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Every writer I knows has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller
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Gee, that is a problem. I never have a problem writing. Maybe I am not a writer.
To me writing is like breathing. Like seeing. Like watching the human parade of the morally and spiritually disshoveled with a blithering idiot section (reserved for those with a public presence), each marching out-of-step with one another – and in this I include the upper middle class haughty bourgeiose – the pretenders of affluence, the self-proclaimed “special people” and those of faux status and little humor – the “intellectuals,” the people near the top of the pyramid, the celebrites and the life-long elected – “ahummm” – “public servants” who seem to gain more belly fat with each successive electoral victory – balloning in time to the size of a small banana “republic” or a well-fed water buffalo.
I was born poor. To this day I have not become a man who looks like he swallowed a small Volkswagon or Toledo, Ohio.
I can still see my feet clearly with no interruption at the waist line. Poverty, dyslexia betrayal and untimely loss kept me humble – a near failsafe against a culture of being “special.”
As to writing – life has always seemed to me to be hand to hand combat and an hilarious Marx Brothers adventure. A combination of terror and hysterical laughter. This – more than an adequate mix for a verbal man such as myself.
Long ago someone said to me – “You write like you speak.” Ah, that is the answer to the puzzle.
I am who I have always been. The same eyes looking at variations of the same insanity with rare moments of crystal clear brilliance on our worse and on our best days.
Light and severe dark produce the same product: I write from this – the combat, the terror, the instinct to fight back, the absurd idiocy and the humanity of it all – delivered outside to reside within until its moment arrives.
The crowd and its antics, like God, write of me – I just transcribe. Somewhere in my head and heart the notes have been stored, the images kept fresh.
If I am a writer it is all because of what God gave me. Blame Him. I write from the gifts of pain and suffering, from cunning and courage – and from the endless laugther at the folly of it … from the surrounding of beauty, heartbreak, sacrifice, heroism, pathos, common injustice, freinds, people who loved me and the uncommon victory that emerges now and again.
Shalom.
Ekklesia (Greek word meaning church) … signified the assembly of citizens of the polis (a city or small state in ancient Greece), who meet to make decisions.
Dairmaid MacCulloch, in Christianity: The First Three Thosuand Years
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The history of Western Civilization aligns faith or church with governing – ekklesia with polis. But we live in a time (a treacherous time) in which that nexus is lost … and that loss makes for a far more errant society and culture – a government more prone to chaos than tranquility, distain and division than gratitude and unity.
This is where we are now in the West and in America.
If you want a source of our problems in government, in law and in public affairs – look no further than the disconnection between church and state and the hostility and sickness that arises when this nexus is ignored, or worse yet – attacked, disparaged and forbidden.
Really, there is not much more to say except – when you listen to public discourse ask yourself one simple question: Does this man or woman speaking convey any sense that he or she knows anything at all about who we are and who we have been for centuries, or for the tenets which have provided our foundation, survival, peace and prosperity?
If you answer in the negative – stop listening – for that speaker deserves none of your time or attention.
Shalom.
… it is difficult for churches, government, and leaders to move beyond ego, the desire for control, and public posturing. Everything divides into oppositions … vested interests pulling against one another. Truth is no longer possible at this level of conversation.
… you can lead people only as far as you yourself have gone …
Richard Rohr, in The Naked Now
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Richard Rohr writes of two monks of the 11th and 12th century – Hugh of St. Victor monastery in Paris, France, and Richard of the same monastery. He tells us that these monks wrote that humans have been given three different ways of seeing. One way arises from the eyes that produce thoughts. The second way of seeing leads to reason, and to reflection and meditation. The third way of seeing leads to true understanding and contemplation.
It is the third way of seeing that is the rarest and most evolved. Whereas the first way of seeing is common, it produces little depth of experience, is more concrete and binds one to the immediate without nuance. The second way of seeing allows one to relish his or her power to conceive of the material disposition of the world. Ah, but the third way of seeing allows one to do more – it allows one to “taste” existence, to be in awe before the underlying mystery, coherence, and spaciousness that connects one with everything!
The third way of seeing is seeing as a mystic sees – seeing as God has designed us to see. This seeing exceeds the senses, does not rest on knowledge and intellect alone – but rather sees in a manner that expands his or her consciousness – and in this is transformed, made whole, lives in and above at the same time, is mortal and immortal, contented, whole and wise in ways that neither the senses nor intellect can offer.
In commenting on this Rohr says “I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the separation and loss of these three necessary eyes is at the basis of much of the short-sight-edness and religious crises in the Western world.” Hence the above quote that leads into today’s blog.
The view that Rohr shares, Dear Friends, highlights how and why “identity politics” is so destructive, so wrong-headed, so primitive, tribal, hostile, aggressive, hateful and unappetizing. Those with greater depth of human experience cannot abide that which pits one against another in a death struggle. We are, after all, not made to be enemies to one another but rather brothers and sisters to one another.
