and scarcer. So–

It’s this or nothing at all.

“And enough palaver! I’m here to do

Some slaying, and here I stay

‘Till I have slain your Giant in two.

So bring him on I say!”

“Well, then,” said the King, “just wait a bit.”

And he called his Cannoneer.

Who brought him a cannon and pointed it

In a way that made it clear

The palaver was over. “That’s unfair!”

Cried the Hero.

“So it is,”

Said the King with a sigh. “You have me there.

But in Long Ago Kingdoms like this

“We have to be careful. It takes time

To become a Long Ago.

And though being a Hero is hardly a crime,

We do better without them, you know.

“A peaceful Kingdom’s the Kingdom for me,”

Said the King. “And as for you,

go save someone else. For–do you see?–

I dislike being saved in two.

“Heroes are handsome and noisy and bold

But they will come out on top.

And once they start saving you, I’ve been told,

They don’t know when to stop.

“I run a peaceful Kingdom here

And I’d like it to age a bit.

“–To which, may I add that my Cannoneer

Informs me his fuse is lit?

“You have ten seconds. I mean, nine.”

“Unfair!” the Hero cried.

“Eight,” said the King. “You do look fine

But–seven–a fast ride

“Could–six–prevent some changes you

Might–five–not wish for–four–

(Or is it three?) Well, now it’s two…

One…and–What is that roar!

“A cannon? Why on earth?–Oh, yes,

Now I remember. Well,

I tried to tell him. But I guess

Heroes are hard to tell.

“Someone go let the Giant out

“And ask the Lark to sing.

“And I say, isn’t it about

Dinner time?” said the King.

…And that’s how it went One Long Ago

And Far Away by the Sea,

Just as a Little Bird I know

(A Lark) told it to me.

The Kingdom was saved from being saved.

The Giant was saved from a fight.

The King was afraid he had behaved

In ways not entirely right.

“But there was the fuse, and it was lit,”

He said, “and time ran on.

And before I had finished explaining it

To the Hero, he was gone.

“In–I’m afraid–a sudden puff

That puffed him out of sight.

As Heroes go, he was brave enough,

But I’m not sure he was bright.

“I’m sure I made it perfectly clear

What sort of Kingdom I run.

Why I even scolded my Cannoneer

For firing that horrible gun.

And I’m sure–had I stood where the Hero stood,

All mounted and ready to go–

I’m sure I could have unerstood

In, say, two seconds or so

“That only eight were left to me.

And I’m sure that, given the eight,

I could have made it easily

Out of the palace gate.

“–Well, maybe not. But if it’s true

That, maybe, I misbehaved,

At least I wasn’t saved in two.

In fact, I wasn’t saved.

“Except from being saved,” he said.

Which is all the saving I’m for.”

…And that’s that, friends. And so to bed.

For that is all there’s time for.

I have been thinking about the powerful healing to be found in irony. This is a concept that, for differing reasons, we are all too unfamiliar with in our culture. Now, I know what your thinking: that irony is everywhere, no one is serious about anything, and we can’t get a straight answer from any authority, and that irony is chiefly a way, and a very good one at that, to create distance between truth and experience. In a sense, that is literally the definition of irony. Irony means: 1.a. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning. b. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning. c. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect. David Letterman and George W. Bush, among others, seem to have mastered this literary and rhetorical trope. But there are deeper mysteries to the concept of irony than one might initially suppose. Melville suggested that Moby Dick should be read through the myth of Narcissus and Echo, and by so suggesting, is in my mind saying that his novel is ironic, and found within the irony is a truth so large and unsettling, that stating it directly would be violently dismantling.

