The flame in your temple

My mother loved going to concerts. One of her motivations here had little, or only obliquely, to do with the music. Rather it was that, as she confessed, "I like to fall in love with the soloist." She was capable of falling, and did fall, in love with painters, sculptors, filmmakers - so long as they were celebrated. So Dalí and Picasso were "geniuses" [speak the word with terrifying reverence] and, as far as I am aware, to this day she wishes for none other than Ludwig von Beethoven to welcome her personally when she arrives on the other side.

The human love of human 'stars' has, probably, everything to do with being overcome momentarily with the feeling that you've champagne, or even the cosmos itself, in your veins, rather than blood. However, I do wonder whether this feeling is aroused by the artwork you're apparently appreciating, rather than by the contiguity you find yourself in, beside awestruck fellow humans, all of them in a thoroughly heightened state. Mob mentality does not kick in only when it comes to demagoguery, violence and war.

In the arts, rock concerts have exploited this human weakness - the deliciousness, the necessity, even, of losing the self - to an extreme. The Dionysian frenzy that fans whip up in their orgasmic surrender, to whoever it is they are united in worshipping at that moment, has been obligatory for at least as long as we have had electricity - though several millennia back, thousands of ancient Greeks would apparently weep and tear their hair in unison on seeing Oedipus Rex or the Medea, performed live in their amphitheatres. The very word 'fan', used in this sense, derives from 'fanatic', which originally meant a "mad, enthusiastic person inspired by a god" and, even nowadays, is not imbued with wholesome meaning. 

It is naturally cathartic to self-forget, to lose oneself to something that is blissful or terrible, overwhelming and literally awesome. What worries me when it comes to fanship, however, beyond the excessive enthusiasm it can stoke, is the one-way-street of stardom.

At times, it feels to me as if we've lost touch with our primitive (wholesome) worship of the sun, stars, moon and planets, because we've put human beings in the place of the heavenly bodies - sacrificing how many new Prometheuses to be daily divested of their livers? For, as everybody knows, the industry of fame can be a gory one indeed.

What worries me, perhaps most, about that industry, is that it transactionalises love. The lovers are turned into a clientèle, whose hunger is fanned by their own fanship, which is by definition a state of being in which you do not inhabit yourself. Indeed, who remembers to nourish their own flame when super-ignited by spectacle and sound effects, heated by a fired up crowd? Nowadays, this kind of experience is available 24/7 via video footage with shrieking applause and mind-numbing lighting aerobics.

There is naturally a place for (harmless) madness in this world, and music fests are a cheery way of allowing us to express that madness. I share reverence for a particularly good phrase or piece of writing, or piece of art or music and, along with other poets and performers, I do love mesmerising an audience with my voice at times. But what matters ultimately is surely what is stirred in you, rather than what is happening outside of you? A resonance, a flame that continues burning even when the lights dim down and everything is quiet again.

The Latin word fanum, whence 'fanatic' comes, meant 'temple', 'shrine' or 'consecrated place'. If my work should enjoy devotees, I would hope that it's because I've managed to introduce you to a consecrated place inside your own precious soul - helping you to remember, rather than forget, your dear self.

Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash

'Lovelight' (ceramic by Silke Heiss)

Navigating a self-altering future

The attractiveness of 'the law of attraction' in everyday life is that it declares that you have the potential to control your thoughts. Of all things possible to control, one's own thoughts are perhaps the most rebellious of all. It is a sweet victory to be able to claim truthfully, "I control and, indeed, lead my thoughts." Even where one manages to achieve it occasionally, my experience teaches that it remains, daily, an effort. Writing down your thoughts does help.

The elusiveness of our thoughts may be, because many thoughts are not exactly conscious; nor, frequently, are they owned by, or originate from within, the self. 

In 'Staying Connected', Rudolf Steiner went so far as to say that our thoughts are infusions from the spirits of the dead in their attempts to lead (presumaby they could also mislead) us. I have yet to get through, let alone understand, his book Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. I do not have my own copy and vaguely recall early passages in that book being concerned with discovering one's true motivations; I confess that I still belong to that class of lesser mortals for whom dwelling on true motivatons initiates a definite adventure into smoky territory.

I won't even mention the infusion or influence of thoughts from the living into our conscious- and subconsciousness - I am sure that every person reading this can attest to the confusions, convictions, delusions and intoxications caused by mental and physical continguity with the living. 

Yet everywhere, these days, is the popular slogan seen - 'Build the future YOU want'. On one level, this could be seen as an open rebellion against David's plea, 'I shall not want', in Psalm 23. (Some bright sparks have deemed fit to translate this line as 'I lack nothing', but that is too monodimensional for me.) Yet it would be fair to give the slogan the benefit of the doubt - building what you want can by all means chime with the laws of Nature, or God, or the general good, all of which are forces far more long-lived than the potent little microcosm of your self.

