New Direction for Blog! Epithets of Wisdom

No one will accuse me of not being prolix at times, so I aim to amend my logorrheaic ways with a new direction for the blog: epithets of wisdom.

Here's today's:

Follow the light you have.

It seems like everyone's heard this but we need to be reminded now and again. Here is my verse (as opposed to poetry) to commemorate this piece of wisdom:

Follow the light you have.
Do not pray for more.
Always the fearful brave
See light under the door.

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I've been well for so long now, nearly a year-and-a-half, that I do not feel impelled to write about mood disorders. But if you wait long enough, manic-depression is a recurrent and incurable illness, and I always aim to please!

Thine in Truth and Art,

Craig Erick

Kamikaze Turkey! Poem, "Turkey Heaven"

Most of us have seen a sparrow or some other diminutive bird fly into the house and break its neck against a window. A common occurrence, one might say.

But the other day I witnessed something extraordinary.

There is a flock of wild turkeys near our home and I often let my dog chase them. They rise in flight in their ungainly way, and though they outweigh him they suffer from inter-species fright and flutter away. Anyway, when J. Alfred (my dog, see picture) took off after them all rose and flew SW except for one old Tom who rose and flew NE towards the cottages. I heard a resounding crash and thought "No, it couldn't be." Then I walked to my neighbor's and there was a large window broken and the turkey, splayed on the ground, its neck bent, reflexively flapping and moving its feet in a death spasm like a pithed frog animated by electric current. I took two nearby feathers for a souvenir of the Kamikaze. He wasn't suicidal, just confused. But a fifty-pound bird crashing into your window? Too bad Hitchcock didn't think of it. One turkey would have smashed the phone booth in which Tippie Hedren took refuge.

I have tried to publicize this menace through my liberal friends, those who legislate helmets and seat belts and food additives, the mommy brigade, but none thought my crusade as valid as the end of 2 million lawn dart sets after one boy was killed.

Who will protect us from flying turkeys? Certainly there should be government regulations against the danger. Call your state representative today!

Here's a recent poem about turkeys:


Turkey Heaven

Three wild turkeys
foraged above the leach field,
pulling their great teardrop bodies
behind like U-Haul trailers
as if their red pistoning heads
propelled them forward,
chest feathers dangling
in long pendants.

In shadow, grave, funereal
they stepped lightly forward
as if avoiding pebbles
like Puritans in a queue
treading carefully over sins
to meet a god unappeased
by burnt offerings.

I thought of Mather and Edwards
in long frock coats
filing forward to the altar,
heads heavy with theology,
pulling congregants behind,
dark bodies hauled to heaven.

But when the birds broke into sunlight
they were transformed
by brass and crimson highlights
etched in metallic green,
equal to any peacock
raising his paisley fan.

If metaphors could fly, they flew
at my dog’s frenzied approach,
oversized wings pumping,
boulder bodies rising,
gravity upended
in a miraculous roosting.


All for today. At one kilobunny,

CE

"Catcher in the Rye," Leonard Cohen and the Global Economy

I passed 50,000 visitors some time ago and have five posts left to make 600.

Naturally during my silences my readership has fallen, but as I have before stated, this blog is therapy for me, and obviously my absence is a good sign--I have not been in need of therapy. Still, in re-reading a few random posts today, I am pleased with the breadth of this blog--from psychology to religion and literature to science and football and current events--the number of topics is legion, though all tied together by my inherited illness, the suffering of which has been the main concern, and likely attracted the most readers.

I suppose it obvious that I have a rather abstract mind, though I hope that my writing contains enough concrete experience (and/or figures of speech) to keep the reader interested. Of course you must be a select reader to come here; as was said of Camels, "They're not for everyone." My perorations can be abstruse, though I try to write clearly. Clarity is what I most prize in prose, why I think Milan Kundera should win the Nobel Prize. Like John Steinbeck, and for similar reasons, I love Kundera's lack of adornment. I cannot say my own writing has progressed to such, but then I am lousy at fiction in any case.

