The Dark Side of Each Human Heart Still Exists

Generations
“May the most Holy, most sacred, most adorable, most incomprehensible and ineffable Name of God be forever praised, blessed, loved, adored, honored, thanked and glorified in Heaven, on earth and in the hells by all the creatures of God, and by the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the most Blessed Sacrament of the altar. – The Golden Arrow prayer of ‘Reparation’.
The Jewish and Catholic doctrine of ‘suffering souls’ has yet to come to full fruition as ‘common knowledge’ among the people.  At His death on the Cross Jesus descended into the depths, into the caverns of the past.  Other modalities in the world treat the depths of the soul of man in their non-sacramental cultural belief systems.  However, God is Creator of all things and He is Merciful and Loving and Patient.  Even the Christian and Jewish fountains of grace have long been neglected for other ‘cisterns’.  Again God has mercifully ‘carried’ ignorant souls from the beginning.  While there is God’s justice unto the third and fourth generation He set forth mercy unto the thousandth generation.  The answer to unresolved ‘sin issues’ is nailed to the Cross carried there by God Himself.  Our part in the Great Drama still has to be lived out in each one of our lives.
Jung, as much as I have come to mistrust his work overall, did find himself as the son of a doubting Protestant pastor in the uncomfortable position of dealing with the ‘unresolved sin issues’ in the souls of men.  More than anyone else Jung has brought light to bear on the reality that what is not dealt with properly is thrust into the dark and often morphs into aberrations to meet crucial, critical needs for reparation and healing in the souls and psyches of all people.

“Am I my brother’s keeper? ‘   You better believe it.  Absolutely.

But first we must know ourselves. 

        Soul Wounds

"Just as we seek a doctor without any delay and hasten to apply remedies if some blow or wound comes over our body; so we should act with regard to the wounds of our souls."  ~Saint Caesarius of Arles
Breaking the Chains
“The departed souls of our relatives need us as much as we need them. There is a unique power of healing that only our waking consciousness can generate. Some of us are plagued with psychological disturbances, which we have psychically inherited from those close to us who have died. Every unresolved trauma or other unresolved  (sin) psychic issue is passed on from one generation to the next, until the chain is broken. Breaking the chain means bringing the dark into light, making what has been unconscious conscious. That is the job of the living and only we can do that. That is our purpose in life.
Jung writes in the Red Book (RB) “If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never ending, the life of history and inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race”. Before we can become who we are meant to be, before we can live our own life, we must descend into the shadow left by those who have gone before us.
If we surrender to the natural movement of the soul, we can and must bring forth pieces of the personal and collective unconscious that need to come into the light. This is growth. This is healing. This is becoming.

But maybe we want to remember some of the old ways and honor the dead. As Jungian warriors we may want to sit quietly and reflect on what has died within us, what traumas have we inherited from our personal and collective ancestors. What is it in our lives that needs to be faced and owned? Who are the hungry ghosts in our soul? How can their energy be released and transform in the light of consciousness?

... This level of consciousness is usually hard-earned. It is life’s gift after much inner work, focused concentration and often much emotional suffering. It comes like an unexpected embrace by Sophia, the personification of divine wisdom. It is the relief of dew drops calming parched skin. Surely one gets there only on one of the roads less traveled. “Stop thinking and relax”. Be still.  Relax down into your bones, because without that deep relaxation one is not able to receive, not what is “out there” nor the images and guidance we all have available from within. ~ Exhale, relax, let go ~ that is a good start for all things.”         ~essay on Jung

―The Two-Sided Man ―a poem included in Kim summarizes the ambivalence and the co-equal admiration for God and Allah found in Kipling’s writing.  In the Greek it is Janus.  All of this now has developed into a penchant for the modality of ‘ambiguity’ in religion, philosophy and psychology.  It is the ‘point of battle’ pointed out by St. Paul.

The true battle is within.  St. Catherine of Siena and many saints lived and wrote of the spiritual combats.  Recognition does not justify rebellion and license.