The myth of Narcissus and Echo seems to me to drip with irony. Let me briefly recount the story:
Echo was cursed by Hera (juno) for detaining her in conversation while Zeus was Dallying with some nymphs, long enough for them to run away…when Juno realized the truth she said, “the power of that tongue of yours, by which I have been tricked, will be limited; and most brief will be the use of your voice.” From that time on, Echo can only repeat the final phrases of the utterances she hears.
Narcissus was the son of a nymph (Lyrope) and a river god (Cephisus). He was a beautiful boy…Lyrope consulted Tiresisas to see if he would live to a ripe old age. The prophet said that he would, “if he will not have come to know himself.” Narcissus grew up and was desired by many youths and maidens, but he was also filled with a “firm pride” says Ovid, so that none dared to touch him.
Echo saw him strolling through the forest with some friends, and was immediately stricken with love for him. Ovid says she “burned with passion” for the boy. She followed him, stalked him really, but she couldn’t make a move because she couldn’t speak! So she waited for the right time when she could return his utterances with her own words.
As fate, or shall I say myth, should have it, he becomes separated from his friends and shouts, “is anyone there?” Echo replies “there!” Narcissus is dumbfounded and looks all around and shouts, “Come!” Of course, Echo calls back to him with the same word. He then says, “why do you run away from me?” She echoes his words exactly. This is the first reflection that beguiles him: echo’s persistent voice echoing his own…
Narcissus says, “come here and let us get together.” And echo, never with more willingness or desire, says, “Let us get together.” At this she runs from the woods and throws her arms around Narcissus and, I imagine, begins to kiss him all about. He eludes her grip and flees saying, “I would die before I let you posses me.” And in what I think is one of the most poignant scenes in all of mythology, Echo, standing there broken hearted, says, “Posses me.” And now, Echo becomes fixated, hiding in caves and pining away for the boy. She wastes away into thin air, only her voice remaining.
And so it happens that another (as it happens, a young lad), who was rejected by Narcissus, invokes a curse that he should fall in love and not be able to possess his beloved. So, while narcissus was leaning over a pond trying to quench his thirst, he became captivated by the reflection of beauty that he saw. Ovid says that he, “…fell in love with a hope insubstantial, believing that what was only an image to be real and corporeal.” He was transfixed by what he saw; such beauty and grace!
Finally, it slowly dawns on him, but the awareness is too late to save him: “I am you! I realize it; my reflection does not deceive me; I burn with love for myself. I am the one who fans the flame and bears the torture.” He too disappears, and Echo felt sorry for him, even though she had formerly been angry and resentful. “Each time the poor boy exclaimed ‘alas,’ she repeated in return an echoing “alas.”
Narcissus’ last words were “alas for the boy I cherished in vain.” Echo repeated these words as well, and when the boy said “farewell,” she repeated farewell too. As the Nyads were preparing his funeral pyre, they discovered that his corpse was nowhere to be seen. Instead they found a yellow flower with a circle of white petals in its center—the narcissus.

This myth is redolent of irony. Narcissus could only see himself, and didn’t realize it was himself!! It’s as though he experienced a profound depersonalization. It is profoundly ironic that in entering too much into self as subject, we lose ourselves: our consciousness, our ego, our sense of me-ness, and as James Hillman says, we lose too, “our sense of the world.” Even the death of Narcissus is ironic because instead of leaving a corpse, he leaves a beautiful flower we know as the Narcissus. Virtually everything Echo says is ironic, because she may never use her own words to express herself, thus the words she uses–the words that come to her from overhearing, she uses to mean something entirely different.

Echo used irony to bridge the emotional and psychic distance between herself and Narcissus, and this is one of the two enormous potentialities that irony offers: Irony may bring one closer to one’s truth, or it may move you father away from it depending on one’s particular psychology in a given moment. If the truth of the moment is too dangerous, irony will move you away. But…if you want to really move into the depths of oneself and discover the potential for regeneration, rejuvenation, and significance, then irony offers itself as a compelling vehicle of self exploration.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote:

“Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks eo ipso what might called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude. (The Concept of Irony, pt. 2, “Irony as a Mastered Moment. The Truth of Irony”).”

