The Ecstatic Blur

 

Sunset yesterday

     Sometimes a partial is all that’s given. Whisp of a dream… the unavailable you and the might-be beloved speak “You…” The words in the dream have slipped back across the veil. Right enough. Dreams and other ecstatic whiffs are just enough to draw the next step, into the blur…A-slant. 
Ex-stasis. Outside self. Not literal. 

Literal. Letter?  Word. Representation. Re-Present is not same as present (in its multiple meanings slip-sliding to push the edge of sense). This chain of associations brings to mind Epaminondas: the tragedy of literalism and fundamentalism; the risks yet critical necessity of imagery running into troubles of idolatry and idealism…
     All this points toward realization of “other.” The standing outside of one’s self. The Ecstatic. The Not. Nothingness. Not knowing as beginning of wisdom. Nishitani on going beyond emptiness. 

“It is only in breaking through to the field of ecstatic transcendence (or trans-descendence), then, that the awareness of birth-and-death as ’transmigration’ comes about. This ecstatic trans-descendence appears in the endlessness of finite life and in the totality of the horizon that embraces the mode of being of man along with that of the other species. Nihility opens up only in this transcendence.” (Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, pp. 174-5). 

Transcendence?  At least going outside. Ecstatic. “Non-knowledge communicates ecstasy,”  Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring, quoting Bataille, Inner Experience.
     Rosemarie Waldrop opens Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes:

“Faced with an undecipherable world we set out to create language, a place where human discourse can arises, and we come to exist as human beings; where, at the same time, we can maintain a relation to what transcends us, the undecipherable, the ultimate otherness, and speak to it under the name of God.” (p. 1)

Confounding of Suffering/Joy

Pre-Dawn December 4

 Hard to imagine writings of more importance on spiritual walking than the work of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, and equally difficult to find anyone better for guidance into their texts than Edith Stein. Wikipedia’s entry for her begins with this background:

Edith Stein [in religion, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross] 12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942) was a German philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. Edith Stein was murdered in the gas chamber at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp on 9 August 1942, and is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein

The Science of the Cross is Volume VI of The Collected Works of Edith Stein and it focuses on St. John of the Cross. In Kieran Kavanaugh’s introduction to this volume, he says that Stein “weaves together John’s words and her own. The fire that was dark, consuming, and painful is now brilliant, loving, and gentle” (p. xxxi).  

Moving into this material seems impossible without willingness to persist in mystery; the “Dark Night of the Soul” admits passage only as one yields to the Unknowable and to the Incomprehensible Love. To sustain the journey, the traveller leans into frequent confounding of suffering/joy and dark/light, accepting just what is sufficient to take a next step, uncertain of the ground yet trusting in the guide. The manna is rich, complex, and it thus requires time to integrate into the grey moments of personal experience, in order to gain candle-like illumination, for receiving sufficient light and warmth on the way.

For example, in relation to feeling the Presence of the Guide, Stein elaborates in Chapter 17, “Rays of Divine Glory,” on  Stanza 3 of St. John’s Living Flame of Love :

O luminous lamps of fire

In whose resplendent rays

The caves of sense—profound abyss—

Which once were dark, bereft of sight,

With rarest beauty unite

In gift for the Belov’d, warmth and light

[p. 203, Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel]

In Living Flame of Love , St. John followed the poem with his commentary which includes this discussion of Stanza 3 (paragraph 23):

“Yet—may the Lord help me—since it is true that when the soul desires God fully, it then possesses Him Whom it loves…the greater the soul’s desire the greater will be its satisfaction and delight rather than its suffering and pain” 

(pp. 618-19, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, Trans/Ed Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriguez)

In her discussion of this material from St. John, Stein notes:

“Yet, if the soul longs for God in truth, she already possesses the one she loves and so it seems that she is no longer capable of feeing any pain…the more intensely she desires to possess God, and she will do this all the more because she lives all the more in possessing him. Therefore she, too, feels neither suffering nor pain.” Stein, p. 207

Moments felt as dark can be incorporated with the three abidings: faith, hope and love. Suffering can be known as refining faith, as affirmation of God even when it’s inexplicable (cf “why hast Thou forsaken me?”); hope may be extended into times when no positive way is seen or imagined; and love claimed even when it seems no one cares.  There, in the darkest night, is God found. In ways and knowing beyond…

In Chapter 11, Enkindling of Love, Stein elaborates the preparation for and initial experience of union with God.

