November 1, 2006
The Bird Sings. Its Feathers Shine.
November 1, 2006
When I was in junior high school I checked out a book from the school library about a minister who was struggling with his religious faith, his role as a leader in the community and his notions of death and the afterlife. It was a particularly prodigious book it seems to me now, in retrospect, to have been found in a children’s library. But I had been reading more conventional boys adventure stories and this seemed to me to be just another one—a spiritual adventure set in contemporary times but with heroic Biblical themes I was already familiar with from Sunday School. After reading that book I decided that when I grew up I wanted to be a minister, myself, struggling with religious doubt and questions of death and eternal life rather than enemy armies, or crocodiles or storms at sea. Other boys my age were fantasizing careers as professional athletes, soldiers and sailors or even latter day cowboys. But I wanted to wear a clerical collar rather than a bandana and do battle with Satan himself.
The intimate diary entries I publish here below for this issue of the New Hope Journal are from some dark days in July of this summer. They are behind me now but the issues they deal with are always on my mind. It seems the themes of my youth have changed very little in 50 years. I’ve read a few more books and my body is clearly in decline now. But on balance I’m still talking about faith and reason and fretting about my morality and my mortality. I just don’t wear a collar or give Sunday services for the faithful, or even attend them as a mere member of the fold. But as Freud said, “Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation, is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate.”
Twenty years ago I wrote a poem called “The Pain of nearly Knowing,” which may be found in the Poetry section of the Index to this website under “Four Poems about God (sort of).” That poem remains to date the most concise coda I have yet written for a life long struggle with what Wallace Stevens (in the poem I’ve included below) calls “Mere Being.”
A new book by Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion,” is reviewed in this month’s Harper’s Magazine by Marilynne Robinson, T.S. Eliot’s apparent heir to the throne of Literary Defender of Religious Faith. Her review is a peevish exercise in medieval scholasticism, ironically titled, “Hysterical Scientism.” Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and is an unapologetic defender not only of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution but of its central role in destroying any lingering illusions one might have of the existence of a God or gods as they have traditionally been understood throughout human history. I have not yet read this new book but I have read two previous books by Dawkins—The River out of Eden and The Devil’s Chaplain—in which Dawkins began his crusade to place religion in its scientific, and historical context. Until I read the Harper’s review of “The God Delusion,” I’d never heard of Marilynne Robinson but it turns out that she has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award for a novel called “Gilead” which has as its subject matter a minister (writing letters for future perusal by his then 7 year old son) that sounds for all the world like it might deal with some of the very same themes as “The Bishop’s Mantle,” the book I read as a child myself back there in junior high school. I seem bound now, if only for nostalgic reasons, to read “Gilead,” and maybe even re-read “The Bishop’s Mantle,” if I can find a copy somewhere.
Reading Robinson’s review of Dawkins’ new book reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and that is the dialectical (perhaps I should say trialectical) interplay of the three great branches of human intellectual enterprise: Science, Art, and Religion. Reading Freud’s essays, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practice” and “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” back to back as they appear in Peter Gay’s “Freud Reader,” suggests the foundation for a unified theory of Art, Science and Religion. If I live long enough, such a theory might turn out to be a way for me to wrap my mind around “mere being,” once and for all.
Finally, and not wholly unrelated to my current ruminations, I want to announce to the world that a few weeks ago my daughter was married in a beautiful ceremony in an outdoor sculpture garden, with music by a Latin jazz band, officiated by an octogenarian Hindu Priest who prayed to half-dozen or more Hindu Gods for the success of the marriage and ending in the recitation of traditional Christian wedding vows. After the ceremony one of the many new Indian friends I made at the wedding came up to me and said, “You know, in India weddings are for life.” I said, “Well, they’re for life in America, too. They just don’t always work out that way.”
Besides the ceremony itself, the wedding celebration included two large parties at the home of the groom’s parents and a lavish dinner and ball at one of Princeton, New Jersey’s finest hotels. All of it was paid for by the groom’s generous and prosperous parents and attended by hundreds of the grooms family and friends from all over the world. The bride’s coterie, mostly from Texas and New York, was a smaller but equally devoted fan base. It was a wedding of a lifetime and for all of a life.
When I got home to North Carolina, I went to the public library and checked out Conrad Rooks’ 1972 film (filmed in India) of Hermann Hesse’s “Siddartha.” I was reading the German Nobel Prize winner's explorations into the connection between eastern and western consciousness at the time that this now Indian wedded daughter of mine was born. Her name in fact is derived from the title of Hesse’s first novel, “Peter Camenzind.” She and I had seen “Siddartha” together in Dallas when she was ten years old and my marriage to her mother (though not our life-long friendship) had just ended.
