transparent eyeballs

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This is a response to remarks after my last post by my friend, Curtis Beaird. I thought I’d put them here rather than in a comments box.

Hi, Curtis. I should start out by saying that I’m after talking about what I take to be one kind of religious experience. I make no reference to experiences that involve seizures or glossolalia, or other kinds of transport whose subjects usually cannot remember afterwards.

As you know the Rilke poem to which I refer ends with the statement: Du mußt dein Leben ändern, usually translated “You must change your life.” I wrote a poem once that attempted to respond to that statement. It’s here. Most biblical archetypes to which I can refer religious experiences (this one and others) are theophanies, not hierophanies, I think. Jacob wrestling with the angel may be an exception, but the account of that event in Genesis is not undisplaced, as Jacob gets his new name.

I’m after describing religious experiences in as undisplaced a manner as I can, which I take to require a recounting of the experience as it occurred in time with as little reference to a body of archetypes as I can get by with, not that I couldn’t make archetypal references and not that it wouldn’t be fun to do so. But I think it’s part of the nature of religious experiences that they are not repeatable or recallable. They become timeless in memory, and for each one the hierophany that is it’s objective correlative becomes the means of calling up its memory only, not the thing itself. I think this is what Wordsworth and Coleridge meant by “emotion recollected in tranquility,” but I think Wordsworth was mistaken in thinking that contemplation of the recollection of emotion would generate “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Coleridge agreed, I believe, and that is what “Kubla Kahn” is about, among other things.

What I’m after is something like Romain Rolland’s oceanic feeling, for which a host of others, Freud and Jung, for instance, have supplied glosses. I agree with Rolland that experiencing this “feeling” marks one as a religious person, and that one need not tie the experience to any archetypal establishment (or that if one does it is perfectly reasonable to consider that the tie is a matter of convenience and not necessity). And I’m not talking about a feeling, either, or a sense of being bonded to the external world, or some such. It’s quite different from that. For me, Rilke’s image: . . . denn da ist keine Stelle,/die dich nicht sieht, “so that there is no place that doesn’t see you,” gets at it better than any other because it leaves the subject free.

And that’s the lightness, that freedom, a kind of Nietzschean lightness that need not be trivial or immoral as Kundera takes it to be. And there is always the feather. Emerson, when he felt himself become ‘as a transparent eyeball,’ didn’t forget that he was ‘crossing a bare common,’ and I didn’t forget to buy my book, either.

Ein tag im Jahr . . .

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Here’s a memory from my time in North Carolina. I associate it in my mind’s imaginary with All Souls’ Day, Allerseelen in German: the title of a song I used to sing. That time when the year starts to sink from late autumn into winter and we recall the names and ways and times of absent friends and loved ones. We recall the feel of them, too, and the feel of the world with them in it, as figured in my memory by the song of the French horn in the last of Richard Straus’s Last Songs. A time of last things in that sense, before Advent arrives with its heavy script.

I was on my way home from a two-day meeting at the Quail Roost Conference Center about this time of year, I think, in 1975. My way took me through Chapel Hill, which then still had a little of the village about it. On impulse I decided to stop at The Intimate Bookshop on Franklin Street. By then I had better than ten years’ experience of the place, known by those of us who loved it as “The Intimate.” I went there whenever I could, sometimes looking for something specific, sometimes to browse, sometimes just to soak up the atmosphere.

It was about five o’clock when I walked in. The day outside just gone to twilight, warming to a muted sunset that sat folded like a well-worn rug on the horizon. As I entered, the chill outside gave way to a wonderfully shabby interior of wooden floors and jerry-built bookshelves, stairs that creaked as someone walked up to the mezzanine. Like many another college-town bookshop, The Intimate did a big textbook business, supplying UNC and Duke students, but also dealt in trade books. I looked about me to see what was new since I had last been in.

On a table in front of me was a stack of newsprint catalogs form Marboro’s in New York, a scattering of remaindered art books, and a few copies of T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, the edition with the pink cover. I picked up the top copy because I didn’t own it and thought I’d buy it to add to my small but growing collection of non graduate school books. As I opened it my eye fell upon “A Song for Simeon,” a poem I didn’t know well then, my education to that point having focused my attention on Eliot’s earlier work, particularly “The Wasteland.” I read the opening lines:

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.

In autumn 1975 I was barely thirty-eight. That Eliot poem in that setting gave me an intimation of mortality that was new. But the surprising thing was that no chill emanated from it. The moment was in feeling altogether welcome and welcoming. I had been given a brief but direct experience of passing divinity, of standing where there is no place that doesn’t see you, as Rilke put it, in which life and death fall away and there is only the real thing left, just now, just for now. My heart burned within me as surely as John Wesley’s had at Aldersgate.