The human intellect, united with the divine through supernatural illumination, becomes divine. In like manner, the will is united with the divine will and divine love, and the memory, affections, and appetites are converted and changed according to God. . .

The dark night of the soul also deprives the soul of satisfaction in good things, yes, even in supernatural and divine things. This is so because the soul’s impure, lowly, and very natural faculties can receive supernatural things only according to a human and lowly mode. Through ‘being weaned, purged, and annihilated…they will lose that lowly and human  mode of working and receiving, and thus all these faculties and appetites of the soul are tempered and prepared for the sublime reception, experience, and savoring of the divine and supernatural that cannot be received until the old self dies.’  

[pp. 137-8; Stein references St. John’s Dark Night, Book 2, Ch 16, para 7, 9, 13, 14 which may be found in Kavanaugh and Rodriguez,  pp. 365-368]

The fire felt, the darkness of knowing, the aloneness of bereavement, all witness the Divine transforming the soul (will, intellect, feeling) that moves, knows, and loves into the ineffable, the unseen, through embraceable longing, all that mediates toward, possibly even into, union with the Oneness.

Full Moon Rising, December 3 

Picture-taking & the Ecstatic

    Winnowing reflections on this first day of September, wondering what’s wanting to be drawn from the seine, like the folks fishing watch as water flows from their nets…Why not stand beside them, wondering if Jesus has spoken? And the term “Ekstasis” flits up in the mind with an uncertain recollection of where I was reading about it.  The book was probably giving the root of the term “ecstasy,” thus suggesting it has to do with positioned beside or outside oneself.  I’m not finding the place where I was reading but it probably came from one of these:

     Anyway, the point is that this magnetic attraction toward the ecstatic inclines us, sometimes with a more emphatic shove, toward realizing the divine alongside the everyday. Perhaps some of us need it, certainly I want the push toward increased awareness. How easy and how unfortunate it is to miss the sacred as it disappears due to unholy distraction. How often the visitation gone. The missing not even noticed.

     The picture shown above came through the default editing of the camera shutter this way:

Re-editing the image

happens partly because I walk outside most morning, predawn, and imagine how the darkish horizon might be imagined if I just attend further into the shadows, 

venturing through the invitation of foggy places, hoping with the early sunlight that bends over while mostly unseen, as if asking one to see through the veils. How might we move closer to the Presence? 

Messages from the mystics often feature “attending,” “interpretation,” entering the dark and/or silence. To stand beside, to experience the ecstatic, especially in the more subtle vibrations, might require “slow art.” The opportunity is to extend looking, to intensify attention, to open imagination, to go further than the default experience given by “normal” “default” time and space.

The framing and focus on my horizon has been re-set-ing through readings as well as in picture-taking and editing. Arden Reed in Slow Art (pp 120-121) quotes historian Jonathan Crary (Suspensions of Perception) who quotes William James (Principles of Psychology): 

In fact, Crary argues, attention and distraction came to define the modern self. For the psychologist William James (1842-1910) experience itself was not given but formed through acts of attention. He explained in painterly language: ‘Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses in ways which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to … Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground…Without it…consciousness…would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.’

For more of this excerpt from William James, Chapter XI, The Principles of Psychology, 1890, please see: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin11.htm 

      From the closing pages of Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams asserts: “Nature photographers particularly need to widen their subject matter if they are to help us find again the affection for life that is the only sure motive for continuing the struggle toward a decent environment” (p. 103). I’m also being moved by reading Denise Levertov. 

      In addition to picture-taking and editing, my response led to this draft:

The point obscure.

   Like ecstasy, likely obsessive. 

Direction? Where the center,

   illumination? 

Maybe the draw

   not to beauty nor truth. 

Separate no one

   from the ninety nine. 

Just attend with a sixth 

   or further 

sense toward the unknown,

   the Unknowable. 

Focus for the whispered 

   hint, the inaudible 

“Good enough”—

 

Revelation: Resonance and Radiance

2AM or maybe three, with coffee in the dark. Notes from recent nights.

   Vibrations of sound and light offer guidance for travelers between the worlds. Solitude and silence mark access with entrances signaled and illuminated by the qualities of God, especially Beauty, Truth, Love. Those moments out-of-time whisper in silences soon past midnight, reverberating with “the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you...” (Rumi, of course) 

   Because Faces of the Divine reach beyond into the Unknown, the holy qualities shift with elusive forms, refusing to hold still while paradoxically affirming authenticity. 