If one reads of the experiences of St. Padre Pio or St. Faustina one soon sees the spiritual aspects in Creation.  Suffering souls in Purgatory have appeared to many believers to seek their aid in being released from unresolved sin issues. Jung rightly maintains that it is our responsibility to seek to obtain mercy for those who ask it. Within every cell of our body we ‘belong’ to the generations of the past which we pass on to every generation of the future.  It is the ‘garment’ we are given at Conception.  It is a sacred trust.

God is the Father of all the families of the earth it states in Scripture.

It is not only ‘in the land of the ancient ones’ but within our own immediate families that we encounter profound spiritual battles. The dark shadows assail our children whether we are religious or not.  R.D. Laing’s children reflect these torments well.  He was rarely at peace tormented with addictions from which he never freed himself.

 “ He was a pioneering psychiatrist who blamed parents for the psychological problems of their offspring. But as a father, RD Laing was depressed, alcoholic and often cruel. What would he have made of the latest tragedy to hit his own family - the death ...of his son, Adam?

... Before speaking, Adrian Laing takes a small, precise sip of his cappuccino and carefully wipes away the specks of froth from his top lip. 'When people ask me what it was like to be RD Laing's son,' he says, 'I tell them it was a crock of shit.' He laughs, shaking his head.
The question of what it was like to be the child of one of the 20th century's most influential psychotherapists has been playing on Adrian's mind of late. 'It was ironic that my father became well-known as a family psychiatrist,' he says, 'when, in the meantime, he had nothing to do with his own family.'

His background left Laing with an abiding antipathy towards the nuclear family. By the time of his death he had fathered six sons and four daughters with four women over a period of 36 years.

... Laing would disappear for months on end, forgetting birthdays before turning up in a blizzard of misdirected anger. In a 1994 biography he wrote of his father, Adrian recounts one of Laing's rare visits to their new home in Glasgow when, having argued with Jutta, he took out his anger by beating his daughter, Karen.
The Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz puts it a different way. Laing, he wrote in 2004, displayed 'an avoidance of responsibility for his first family, indefensible since his line had been that the breakdown of children could be attributed to parents and families.'

'Dad solved other people's problems - but not his own'  ~Laing’s daughter

~Elizabeth Day and Graham Keeley.  The Observer, 31 May 2008 Guardian UK

Back then, the dark side of the human heart took over most of Europe.  In the name of racial purity and absolute power, it turned hatred and violence into hungry gods eager for blood and death.  The Nazis changed the world forever, but as hard as they tried to stamp out Jewish life, they couldn’t.  ~Elie Wiesel

The Dark Side of Each Human Heart Still Exists

    More seriously still, our intergenerational workshops have revealed to us

graphically that children’s minds can be unwittingly imprinted by the Holocaust

experiences of prior generations. Such transmission is one of the most vexing aspects of

the Holocaust. Isn’t it bad enough for survivors to have been traumatized? Must they also

be unwilling vehicles for trauma to their offspring? But then trauma is not just; and its

unfairness is universal.

Transgenerational Trauma

    The unprecedented horrors of the vast demonic evil of the Holocaust, the Shoa, which clearly the demonstrated the evils residing in the heart of each person have brought to the surface the need for not only recognition of our own fragmented selves but its medusa-like nature in projection onto the many scapegoats in our families and society.  That each of our children do bear our unconscious evils is well known.  Unfortunately the dark heritage is too often required—like father like son...

“... The younger the child, the more vulnerable it is…They imbibe and respond to their parents’ physiological and behavioural responses and both become imprinted in the developing brain and its connections.

Between 3 and 7, language and thinking develop, but are not cohesive.

.. Children’s own physiologies, sensations, feelings, behaviours and attitudes alternate between imbibing and rebelling against parents’ over-silent or over-loud responses. In either case they are drawn into their parents’ traumas, and are secondarily traumatized by them.

They experience double trouble: not only are they required to adjust to their

parents’ alternating physiological circuits, emotions, behaviors and attitudes, but they

must cope with their own automatic survival responses to their parents. They may not

understand either. Their own stories may be in untellable fragments.

And as happened with their parents, when thought glimmers beyond automatic

reactions in these children of survivors, they may feel guilt; for having brought on their

parents’ suffering, not having rescued their parents from their troubles, not enlivened

them sufficiently; not remembered or not forgotten the Holocaust enough, in accordance

with conflicting parental demands...”

