Existential Vegetarian

You can argue all you like about eating or not eating meat.  I have never seen either  side  win such arguments. As a 'vegetarian' up-taker I do not argue nor judge at the individual level.  I have simply made an existential choice.  The choice is how I want to live.  The choice is to give up food provided by the capture, husbanding  and killing of animals.  At first this was not easy, now it is no problem. To the majority food animals are utilitarian and expedient beings. Their use and disposal is behind some temple veil. They are not creatures with a will-to-live, capable of their own fulfilment, possessed of their own lives.  Krishnamurti said he did not eat meat because he did not want to take the shine from their eyes. It was eloquent and sufficient.

Contrary to lazy monotheistic thinking animals are not put on earth by the deity to harvest their flesh so the great human project can flourish. They are rather a result, like us humans, of time and evolution. Generally the difference between us and them is that we have won the evolution lottery. Our brains, knowledge and technology have made us masters of the world, lords of all creation. The status of the 'domesticated' animal means little to us. That it is the strong and mighty, the civilised,  killing the weak barely registers as unjust. If we could see in one vision the vast apparatus of man's scheme, the enclosures, the feed lots, the slaughterhouses and distribution links it would astonish us. As we are a little squeamish and ashamed (our better part) our provisioners hide it from us. It is ironic that having elevated ourselves to the status of 'human', a meaning of which is being substantively different to other creatures, we should in our treatment of  them be so heartlessly exploitative. No doubt, man will continue with his dismal project (unless climate change forces a shift.) Most of it is done in good conscience. It is the way we are conditioned in childhood,  the banal cultivation of unfeeling and unthinking.  But the existential choice is always there, simple, clean and liberating.

Hammarskjold and the True Meaning of Humility

If you were alive in the 1950s a household name was Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Hammarskjold was a man who combined a life of high public office with a life of the spirit.  He died in an air crash while on duty as Secretary-General travelling to a trouble spot in the Congo. Undoubtedly this death has added to his posthumous fame, although I doubt few born after 1980 would know of him.  He discharged his executive life with great inner grace.  I imagine only a few friends would have seen his inner conflicts, the clash between contemplation and action, the private and public. His encounter with the great traditions were his fuel and and his notes were made into Markings (Vagmarken, 1963).  I acquired a translation  of this work early in my life (Faber &Faber, 1963). Markings is a compilation of  part musings, quotations, prose and verse. It is an impression of a life of the mind.  I gave the slight paperback the special treatment of  rebinding in boards.  One wishes that all men of action, the bit-wigs chasing this and that, the hollow men, would  read Markings.  Maybe they would take away a vision of the Life of Action, the life in the world suffused with higher things.  

Here the Secretary-General gives us a lesson on humility -- and doesn't it all start with humility?

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud, a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable. 

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons.  Secure in its reality, the self is neither better or worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is --- is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement. 

To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your bearings, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise or blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance. 

Towards this, so help me God --- 

Markings

That Which Comes From Heaven

It is only that which comes from heaven that can have a real impress upon the Earth.  

Simone Weil 

Heaven is a part of my inscape. Not the heaven of religion as I have no formal religion. Heaven is not a place in my schema, it is a mythic counter point to the world. In heaven all worldly things are resolved and  all opposites co-joined. This is not true in any literal sense but through and in the neediness of sentient nature.  It resonates with Chinese thought. I think of heaven as a better metaphor than a deity for the yearning of the human spirit.  One does not have to confront a super-ordained ego-person. Heaven does not love and is not bossy. Heaven is the mother of harmony.  Heaven cannot be possessed and does not possess.  It suggests and does not command. Tao starts from heaven but ends up on Earth as a blessing. Looking around I see a lot of  fracture and discord.  There is no bedding down, nor comfort, which comes from the Latin fortis for strength.  We lost sight of the celestial begetting place from which we spring. We move quickly, in flight, and stuff ourselves with sensation for fear of the heaven-forsaken abyss around us. Please don't take this too seriously.