   Resonance has become a closer friend over these seventy-eight years: Intimacy felt by absence as well as Presence; the sense of the vital-missing that leads most surely away from superficial enchantments--too material and too temporal. 

   The vibration, maybe that called “felt sense,” opens the boundary between worlds, becomes more hopefully trusting through repeated experiences in the beautiful/true/living that which awes/inspires/cares. It’s an intimate, interactive, almost unknowing, risky yet reassuring. 

   This texture knows loneliness and wishes for company in love, the textured kind that emanates from memoir—like when Mark Taylor writes of needing countryside instead of city, and my deep-knowing sighs. 

“Eventually, things reach the tipping point and more becomes different. Speed renders life ever more transient and thus increasingly ephemeral—everything solid melts into ether(nets). The proliferation of media, information, and telematic technologies in infinitely complex networks creates the new domain of cyberspace, where realities that are the ‘substance’ of our lives appear to vaporize and everything becomes virtual. In this placeless place so-called real time is no longer temporal yet not quite eternal. Glimpsing my face in Windows on terminal screens, I realize that I am no place, perhaps even nowhere.

   When real time interrupts ‘real time,’ the flow stops just long enough for me to realize that the time has come for me to return to the country.” (Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living, pp. 73-74)

In the countryside, Taylor writes and reflects in community with Kierkegaard, with his rock gardens, cites Melville, makes mind-pictures of wildflowers, clouds, reflects on memories. All this and more in order to amplify the knowingness of this text-ure-ing. And so my tipping-point nervousness recedes with the advent of such community, with Mark, reassuring and protective. I know in a way-not-known, by faith, by hope, by love. Tenuous. Scary. But enough, just enough. 

   Outside these windows, the view now blues, less gray, promising dawn, this hint of radiance. 

“‘God and the imagination,’ the poet Wallace Stevens avers, ‘are one.’ To appreciate this rich insight we must expand our notion of the imagination and transform our understanding of God. Wherever form emerges from formlessness or pattern appears in the midst of confusion, the imagination is at work. The imagination is not only within us but is also in the world around us. Theologians have had it wrong for centuries—God is the infinite process in and through which everything arises and passes away.” (Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes, p. 78)

Draft…not for release…

 

Lovers: Light/Dark, Open/Closed & Daily reminders of life cycles

Those who might say they know me are unlikely to call me “impetuous,” but surprisingly (especially to me) on several occasions I have jumped in (or out of, over, around, somehow following the invitation: “take-a your chance”). So when my blog-composer-tool puts up “Publish now?…Are you sure?” or whatever it says, I’ll tap it “ok” half-knowing this is a draft that expects revision, maybe deletion. 

     But haven’t we learned to use the term “deleted” paradoxically? oxymoronically? It’s a bit inhibiting to think that every word said (to say nothing of actions done) has been stored somewhere, and possibly in some dim corner of the subconscious already where the fear of such return haunts us. [Note: foreshadowing here. Watch for subsequent “descent/return motif.]  Am I not even warned in the Bible that each fleeting thought might persist to Judgment Day. Perhaps it’s best just not to go there—as if there’s choice. Anyway, this post is published “Draft”… 

And with all that disclaimer, I still see the ghostly figure Kierkegaard approaching with the cartoon bubble overhead: “Despair.” 

Now then, like comfort for a child let’s do story time.

A Tale Told By…   A friend invited me to put my spin in re-telling a love story that in one version begins:  

He came into her life first, and she fell hard. They’d meet on rooftops, where he kissed her like time had stopped and held her like she was everything. She felt safe, even though deep down, he never promised anything. She had been with many before, always the one to leave tired of love that never lasted. But with him, it felt different. Her soul craved the closeness, even if her heart already knew the truth.

So here goes: Once upon a time…   Oops. Hold on. 