Watching “Siddartha” again 25 years later, I was struck by the western fascination with the deeply spiritual, deeply non-material values in Indian tradition. I’d heard those same values expressed again and again by members of the groom’s family at the various gatherings surrounding the wedding—sincere spiritual values, expressed, nonetheless, by very successful doctors, scientists and engineers. My long acknowledged belief that the disjunction between religion and science in the western mind, right or wrong, does not exist in the east, was buttressed in real time by real people, right or wrong. My best friend, who for nearly 20 years has been Hermann Hesse’s stand-in for an appreciation of eastern wisdom by the western mind was there at the wedding with me like the boatman on the river in Siddartha’s coming home.
My own struggles continue, as can be seen in the intimate journal entries below, left mostly raw and unedited as I have been doing for most of the past year. But we go on. “The bird sings. Its feathers shine.” Bloom where you’re planted.
--Larry L. Dill
Rabbit Rock, North Carolina
I grow old…I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Excerpts from the intimate journals of Larry L. Dill
July 27, 2006, 7:30 am.
I keep trying to shroud my melancholy in mystery whereas it is really quite clear and simple what is upsetting me these days: the macrocosm, the microcosm, love and death.
The macro is the desperate situation of the world, politically and ecologically. We are destroying the earth and we are destroying each other.
The micro is my own physical degeneration and economic hopelessness.
Love and Death are about the sad state of my inner life.
Death waits with its cold finality. Love eludes me like cloud formations fading in a clear blue sky.
I’ve been thinking a lot about New York and Paris. The streets, the bookshops, the cafes, the bars, the women.
I’ve been reading about Israel. Israel is such a sad parable for the human condition. Individual Jews can find a happiness of sorts. But Israel as a people, as an idea, as a dream, seems such a futile exercise.
Some comedian quipped that Jews are just like everybody else only more so. Well, yes, but so are all neurotics, regardless of their ethnicity.
The Jewish myth of the promised land is the human myth of paradise on earth. Even Buddha had his tree and his peace of mind.
Jesus’ idea was that the kingdom of God was outside of time and space. It makes more sense than the Jewish myth but it is even more mythical and more insane.
Islam has it both ways. A mythical paradise outside of time and space but with the temporal trappings of an opulent resort.
Holly Stevens (daughter of Wallace Stevens), arranging her fathers poetry for a posthumous collection, placed two poems, in a kind of tension with each other, at the very end of the book as if to suggest her fathers last words on the subject of life and death and myth and meaning. One is clearly set in Stevens’ home in Connecticut, the other in his mythic paradise in Key West, Florida where he vacationed. I write them down here again like a monastery scribe trying to gather spiritual sustenance from words on paper.
A Mythology Reflects Its Region
A mythology reflects its region. Here
In Connecticut, we never lived in a time
When mythology was possible—But if we had—
That raises the question of the image’s truth.
The image must be of the nature of its creator.
It is the nature of its creator increased,
Heightened. It is he, anew, in a freshened youth
And it is he in the substance of his region,
Wood of his forests and stone out of his fields
Or from under his mountains.
Of Mere Being
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
July 30, 2006 Sunday, 7am, Rabbit Rock
A kind of hopelessness has set in now. Even writing seems hopeless. I know it’s the black dog. I’ll climb up on a rock today and see a view. But the view will be static. Like a painting. Fixed like stars are fixed in the sky. Fixed or anyway unattainable.
“You want to take a walk down by the creek?” he asked her. “Why?” she said. “I don’t know. I like to watch the water flow. There might be a duck. Maybe even a heron there. The round stones on the bank are beautiful and you can look at them and maybe find one you like.” “Ok, I guess,” she said. I suppose she was afraid I was trying to lure her into a trap. “There will be a few people there,” I said. “A fisherman here and there. People walking on the path for exercise. You’ll be safe there. I think you’ll like it.”
I need to leave this place for a while. Too many old people. It is like being locked in a room full of mirrors. I prefer imaginary visions of myself. Visual feasts of youth and beauty. Children laughing. Guitars playing rock and roll. I need to read more fiction. Fiction is a magical way of unleashing pent up emotions. No question that my emotions are pent up.
Go on down to the creek. Leave the dog at home. Walk yourself around. Take your Pushkin. Take down your Pushkin, now! Start mapping your heart. Map out your own country first and work your way out. You have the day. You have another day. Treat it like music. Write it down. Sound it out. Play it loud and soft and slow and fast. You have so much inside of you. Leave the black dog at home. Take charge. Be firm with yourself. Read your Pushkin. Bide your time. She will come to you. She? Yes, your muse. Ah! Yes! My muse. Virginia Woolf in sheep’s clothing, right? Right.