Ted Hughes in Passing

At the Lifeline Bookfair these days I am something of a window shopper as I am in the book disposal time of life.   I dribble more books in 'donations' than I take out. Yet it is still fun to enter the vast barn like room and immerse oneself into the sea of books. It is a little like the old cartoons with Scrooge McDuck plunging into his vat of coins. And there is also a sense of community, the bibliophile set, even though you might not talk with anyone. Another benediction is the feeling of escaping from 'the world' outside with all its vulgarity, twardriness and insincerity. On my last visit I had a little encounter with a young woman. I overhead her asking the volunteer if he had seen any books of Silvia Plath's poetry. He could not help but a few moments later I found The Colossus and brought it to her grateful attention.  I revealed that I had just finished reading  Jonathan Bate's biography of Ted Hughes, 'her husband' as I put it. She explained that she was just getting interested in Plath.  She did not have much of an opinion about Plath or Hughes.  In reply to a prompting  she said she was not a feminist. Well,  I could have dallied and got into a discussion about this unhappy pair but I thought it was not an appropriate setting. One must keep moving; I drifted off to another table thinking about Hughes.

Before reading Bate's book I knew little about him apart from his being the husband to the tragic genius Plath, that he was excoriated by feminists and he tended to write animal themed poems.  My luscious read of Bate shows he was a mighty poet, truly talented, deserving of fame. But this did not take me too much into his work.  I did not really take to him as a person. He is a bit of the 'huntin, fishin, shootin' type of man. I am not. And I found his lifelong philandering repugnant. And if I were to sit in judgement about his treatment of Plath I would reckon it pretty shabby - and unbecoming of a true poet. Leaving the fair with my token catch of books  I gave a little wave to my friend but she did not see me.

Mindfulness - another fad?

When 'mindfulness' became popular I thought it was about the mindfulness of 'bare attention', that of cultivating awareness and attention in everyday activities.  Later I learnt that the latest manifestation is about meditation, which is generally the practice of maintaining stillness and following the breath so as to quieten the mind.  I appreciate that in a general sense mindfulness can embrace the concept of meditation on breath but it is widespread in the West to separate these two things. So why the change? what had happened here?   I guess that the sales people of the alternative therapy world thought that the word meditation was too connected with the Eastern religious tradition wherein it arose, principally Buddhism. Meditation had to be neutralised for Western minds and called 'mindfulness'. Once this was done there was no end to the possibilities for pecuniary application.  The doors of schools, corporations, government agencies, community services opened up for this palliative to assuage the confused and troubled minds of the fast-paced world. There is a tacit veiling of its  ancient exotic antecedents.

The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism comprise an acesis or a formal spiritual discipline.  The Four Noble Truths are at the simplest level about understanding the causes of human suffering.  The Noble Eightfold Path, the corollary of the Fourth Noble Truth, is a living and dynamic path to cultivating ethics, wisdom and insight.   Meditation, or what could be called concentration, is an integral part of this acesis. While intellectually extracting  meditation from its foundational context may facilitate utility the extracting reduces it to technique.  It becomes the old 'quick fix' beloved by our world. The fix works for a while but after the initial frisson there is no where to go. There are any number of alternative therapies that have gone under the bridge just for this reason.  Again a problem with The Flight (see post 15/6/2015, Flight from God).

I would not expect people to stop meditating but ground the meditation in a secular understanding of its tradition.

John Cowper Powys

I am grateful to Henry Miller for introducing me to the English writer, John Cowper  Powys. As a result I was also acquainted with his talented writer brothers, Llewellyn and Theodore. In fact the whole extended family is interesting and is arguably an example of  the refulgent flowering of an special epoch.  For someone who lives through reading and imagination Powys can be a great culture-friend and kind of guru.  His The Meaning of Culture  could be a text for the humanistic imaginative life.   Powys does not see culture as something primarily to learn about but something to live through and to seek and enlarge life though its many facets.  By culture he would reference, philosophy, literature, arts, nature and natural religion.  His philosophy is a sea to float one's raft of 'life-illusion'. By life-illusion he means the wishes and whims impractical or not which together form a self perception. You might worship Goethe as a self-model without equating with Goethe.   On philosophy in culture he writes, 'To philosophize is not to read philosophy; it is to feel philosophy. The raw spikes and jagged edges, the sour-tasting dust and wind-blown debris of superficial read life have to be deliberately comprehended, or at least deliberately evaded, before the more secret rhythms, the more recondite patterns of Nature, her humours, her tragedies, her poetry, take shape in the mind.' Likewise to read good literature is to plunge into the imaginative world and emerge enlarged and richer. Sadly you cannot stand back and objectively look at these things as is the way of most education in the modern state. You cannot be afraid of losing proportion, getting things wrong or  fostering some unwholesome prejudice. There is a kind of faith-like abandonment in the process. However there is a tether to reason to prevent loosing touch with reality. Nothing is ever really serious in the ideological sense.