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In 54 years I have never been able to complete "Catcher in the Rye," and this has haunted me, so I bought a new copy and am past pg. 200, which gives a healthy prognosis to my completing it. What turned me off before, and what I can barely stand now, is the self-hatred of this adolescent narcissist. Everything he projects on others ("phonies, selfish, unfeeling") is exactly what he thinks of himself, of course, though he is unaware of the irony. Puzzling is his lack of preoccupation with the female body as a teenager, but many have commented on this in terms of latent homosexuality. If so, that self-hatred is buried even more deeply in his unconscious--he cannot begin to touch it. The only redeeming aspects of Caufield's character are his love for his sister, dead brother, and his admiration for his older brother, although he thinks his older brother, a writer, imprisoned among the Hollywood "phonies." And what is a phony in H.C.'s book? Anyone who is not feeling exactly how he is feeling at that moment.

I can see why this book held America by the short hairs; few have exposed the adolescent psychosis of extreme narcissism so well, and I wonder at what age Salinger wrote it. (Ah, the miracle of the net in instant research! As "Catcher in the Rye" appeared in 1951, Salinger would have been 32 when it was published, still close enough to recall adolescent agony.) To recall such inner experience so vividly requires a great amount of insight, and to portray it requires a great amount of skill. I couldn't have maintained this voice for more than ten pages as it ultimately sickens and bores me.

No wonder so many teenagers, in their developmental nihilism, are so attracted to the book. At 16 I was a proto-human whose boundaries between self and others and God were often magical and evanescent, who believed one thing one moment and another thing the next. What stands out most from that year was my conversion, which unfortunately forestalled the completion of my adolescence into my thirties.

For Leonard Cohen fans, or even if you're not, I want to take a moment to recommend his new, two-disc "Live in London." It averages five stars after 67 reviews there. Truly a wonder, especially considering the man is 73. And what a back-up band, nine pieces, incredible. Kathleen gave it to me for my birthday present (Oct. 17) alone with a new CD player to plug into our ancient van's cassette player, a pleasure she can only partly experience, mainly through rhythm, while we drive (for the uninformed, my wife was born profoundly deaf).

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I would also like to share a passage I recently discovered in an obscure SciFi book entitled "Sykaos," by E. P. Thompson, on the human economy:


Of Money (by the alien, Oi Paz)


If property is the Rule, then 'money' is its Messenger. It is money which commands obedience. All life on Sykaos is a service on its errands. It is money which opens the door to property, and without which one is a holeless person.

Some money is a thing. It is round discs of a base metal such - or gold, which any smith might make, or ‘forge,’ but which it is forbidden to any to forge except an officer known as the ‘chancellor’ whose servants labour at forgery night and day in the ‘Treasury.’ So that he may give out money to those whom he favours and confiscate it from others by a means known as ‘tax,’ which tax is extorted from the general public in papers known as ‘cheques,’ for which reason the Chancellor's palace is known as the 'Ex-Chequer', from which exactions he passes an excess (or ‘excise') to the Pee-Em who has built from this store a handsome palace in the country named as 'Checquers'….

But the greater part of money is a no-thing. It is (like property) ¬a kind of awe, whose worship is performed in bumples known as ‘banks,’ which bumples are to be found in great numbers ~ every street.

The worshippers of money are divided into many sects and factions, each of which pay tribute to a different bumple, but I could never decipher the difference in their doctrines except that ¬in one sort the priesthood promise to their devotees that they W’’~ ensure that they are among the Elect after death--by which they are known as 'Life Ensurers’--whereas the other sort is more this-worldly in its catechisms, offering to believers the 'interest’ of their prophets, with much wild language exhorting the people to 'conversions' and 'savings', and calling upon them to surrender to the prophet’s their 'deeds' and 'wills.'

These prophets (or 'profits') were once great persons in antiquity, or founders of bumples and the authors of their books of faith, or 'bibles', whereby they were sometimes known as '¬'book-keepers,’ or 'bookies'. But now, as with all things Sykotic, they are degenerated to common servitors. It is their office now to stand like counters in a line behind little grilles where they hear the confessions or worshippers. And when the worshippers have given a tribute of money, they confess their sins in whispers through the grille and are 'paid' according to their merits .. with a penance (or 'debit') or an exhortation to faith (or ‘credit’) which is all set down in a computer as a 'balance' for the final Day of Reckoning. And some few, who are favoured by the profits, are given dispensation with the return of a little money, which they carry out of the bumples in their pockets and bags.