But the use of irony can feel psychologically threatening, dangerous, because it may lead us into the Underworld, and we carefully construct our lives to avoid having just such an underworld experience. How does Irony do this? Remember the Narcissus flower that grew up where Narcissus’ corpse should have been? In order to please Hades, Zeus “produced as a snare for the fair maiden a wonderful and radiant narcissus, an awesome sight to all, both immortal gods and mortal humans. From its stem a hundred blossoms sprouted forth, and their odor was most sweet…The girl was astounded and reached out with both hands together to pluck the beautiful delight (Homeric Hymn to Demeter).” When Persephone plucks the flower, Hades himself, astride his awful chariot powered by his dark horses, emerges through the opening in the earth where the Narcissus flower had just been and abducts Persephone into the Underworld. In virtually all other myths, Persephone seems far from unhappy with her fate. She is always described as beautiful, powerful, and queenly. She has come into her own as the result of her underworld experience, she is the beautiful Queen of the Underworld, ruling alongside her husband. In fact, she, along with her mother and Dionysus, is the focus for the mystery religion at Eluses.
Hillman, following the Keatsian notion that the world is a “vale of soul making,” asserts that soul is made in the depths; in the valleys, in the depressions, in the darkness, in the vales. It’s likely that Persephone, as the result of her initiatory experience, is also exposed to the hidden wealth of her own psyche through her abduction to the underworld. Besides, doesn’t it feel like an abduction when we find ourselves depressed, wounded, or in a sticky situation that isn’t likely to end well? There is, at the same time, a momentum which pushes our own psyche farther along towards individuation and wholeness. In fact, it is only the experience of something so overwhelming that it threatens to destroy us, which may put us in touch with the awareness of our wholeness. Rilke says this of art. Surely this can be said of the development of the soul as well: “Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further (Letter, 24 June 1907 to his wife (published in Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne, 1952; tr. 1985).”

The irony is, that just when we think we can go no farther into our own depths, just when we think we can bear no more, is the exact moment when we can and we must.

That awful summer 40 years ago, that summer which witnessed or gave birth to–I don’t know which–a summer of tremendous, violent convulsions and transformations was made more terrible for me by the sudden, unexpected death of my grandfather. I was a child, awash in death that summer, death that seemed completely senseless and unsettling. For the first time, life seemed unpredictable and threatening to me. Things happened, as a result, that I never would have dreamed of. Receiving word of these three deaths, I saw my father weep for the first three times in my life, and, after the first of these deaths, I heard remarkable words that have unceasingly rung in my ears for 40 years.

When Robert Kennedy broke the news of King’s assassination in Memphis to a largely African American audience in Indianapolis, he spoke in an unprepared, unrehearsed, and astonishingly unguarded, heart-felt and soulful manner:

“…we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.

“My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”…. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” (Italics are mine. To read the text of, or listen to this speech, go to http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/rfk.htm. Video of RFK delivering this speech may be found on YouTube.com)

Kennedy spoke with such deep sadness and compassion. And wisdom. Phenomenal wisdom for one so young. Wisdom born of the pain falling, as Aeschylus said, drop-by-drop upon his own heart. I believe that the assassination of his brother, four and a half years earlier, profoundly altered his world-view, and equally transformed his thoughts about purpose, meaning, and existence. He seems to have come around to viewing others and the world genuinely through the eyes of love, and this was never more evident than on this painful April night. To paraphrase the poet-scholar Anne Carson:

He talks to himself where he has to
where the soul oh
where the
soul with its soft
edges
cuts
into
the
sharp
body.

“We have to make an effort to understand…” but how do we comprehend the incomprehensible? How do we understand the soft edges of the soul cutting into the sharp body? How do we understand the leave-takings and the loss enforced upon us by Death? How are we able to calculate, how are we able to perform the emotional math and arrive at the sum total of that which we have lost and that which we have gained?