 I do not know anyone who writes like Powys; it is an expansive, spontaneous metaphor-rich embroidery of words which defies classification. He draws upon a vast reading and philosophising.  He is universalistic in the way of the  self-made Victorians who stood (in a deluded way) upon some promontory at the end of Time. Yet he is clearly a modern.

'What the ambitious man regards as thoroughly foolish and is prepared to denounce as self-indulgent, dreamy, absent-minded, as confession of personal failure, to a really cultured man, to an authentic stoic or epicurean (for these opposites amount to one and the same thing when they are contrasted with the values of the world) is the true purpose of life and an eternal fountain of abysmal pride.'

'Can it be said too often that 'the meaning of culture' is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.'

'Many lonely natures, if only they had the wit to realise it, are, by a kind of atavistic adoption, children of some long-past epoch of the human pilgrimage. They may live in some little wayside town in Iowa or Colorado, while in their most integral instincts they belong to Periclean Athens, Imperial Rome, the Florence of Medici, the London of Ben Jonson, the aristocratic salons of the Eighteenth Century, the revolutionary Europe of Heine, of Byron and Shelley!  There must be little local Carnegie Libraries  all over the United States full of bad mixes, odd fish, misfits, queer ones of every wounded sort of wing, who are taking refuge there in regions totally unknown to their neighbours, wonderful Elysian fields of escape, into which no exacting employer, no debase public opinion can ever pursue them.'

'What our true sophisticated culture shows itself is in our attitude to the unimportant, the negligible, the weak, the mean-spirited and pig-headed.'

JCP The Meaning of Culture

T.E. Lawrence

As a boy I had a friend who lived above a grocer cum milk bar in a harbour side suburb. His parents were Christian Palestinians who had fled from Haifa just after the war of 1948.  Playing with my friend one day in his flat above the shop he opened an old tin chest and showed me an Arab headdress (a white cloth kuffiya with gold agals)  just like that worn by T.E. Lawrence. This was very exciting for us and we paraded wearing it around the room. Later the father told us that not only did he wear a headdress like Lawrence but he had actually met him in Palestine during the First World War. This aging weary grocer struggling with a new life in a strange land was instantly illuminated in our eyes by his association with the fabled Lawrence of Arabia.

Unless your soul is dead you will find Lawrence attractive especially his war time leadership in the Arab Revolt of irregular Bedouin fighters. There is the other side which also attracts differently. It is his withdrawal from the glamour and fame and the sequestering himself monk-like among the ranks in the British Army and then the Royal Air Force.  This was no peevish affectation but something he had to do: it was a necessary reclusion following the degradation of his sexual assault at Deraa (which I believe true) and a nervous breakdown after completing his magum opus and his despair of the fate of the Arabs following Versailles.   As someone said of  Lawrence that in the ranks he was like a 'unicorn in a racing stable'.

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is  a masterly book but  not that readable owing to its somewhat dated style and its dry reportage --- perhaps I am wrong here. Anyhow it is wonderful book to have on the shelves and dip into now and again; and you know that the fantastic life of Lawrence leading his Bedouins is a presence in your bookcase.   The Mint, an account of his austere life in the ranks of the RAF is also a very fine work. Here T.E.L. has stripped away any theatrical effects and the man stands before you; a man whose excellence would stand out in any occupation. Beside reading umpteen biographies of Lawrence the book I like most is his collected letters edited by David Garnett. In these epistles is the superior man, the enigma, the charismatic great soul, the stranger, the self-tormentor, and the perfect blend of  aesthete, intellectual, book-man and warrior.

Lawrence in ranks - what intelligence!

The Outsider

Colin Wilson, who died in 2013, was  almost tagged with the concept of the outsider. His famous book of the same name, The Outsider,  published in the fifties, was a tour de force of its type. Follow up books, Religion and the Rebel and Beyond the Outsider expanded and modified the discussion. Religion and the Rebel was a sympathetic survey of outsiders in history which revealed a amazing reading and ability to sketch the essence of a thinker. The outsider is the person who lives a life 'looking in'  or an  onlooker to the main activity of humanity. The outsider is forced by his shy inner nature to look through the keyhole of life. He is uncomfortable with the collective and group, eschews team spirit, of being arbitrarily included, or being in unison, of  being of the school. The type is naturally solitary. He is slow to  trust or like people.  He can be warm and benevolent inside and  convivial to the familiar group.  In fact inside he might be a volcano of feeling. But he cannot express this. To others he is inscrutable. These personalities are probably discovered and rejected by in the pernicious 'human resource' psychological test.  Wilson wrote of the connection between being deeply religious and being an outsider.  Meaning I suppose that those who ruminate upon the elemental questions and choose an unfamiliar path which they need to walk alone.  The great religious figures. Jesus, Buddha and Mohamed were arguably of the outsider caste. These persons in there exalted state stood apart from their acolytes. One who is followed is always alone. If a denomination is a party of believers then Jesus was not a Christian, the Buddha not a Buddhist and Mohamed not a Muslim.