     First, a note on my process of composing story. We’ll have to go way back, about 35 years, to when I first experienced narrative discourse enacted by Gioia Timpanelli, who had just been introduced at the Great Mother Conference by Robert Bly as “the greatest storyteller in the country.” Through the next decade or so I’m listening to Gioia, transcribing audiotapes of her tellings, and beginning to try it myself. I was most taken by what I call “asides” in which a different voice or persona comes in, interrupting the narrative flow. I found the asides functioned like a brief commentary that was revealed to the storyteller in the moment of performance as something that was needed for me (and, of course, at times for someone else) in order to get to the Story. The aside somehow mediated the archetypal/personal (similar to the transcendent/immanent, the Self/self), and this allowed access for individual assimilations which might happen or not and could vary according to the readiness of a person for self-development, consciousness, and/or individuation. 

     Whew! That’s a condensation of too much, but it’s been elaborated in previous blogs (especially between Jan 2011 and 2016). In short, this model was the inspiration for my design and implementation of the Good Stories course that culminated my academic career and that often found expression in this blog. Storytelling done in this manner ventures toward an adaptation of Scheherazade’s healing the King through the Thousand and One Nights.

     So, if I’m to re-tell the story noted above, I approach it like a fairy tale 

using guidance from Goia’s model and from theorists such as Marie-Louise von Franz (e.g. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Boston: Shambhala, 1970).  I might consider the woman in the story as She-Who-Loves. Perhaps this “name” derives from looking for an equal half to the Guiding mantra: “he who knows himself knows his Lord.” The best-case for the would-be lover to liaise with She-Who-Loves looks to be the Archetypal Beloved. Possibly in this rendition, the character progression of Mr. Right might first adapt from the Genesis paradise account in which Adam and the serpent are entwined. 

     This brings the Beauty and Beast stories to mind, especially Psyche and Eros which is drawn from Lucius Apuleius (cf Erich Neumann’s Amor and Psyche), and further developed through C.S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces) as well as other wonderful variations. In addition to these (although I haven’t developed my own blend of it) I’d at least want to source the Majnun/Layla tale for enrichment. Especially of interest in that material are the “madness” of Majnun and the lovers’ capacity to live with longing rather than demanding gratification.

     She-Who-Loves enters with Mr. Right. Depending on the age and development of the audience, he appears as the high-school hunk (or naughty boy); but for a more advanced audience, he may be sophisticated and materialistic. Still more “advanced,” the apparent “beloved” could well be a spiritual teacher, a caring mentor, a best-friend’s spouse… The options are abundant. 

     Their meetings on roof tops suggest a heavenly setting for their romance. Yes? We might draw on personal experience and have love strike at a conference where personal/social ideals are the focus. Wouldn’t an adventure involving natural horsemanship be lovely! Another attractive setting would feature the gathering of friends who search for the spiritual pathway, the better environment, the healing of political, religious, or whatever divides us. 

     I don’t mean to be cynical. That’s just the way love goes as far as I can tell. Making/telling the story offers a wonderful opportunity to turn off the Blame/Shame game because those censors kill life. Let the story go through the theatre curtain and play for a time. 

     For advancing plot, I’m drawn into the descent/return motif where character develops through dark forces more than rosy light. Perhaps we’ll even begin with the Wedding itself! What about opening with a lush lovely wedding and then She Who Loves wakes from her dream. 

    The telling might include a recitation of lines from “The marriage of true minds” or from some contemporary song or ancient psalm. It’s a love-story and surely a most significant Face of God is Love with the Creation, one two three: one, creation of human; two, separation of man/woman; and three, the pairing held in Mystery. Yes, when the young woman takes a lover, the deep self overflows—or as the myths tell it: Cupid’s arrow quickens the pulse and the cautionary brain falls into trance…

     What then?  Yes, soon enough the inevitable broken heart falls from the mountain top—from heaven? Ecstasy seldom strays far from its other side—despair. Kierkegaard says despair IS. It’s unavoidable, especially if a person is to gain consciousness. And yet, not total tragedy. For (according to SK) only despair allows the advent of Grace. Perhaps Kierkegaard doesn’t say it that way (I’m only midway through a first reading of the combined Fear and Trembling/Sickness unto Death), so I recommend checking it out.

     Obviously, I’m caught in this Orpheus theme (Persephone, if you wish) which plots 

1) an opening (Kenosis or self-emptying), 

2) then descent (e.g., through the vent to the Underworld that took Psyche), 

3) x, 

4) return.  