Only God can provide the avenues of healing.

“...when people have unresolved, unhealed trauma, they often pass on their fears and anxiety, unconsciously, to their children and it's not unusual, under these circumstances to see transgenerational trauma...

"Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History"  ~Cathy Caruth

Caruth offers a framework for understanding history that is not based on linear empiricism, but on observation of delayed responses and "other intrusive phenomena". Through this observation, we can begin to fill in the gaps left behind in the wake of trauma, to better understand the trauma's place and its implications, and to orient the history around it, the same way we understand the nature of a trauma by observing the manifestations of the effects of the trauma on the victim, what triggers it, what hallucinations are suffered by victims. If the victim cannot cognitively grasp at the traumatic event himself, the event can still be understood peripherally.

... Michael Bernard-Donals writes in the case traumatic memories, that "testimony marks the absence of events, since they did not register on, let alone become integrated into, the victims' consciousness." So testimony is not about the history of the event, so much as it is about the effect of the event on the victim. Setting this within the framework Caruth has laid out, testimony is about the act of departure, of walking away, and what happens when one manages to walk away, what one can recover after walking away. Furthermore, testimony is an act of asking recognition for the fact that the testifier has managed to walk away, and acknowledgement of what it is they walked away from.
‘Delayed Manifestations”

God reminds us: ‘Their blood cries out from the earth...”

In the delayed manifestation of the generational mystery, we and they are paying for what has been done.  We pay for our own sins but justice requires reparation to the community that has been harmed by the evil.  From the beginning it is required of each person to ‘make things right’.  Serious wounding of a soul must be atoned and set right within society for ‘No man is an island.’  If the contagion were TB or any other disease the transmission would be understood with a society’s communal understanding, research, treatment methods and healing arts with ‘healing’ places.  This same philosophy and belief must be incorporated to include dealing with soul and psychological wounds and diseases.

...” Here is where the limits of psychoanalysis are revealed: even as it tries to get to the origins, it doesn't offer us a solution for the now. What are the measures to take in dealing with these manifestations? Can we, in effect, perform a kind of damage control? ‘

Yes.  Christ’s shed blood ‘atones’ for every sin of every person but we must accept it, come to understand it, and then help wash the feet of our brethren and serve them in shouldering the cross they carry.

Order from Confusion Sprung

     If you love ... you will perceive the divine mystery in things, and once perceived, you will begin to comprehend it ceaselessly.     ~Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

   The mirror which confronts us every morn…humbling ourselves to admit that ‘a struggle’ is taking place at all…~Eve Tushnet

Excerpt from The Kingdom of God by Jessica Powers
Not toward the stars, O beautiful naked runner,
not on the hills of the moon after a wild white deer,
seek not to discover afar the unspeakable wisdom,-
the quarry is here…

“What does it mean, ‘to remember’?  …It is to live in more than one world...~Elie Wiesel

---------------------
Dark lightning’s electric shock, l’malheur,

Je n'ai plus qu'un seul cri du cœur :

"J'aime pas l'malheur ! J'aime pas l'malheur !"

Laying bare Tree’s twisted roots, O Seigneur!

Ab los que tenan pura devocio, O Devot Christ,

entends ma voix qui t'appelle, sorrow’s tryst,

Nail-bruised, betrayal’s comely fist.

Le cri d'un aigle blessé, l'annonce de Baptiste!  ~3/1/11

Suko's Notebook: New Feature! A Guest Post by Madeline Sharples

Suko's Notebook: New Feature! A Guest Post by Madeline Sharples
Excerpt:

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." ~The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Today I'm thrilled to begin a brand new feature on Suko's Notebook, original guest posts by writers.  Author, poet, and web journalist Madeline Sharples has written an exclusive guest post for my readers.  Her new book, published in 2011, Leaving the Hall Light On: A Mother's Memoir of Living with Her Son's Bipolar Disorder and Surviving His Suicide, is a book I expect to find both affecting and insightful ....