There are thus two kinds of money, which are known as ‘cash’ and 'debt'. The cash goes around in bags and pockets and passes between counters, in the form of papers, discs, cheques and other such forgeries. But the greater part is debt, or a fiction stored in the computers of banks, as a record of penance and faith. It is a promise of a hereafter, which the chief profits shuffle around in a continual circulation (or 'currency') between promisers and askers, believers and sinners, until all enquiry is perplexed and all that is left is awe.

We must note two remarkable qualities of money. The first is that the less cash there be, the greater the command of 'credit', and the greater the power of awe. For it happens sometimes that the person has no credit and is 'broke', from which qualification he may set up as a private profit or 'broker', and by cunning balancing of one promise against another (although there be nothing in these promises but air) he may in a short while erect such a structure of fictions that he is accounted by the computer to be one of the 'richest' men in the land.

The second quality of money is that it breeds or multiplies according to its use. For that small portion which is cash and which passes from bag to bag is infertile and grows daily less from use. But that great part which is fiction swells and procreates in the computers. So that a great moneylender, such as a broker or the chief profit of a bank, who instructs the computer to imagine that his money is some nation's debt, may lie all year in bed doing nothing and yet at the end of it his money will have multiplied. And it is pretended that this man (but in truth his money) now owns great extents of lands and trees and buildings and flocks of beefs. Which 'properties' he has never seen and cannot use.

All this goes on above the heads of the people, who worship it as a sacred mystery. For the greater part of them have no more business with the banks than to take to them a weekly tribute for their profits and to make confession. And yet all their goings and comings are ordered within the Rule of Money.

This is all as I have observed, and I set it down as exact science. What, then, is money? If it be a measure, then what quality—as colour, or weight, or heat--does it measure? A person pretending to learning will say that money measures 'value;’ but if one asks what value is it will say that value is what a thing is 'worth' or honoured; and if one asks how worth is determined and who apportions honour, it will reply that it is done by 'price'; and price is the name of the scale of money. So that it is money which apportions honour and which measures this whole planet in its scales.

And as they pretend to 'own' nature, so also they measure in money all their creature-intercourse. Except within the secret life of their little series-sets, or families, they have no concept of gifts, or fair trading in which honour is the measure and the increase of the social sum is the end. They do not, in obedience to the Festive Fairs of the Colleges, send out their carriages laden with votive offerings. One sees in the streets no casual exchanges between givers, each anxious to outvie the other in generosity, and so to come better out of the deal. There are no troupes of dancers, or flautists, performing in the squares, and richly rewarded by the street-walkers' joy. There are no poets, galloping on unicorns, hastening to serve their writs to the multitude without any thought of any 'quid.’ No: every duty, every service, every obligation, all are met, not with an equivalence of courtesy, but with a few dirty discs, a scrap of paper, or a promise of hereafter whispered to a profit in confession. As if Oi Paz [the alien narrator] were to write this grave tome, and indict these weighty sciences, and expect in exchange for all his pain and labours, not the awe-struck deference of the Club of Critics, but a few lumps of gold like chuckall's dung. As if Oi Paz were to write for money!


I have never read such a prescient precis' of the global economy.


1 Kilobunny,

Craig Erick

The Whole Thing II

It's been a while since I've blogged, but that is a measure of mental health in that I don't feel the therapeutic need to do so, even if I had a little dip in my mood in the last week, though increased medications seem to have that on the run. I won't list my medications; I've done so in the past. I don't want anyone to think my cocktail is universal or easily applied to others. These combinations of drugs are beyond psychiatry's ability to determine if and why they work--as long as you're doing well, keep taking them. In medical school in a lecture on psychosis a professor opined: "This is an antipsychotic, Mellaril. Take 50 mg. a day and if you feel better, don't tell anyone."

(Doctors are the most serious drug abusers and RNs a close second. Availability, availability, availability. But Mellaril is hardly a drug of abuse.)