This historic moment requires us to see as the mystic sees.
Shalom.
The more the powerful and independent consciousness becomes, and with it conscious will, the more is the unconscious forced into the background. When this happens, it becomes easily possible for the conscious structure to be detached from the unconscious images.
Richard Wilhelm, in The Secret of the Golden Flower
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To be whole and have psychic health, full development and contentment, our conscious life must be attached to our unconscious life. Without an unconscious life, life and our experience of it is distorted, limited and chaotic.
Indeed, it seems that this is precisely where we are in our country today.
Look at the celebrity and political class and those in control of higher education (the “teaching” intellectuals) and you see not mature and insightful individuals but narrow people full of self-assertion, anger and extreme and destructive notions.
Yes, being stuck in conscious alone is a superficial state of being, a fragmented and unhealthy state of being.
Carl Jung in a 1931 essay noted that the disconnection of consciousness from the unconscious makes for the modern man who Jung identifies as “unhistorical” – that is void of any of the broader lessons of human history.
Jung’s observation might explain the measure of ideas offered and advanced by the American Left today as well as the limited use that can be made of public discourse among those engaged in news reporting and commentary.
I find nothing so much as the separation of conscious and unconsciousness to explain what I see among public personalities, see in the conduct and discourse of the elites. Sadly, this reminds me of the tragic decline in the German culture in the inter-War years.
Disordered development creates great risk for cultures – and a failed education system and rejection of faith makes for increasing the risk of serious error and destruction. And make no mistake religious narratives all over the world instruct us in symbols and metaphors that open us to our unconscious. Ban or undermine religion and we increase our collective and individual danger.
Our individual full psychological and spiritual development is critical, indispensable to our flourishing and survival … and a sign of how far we are from health is evidenced by our reaction to the horrible shooting of people in New Zealand last night. Immediately our public commentators see it as a product of political opinion when it is rather an indication of psychological sickness – disorder all too common to its counterparts around the world.
Shalom.
I took a relatively rare break form posting a Blog entry yesterday in order to spend some time with a dense and somewhat vexing article written by Carl Jung, M.D. entitled “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man.” I shall visit this article in several up-coming posts over the next few weeks. The article appears as a chapter in Jung’s book entitled Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
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The modern man (is) the man of the immediate present … fully conscious of one’s (immediate) existence … with a minimum of unconsciousness … He is … of necessity and at all times, for every step towards a fuller consciousness of the present (which) removes him from his original “participation mystique” with the mass of men – from submersion in the common consciousness (thus) … tearing himself loose from that all-embracing, pristine unconsciousness which claims the bulk of mankind almost entirely.
Carl G. Jung, M.D. in Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
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Jung is discussing “the loaner,” the vacuous celebrity of the contemporary highly secularized mass communication culture that is densely visual and digital in present day America.
He is describing as he says an “unhistorical” man and woman – those without any past – any wisdom, any sense of the long story of the human person, any contact with their unconscious and the essential spiritual essence of the human person and human existence.
He is describing what I call the Nada Man … nada being the Spanish word for “nothing.”
Modern man is Barack Obama – a man who accomplished absolutely nothing before winning the Presidency, a man with no work history. A man much like Joe Biden who never earned a private paycheck but sucked on the government tit all his life and who aspires to close out his life of nothingness by occupying the Oval Office into his near dotage.
Lest you think there are few of these nada men – there is Social/Communist Bernie Sanders who never earned a week’s pay until at 40 he was elected to public office in Vermont. And there is any number of Members of Congress who secure law degrees from Harvard and do absolutely nothing with them …
The Democrat assembly of presidential candidates is full of members of the nada class including a woman who “slept” her way into government jobs, a faux Indian Princess, a childish former city major with no evidence of having assumed an adult life with family, children and a private work history.
Frankly, political figures today resemble most the theatrical crowd – the fodder of tabloids lining the shelves of supermarket check-out counters. And the TV news shows resemble collections of boorish numskulls assembled for bargain rate group therapy.
We have in Jung’s “modern man” – George Costanza in multiple forms and iterations but George all the way – a faux “marine biologist,” “Penske material,” a man in the front office of the New York Yankees who hides under his desk to avoid any and all responsibility.
Yes, modern man – the nada generation …
You know you have a real problem when public figures from politics to media, from to entertainment to TV news and “the Press” look like characters in the Seinfeld Show – a show its creators tell us is about absolutely “nothing.”
If this ain’t rock bottom is sure is close.
Shalom.
Postscript – The dear little Leftist children at Sara Lawrence College have posted demands that include – free laundry detergent and fabric softener. How frigging ridiculous is this! Maybe we ought to consider expanding this infanticide thing to college students? The news is becoming a Woody Allen comedy routine. No wonder the Democrats want free college – they run their scam on the backs of people who riot for fabric softener. I-N-S-A-N-I-T-Y.
Spirlaw 