Healing and the 'Ground of Being'

Dynamics

...“the fault … lies not in our stars, but in ourselves” (Julius Caesar, I, ii) in favor of that proto-narcissist Lear’s protestation that we are “more sinned against than sinning” (King Lear, III, ii). “

This conglomerate bipolar view suggests no more than two points at opposite ends of a long pole.  While some would construe a both/and position with a blatantly trite rendition of ‘ambiguity’ the actualities ARE different faces of the same coin.  Additionally these are not STATIC entities but are dynamics-in-flux.  It is also incumbent on us to realize there is a psychological continuum involved in the dynamics.  Just as our bodies constantly change so do our souls and psyches.

=================

  ...a fundamental primal corruption...

... “syndrome of the compromise of integrity”...    ~Self in Exile

   “ They asked Him: Who sinned this man or his parents?....”

=================

‘The Cart before the Horse’

I was reading about this issue when I ran across an essay:

    “Winnicott’s multi-faceted thinking that stresses “egorelatedness” and the self psychology that is so congruent with this) tended to downplay intrapsychic conflict among superego, ego and id in favor of an emphasis upon trauma, deprivation, abuse and neglect by caretakers—i.e., the ways in which we are more injured than injurious.

But the Freudian and Kleinian approaches that focused on such interior conflict, on issues of “crime and punishment,” have in some quarters been marginalized over the past thirty years or so. As Horowitz (2004) has recently reminded us: “… all patients (and each of us) have had private theories of pathogenesis of neurosis and for the most part these theories have been about trauma at the hands of parents. It is still difficult to demonstrate to patients or students the

role of conflict in neurosogenesis” (p. 2).

A major contributor to the de-moralizing trend in post-Freudian and post-Kleinian

psychoanalysis is Harry Guntrip. The guilt-evasion that characterizes certain trends within contemporary psychoanalytic thought and the contemporary culture to which they have adapted mirrors that of Guntrip himself who, despite his background as a Christian minister and his years of analysis with two of the most creative analysts in the field, managed by the end (in my hypothesis) only a paranoid understanding of himself as a victim of a murderous mother, rather than a man crippled by a need to punish himself for his disowned murderous wishes toward a brother who died and toward the mother he hated and blamed. [3]

In focusing upon the roots of the “schizoid problem” (Guntrip, 1971, chapter 6) or the “disordered self” (Kohut, 1977) in defective early object relations Guntrip obscures entirely the role of guilt and the need for punishment in these conditions

and promotes a cure based on reparative re-parenting rather than analysis and resolution of inner conflict.[4]

I expect it has always been difficult to consciously bear guilt and not evade it by attacking either the other or the self. In the former case, guilt is displaced or projected onto the scapegoat. In the latter, since our narcissism renders conscious moral suffering intolerable, the superego exacts its pound of flesh

through unconsciously constructed forms of self-torment.

A few months after his death, Guntrip’s (1975) “My experience of analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott” appeared in the International Review of Psycho-Analysis. He describes how he sought analysis for “vague background experiences of schizoid isolation and unreality” (Guntrip, 1996, p.743) and a recurrent “exhaustion illness.” In the 19th century this would likely have been diagnosed as “neurasthenia”; today it might be seen as “chronic fatigue syndrome” or a type of depression. Guntrip sought analysis to overcome his amnesia for what he had decided was the traumatic cause of his illness. [5]

I fell mysteriously ill and was thought to be dying. Her doctor said: ‘He’s dying of grief for his brother’” (p. 746).

For the next year and a half, Guntrip suffered from “repeated petty psychosomatic ills, tummy aches, heat spots, loss of appetite, constipation and dramatic, sudden high temperatures” (p. 747)... my hypothesis is that they represent forms of hysterical and psychosomatic self- torment for the phantasy-crime of having killed his brother. Around age five Guntrip replaced self-directed aggression with outright rebellion... Guntrip’s internal world of sado-masochistic struggles with his mother...”  ~ Donald L. Carveth, Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis

==============

This is all true, relevant and efficacious.  What concerns me is the primary, foundational need for a ‘beyond the descriptions’ view and a more profound knowledge and use of the guilt-punishment scenarios.  Additionally, the word petty could have been avoided.  A five year old cannot be harnessed with the same ‘responsibilities’ of an adult.  I have not experienced the needed ‘embracing’ of the fact that the ‘exiled, disordered, tortured’ self’s actual ‘ground of being’, the psyche, is fractured and damaged.

