Proximity to Truth

     This past week I finished reading a book that a few years ago I’m pretty sure:

a) I would not have selected at all.

b) If I had started it, I would have shelved without finishing. 

c) And, if I somehow read to the end, I’d have trashed it—as I recall doing with only one book, a highly-rated novel with a similar plot line.

     Perhaps I’ve become able to appreciate the power of the way this author troubled the waters and in doing so reworked my thinking, feeling, valuing, and maybe even transformed conscience/consciousness. For this to happen, the novel was not working alone but was interweaving with other books that are especially contributing to my development, particularly Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying; John Dominic Crossan, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges; and Attar’s Conference of the Birds (translated by Peter Avery and by Afkham Darbandi/Dick Davis).

     Rather than explaining, I’ll show portions of the book; but first, here’s the Spoiler Alert: these extracts might mess with the experience of reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle. If you plan on reading it, consider stopping now! 

     In the opening pages, Murdoch’s main character is portrayed: “He believed profoundly in complete truthfulness as the basis and condition of all virtue.” So, in the early chapters, he persists in telling the full truth to his wife even as he realizes “He could not now make his knowledge of her into love.” Soon enough, however, as he falls in love with another woman, he experiences that “truth” about the new relationship is a phenomenon he cannot express in words that will be comprehended by his wife. He’s perplexed in feeling unable, even if he tries, to tell the truth. Through the second half or so of the book, I am led (but not forced) by the author into a hard acceptance of truth as congruence instead of romance. His lover tells of the spinning (truth or lies or paradox) of the telling of their relationship this way:

“But now I can see. I see that it was you that tricked me—and I too that deceived myself. I saw it all so simply, with nothing to it but you leaving your wife whom you didn’t love and who didn’t love you. But a life has so much more in it than that. I had not seen that I would break so many many things.”

“If you love me—“ he said. 

“That word cannot guide us any more.”

     In other Murdoch novels, the congruence of parts includes the break-up of a marriage. Murdoch is not prescribing a case law in the sense noted by Crossan below. The truth of the full trajectory of the relationship of the lovers is best forecast in metaphors; in this novel, it’s in the title, The Sandcastle, and in lines spoken during the collapse of their romantic structure, “You are a growing tree. I am only a bird. You cannot break your roots and fly away with me.”

     The reason I’m compelled by Murdoch’s work may be explained in Peter Conradi’s biography:

“It could be said that all her fiction, and much of her moral philosophy, are acts of penance for, and attacks upon, the facile rationalistic optimism of her extreme youth, when she thought that setting people free was easy, that ‘socialism (of which we had no very clear idea) would bring freedom and justice to all countries, and the world would get better’. . . Her work explores, among other matters, those ‘irrational’ psychic forces within the individual which make Hitlers possible, and freedom problematic.” (Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch, pp. 78-79)

     Concerning freedom, in a somewhat similar manner, I’m reconsidering my position in relation to the presentation of narrative, particularly in the fable and in the parable. When teaching Good Stories, I wanted students to realize freedom in constructing meaning. Going against the usual approach to the fable as having an explicit moral, we worked at considering multiple possibilities so that each individual could attempt to discern one that fit for himself or herself. We followed the direction of Lloyd Daly’s Aesop without Morals and made interpretations of narratives that did not force a specific moral. Now, I want to be careful in giving freedom, especially in view of Crossan's treatment of parable.

     In his take on narrative truth and freedom, Crossan develops the parable with emphasis on the distinctive features in texts of Jesus and Borges. He articulates “the core elements of parable” in a way that shows the shaking up of a person’s thinking/feeling/valuing and then leaving the person with the freedom to reach into the beyond:  

"... the core elements of parable. The first is paradox. The second is story. This is accomplished by effecting a structural reversal on a traditional or expected story at the deepest levels… 'symbols which through their paradoxical form expressed the inexpressible without betraying it.'" (pp. 94-95 building on and quoting from Heinz Politzer’s Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox)

But Crossan also stresses the danger in the extension of freedom: “to abide with the Holy is more fundamental than any case law and is itself original ethics and fundamental morality. It is also much more dangerous” (p. 69). This radical activity of parable in Jesus and Borges circles back again to Murdoch’s realization that freedom given to person unable to “see,” unable to discern lies, allows the rise of Hitlers.

     Murdoch does not turn against freedom; instead her work pushes us to face the lies we tell ourselves and to engage the hard truths. Our thinking, our moral sense, needs to include paradox, and our realities marry imagination. The most important truth comes in a person’s approximation to discerning the touch of the divine in oneself. As Sells develops in the Unsayings, that’s what the mystics try to show us.