Thomas Hardy said, “if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.” In Hardy’s formulation is a brilliant gem of conceptualization and truth. The way to the Better, the way to healing, the way to redemption is to no longer allow oneself to avert one’s gaze. It is the willingness to bear witness that “tames the savageness of man and makes gentle the life of this world.” It is the eyes that are the doorways to the soul, or as the Troubadours of the Middle Ages used to sing, the eyes are the scouts for the heart. Wherever, and upon whatever, we train our gaze, that image enters the soul, and its penetration may be felt as wounding no matter the valence (relative goodness or badness) of the image. In fact, whenever we open our hearts, whenever we open to knowledge or understanding, we invite a wound. Why must this be so? Aeschylus teaches us “we must suffer, suffer our way into truth.” In this manner of suffering, we encounter the paradoxical relationship between pathos and mathos, suffering and its significance. In that relationship is life itself, pain becomes a stimulus and a gift and is not only the essence of human existence, but is the very stuff of human transcendence. We die into our lives, as some Sufis say. This is what, in psychoanalysis, I often refer to as the death of the ego.

All great tragedy, in the sense of literary genre, communicates this paradoxical intent of suffering: we are challenged and trapped, perhaps between or perhaps because of, our character and our fate. Take, for example, Oedipus, who upon learning that he has fulfilled the prophecy and indeed killed his father and married his mother, takes the brooch from Jocaste’s gown and gouges out his own eyes, says to one of his friends that indeed a god compounded his pains, “but the hand that struck my eyes was mine and mine alone.” The momentum of tragedy threatens to crush us as if it were some terrible engine of fate, yet it also summons up, if one only refuses to avert ones eyes, the human capacity for transcendence. C. G. Jung notes that it is only something that feels so overwhelming that it threatens to destroy us, which can make us conscious of, or put us in touch with our own wholeness.

Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, they were ambushed. The Greek word for ambush is lochos, an ambush that cries out for revenge, but in another usage, lochos means a bed of childbirth, too. This is the question we must ask ourselves: what is being born out of these tragic ashes? The only way such a birth is brought to term is by the willingness to not avert ones gaze, to pay attention, to bear and bear witness to the tragic in life. Even when the savagely violent and vengeful Furies are awakened by the terrible wounding of a moral code as they are in Aeschylus’ brilliant trilogy we know as the Oresteia, the force that transforms them is the compassionate gaze of Athena, the willingness of the goddess to bear compassionate witness to their plight transforms them into the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. While they never stop being the Furies, the disparate parts of them are unified, and they are become whole. In this wholeness of being they also become the Semnai Theai, the Awesome Goddesses who sanctify the law, a new creation with essences of each of the former ways of being. The Oresteia moves from violence and split off consciousness into wholeness, justice, and compassion; it is a story of creation, a story of “taming the savageness of man and making gentle the life of this world.”
When we violently and blindly impose our will upon our world, those we love, even upon ourselves, we are unable to explore the creative potential that attends destruction; we are not able to journey into the soul of compassion and bear witness to our lives; we are not able, at some point, to go on, for violence and oppression, physical or emotional, eventually stops and then, what remains? Only love and a compassionate gaze can create something that endures, something that continually reinvents itself. Only with love and compassion can one undertake the exploration, the ensoulment if you will, of the world.

The world opens itself to love and compassion, and while the opening may still be a wounding, it is a bittersweet wound, an opening, a chance for the soul, and is to be submitted to gracefully in the knowledge that, as T. S. Eliot writes, “In the end is my beginning.”