The self of the person continues to experience everything with the same matrix-mesh constructed from the beginnings of its life. There has to be dynamic cocoon-holding for the psychic structure in crisis to enable a safe healing ‘change-growth-dynamic’ to occur.

I am certain there are mental health and ‘spiritual’ professionals who have instinctively understood this and just do what is needed ‘to care for the hurting person’ and to lead them as much as possible back to health without all the ‘agendas’. In the different cities and states where I have resided this is not the norm.

Simply put if someone has a sword lodged in one’s chest doctor’s and nurses spring rapidly into action to save the person’s life.  All the ramifications of choice are irrelevant to the healing dynamics of the team whose goal is the same. 

I am troubled by an almost impervious disregard for the psychologically troubled person in the throes of crisis.  Assessments and judgments just don’t work because the foundational being structure CANNOT be judged and punished without further hurting.  One cannot be expected to ‘walk or run’ without legs.

Many use sublimation, adjustments and often stoic determination, to allow for some success in living and working in the world with a minimum of discomfort or crisis.

It is when the psychic foundations are no longer strong enough to sublimate or adjust or psychological boundaries are insufficient that a safe, healing place along with a competent, empathetic and caring therapist are necessary.  In an age of rampant disregard of ‘ethical and quality assurance’ in all fields, these ‘safe’ healing places are few and far between.  Even these are not only pummeled by attacks of ignorance from outside the mental health realms but more and more from within.  In both cases the bottom line seems to be a false community ‘prestige’ to be maintained along with insurance costs.

There can never be a one-size-fits-all diagnosis for human souls traumatized and neglected to the point where damage has occurred and psychological bones ‘reset’ in order to survive. Daily life is struggle enough for everyone but for those in terrible crisis whose struggle is with their own inner emotional and psychological ‘ground of being’ every moment is a war zone filled with pain and suffering.  It is not ‘inner demons’ those in crisis are dealing with but how the psychological-emotional being was put together to begin with.

Therapy involves breaking the ‘bones’ of being true but great tenderness and discernment is critical to avoid ‘killing’ the soul.  “Conviction is never condemnation.”  Those people who actually sustained the drive through the invisible mine fields of a hostile society to reach out for help in therapy are in desperate need of freedom from the damage of the stigmatization of self-righteousness and mob violence from those around them.

After a car accident a victim faces hospitalization with terrible pain often followed by even more pain in physical therapy.  This is true of those with mental illness.  They have been victimized, wounded and are handicapped in certain areas of human interaction.  There is no place for stigmatizing rash judgments in any sphere but most especially for the wounded of the ‘invisible war.’  Not only is therapy needed but a ‘safe’ support group is absolutely necessary.

Each person is unique.  Each meeting too is unique and must be cherished.  At best we can only brush against the beings of those with whom we have to do in this life.  It is hoped that especially as Christians or as moral human beings that all our ‘meetings’ with others can occur with humble respect, loving harmony, unbiased freedom and peaceful caring.  It is vital when caring for those whose inner being is painfully wounded no matter what the initial cause.

       In a life-or-death struggle, there is often no chance to "try again."

My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints

Review [Amazon] of Dawn Eden's book: by Margaret M. Myers
"As a Catholic adult who was sexually abused as a child, I pre-ordered "My Peace I Give You", waiting eagerly to receive it. To say I was NOT disappointed would be an understatement. If you are a Catholic who was sexually abused as a child, this book is for you. Even if you were not, if you have suffered from other abuse or neglect...indeed, whatever you suffer, there is much that you, too, can learn from this book. And if you are close to someone who was sexually abused as a child, it will give you a greater understanding.

It took me nearly fifty years to understand that my having been sexually abused as a child affected me in more ways than one. Dawn Eden explains, offering both affirmation and hope. She speaks of one man suffering also from his "family's failure to provide him with protection"...and she speaks of our need as children for belonging and identity...and of "the lonely sense of isolation that is the result of having one's self-image disfigured by abuse".