As for reading, I've plowed through a slew of novels of late, have nearly finished Wallace Stevens' collected poems, and am more than halfway through with John Ashbery's selected. Stevens is a master; Ashbery is a curiosity of our times, a man who shares his present, quotidian consciousness with us and often contrasts it with the past and muses on stages of development. He is not a lyric poet; he is not a logopoet; he is a discursive poet who throws everything in but the kitchen sink in his usual pastiche of narrating his own consciousness. He is boring, obtuse and self-indulgent. When he briefly attempts formal rhymes they are laughable. Had he been writing a century ago I daresay he wouldn't have been a poet at all. Back then you had to be able to master a sonnet. I cannot disrecommend him more highly, but he has benefited me in loosening my associations in my own compositions.

Earlier in this blog I attempted to encompass "the whole thing." Here's a link to that post: The Whole Thing

I have now worked the same thing into one of my recent poems:


The Whole Thing

Is a nimiety of untold proportions,
a whirling globe of radishes,
a carnival with a trillion barkers,
a moon braying at a palm forest,
a thousand-eyed politician,
numberless embalmers with brake fluid,
the naked ballerina twirling at the speed of light
like some vanishing gyroscope,
how the pumpkin seeds coat everything,
the evaporation of water,
salt crust of a diminishing bog,
carnivorous plants in a Gorgon wig,
the extinction of dinosaurs,
the Dodo holocaust, the decline of frogs,
nimbus of maggots, temple of flies
wound around a rubber center
like a golf ball with its shiny dimples,
the stainless steel contraption
we dreamed of that did everything,
the ultimate Swiss Army Knife,
a Hoover with a million attachments
for soldering and colonoscopy and carpet cleaning,
the crystal hagiography of various churches
spread like maps on the brown velvet
and all the funny hats, funny hats
in Cardinal red or Quaker black
honoring the birdbath of their flocks,
a giant gumball rolling down a farm road
picking up feathers and cigar stubs
and all manner of vegetables,
growing monstrously large
like an irradiated pumpkin
but uncontainable, incontestable,
always in motion while accreting substance
of sand, shells, gravel, straw, burrs
stuck to its expanding surface
like hemagglutinin spikes on a virus,
a thing of absolute obesity
gobbling souls like popcorn
while film coils around film
into the ultimate movie,
a chambered nautilus of action figures,
special effects and nausea,
the smell of charred spaceships
mixed with Chanel No. 5,
bubbling green alien flesh on no earthly channel
rather broadcast to us by them
who overpopulate the periphery
of the humongous outbreak of potentiality
that attracts everything, having more gravity
than anything, an all-absorbent ball
of paper towels, a thing without tonsils or teeth
that absorbs us through its porous skin
as a frog does oxygen, a sticky thing,
a caramel apple of prodigious girth,
taking the shape of a sphere
because it is the most economical
though it cares nothing about economy
as it eclipses the global GDP
in its relentless overbearing on everything at once,
pressing down on the collective forehead,
depressing eyes with fishing weights,
insatiable superplanet sucking up moons
like plankton, the whole pelican’s beak
but already molting beyond that,
plastered about with hummingbird wings
like bumper stickers, the whole damn
indefinable mess of it, an all-encompassing
space-time Thanksgiving turkey
obliterating the Big Bang with drippings,
stuffing itself with the bread crumbs of galaxies,
constantly feasting on the universe
but perverse enough to fuck with you
personally if you take it that way.


(It garnered an honorable mention at the Wild Poetry Forum one week.)


To recount the events from my life in intervening weeks would be beyond my scope or ability. The Mendocino Men's Circle retreat is happening the weekend of the 25th, a process in which I've been heavily involved, and Kathleen and I are leaving for NY on the 29th to see her mother and assorted friends. I hope to visit Norm Ball in DC and take in the Smithsonian as well. I am, however, a west coast snob, thinking our northern Pacific coast far superior to anything they have out there in Flatland, and the Appalachians are nothing like the Sierras.

For those who wished the Melic Board were reestablished, I can only say I have no plans for the immediate future, though I often regret ending the magazine when I did, but I was lacking a webmaster and engulfed in a two-year depression, as followers of this blog know.

I've purchased a stunt kite that is so far too difficult to fly, though I have lacked sustained winds. The other day I shot par at the local Frisbee golf course! Today I must spray the flower garden with deer repellent, made with spoiled egg salad and garlic, sold commercially--I kid you not. But it works. Those four-hooved rats don't like it at all.

I just had another rejection from Poetry but I soldier on. I hope my opinion of Ashbery doesn't disqualify me.