But my experience carried with it no conviction of salvation. Such a thing was as remote from my mind as yesterday’s news. I have experienced other hierophanies. Each has left its print. As I drove home in the early darkness of that long ago November day with my newly acquired Collected Poems wrapped tight in a paper sack on the seat beside me, I carried with me a new and as yet wordless apprehension of the fragility and wonder of the world

—and it was well.

Adam’s Curse

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We’re just back from a long weekend in Chicago that we mostly spent going to museums. But we had a few interesting and pleasant encounters with fellow travelers as well. Here’s one.

We stay at the Essex on Michigan Avenue since we discovered it a few years ago when we had waited too long to get into the Hilton across the street for the annual meeting of the National Communication Association. It’s a nice simple hotel, friendly to commercial travelers and vacationers alike. One pays a bit of a premium for its location on the south loop, but not as much as one pays for grander digs at the Hilton or the Blackstone.

On the afternoon of our arrival we took a walk along the edge of Grant Park and as we returned to the hotel fell in with an extended family group who seemed to be waiting for the hotel shuttle. At their center was a cluster of children of various ages, including a small boy who had attracted the attention of one of the women in the group. They seemed to be talking about the fact that the boy played the fiddle.

I would have guessed his age at about nine, old enough to speak up for himself but young enough still that he hadn’t yet passed that age when little boys sometimes turn into hellions. His aunt, as I guessed her to be, was saying to him that he could play his fiddle on the street in front of the hotel and make himself some money whilst they were there. His reply to her was that he might do it and then spend all the money he made buying video games.

We chuckled at the exchange, nodded to the grownups in the group as we walked by, and didn’t think about it again until the next morning. We had eaten breakfast in the little Brasserie that opens off the hotel lobby and were settling down to wait for another shuttle to take us to the Art Institute when we spied the small boy sitting in a chair just outside the hotel entrance playing a three quarter size cello with his instrument case open in front of him.

I walked outside to listen, and instead of the squawing I expected heard the surpassingly beautiful strains of a portion of of one of the Bach unaccompanied cello suites. I stood close by and listened to the boy’s playing for a bit then took some bills out of my pocket and put them in his instrument case, noticing as I did that he had already collected quite a reasonable fee. He thanked me politely without breaking his stride, and then I noticed two adults sitting on a concrete tree surround not far away and walked over to them.

“Is he your son?” I asked. The mother beamed and said he was. She then told me that he was eight years old and had been studying the cello since he was four. I speculated that with that beginning he might very well become a professional musician. The mother demurred a bit, saying that careers in classical music are hard. I mentioned young friends of mine who play in symphony orchestras by way of saying that such careers are still possible. Both parents smiled in a way that said to me how proud they were of this little boy, bravely playing his “fiddle” on the street and planning to spend all the money he made on video games.

As we talked on, they allowed as how the adventure had been his idea and that they had been against it at first but had given in because he had seemed very enthusiastic. What struck me, aside from his impeccable and beautiful playing, was the little boy’s confidence. And watching them all together I thought what a fine thing it was that there are still such little boys and such parents in the world, parents willing to nourish a child’s talent without regard for whether it might ever make him any money, parents who understood the preciousness of his gift.

For he had already learned a very important thing about who he was and what he was for. His music was already imbedded in his being; he tossed it off as though it were a slight thing, though of course his abillity to do so bespoke hours of toil and practice. I thought of Yeats’s wonderful poem:

. . . . . . . . ‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.’

I did not ask his name. It was blessing enough to have encountered him and his parents anonymously. The memory of his playing now resides in my mind among other archtypes that speak of the love of life and find me still rejoicing in the worth of the world.

one more thing

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In an introduction at Facebook for my last blog post I wrote as follows:

A few years ago at a public forum I listened apprehensively as the owner of a large St. Louis business defended the attacks on pensions that are going on presently in the public and private sectors. “Why should today’s managers have to abide by contracts with workers that were made over twenty-five years ago?” he asked. I might put the question differently, at least with respect to public workers: “Why should todays managers, having systematically and illegally underfunded public pension obligations for years (and perhaps lost workers’ contributions by bad management and high-risk investment strategies) be allowed an escape hatch?” But my argument and others like it have largely fallen on deaf ears for the past thirty-plus years. Now we’re seeing the consequence of this unconscionable public irresponsibility in Detroit, complete with the connivance of the Obama administration.

But I spoke too soon, at least in one respect. Underfunding pensions for public workers has not been illegal since 1974. In a piece that appeared in Rolling Stone a few weeks back, Matt Taibbi has presented a substantial and well-documented analysis of the financial crisis we seem to be in as a nation, that honors the perspective of those of us who worry that benefits we worked for years to obtain may disappear because of the machinations of “huckster financiers.”