Dawn applies her knowledge of theology and the lives of the saints to the suffering we have in our own lives in ways that I hadn't understood in my forty plus years of being a committed Catholic. Even though I already knew many of the saints whose stories she included, she presented them with fresh clarity and insight.

Dawn does not minimize either our past suffering or the effects of past abuse, as she shares her story and the stories of saints with delicacy and compassion. Yet, at the same time, she shows us God's great love and how he heals us THROUGH our wounds.

My emotions in reading this book were relief in understanding more clearly, and overall, a sense of hope and joy."

Abbey-Roads: The healing of sexual wounds.

Abbey-Roads: The healing of sexual wounds.

First Known When Lost: Perspective, Part Three: "Our Windows, Too, Are Clouded Glass"

First Known When Lost: Perspective, Part Three: "Our Windows, Too, Are Clouded Glass"
Excerpt:
We live in a world of shameless self-promotion, overweening egotism, and dubious, spurious, and/or ill-gotten "accomplishments."  What evidence supports this assertion?  Any head-of-state that you can name.  And any "celebrity" that you can name.

Of course, this has always been the way of the world...Never in a million years would it occur to them that Charlotte Mew is trying to tell us something about ourselves, something that we ignore at peril to our souls.
...Theirs is the house whose windows -- every pane --
     Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:
...None but ourselves in our long gallery we meet,
     The moor-hen stepping from her reeds with dainty feet,
          The hare-bell bowing on his stem,
Dance not with us; their pulses beat
     To fainter music; nor do we to them
               Make their life sweet.
...

Pentimento: despair

Pentimento: despair
Excerpt:

A Prayer for Anyone Inclined to Despair

Lord, I am in this world to show Your mercy to others.
Other people will glorify You
by making visible the power of Your grace
by their fidelity and constancy to You.
For my part I will glorify You
by making known how good You are to sinners,
that Your mercy is boundless
and that no sinner no matter how great his offences
should have reason to despair of pardon.
If I have grievously offended You, My Redeemer,
let me not offend You even more
by thinking that You are not kind enough to pardon Me.

Amen.
..................

We Are One: Fuzzy brain

We Are One: Fuzzy brain
Excerpt:
"What's a Wrackspurt?" - Ginny

"They're invisible creatures. They float in your ears and make your brain go fuzzy." - Luna Lovegood

Clearing out brain fuzz today.  Part of the problem was lack of sleep, I took a long nap.  Part of it is calming down from how I felt this morning.  Before integration, I could switch off emotions.   Switching off more and more frequently until 'Wrackspurts' took up permanent residence.  Depression, fuzziness, switched off, all descriptions of how I kept how I felt under wraps.  I am calm tonight.  All day, I thought about how could I possibly make a difference.  Taking a whack at it I feel like a pigmy attacking a tank, puny and useless.  I checked my iGoogle quotes and checked out what was waiting for me tonight:   [Ruth]

"Never worry about numbers.
Help one person at a time,
and always start with
the person nearest you."
- Mother Teresa

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Momentary Beauty is Attendant'

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Momentary Beauty is Attendant'
Excerpt:
Poetry has been euthanized by its practitioners, with assistance from critics, professors and readers, and few have the will to point out the stinking corpse.

“If they do so inquire, that will be a very good thing—and for two reasons. It will mean, of course, that poetry has survived the complicated (not to say sophisticated) nihilism and materialistic hedonism of our literary and artistic culture during the last century, despite all the odds. Furthermore, it will be in that light that [Helen] Pinkerton’s work shows to its best advantage. Too quiet and rational to attract the attention of the loquacious emotivists crowned evanescent monarchs in our media age, Pinkerton’s work holds up well in a higher standard of judgment with a longer historical sense. She compares well with John Donne and George Herbert, while between her work and that of the likes of Lynn Hejinian, David Antin, John Ashbery, or Mebdh McGuckian there is no intelligible comparison at all.”