1 The beginning, AKA Genesis 1, (anticipate the serpent). Once there were two lovers. The wedding was grand. Just fill in your fantasy. Options: a) Elopement if you prefer. b) Second or third marriage with previous children attending. c) What else comes to mind…

It seems to me marriage (of true minds and with capacity to LOVE) takes several rehearsals or attempts. So I’m tempted to begin this story with characters capable of engaging more substantial dragons (like the death of God or living with simplicity and truth-telling…and death…hmm, did I already say that?).

2 The middle of the story features plot and related character development and thus involves internal/external monsters, I’d draw on my favorite myths. For example, The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell. 

     For another direction within the descent/return motif, as already noted, I love the variants of Psyche and Eros. 

      In the Weddynge option, Ragnell offers a chance to play into magical transformation, trying to bridge the once-upon-a-time with the contemporary as we reach toward relationships that enact fealty, chivalry, beauty, sacrifice, and sovereignty. Yet, while Weddyng attracts, perhaps the story is too susceptible to perpetuating the worship of superficial beauty and of power-over. 

     Although not immediately evident, the significant character development in the Ragnell story has to take place in the male/masculine, portrayed by Gawaine. While often perceived as “pure” due to the Grail connections and as a most accomplished knight as developed in the Arthurian corpus, Gawaine still needs transformation into the radical performance of loyalty and love that includes (gasp) woman! As revealed 2000 years ago, we must remove the pain-giving impurity from our own eyes. Abundant material to build this part of the story is available in Robert Bly’s writings (e.g., Iron John, Maiden King co-authored with Marion Woodman) and many others, including especially those giving attention to how the man needs to develop the feminine. 

     As well as developing the “heroic,” maturity and spiritual progression in men and women depends on suffering, dealing with despair, and building capacity for co-participation in the revelation of continuous mystery. What are possibilities for sustaining community in space/time beyond but known in “now.” [I think this is the theme of my next blog.} How do we find and maintain the “realm of God” that’s already happening and not just in the hope for an after-life. We have vocabulary for this that would benefit from story, for example “re-deem” as imagine anew by recovering an inheritance and “atonement” which can be storied through the telling of marriage and community reaching into “at-one-ment.”

3 x

     X stands for the Unknown (and likely feels like hell or at least a dark dungeon).  X also signifies multiple possibilities, and this is necessary to fit the Individual whose essential attribute is the Unique. But our Life Design, best I can tell, forces a dialectic in which the absolutely personal gets played by the transcendent (as close to the capital T as we can get). So we each have to compose that part individually which means “live it” (for suggestions, read Kierkegaard, my current choice; Iris Murdoch—an old favorite; death-of-God theologians, eg Altizer); and the one/s that provide that telling resonance for your journey. So I recommend you make your own sense of “why X.” It’s life, as I find it and suppose I wouldn’t have it otherwise. 

4 return

The ending? The story draft I’m working from left off with this line: “He moved on but she still didn't , remained with her trauma” [no period]. 

     While not exactly “happily ever after,” neither is life and often not narrative either. I’m expecting any day now to receive a book order: Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Tantalizing title, yes? The blurb advertises:

Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story—the history of which encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King—that ends with a question rather than an answer. The detective not only fails to solve the crime, but also confronts insoluble mysteries of interpretation and identity. As the contributors to Detecting Texts contend, such stories belong to a distinct genre, the "metaphysical detective story," in which the detective hero's inability to interpret the mystery inevitably casts doubt on the reader's similar attempt to make sense of the text and the world.

Can hardly wait. Because, yes, life remains a mystery. What is love anyway? To say nothing of God—which may be the same question after all. 

So we might want a closing other than the word “trauma,” and I’m leaning toward “…” the open-ended ellipsis. My middle/muddle-of-last-night’s “meditation” went thus:

Perhaps the story resolution resides in no resolution, in surrender of illusion. The image of paradise imprisons. Ecstasy kills reality. Idols of materialism, power, superiority…separate us from God and from each other, now as then. All the great qualities—truth, justice, peace, love…— have demons stuck to them. God won’t be bought or sold to, neither owned nor lost. And here be Stopping Place. 

   My wandering mind brings up SK where he hesitated to publish material that he felt was getting preachy (“edifying discourse” vs “dialectical lyric”}. See Walter Lowrie’s Introduction in the combined volume mentioned above. 

This meditation closed with the suggestion for following the ellipsis with a phrase and another ellipsis: … our work/play never-done… 

   

Quality of light. Near dusk…dawn…