The climate of the times tends strongly towards encouraging the assertion of individual human will over him- or herself, in order to harness and calibrate experiences, decisions and choices, and I strongly motivate for self-control in thought and action - it's a pretty exciting thing to be investing time and energy in, mainly because it grants you the possibility of genuine friendship with the most elusive aspect of your life: your embodied self on this earth, thoughts and all.

Once you begin to be able to change ancient patterns in your behaviour, you are rearing, or re-parenting, your self. This generates new imaginative possibilities for you - possibilities beyond imagining, so to speak. It does mean no longer tolerating stuff that once used, maybe, to be 'inevitable'.

Perhaps some of these free-flowing strands are useful to you as you navigate and build.

Blue cranes in fallow fields. Photo by Sigi Heiss.

 

 

  

Against an automatic cringe

In a recent review of Finuala Dowling's latest poetry collection, Pretend you don't know me, published by Kwela, Reg Rumney writes:

"In an age of self-obsession and poetry as therapy, poet and novelist Finuala Dowling’s work is outward oriented. She makes it her business to have an audience. Her poems talk about what is most painful to us, publicly and privately without inviting voyeurism and she’s not afraid of politics beyond slogans. And she enjoys performing her poems. They are not internal monologues."

Rumney's point is valid and I completely chime with his praise of Finuala Dowling's work. I agree with him that any reader would benefit from possessing a copy of Pretend you don't know me.

However, I would like to invite you to rewind to his words, "In an age of self-obsession and poetry as therapy", going on to imply that, in this 'age', much poetry amounts to no more than "voyeurism" of "internal monologues".

I do not question Rumney's feelings about selfie-type poems. These feelings are perfectly understandable.

Nevertheless, I would like to invite you to look again. 

Yes, there is much preoccupation with the self in recent poetry - the self both in its psychological as well as physical manifestations - during this year, and the last, and perhaps the previous ten to twenty; a trend that was arguably begun by William Wordsworth more than two hundred years ago. To offer my own eye on this trend, I would say there is far more going on than can be simply dismissed as an irritating literary aberration, due to a lack of education among emerging poets as to proper poetic attitudes and style.

Yes, it is exhausting and enervating to plough through hundreds upon hundreds of poems, often imaged as memes by (frequently) young, often love-struck, more often love-starved, psychologically struggling folk, who may be on medication or not, using words as a way to keep themselves from drowning in loneliness, despair, and social neglect. I am not even mentioning the environmental and political crises shadowing the globe. 

And yes, it behoves a critic and reviewer to remind readers and writers of modes of expression that would take them beyond themselves and outside their anguish, no matter how desperate they might be. For example:

"I have sweated metals and fused quicksilver to moonlight.
Equations have haunted my walls in a race against time." - from The Alchemy of you by Jessica Denyschen, in The Magic, The Madness and the Loss, Poetree Publications, 2018 

Even out of context, these "self-obsessed" lines are potent, reaching deeply into self in a formidable and rhythmically utterly convincing way. 

Overall, I would caution protectively against an automatic cringe in response to the search for self in an age that requires and facilitates the individual's search for their own soul more than ever before. I think it was Pearl S. Buck who said that the human soul was the least developed area on earth. If our young writers are searching so, who are we to dismiss the awful - and it is by definition awful - struggle?

Dowling is not a part of the new generation; she is older and wiser and it shows in her writing.

Please do not condemn the young who are going through struggles we oldies will never even taste. I daresay Nuala - yes, I do know her a little bit, well enough to call her so - would be highly unlikely to dismiss emerging poets grappling with their human selves by means of trying to make poems. However poorly for now.

I would go so far as to say that a true poet does not put their craft before their soul. Even if critics and reviewers may at times wish that we do.

For the full review by Rumney, see  Reg Rumney Review of Finuala Dowling  

Self - A poem for my mother

It's my last day in Somerset West with my parents. I suddenly remembered that I'd been meaning to take my mother in her wheelchair to her mirror, to see whether the stroke-paralysed left side, and her hemianopia, may not benefit from the objective self-recognition, which a mirror asks for.

It was an uplifting moment, which brought not only gladness in us, and relief, for both my father and the carer, from the duty of combing my mother's hair, but, too, this little poem -

Self
for my mother

For the first time
in twenty-one months
she's wheeled before a mirror -

'Looks familiar,' she quips,
touches her lame, left shoulder and knee,
crosses the left-right hemispheres - no problem -

combs her long, white hair,
is glad it doesn't pull
as much as when my dad or the carer do it -

and the very strands spontaneously make a delicate wave
above her brow, as newfound dignity
takes her forward

to the image now
of her lovely old
self.

- Silke Heiss, 3rd January 2019