-----------------------------------------------

Insert from The Book Haven:

Winters described Pinkerton’s poetry as “profoundly philosophical and religious,” and she discusses how  Ben Jonson scholar William Dinsmore Briggs led her in that direction, though she never met him – his teaching on medieval and Renaissance learning “permeated” the work of (Yvor)Winters and Cunningham, she said.  Helen became preoccupied with the Thomistic notion of esse, and sees “nothingness” as the primary temptation of humankind.  Hence, her poem, “Good Friday” (included in her book Taken in Faith), which claims:
Nothingness is our need:
Insatiable the guilt
For which in thought and deed
We break what we have built.
But more than temptation – it is delusion.  “The chief aspect of the drive is the metaphysical assertion that nothingness is the real reality – that there is no real being.”
She links this drive with the thinking of the 19th and 20th century, particularly romanticism, which she sees as a drive toward annihilation.  “Real love is the love of being. Eros is the love of non-being”:


I found my way out of it by grasping the Thomistic idea of God as self-existent being. There is no nothingness in reality. It is a kind of figment of the imagination. To believe that there is is a verbal trick – a snare and a delusion. Much of modern philosophy (Hegel, the Existentialists, et al.) are caught up in this delusive state of consciousness.
I do scorn and critique (always) “romantic religion” – or the religion of eros … as I call it – and I did see in others, as well as in myself – a pervasive “unavowed guilt” in our culture – based on an unavowed longing for “nothingness.” This is a kind of obsession of mine in my early thinking (and consequently in my poems) after I came to a realization of the nature of my consciousness. What was driving me to be dissatisfied with everything and everyone, including myself, was this “eros,” this craving for extremes of feeling, for a kind of perfection in things and in others.
Patrick Kurp has written some lovely stuff about Helen at Anecdotal Evidence – here, and here, and here … oh, just type “Pinkerton” into his search engine.  There’s lots.  I’m proud to have introduced them.
...

“She has written some of the best poems of her generation,” says poet and scholar Timothy Steele, ’70. Pinkerton’s mentor, Yvor Winters, deemed her “a master of poetic style and of her material. No poet in English writes with more authority.” 
...

Pinkerton is passionate and, she fears, controversial as she decries today’s “breakdown in the notion of what a poem can be.” She deplores the tendency to call any kind of lineated self-expression a poem.
“I think the kids today aren’t learning the art of poetry. They’re told that everybody can be a poet,” she says. “Not everybody is capable of being a poet —just like everybody isn’t capable of being a fine ballet dancer or a fine pianist.”
...


Pinkerton was born in Butte, Mont. Her father was a copper miner; her mother had been raised in an orphanage—“or whatever is the politically correct term nowadays,” she qualifies. When Pinkerton was 11, her father was killed in a mining accident, leaving her mother to rear four children, including two teenage boys and a 6-year-old girl. The death created a decade-long crisis of faith for Pinkerton, whose parents were Catholics. Perhaps this is one reason faith is a running theme of her poems. She describes her central concerns as Thomistic—focused on St. Thomas Aquinas’s “questions of being and existence.”
Pinkerton came to Stanford determined to be a journalist, after working a two-year after-school stint for a Mt. Vernon, Wash., weekly paper, as well as editing her high school newspaper and yearbook. Her colleagues at the Stanford Daily raved about Winters and encouraged her to take a class with the outspoken maestro.
Meeting Winters turned her aspirations upside-down. “I discovered a whole new world, which was the serious writing of poetry,” she says. She decided she’d rather be a mediocre poet than a first-rate journalist. For Pinkerton, poetry “was a better thing to do—it was more interesting and more valuable. It was a funny choice to make, I must say,” she adds wryly.

 

~Cynthia Haven
-----------------------

 

The Media

Neglected Poets: C. H. Sisson

Even though he worked in government until the age of 58, C. H. Sisson (1914-2003) wrote a prodigious amount of poetry (both his own and translations) and prose.
Excerpt: The Media

1
The world is fabricated by
A gang of entertainers who
Have replaced God Almighty.

The universe, made in six days,
Is re-made every day by those
Who hear all that the newsman says,
For whom fact is replaced by gloze.

2
The air is full of noise,
The screen of caper:
Reality enjoys
No inch of paper.

The most expensive lies
Flourish in every home:
Great gulps of froth and foam
Win the first prize.