I would say to people: look out for the outsider, do not crowd him, he marches to a different drum, he wants to be known, he wants to know, he has reservoirs of  kindness and a richness of mind.

 I understand that Colin Wilson intellectually moved away from his earlier writings on the outsider.  In later life he moved into the paranormal and crime. This writing did not interest me.

Flight from God

For me Max Picard's Flight from God (1951) is more about philosophy than God. I ignore the God bit and substitute that man is ineffably grounded in a elemental and enduring human nature. The further we go from this core nature the more we degrade our lives. Perhaps it is more akin to our divine Mother than divine Father. I suppose it is like the unisex Tao. Flight is Picard's word for alienated man and his accelerated world. We are so unaware of it. We are taught to flee from the first day at school to the bureaucratic varsity. We get so used to it. We even think it is a good thing. We have fractured our wholeness  in order to exploit the world of technics, organisation and efficiency. We have made ourselves into abstractions which are easy to transform, manipulate and discard.  Materialism is a fetish which makes us drunk. To let Max Picard speak:

In the Flight a person does not distinguish himself because he wants to manifest his being: he merely wants to show that he is somewhere. Being is no longer supremely important; it is only a means to make the person externally distinct. The kind of subjectivism no longer exists by which a man, from the depths of his being, shows himself plainly before man and before God. Nothing remains but a kind of formal subjectivism according to which all being and all that is within being are used to give man a sharp outline that he may be aware of himself in the turmoil of the Flight. 

In the world of Faith, history is of use to man in helping him to rescue for the present whatever of the present may not stand solitary before God. In the world of Flight, history is degraded into a mere ransacking of the past for things which can serve as the companions of man's flight. 

It is love that holds man back from rendering himself mobile for the Flight. A man who loves another, or a thing, contemplates what he loves with care and for a long time, careful to discover in his contemplation if there is a part he has so far neglected to love; and love is long-suffering, waiting until the beloved grows into love. But all this, in the Flight where one must be forever en route, demands too much time. And so the world is systematically emptied of love. All the relationships within which love can exist --- marriage, the family, friendship --- are being brought to destruction by the men of the Flight. 

Thoreau: Letters to a Spiritual Seeker

Recently I have re-visited a small book edited by Bradley P. Dean entitled, Letters to a Spiritual Seeker (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).  This is an odd title for I do not see either Thoreau or the 'spiritual seeker', Mr Harrison G.O. Blake, was particularly spiritual unless you include New England transcendentalism as spiritual. They are certainly soulful. I sense that Thoreau would run a mile from a spiritual seeker as he said he would from a church do-gooder. Anyhow this book is interesting in that you encounter a spontaneous Thoreau who has not had time to work over his prose.  His writing is close to the flow of his thought and has an unusual freshness. I admit there is some  preaching in Thoreau's missives but Thoreau was always a preacher - or is it prophet?.  At first he seems a little put off by Blake's vulnerable earnestness. Perhaps he senses Blake is not his type, a bookish man who faltered on the path to churchman not unlike Emerson's loss of faith. But he affords his natural kindness and a little self-consciously becomes Blake's philosophical mentor and friend. Blake's seeking of a 'meaningful' friendship in turn satisfies that in Thoreau which desires a deeper companionship of the spirit. These two men come to explore a common life of the mind. You sense that this is something that Thoreau has thirsted for in his rather lonely life. The salutations never get beyond Mister and it is this formality which prevents the association from becoming mawkish and claustrophobic. Thoreau also becomes protective of the sensitive Blake and does not wish to include him in his more rugged excursions. He cannot see the delicate Blake wading through swamps or bivouacking on cold mountains. Blake takes some offence at this rejection maybe because it casts him in a less manly light. While Thoreau sought to create a literary image of the nature-hermit you discern in the letters a man eager to associate with empathetic men and share outdoor challenges. He comes across as a regular 'bloke' as well as solitary.