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools…”
King Lear

To note the arrival of All Fool’s Day, I thought it might be interesting to look at why foolishness can seem to be a subversive force in social circumstances and radically destructive—perhaps deconstructive is the preferable term—to the province of the personal ego. Though at first blush foolishness might give the impression that it is pointless, in foolishness something extraordinary and soulful is finding its way into the world. To illustrate better what is at work in foolishness, I want to look at just two of any number of examples from which one could draw: From dramatic literature, the tragedy of King Lear, and from myth one of the more mysterious narratives of Dionysus.
There are important differences between the folly of villainy, the folly of madness, and the folly of a fool. Villainy holds no wisdom in itself but rather puts forward and answers to only an insatiable appetite for power. Madness abdicates reason and creates an insular and idiosyncratic world that, as illogical as it may appear to the spectator, is as ordered and understandable to the madman as a greenhouse is to a gardener or, as it is for Lear, a grave to a dead man: for as the old king says as he wakes from a restorative sleep, “You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave…(Act IV, Scene VII).” Foolery, on the other hand, is not interested in power, nor is it interested in psychically terraforming one’s experience of life in such a way as to create a self-contained, self-referenced, and self-deceptive illusion of existence. Foolery is chiefly interested in seeing the world from a perspective that destroys all illusions and allows us to, as Lear says, “…take upon [u]’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies (Act V, Scene III).” I especially like this image: that fools (and all of us are fools at one time or another) are agents for divine espionage. And what is the espionage being perpetrated? Just this: the fool turns the world upside down, and this inversion is reflexively threatening, but what isn’t realized is that the world has previously been inverted by a will to greed and power, by a splitting off feeling and substituting sentiment, by a ruthless enforcement of orthodoxy and conformity. Through his efforts, the fool is really setting the world aright, redressing the wrongs previously wrought and re-ensouling the world.
Only a fortunate few are wise enough to be born fools. The rest of us may only come into our foolishness after we appear to have been treated meanly by Titanic forces, or possibly in another way: by having the unaffected, born fool point out our folly. The fool pushes, prods, and needles one toward self-knowledge (“Fools had ne’er less wit [“grace” in Folio] in a year, For wise men are grown foppish, They know not how their wits to wear, Their manners are so apish” [Act I, Scene IV]) by forcing one’s shadow material into conscious awareness as in this exchange: Lear–Who is it that can tell me who I am? Fool–Lear’s shadow (Act I, Scene IV). Self awareness is often the residue that is precipitated out from the psychic storming that threatens to whelm one’s familiar world during a horrifying encounter with those psychic constituents which have previously been rejected for their inconvenience, incongruence, inflated, repulsive, or terrifying countenances.
When Lear and his small entourage are abandoned to a wild storm of such force, that every living thing caught out in it is threatened, only the fool remains unsheltered and outside with Lear to face the full fury of the gale. From the perspective of psyche, one might imagine that the foolish energy itself has unleashed the storm in order to make Lear conscious of his unreflected, unpsychological, and psychically topsy-turvy attitude. Shortly after this scene the fool apparently, but not entirely, disappears from the play; he seems to become conflated with Cordelia from this point on (which makes sense as a strong argument may be made that Cordelia has herself acted foolishly and has helped to set the tragedy in motion; in fact, over the past 400 years, in many of the countless stagings of Lear one actor was often cast in both the roles of Cordelia and that of the Fool).
As alluded to a moment ago, the fact that the fool seems to disappear from the play might be read as though the fool is a personification of psychic energy, and once that energy has constellated a move toward greater consciousness and punctured Lear’s extraordinary narcissism and inflation, the fool as a personified image is no longer needed. A further insinuation that the fool is an energetic signature may be read into the end of a prophecy he offers: “This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time” (Act III, Scene II. Italics are mine) . Shakespeare’s play is set in or around 800 A.D. or so, and every Englishman would know that Merlin was said to live in the 6th or 7th Century, and by suggesting that the fool lived even before Merlin—even before there was an England—may be a way that Shakespeare suggests the ineffable and primordial quality of foolish psychic energy.