Go to the quiet wood
To hear the beating heart:
Leaf fall and breaking bud
Will play their part.

And so the truth is out
Which only quiet tells,
And as it does, its voice
Sounds like a peal of bells.

Dance of the Macbre Mice

"Dance Of The Macabre Mice"

I do my best to keep politicians out of my consciousness.  The admixture of self-importance and childishness is laughable and breathtaking, but vexing.  (Particularly in heads of state.)   However, you cannot avoid them entirely.  The best that you can do is keep them in perspective and in their place.  As follows.

               Dance of the Macabre Mice

In the land of turkeys in turkey weather
At the base of the statue, we go round and round.
What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise!
Monsieur is on horseback.  The horse is covered with mice.

This dance has no name.  It is a hungry dance.
We dance it out to the tip of Monsieur's sword,
Reading the lordly language of the inscription,
Which is like zithers and tambourines combined:

The Founder of the State.  Whoever founded
A state that was free, in the dead of winter, from mice?
What a beautiful tableau tinted and towering,
The arm of bronze outstretched against all evil!

Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936).

                         Eliot Hodgkin, "Chiswick Park in the Fog" (1948)

National Grandparents Day - Preserving Precious Memories Introduction

National Grandparents Day - Preserving Precious Memories Introduction

Anecdotal Evidence: `Down Mexico Way'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Down Mexico Way'
Excerpt:   [Who knew we were supposed to take these things 'seriously'!]
In Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry (Oxford University Press, 2007), Holly George-Warren writes: 

“South of the Border, like Rovin’ Tumbleweeds directed by George Sherman, has a topical plot. As incognito federal agents, Gene and Smiley uncover a scheme to capture Mexican oil fields by foreign spies manning a secret submarine base. Just like the song that inspired it, the film comes to a tragic end when Gene’s love interest Delores (Lupita Tovar), sister of the revolutionary aiding the spies (Duncan Renaldo), joins a convent.”

Abbey-Roads: So priests in the United States are persecuted, you say?

Abbey-Roads: So priests in the United States are persecuted, you say?
Excerpt:
[Look familiar to anyone else?]

Soviet gulag - Obviously the "Smoking-section."

 A sense of urgency might be a better term.

Certainly religious freedom is threatened.  Certainly there are isolated incidents, such as the family in Vermont I believe, who were fined for not hosting a gay wedding reception?  Or was it just that they wouldn't rent their facilities to a lesbian couple?  I can't recall the details.  Gay people are litigious, what can I say - and it's a political tactic these days.  No doubt these things will increase - but we are not at the stage of the Spanish Civil War atrocities - yet.  Nor are our kids being kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam as they are in Pakistan.  Neither are our churches burned to the ground as in Nigeria.  There is real, bloody persecution elsewhere in the world - in the United States religious people are pretty much disliked, but tolerated. 

That said, even if these limitations to religious freedom take place and accelerate, and even if priests and religious and bishops and lay Catholics are rounded up and carted off to prison camps - even if that happens - and it hasn't yet - what are we to do?  How are we to act?...
[However, a lot of Jewish families waited until 'too late'.  Of course, back then, there might have been another 'place' to flee from the new 'violent outbreaks'...Unlike now...]

Returning to by Natalia Solzhenitsyn - The New Criterion

Returning to by Natalia Solzhenitsyn - The New Criterion
Excerpt:
Excerpt from the introduction to the newly-abridged Russian version of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...

First Known When Lost: "A Continual Farewell"

First Known When Lost: "A Continual Farewell"
Excerpt:
Edward Thomas's poetry is nothing if not elegiac.  Take, for instance, the title of this blog, which I owe (with gratitude) to Thomas:  "First Known When Lost" is the title of a poem written by him in February of 1915.

An elegy is a lament for what has been lost.  It is written out of love, with an intent to honor and memorialize that which is loved.  To have an elegiac view of the world may involve mourning, but it is a mourning intertwined with love and a desire to preserve.

W. B. Yeats's poem "Ephemera" comes to mind.  Although "Ephemera" is about a doomed romantic relationship, I like to think that its final two lines have a broader scope:

Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.

W. B. Yeats, Crossways (1889).
Read on....