My Binding of Paperback 

Dawn Visits

For some time during my sit in the morning I have heard  just before dawn a noise outside my window which I thought might be a possum 'invading' the house.  I put this out of mind for, while in the past, possums took a liking to the space under the eves between the brick wall and the rafted roof I had filled this area up with bricks and this had deterred the possums.  However looking at this later I saw that an adult possum had taken advantage of living in the space a few centimetres high between the loose bricks and the eve.  I think part of the body of the possum is occupied in the small gap between two bricks. This is a true Houdini exercise.

Well, what has this to do with my sit and Zen?  During zazen you get a heightened sense of sound and movement generally.  So the late nocturnal return of the possum to his humble home punctuates my silence in a very special way. I not only hear it I feel it. And  I think in the deepest Zen sense of this humble creature returning regularly each dawn to take his rest and accepting the most difficult and poorest of abodes. Yet I know also that when I rise from meditation my simian mind will start restlessly seeking to optimise this and that so that my poor ego is fully satisfied. We can learn a lot from how animals deal with living.

Lost Blogger

For some years I used to follow a blog of a very sincere Buddhist of the atheistic bent who lived on his own in a city in Arizona.  His blog was part of a web page designed with Nvu, the open source web page editor.  The web page itself had no design pretensions and consisted of links to other material including some photo galleries. There were several educational Buddhist items in the web page. A lot of the material concerned his life including his time with a poor family in Central America . He helped this family with money, skills and labour and was godfather to the children of the separated couple.   One senses that the poor peasant family did not understand him. It would seem from his narrative that this experiment did not work out and eventually he returned to the USA.  He was still bonded with the children and their drifting away as they grew older was a source of sadness.  He had spend some time in India studying Buddhism.   He was a highly trained computer programmer and had worked on genetics programming and was interested in the fusion of technology and the sustainable future of man.  He had spent much time, in the warmer months, living very simply in the woods.

His regimen in the small flat was worthy of a monk who had taken the precepts.  There were set periods for meditation, exercise and pious reading.  He was very diligent about his vegan diet. He was maybe a little obsessive about his health. He took pride in his notice board which recorded the meditation sessions each day and the exercise taken in winter which consisted of walking up and down the stairs. He kept a blog in the web page with entries concerning his daily life, opinions, observations and problems. Sometimes it might be only a few lines and other times several paragraphs.  He had turned 70 and, as typical at this age, felt his powers failing and was overly introspective. You might say he was a bit eccentric but, of course, any lay person who lives apart and puts an effort into the quest for enlightenment will appear eccentric, or worse.  This man seemed incredibly alone yet he had made a dignified and worthwhile life by the honour of his purpose.  It was the specialness of his life which drew me to him and kept me reading his blog.  All of a sudden he wrote that he was going on a retreat, then the web page disappeared. When the web page went I felt I had lost a friend. This is one of the oddities of our technological life that in reality we are dealing with blips which can disappear at a click. I think now that perhaps his disappearance was a natural conclusion of his journey. I think of the lines of Chia Tao (777-841) (Trans. Lin Yutang)

I asked the boy beneath the pines.
He said, 'The master's gone alone
Herb-picking somewhere on the mount,
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.'

Family History for the Diffident

I suppose I am in the post-family history stage having solved the puzzle of my ancestors and produced a monograph which was given to immediate relatives.  I found this process very satisfying and when the job was done I was a little bereft of something to do.  There are, of course, bits and pieces to correct and some fascinating 'brick walls', but the old passion has gone and I now rarely look at my voluminous spring back files so assiduously compiled.  I was never one for collections of names in a database which seems to attract some genealogists (those databases with say 20,000 entries with little substantively known about 95% of them).   I basically wanted to find out whom my parents were and place them in the context of their time.  The family history starts with my parents and goes back in time.  This is perhaps different from the usual family history which begins with the earliest ancestor record or immigrant ship.  The first chapter is about my family and its life which I think is a little unusual. The book is divided into a chapter for each marriage pair and ends with those pairs several generations away.  So it is not a family history as such but the familial history of my parents.

For the diffident person family history holds it perils especially when you find a kins-person  you have never spoken to and then have to manage an ephemeral  relationship. Fielding long distant telephone calls with the new-found kin can be stressful. Your natural shyness wants you to hold back but your eagerness for progress with the job drives you on.  These people are sort of bonding with you but really they know nothing about you.  There is warmth and new friendship but I have found this quickly peters out. What you find out is that you really have little in common  and they fade into oblivion.  The connection is really just a passing frisson and curiosity. This sort of connection in my experience extends to family history societies.  Each member is interested in their particular subject but only minimally interested in their fellow researchers.  As a group they are fairly straight-laced and conservative. I am not sure why this is - perhaps the hip are more focused on the present. Essentially they are dull places where it is hard to find real conviviality. Again when you have essentially finished  your task the need for the society ends too. There are, of course, the long timers in the society but usually they have finished their project and remain on as committee-people, self-appointed experts and gleeful trainers.