   It’s now early Sunday morning 

in pre-dawn meditations on dreams 

of marking the path, 

reflecting on Attar’s parable 

of surrender to the guide

reading time inside and out

eternal now. Time

is simultaneous line and circle

the eternal return.

Being/doing, identity & ?

Living this

as the game of labyrinth,

and whether there is a center or an exit does not matter so much

as the quality of the player, unending purification.

There is only the dance 

as Eliot sings for us & realizing

all this a poem not a line,

and a story not imitative rhyme

and not just a tale told by an idiot

but some beauty composed by

Transcendent Power

The transformation—caterpillar to butterfly—happening inside the dark of the cocoon calls to our sense of wonder, inviting us to join with our destiny in moving toward the great mystery. In similar manner, spiritual transformations also surpass the vision of human eyes, stretch the boundaries of language, and test the edge of faith. Perhaps we gain reassurance about life after life as we witness the metamorphoses of butterflies; since ancient times they’ve symbolized the soul. Transformational growth of the soul happens in this world as we advance in our experiencing the awe and bewilderment of transcendence. 

A primary place for spiritual transformation comes in a kind of death and rebirth of language. In Mystical Languages of Unsaying, Michael Sells asserts: “The transcendent must be beyond names, ineffable” (p. 2). One response to this challenge, modeled by many mystics, is the practice of silence, surrendering speech in the acknowledgment of a far superior knowing. The book of Job teaches the hard lessons of this pathway.

In addition to silence, engaging aporia (“irresolvable internal contradiction”) can bring us into the experience of awe, almost as if a rebirth of language into another power. This endeavor best proceeds through “himma” (intense spiritual resolve) toward the God who is both immanent (e.g., Psalm 139, “in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me”) and transcendent (beyond our thinking and imagining; e.g., Eph 3:20). 

Sells calls such discourse “the mystical languages of unsaying” and says it “begins with the aporia—the unresolvable dilemma—of transcendence” (p. 2). He explicates texts from Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn ‘Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart.

“At the high end of the scale of performative intensity are passages …in which the mystical discourse turns back relentlessly upon its own propositions and generates distinctive paradoxes that include within themselves a large number of radical transformations, particularly in the area of temporal and spatial relationships” (p. 3).

Sells shows how the “unsayings” provide a kind of experience in the field of transformation; they don’t just talk about it—we have opportunity to feel it.

“apophatic language attempts to evoke in the reader an event that is—in its movement beyond structures of self and other, subject and object—structurally analogous to the event of mystical union” (p. 10)“At the heart of that unsaying is a radical dialectic of transcendence and immanence. That which is utterly ‘beyond’ is revealed or reveals itself as most intimately ‘within’: within the ‘just act,’ however humble (Eckhart), within the basic acts of perception (Ibn ‘Arabi), within the act of interpreting torah or fulfilling the mitzvot (Moses de Leon), or within the act of love (Marguerite Porete). When the transcendent realizes itself as the immanent, the subject of the act is neither divine nor human, neither self nor other… The moment in which the boundaries between divine and human, self and other, melt away is commonly called mystical union.” (p. 7)

Even proximity to this mystical discourse takes my breath away, and I don’t seem to be able to stay there for very long. So I’m glad that additional spaces for spiritual transformation come through the arts and through play with language such as storytelling (e.g., tales involving metamorphosis such as Psyche, Beauty and Beast) and parables. John Dominic Crossan says

“When comedy ensures that language, rendered strange by literature, is seen most openly and acknowledged most freely as structured play, the narrow gate to transcendence has been opened” (p. 49, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges).

The “arts” extend beyond visual art. In “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag includes in the arts “the activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer” as stages for “the formal dramas besetting consciousness, each individual work of art being a more or less astute paradigm for regulating or reconciling these contradictions.” Like the paradoxes attended in Sells’ unsayings, Sontag situates contradictions in the “project of spirituality”: “plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.” (Her essay is included at the beginning of Styles of Radical Will, cited from p. 3-4.) 

Persons who know me will not be surprised when I add horsemanship to the arts listed by Sontag, especially because it participates in the spiritual project that involves the resolving of contradiction.  For me, the breath-taking-away event happens again and again when I experience the sweetest engagement with the massive power of the horse in the moment we meet on the most subtle level. For example, when we best transition from the trot to canter, it isn’t communicated through physical cues or even through verbal command but instead as if  in an imagination or wish or spirit.

