The gates of bliss

Over the past several Easters I've posted a number of George Herbert poems, but I've never posted his longest and most moving Passion poem: “The Sacrifice.” It's the story of Jesus' capture and execution from his own lips, overlaid with his God's-eye view of myth and mystery. Every aspect of the episode is given its symbolic resonance, its echo through the law and the prophets and the long history of God's forbearance. Even now, I won't post the whole thing because it's immense, but here are a few stanzas. You can find the whole poem here - it's six times as long, and full of riches.

Arise, arise, they come. Look how they runne!
Alas! what haste they make to be undone!
How with their lanterns do they seek the sunne!
Was ever grief like mine?

Judas, dost thou betray me with a kisse?
Canst thou finde hell about my lips? and misse
Of life, just at the gates of life and blisse?
Was ever grief like mine?

All my Disciples flie; fear puts a barre
Betwixt my friends and me. They leave the starre,
That brought the wise men of the East from farre.
Was ever grief like mine?

Ah! how they scourge me! yet my tendernesse
Doubles each lash: and yet their bitternesse
Windes up my grief to a mysteriousnesse:
Was ever grief like mine?

And now I am deliver’d unto death,
Which each one calls for so with utmost breath,
That he before me well nigh suffereth:
Was ever grief like mine?

Weep not, deare friends, since I for both have wept
When all my tears were bloud, the while you slept:
Your tears for your own fortunes should be kept:
Was ever grief like mine?

O all ye who passe by, behold and see;
Man stole the fruit, but I must climbe the tree;
The tree of life to all, but onely me:
Was ever grief like mine?

Lo, here I hang, charg’d with a world of sinne,
The greater world o’ th’ two; for that came in
By words, but this by sorrow I must win:
Was ever grief like mine?

But, O my God, my God! why leav’st thou me,
The sonne, in whom thou dost delight to be?
My God, my God ------
Never was grief like mine.

But now I die; now all is finished.
My wo, mans weal: and now I bow my head.
Onely let others say, when I am dead,
Never was grief like mine.

 

Henry James Asks for Directions

I just adore this story, told in Edith Wharton's memoir, A Backward Glance, about driving around in England one rainy night with her maddening friend Henry James. It's as good as satire, but better because it's true. 

“While I was hesitating, and peering out into the darkness, James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. ‘Wait a moment, my dear — I’ll ask him where we are’; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator. ‘My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer — so,’ and as the old man came up: ‘My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.’

I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: ‘In short’ (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), ‘in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which, in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right), where are we now in relation to…’

‘Oh, please,’ I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, ‘do ask him where the King’s Road is.’

‘Ah -?’ The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?’

‘Ye’re in it,’ said the aged face at the window."

Shooting from the gut

Yes, of course, the answer to my last post about the dominance of the rational is ‘Well, what about the late pernicious rise of the irrational? What about the growing power (indeed real political power) of a mentality that rejects scientific method and consensus, and the authority of evidence or even of logic? What about the multitudes who indulge in magical thinking about economics or science or healthcare or national security? Who don’t believe in climate change or vaccinating their kids; who don't see a link between guns and gun violence; who are probably about to vote for Donald Trump?’ The prospect of America’s ‘id’ as president is alarming, as is the prospect of rising oceans and unbreathable air, the return of typhoid and polio, unending war in the name of freedom. A world like this would truly represent the triumph of the irrational. 

To all of this I might answer that the irrationalist insurgence is not a sign of rationalism's decline but a result of its dominance. It's a revolt against authority, based on a suspicion (sometimes justified) that authority is both dishonest and self-interested, and an intuition that rationalism doesn't cover the waterfront of human life. And it might have been mitigated if the rationalists had been more tempered by their counterparts, the humanists. If rationalism had given more ground to the holistic, poetic aspects of human being, it might not have lost so much ground in the war against populism. The repression of ego left id and superego to battle it out. In other words, relegating the heart made room for the gut to mount a challenge against the mind. And gut is winning. 

Broken creatures

 

“When I first saw her - clumsy, uncouth, all-of-a-fumble - I saw her merely, or wholly, as a casualty, a broken creature, whose neurological impairments I could pick out and dissect with precision.”

This is Oliver Sacks, who died last year, writing in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat about a patient called Rebecca. In his clinic, she was simply “a multitude of apraxias and agnosias, a mass of sensorimotor impairments and breakdowns.” She fell apart in problem-solving and pattern-seeing tests. She seemed utterly conceptually inept. But then Sacks describes a new scene. He is in the garden, and notices Rebecca sitting quietly by herself. Suddenly she seems whole and harmonious: “composed by a natural scene, a scene with an organic, aesthetic, and dramatic unity.” Pursuing this intuition, he comes to see in Rebecca an ability that the tests could never reveal: an ability to see the world as a coherent, poetic whole. Poetry and stories were “a deep need or hunger for Rebecca - a necessary form of nourishment, of reality, for her mind.”  

This showed Sacks for the first time two distinct modes of being, that he called “paradigmatic” and “narrative.” The first is the intellectual architecture that Rebecca clearly lacked, but the other is the way we first begin to make sense of the world, and the way we always intuitively exist in it. Children understand complexities in stories, long before they can understand complex abstractions. (Sacks himself must have been seeing in this mode to perceive Rebecca's gift in the first place.) But although the narrative has what Sacks calls “spiritual priority,” it’s always ranked below the paradigmatic mode. Irrational is lower or less than rational. Left brain beats right; maths pull rank on poetry. Unlike Keats - or Shakespeare - we are incapable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, instead we irritably reach after fact and reason. The intuitive, aesthetic unities of being fall apart in testing, and test results are the only thing we value now as truth.

For Sacks this anomaly about Rebecca revealed the shortfall of the clinical approach, where tests show only deficits, not powers. To me it illustrates the greater shortfall of our disenchanted, rationalist culture: we’ve privileged the paradigmatic, and radically undervalued our need for poetic thinking, our hunger for stories. We are the broken ones, like birds with one wing limp and folded. We can pass all kinds of tests, but we've forgotten how to sit in the garden: composed, attentive, and whole.  

 

He has put on the garment of the world

 

A god has chosen to be shaped in flesh.
He has put on the garment of the world.
A blind and sucking fish, a huddled worm,
he crouches here until his time shall come,
all the dimensions of his glory furled
into the blood and clay of the night’s womb.
Eternity is locked in time and form.

Within those mole-dark corridors of earth
how can his love be born and how unfold?
Eternal knowledge in an atom’s span
is bound by its own strength with its own chain.
The nerve is dull, the eyes are stopped with mould,
the flesh is slave of accident or pain.
Sunk in his brittle prison-cell of mud,
the god who once chose to become a man
is now a man who must become a god.

 

(Judith Wright: “Myth”)