August 13, 2006. Waynesville, Sunday 6 am.
Always trying to tighten things up. Get back to basics. No writing now for two weeks.
I’ve been terrorized by fears of my own body. Anxiety over what has turned out to be an “indirect” hernia. Even the doctor’s name for it has a mysterious quality. As if my body were slowly being destroyed by rumor and innuendo. Shunning. It took me six months to work up the courage to go to the doctor with a complaint. “If I were in your situation I would elect not to have surgery,” he said. “It’s a very small hernia.”
“Like a very small atomic bomb,” I thought to myself.
I’ve been able in the last few days to stop worrying about it so much and go back to worrying about the way my soul, my spirit, my psychological well being has been slowly slipping away from me.
I’ve been thinking, too, about the Middle East. About Arabs and Muslims. Christians and Jews. America and Israel. I’ve been thinking about three figures of roughly the same era: T.S. Eliot, Sayyid Qutb, Billy Graham.
Eliot won the Nobel prize in 1948. But even more notable among his friends was his conversion in 1927 to high church Anglo-Catholicism. His friend Virginia Woolf wrote to their mutual friend Stephen Spender, for example, “He seems to me to be petrifying into a priest—poor old Tom.”
Graham of course was the globe trotting evangelist and counselor to Presidents. His experience of American lower class Protestantism and his calling to preach the gospel was the most like my own. We’re both southerners. He’s the only one I ever saw speak in person. I’ve always admired him.
I’d never heard of Sayyid Qutb until last week and now it turns out that he is being considered by many to be the father of the resurgence of Muslim fundamentalism in the Middle East in our time.
Qutb, an Egyptian poet and educator, came to America briefly in 1949 to study at a teachers college in Greely, Colorado and then went on to write “Milestones” a lucid analysis of Western decadence and the spiritual vacuity of Soviet style Communism. His conclusion? That a return to Islam was all that could save the world. (Eliot had reached the same conclusion about Christianity. Billy Graham, of course, has become the most widely received evangelist in the history of Christianity.) Qutb’s ideas, though, were deemed dangerous enough in Egypt to cause him to be jailed for many years and eventually hanged for sedition.
A new book by Lawrence Wright about the roots of 9/11 begins with the suggestion that Qutb’s priggishness about modern decadence in America and Egypt is one of the intellectual antecedents to the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in the last three decades. For some reason Wright’s description and the subsequent descriptions of Qutb I read in other sources made me think of Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
An attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince, no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old…I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing each to each
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us and we drown.
August 14, 2006 6:30 am
At the dawn of my vague and metamorphic adulthood I attempted to obtain a license to preach from the Methodist Church. I sent off in the mail as I recall and received a series of questions to answer and mail back in. It never occurred to me until this moment, perhaps 40 years later, that one could cheat on the answers and get help from someone who knew more about the Bible and Christian dogma than I did. So I remember pondering over a question about a particular passage in the book of Psalms that contains the phrase “What is man that Thou art mindful of him…?” The question posed by the licensing authority was “What does that phrase mean to you?” It seemed obvious to me that they didn’t really mean what did it mean to me?, but what did I think it meant to them? I didn’t have a clue. I remember that around that time I was beginning to question my faith. And now with this question I was beginning to question my intellect as well.
I had begun studying poetry and literature in college and was just beginning to learn the tricks of the trade of literary criticism—the idea, for instance that you didn’t actually enter into the scenario of a given literary passage as if to experience it yourself; the idea was to remain “objective”—scientifically objective, clinically objective if you will--about a given passage in literature, examining it the way a doctor would examine a patient with a particular complaint.
The idea of literary criticism as I was understanding it was that poetry and storytelling, etc., was an attempt by an author to use certain literary conventions in creative ways to convey a certain emotion or meaning, the way a carpenter, say, uses conventional tools to construct a house or a porch or a piece of furniture. Recognition of the skill with which the tools were used was a key element in the analysis of how the finished product worked to provide the end result it had promised. There was some debate as I recall (and still is for that matter) between schools of thought on how exactly the analysis of literary texts ought to proceed. I was just beginning to understand that I not only had a lot to learn about literature—who was Shylock?, who was the Artful Dodger?—but there was this whole other thing you had to learn which was how to correctly analyze the literary texts that was as sophisticated and as complicated as the texts themselves.
So even though I had learned how to read, or thought I had, somewhere around age 6, I was now being taught to understand that literary criticism was a much more complicated, much more scientific and allegedly more rewarding way of reading literature than just picking it up and reading it like you would the newspaper. The only problem was that there seemed to be no single way to do literary criticism. Every critic talked as if the way he did criticism was the only way to do it. But there were different critics with different approaches to criticism that were mutually exclusive from each other as if there were different definitions of the scientific method. So methodology and interpretation came to appear to be fields of learning requiring almost as much attention as the literature itself.