Thoreau's Christmas

I worked a few years in Washington DC and a familiar lunch-time walk along Massachusetts Avenue was to Kramerbooks near Dupont Circle.  I was then very enamoured of  Henry David Thoreau (I still am but it is more like an  old marriage now);  one day under his marvellous spell I brought the two quarto volume Dover Publications edition the The Journal of  Henry David Thoreau (the fourteen volumes bound as two). This bookshop still exists but now is linked to a coffee shop. The Dover Thoreau cost me quite a bit and as I lugged it back to my office I chided myself for being too infatuated with HDT and too indulgent with my money. Now this book is not really one you would open and read for entertainment.  It is a monument to be savoured on the shelf  and a reverential dipping-in book.  You dip into the entries which read mostly like an extraordinary naturalist's note book with painstaking and minute descriptions of  the natural world around Concord. The exception to this are the earlier years when Thoreau is more 'philosophical'. To slurp up these digressions I have another small Dover book called The Heart of Thoreau's Journals which contains his philosophical extracts. For many years now I only open my Thoreau journals on Christmas Morning when I am in a nostalgic mood charged by the numinous expectations of secular Christmas Day. This takes me back to my three years in Washington and how I have travelled since then. If I wish to see how Thoreau spent his Christmas for any year I am usually disappointed for Christmas seems the briefest interlude between his rambling in the woods. I surmise Christmas was a more restrained event then and the Thoreau family might have just gathered around the table for a special meal and some exchange of small presents.  This was a more dignified and wholesome age in which the festive day existed for the ordinary folk and not for the industrial complex and its garish and profane manipulations of appetites.

Making Soul

An important ah moment happened in my reading of James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology  (Harper Colophon, 1977) and it concerns the notion of 'making soul'.  Being a post-Jungian it is perhaps not surprising that Hillman should put a value on soul, however his idea of soul being made by the inculcation of culture, or by another name, the liberal arts, can claim some originality.  The art and science of  fiction, history, biography, poetry or philosophy is the raw material for making soul.   Hillman does nod to the Romantics as a precursor of his thesis.  Soul here has no religious or metaphysical connection.  I will particularly cite history in this respect. Reading history helps us explain the past, but it also is very important in making soul.  What would the Western soul be without the narratives of Salamis, Athens versus Sparta,  King Alfred, 1066, the Crusades or the Somme? Where would national soul be without  the stories of Trafalgar,  Henry VIII, Louis Quatorze, Gallipoli?  In the making of soul it does not matter if the events are absorbed with misunderstandings or falsehoods or even shameful aspects; they all go into the soul making process.  Neither is it reprehensible if the acting out of these soul-myths is irrational, offensive to some or even slightly absurd. This process might be better understood in the higher educational establishments which are so focussed upon reason and scholarship that they forget that it is the entire man which is being engaged in the educative process. The educative business of scholarship can go on alongside a more sympathetic treatment of soul making and its place in the full life. 

Larkin: Not Nice But Loveable

Moping around the local library I alighted upon Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica and decided to revisit this book.   Here read again was his rather prejudiced and curmudgeonly view of life. His  disparaging of  foreigners, immigrants, the lower orders, even his privileged academic milieu.  Larkin was at base a life-hater, a people hater, an everything mediocre hater.  Letters to Monica  also reveals how fragile was his psychology; his mental constitution was dominated by acute sensitivities and chronic aversions. He had a morbid fear of illness and death. He did not like to impose on or intrude upon others. He could not overtly self-promote even when he was being recognised as a major poet. An essentially lonely man he spend much effort in avoiding 'people'. He declined invitations for visiting lectureships in the USA.  He detested foreign travel. Like a lot of lonely people he escaped his affliction by work ('the toad'), a select correspondence and a few friendships. He did not seem capable of intimate relationships but no doubt had a 'sort of loving' for women. Monica was his soul-mate, she sharing many of his artistic tastes, conservative politics and habitual drinking  His admiration and affection was for books, the arts, literary figures and a nostalgic idealised England.

