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).