My experience in college, though, was that in every single English course I took ( and I took many), the lectures proceeded and the criticism began without so much as a word about methodology. It was assumed by the professors that you did not know how to read the literature but it was also quite irrationally assumed that you did understand the various methodologies that are used to understand the literature that you were assumed not to know how to read.
It was a sort of sadistic, primitive swimming lesson whereby the child is simply thrown into the river to sink or swim. Some figured it out. Some drowned. Survival of fittest? Or the luckiest? Who knows. You were trying to learn 3 things at once. The literature, the methodology your professor was using to “enlighten” you and the varieties of methodology that you might prefer to the one you were supposedly using if you knew what it was that you were using. The professors taught mostly with the certitude and piety that preachers often preach and the faithful often follow. There is only one way to pray and only one god to pray to and he is the god I say he is and the only way you can communicate with him is the way I am telling you. The whole system was completely arbitrary and in my case at least almost totally counterproductive. I went in with an open mind and came out in a fog.
August 15, 2006 8 am
I’ve begun to sketch a portrait of the artist (this artist) at a crossroads in college when I was working my way out of religion and into literature. Looking back at what I’ve been describing it is clear that what the two disciplines had in common for me then was mystery and confusion. It was as if, to quote Dante, “I awoke in a dark wood.” Well, we have to be somewhere. In a waking, rational mind one tends to wear a certain kind of clothing. Sometimes we change clothing (to a different style, I mean) but we have our preferences. Our prejudices, really. On the other hand in a dream we tend to be led around like children or prisoners. We still have our preferences but we are fairly helpless to invest them. We may be aware of our subjugation to thoughts or events not of our own choosing but we are unable to extricate ourselves and move in a more positive direction.
Such was my condition back there in college at the crossroads between religion and literature. In a strange way I believe now that the accidental crossing of two of my personal quests—to become a legitimate preacher and to become a legitimately educated man—is where I discovered not only literary criticism as a new way of thinking about the words one finds written on the pages of books—from Shakespeare to the Bible—but critical thinking itself which involves looking critically not only at books but at everything: every thought and speech, every political and philosophical idea, every form of human behavior.
I must have realized somewhere around this time as the fog at the crossroads began to lift somewhat, that though certain ways of thinking and belief had become dogma in English departments no less than in churches, that nevertheless intellectual freedom and some proximity to the methodological rigor of the scientific method was more likely to be found in the secular world than in the religious. I had discovered in other words, for myself, the historical enlightenment. Nothing is sacred.
“Nothing is sacred” is an ambiguous phrase, so I have found over the years. On the one hand it is a sort of motto of critical thinking. On the other hand, since “critical thinking” is sacred, as it were, to the enlightenment, the expression “nothing is sacred” stands as a warning to critics that human language and logic has a number of chinks in it that are constantly being patched and re-chinked with metaphor, irony and mystification. To the dogmatist, the idealist, the true believer, “nothing is sacred” doesn’t mean that you can look critically at anything. It means simply that those who believe that nothing is sacred are either evil or lost. Either way they have no common decency.
Of course labeling yourself a critical thinker is in a way like labeling yourself pious. Or even tall. Saying it doesn’t make it so. Human beings are constantly subverting their own ideals by consciously or unconsciously confusing saying something with doing something.
Since Einstein, I suppose, many people who think about critical thinking have come to the conclusion that everything is relative including the truth which for all practical purposes makes the stand alone word “truth” meaningless. But these are all problems with the structure of language, problems which are intrinsic in language in a biological sense.
Take, for example, the fact that women suffer during childbirth because the evolution of the size of the human head has outstripped the evolution of the size of the female pelvis. Or that having stood up to see over the tall grasses on the African plains, humans have evolved as two legged creatures without a corresponding evolution in the spine, thus presenting us with the eternal problem of lower back pain.
Language, too, seems to have evolved with some internal contradictions because it has had to come to express both rational observations (Look! A deer!) and also irrational observations (Last night I dreamed about a deer. Maybe that means we will see a deer today.) Our minds don’t really seem to have clear cut distinctions between the rational and the irrational. We only have one spine to crawl with or to stand erect. The incompatibility of the two activities often causes pain and at times even incapacitation.
Not only was I stuck at a foggy crossroads in college. I’m stuck there still, somewhere between art, science and religion. Somewhere between truth and fiction.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
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copyright 2006 by Larry L. Dill
photos by Robin Birnstein and Jessica Dill