This paradox of power in which the light rather than the heavy brings forth the transcendent is also (and probably more frequently) evidenced in its negative form when force is attempted and things turn ugly. Greatness (e.g., “Make America …”) is often viewed in terms of Power; tragically when the transcendent goes missing, results are ugly.  Jesus said, “The greatest among you will be your servant” (Matt 23:11). We teeter at a crucial time when being great depends on transforming the enactment of power and greatness into this transcendent level.

It’s not easy, and yet it is. It’s like reaching for the beauty and art of riding and how it comes in when letting go more than by using force. Similarly, approaching the mystics doesn’t happen by force. For example, it just doesn’t work if I force myself to read Michael Sells or Chittick, Corbin, etc. Instead, it moves by gradual immersion and absorption; and somewhat surprisingly, for me, “getting it” works when accompanied by easier reading, particularly mysteries (e.g., Ellis Peters) and novels (e.g., Iris Murdoch) whose narratives probe the paradoxical nature of truth, love, and power. 

This discussion opened with the butterfly as symbol for transformation. We might also do well to consider the plight of the butterfly as warning for the endangerment of spiritual transformation. The monarch butterfly merits special attention as it is under consideration to qualify as an endangered species; the eastern monarch has declined 90% in two decades. In a similar way, I believe the quality of tending the human soul has diminished severely; the transformational butterfly of our being has been sorely neglected. Signs are everywhere, but who sees? Who cares?

In his introduction to the biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter J. Conradi focuses the forces that shook apart the foundation that (in my view) had supported a faith-field where spiritual transformation made enough sense to live by. Condradi set Murdoch’s “work in the context of the cultural/intellectual life of the mid-twentieth century, of the generation who struggled to come to terms philosophically and emotionally and artistically with Stalin and Hitler, with existentialism, and with the slow collapse of organized religion” (p. xxv, Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch; see also, Diane Butler Bass' work). Today, especially in the U.S.A., I believe we’re still struggling to come to terms with all this as well as with the Vietnam War and subsequent exercises of power. If we cannot transform and transcend, we appear condemned to living with lies. As with any time of crisis, spiritual transformation is vitally needed in order to invoke the transcendent.

These boots were made for...gratitude

When sitting down on my favorite porch rocker in order to lace up my riding boots, I sense something’s a bit strange. As these boots have been resoled twice, it’s a familiar action, but usually done as a bit of a chore, more trouble than loafers or even pull-up cowboy boots. If I’m more honest, I’m probably miffed about accepting that I might fall on my head if I try to put on shoes while standing. In any case, this time while seated in the rocker and putting on the boots, a lighter touch than usual is in the air. The sensation reminds me of how I feel when overwhelmed with gratitude. But what’s to be thankful for here? Well, start counting, buddy…

1. The Grace that so generously is providing material blessings. Upon reflection, I realize that this rocking chair takes me back a dozen years to when we closed on our new home and found we could stay in it that very night. So we found the rocking chairs and they’re still making the perfect coffee-drinking spot. And remember the boots—they came along not long after we’d moved in and Leg’cy came into the family. What a surprise! What a gift!

2. Gratitude for the Health to go along with these material blessings. With the 72nd birthday approaching, I’m still able to enjoy riding as well as stewarding the woodland, gardens, and berry patches. 

The gallon milk carton contains the blackberries picked this morning to give away to the fine folks who take care of our strong-willed mare.

3. Thankfulness for all that opens the Holy for our time in this world. John Dominic Crossan talks of the Holy as “what strikes us as both absolutely fascinating and equally terrifying” (p. 43, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges). If we want to know what he’s talking about, he recommends: “take up any dangerous sport for yourself.” 

Leg'cy meets me at the gate (in contrast with the way she used to be almost uncatchable).

Maybe that’s why I was drawn into this craziness about horses. In today’s ride, the numinous came in with about the sweetest trot to canter transition thus far. We picked it up in a way that helps me feel the texture of the inarticulate “unsaying” (see Sells just below). Rudolf Otto elaborates on the Holy with “the elements of the numinous”: “mystery, fascination, awefulness, and energy” (p. 151, The Idea of the Holy). Imagine horse…

It’s probably obvious enough with these citations; but to be clear, in addition to gratitude for home, family, stewardship, and horsemanship, I’m thankful for the openings into the Holy provided by the mystics. I’m currently being carried on such as the ones in Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying: Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn ‘Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart. With much gratitude.