Next I want to look at the image of the fool, not in a coxcomb, but in the horned guise of Dionysus. There is an ecstatic, wild, and bold quality to Dionysus that, to the modern sensibility, smacks only of foolishness and addiction: an excesses of wine, women, and (via Orpheus) song that results in a hierophant’s experience of extasis, an experience that appears, to a conformed, ordered, lineal, and civilized perspective, to be irrational. This is, however, a too facile reductionism. There is much more to Dionysus than behaviors that, to a pathology-sensitized eye, constitute unconscious acting out.
At first blush, there is something uncensored and vaguely obscene about Dionysus, but it is not this—his enthralling, sexual charisma—that threatens one foolishly. Rather, in the case of Dionysus his foolishness is sensed in a startlingly reckless relationship to the Underworld; he is the wild, untamed, and horned youth clothed in animal skins—an image of the sacrificial goat or ram that willingly sacrifices itself. In the Orphic traditions, Dionysus was to have been the successor to Zeus, himself, but the Titans, their faces painted a death-like white, fell upon the child god, tore him into seven pieces and threw his remains in a cauldron. Zeus, drawn near by the smell of roasting flesh , discovered the Titanic forces at their work, and hurled the Titans into Tartarus while at the same time preserving the heart of the young god. Dionysus’ heart was then made into what I imagine to be a kind of heart-stock, pomegranate soup that was then given to Persephone. After drinking this strange brew, she gave birth to Dionysus Chthonios, the “subterranean.”
It may well be that Dionysus is most readily identified with acts of dismemberment and transformation, and these powerfully destructive forces are precisely the legacy extended even to the kin of Dionysus. Dismemberment was the fate of his cousin, Actaion, who was famously torn limb from limb by his own hunting dogs; dismemberment was the fate even of Orpheus himself, who, spurning them, was dismembered by lustful Bakchoi (Bakchoi—specifically not Bachanntes—were properly identified with the worshiped deity, in other words, they were become Bacchus). What the myths of dismemberment seem to illustrate is the notion that the soul longs for its own deconstruction and subsequent transformation, and it necessarily draws us away from a place of physical and/or emotional comfort, familiarity, and relative safety. Instead one is plunged into a situation of great risk, terrible psychic danger, and utter confusion. To leave the one place for the other is to leave the known and the comprehended for the unknown and the never dreamt of. This movement of the soul defines the essence of life and living even though from another perspective it may look like death and dying.
The dismemberment symbolized in these myths, as the various sobriquets to Dionysus’ name that invoke rebirth attest, is anything but a literal death. In fact, I believe these myths are an attempt to capture the soul’s movement through imagination and representation. Through such lenses the soul can be glimpsed, as C. G. Jung notes, as “quick moving, changeful of hue, twinkling…something like a butterfly (psyche was also the Greek word for butterfly) which reels drunkenly from flower to flower and lives on honey and love (CW 9 §55). The ego dismembering and intoxicating—one might say, Dionysian—motion of the soul moves one’s center of being from that of a substance to that of a no-thing and brings the awareness of one’s true nature into consciousness. Gaston Bachelard argues that, “Motion, more than substance, is what is immortal in us. Motion says: ‘I change, but I cannot die” (Air and Dreams, 46).
If motion can illuminate what is immortal within us, it may at the same time dispense with what is unnecessary about us. It is certainly not rational to suggest that one may live life drunk with honey and love. Nor is it rational to say that one is immortal. But to be able and willing to accept such apparent irrationality is just the point of foolishness. As the motion of the soul becomes more and more noticeable, the rational drops away and the images the soul produces become increasingly more remarkable, realistic, and ultimately real, thus enabling the soul to “move toward the depths in order to find the images of the black chasm, images to which normal, rational sight is particularly unsuited” (Bachelard, 99).
Standing at the edge of the chasm, preparing to be hurled or even hurl himself into the sea, is the young Dionysus with many epithets such as Trigonos, “the thrice born,” and Zagreus, “the great hunter,” to name only two. Dionysus imagines the various impulses toward re-birth and transformations that tirelessly hunt us down; to accept such dismemberment is far from being absurd. It is foolish.