I discovered his poems  in thin faber and faber  paperbacks with poor quality paper published in the 1980s, The Whitsun Weddings, The North Ship, and High Windows.  I was stimulated by his  poetic skill which captured so succinctly the ferment of ordinary places and people. He was not unlike John Betjeman in seeking a blend of the comic and tragic, although Betjeman had a more kind and wholesome view of life. I was informed about his problematic personality and circumstances by Andrew Motion's  Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life and his own all-revealing Letters To Monica

Perhaps here is the kind of poet that one should not to probe into for fear of spoiling the poetic image, the stand alone value of the work (Lord Byron might be a good example).  I would disagree if only for the reason that I think the truth of the poet as man better elucidates  the poetry.  And in the truth of the poet we can discern the soil of the poem, it humus of time and place.  His cribbed and despairing life was not uncommon in a Britain of cold war angst, the bomb, and the social overhang of the War.  Ordinary people were not so converted to the need to appear nice and amiable. This was a time of character which cannot be faked.  I can appreciate his disdain for pose or self-improvement mantras or cosmetic gimmicks so popular for the media-primed artist of our time.  Those who create art out of a bare witness to reality produce the better art. And they seem to draw the sympathy from the reader and become vulnerable and almost loveable.

Day of a Stranger - Thomas Merton

What strikes you about Thomas Merton is the sheer likeability of the man.  He is a 'true man of no status' , a universal man, a shy man without a mask, perhaps what we might term in the local argot 'a good bloke'.  Towards the end of his life he wrote an essay called Day of a Stranger, (1981, Intro. Robert E. Daggy), the word 'Stranger' denoting one who is an outsider to the modern technological world, puzzled by the drives and ambitions of ordinary folk.  This little pamphlet-like work is interspersed by Merton's own black and white photographs from around the hermitage.  Unlike a lot of images in 'spiritual' writing these enhance and do not detract from the text. Of all his writing I think this essay best shows the essence of his personality and where he had arrived at in 1965.  This was an a time when he had just begun to settle into living in his hermitage in the woods at the Abbey at Gethsemani in Kentucky. He had gained separation (in part) from the suffocating world of the abbey life, what he called a 'hot environment' meaning one where busyness ruled if only in a institution of religious men fretting over purpose and meaning.  It reminds one of the atmosphere of modern bureaucracy where all must be engaged and transmitting messages, all is movement and flight. The content is not as important as that one is seen as a party to this game of exchanging messages. Merton had at this time also ripened in his understanding of  Eastern thought, of Zen, Taoism and Buddhism in its various facets. He appears to have adjusted his Christian view to find a place for this wisdom; or perhaps he was heading in the opposite - a place for Christianity in Eastern spirituality. Just to read Day of a Stranger is a 'blessing', a release from the craziness of a particular day and an odd sense of being in a still point with Merton in his hermitage in the woods, with his bare attention to the simple surroundings of the new home and the loveliness of the little piece of Kentucky nature where he lived and had his being.  Here is a self-dialogue from Day of a Stranger

--Why live in the woods?
--Well you have to live somewhere.
--Do you get lonely?
--Yes, sometimes.
--Are you mad at people?
-- No.
--Are you mad at the monastery?
-- No.
--What do you think of the future of monasticism?
--Nothing. I don't think about it.
--Is it true that your bad back is due to Yoga?
--No
--Is it true that you are practising Zen in secret?
--Pardon me, I don't speak English.

Plate 46 from Day of a Stranger

Haiku

I recently posted some self-authored haiku.  I should say that they are in the style of haiku rather than haiku.  They do not follow strict metrical patterns and some are even not about nature or the human in the setting of the natural. I am indebted to R. H. Blyth for the insight I have into haiku, in particular its origins in Japanese Zen Buddhism.  Reading the magisterial four volume Haiku (The Hokuseido Press 1975), first published in 1949, has been the core of my  induction into this gentle art.  I only possess Volume I. Eastern Culture, and have wanted the remaining volumes; I have been put off by the approximately $500 cost. Fortunately the local library had the remaining three volumes,  No. II, Spring, No. III, Summer-Autumn, and No. IV, Autumn-Winter.   Every page of Haiku is infused with the mystique of Zen and one can only surmise that  Blyth had both a scholarly understanding of the art of haiku as well as a deep appreciation of its origins in Buddhism and Zen in particular. It is clear from reading Blyth that the 'study' of Zen is the royal road to haiku both as a reader and practitioner. Blyth also compares the sentiments in haiku to extracts from Western literature which provides a unique view into the occidental genre.

I would say that Section II, of Vol. I of Haiku, Zen, The State of Mind for Haiku, is one of the most moving and profound things I have read. In this section Blyth draws from the qualities that characterise Zen and relates them to the mind of the haiku poet with examples of haiku.

1. Selflessness
2. Loneliness
3. Grateful acceptance
4. Wordlessness
5. Non-intellectuality
6. Contradictoriness
7. Humour
8. Freedom
9. Non-morality
10. Simplicity
11. Materiality
12. Love
13. Courage. 

Pumkin  Mushakoji Saneatsu
Plate 19 from Haiku by R.H. Blyth

Naturalism

Hands up those who are naturalists?  I do not see many hands up.  Perhaps some think this is related to a naturist. Not so, naturalists like to look at things plainly but do not remove their clothes. Nor in this case are they autodidactic observers of nature like Thoreau. Well, naturalism is not an ism at all; it is a world view or a way of apprehending the world; a template if you like based upon what good science has found out about the natural world. In my experience most people are unknowing and unthinking naturalists. It is their unconscious modus operandi; it is their hidden rock of common sense and expectation as to how things work. Almost none think of the balance of the  'four humours' as the basis for health, or that walking under a ladder will bring bad luck. Naturalism has brought light to the world of ignorance and superstition. It is the sine qua non of modern man.

Oddly though people fall back upon non-naturalistic world views. They take their dead to church and temple in the hope that by petitioning an unseen omnipotent being their loved one will be transported to a ultra-mundane world and spend an infinity in bliss in  the presence of celestial beings. One can multiply the examples.  These people consider themselves part-naturalist; it is based upon an assumption that the world is split into natural and supernatural components. Of course, this is a nonsense to the naturalist for naturalism can only be naturalistic; it cannot accommodate the supernatural any more than (at sea level) water might boil at 212 F in one part of the world and 250 F in another.

 So this hybrid naturalism-supernaturalism is a naive contrivance to save one from facing the facts. Better to say you are do not have a naturalistic world-view than say you have a hybrid naturalistic-super-naturalistic world-view. Yet it is so hard to say you are naturalistic.  It is to stand bare in the face of things, the buffeting and swell of what arises by necessity. You have to concede that the world is fundamentally meaningless in human terms.  And yet it is also a comfort for you do not have fall back positions that lack logic, reason and depend upon sophistry or faith assertions. The naturalist also does not fear death for death is merely the end of consciousness.

Fall of Public Man

Some books entertain, some inform and some change the way you think. Of the latter, Richard Sennett's, The Fall of Public Man (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976) was singularly important for me.  The gist of his thesis is that prior to mid 19th Century there was a facility and ease with which people of different rank and station could talk to one another in a public space, for example, in  shop, a park, or when travelling. The 18th Century picaresque novels of Laurence Sterne or Henry Fielding are characterised by these instances. These were encounters between perfect strangers which cultivated the civil society and spread a reassurance that all was well with the world. The actors in these mini-dramas were not conversing as exposed personalities rather as public persona. For example, in the neutral public space, the chimney sweep might talk to the architect, the gentleman to the labourer, the Lord to the publican without any embarrassment or suggestion of talking up or down. Not that the exchange was egalitarian was we might understand it, but that of individuals speaking from the dignity of their respective estates. 

Sennett argues that around about the mid-century things changed. This was influenced by the effects of the Romantic movement with its emphasis upon inner enquiry and self-transformation. This change was subsequently influenced by the budding discipline of psychology, which culminated by the revolutionary impact of the ideas of Sigmund Freud. The theory of the unconscious and primaeval  Id ended forever the naive notion of inner clarity and purpose. For the erstwhile 'public man' a fear developed that the unsolicited conversation of the stranger might be a prying into the inner psychological world.  Soon there was hesitancy all round in the public space, a tendency to avoid eye contact and initiate conversation with a stranger. 

I think this state of psychological vulnerability has become even worse in latter times.  This is despite the faux friendship of social media which is usually conducted between cyber drones rather than real people. The pubic person as distinct from the private  has almost ceased to exist. If a stranger initiates an exchange in a public space we worry about their ulterior motive and the risk that the veil might be penetrated over our sacrosanct inner private world. 

I would like to see a return to the manners of public exchange. There is a proper style of address, demeanour and tone to initiate a public exchange. For instance, it helps to speak to the obvious outer man or woman rather than assume a pose of familiarity; after all seeking familiarity goes with knowing.  Using a proper form of address without being pompous helps. It is notable how calling someone sir or madam puts them at ease. A dignified and pleasant tone is also important. One can also confer on people the worth and dignity of their calling no matter what the 'status' might be in our crude modern reckoning (what a shame that nurses stopped using uniforms).