All for today,

CE

On Poetry Boards; Last Night's Reading

Last night I had a lovely reading at the Mendocino Hotel where I sold four books to a sparse audience. But they were attentive and I had a grand time. Doing what I do best, reading from my own work, always pumps me up! I got to bed late. But what a pleasure to fulfill your calling--a calling with which those who have followed this blog are familiar.


Today at Poets.org in a discussion of the effect of online poetry boards, I had this to say.

I have nursed these questions for years, having begun the Melic Roundtable poetry board in 1998, shutting it down in roughly 2006 when barbarians invaded. We did not require registration at the board, one of the last "free" boards, and the moderators had no power to delete. For a while we had a thriving culture, winning more IBPC awards than any other board. But it collapsed and policing didn't interest me.

The main difficulty in poetry boards is separating the unfledged from the advanced, so that beginners are not cudgeled into despair nor the elite bored and disgusted. Many boards now include levels to join by personal choice, as in the "Merciless and Possibly Painful Critique" at the Poetry Free-for-All (I don't necessarily recommend this board but here's the link: http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/ )

The proliferation of boards has definitely diluted the quality, say since 2003. At that time there was great competition between a few boards for primacy: Melic, Alsop, and Web del Sol among them.

It is the grand disparity in craft and talent that "dumbs down" boards into factories of misguided compliments. I suspect the best poetry workshops reside in private listservs or carefully guarded posting areas. Zeugma was an early example of this, producing a number of fine poets before it ceased.

Ultimately it's like tennis: always play a slightly better player. But for those of us who have published widely and have non-vanity books, where do we find these players? Certainly the exalted like Ashbery, Murray, Strand and Levine don't play anywhere.

To speak the truth, I wager that most advanced poets have little patience with fledglings, despite the encouragement ladled out at seminars and as MFA instructors expected to be "nice" for the continuing income generated. Here capitalism largely prevents excellence IMHO. The similar "never a discouraging word" culture practiced at so many boards is maddening. Fear of hurting the feelings of the callow will soon make a more discerning critic into a skunk at a garden party (to use a much worn trope).

So rather than deride the existence of mediocre boards, or promote the severity of a board as I mentioned above, I think the best solution is a listserv or personal correspondence between poets of roughly the same level instead of the potpourri nature of boards and their subcultures of obvious glad-handing.

Lastly, "Fleet Street" has always existed, famously satirized in Pope's "The Dunciad." Its proliferation on the net is not a new development, but an inevitable consequence of tyros reaching for the laurel. To this we ought to be accustomed by history.

You can always find me at Facebook now as Craig Erick Chaffin. As I said in a previous post, I think Facebook and Twitter are driving down the popularity of blogs, save the exalted, group blogs (like Huffington's) that have morphed into profit generating enterprises.

At 1 Kilobunny (though I did get very pumped up after the reading as I always do),

C. E. Chaffin

Twitter, Facebook, New Issue of Poetry and New Poem

I have to wonder if Facebook participation has not only crimped my blog but many others. I'm sure the urge to such a platform began with teenage phone-texting, that telegraphic, concrete practice of the young ascending into the cyber-ether with trails of trivia in its wake. To blog, to my thinking, is to write a piece of some substance with enough room for language to do more than say, "I'm going to the store now."

Twitter I have resisted for that reason; you can post a decent paragraph on Facebook but Twitter limits you to the mundane, unless you quote part of a poem, as I have when my publisher first urged me to employ Twitter.

Are our minds getting smaller or is the world just too big to do anything but attach passing comment of little merit? I prefer to think that it is a matter of impatience and illiteracy. How many of the new generation know anything about history in general, especially the history of literature? How many have the patience to sit down with a great book that requires their undivided attention? Video games, cell phones, Twitter, texting, don't these affect the human attention span negatively? Is everyone in such a hurry or is illiteracy the new standard?

I confess this state of affairs has somewhat discouraged me from blogging, since it's hard for me to say something in 100 words or less. Expository prose needs something more than a breathless exhalation of the latest personal circumstance. It needs pacing, development, and patience on the reader's part.

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I have just received this month's edition of Poetry and am per usual underwhelmed, except for the section of personal essays in which, of all things, a Tampa Bay Outfielder weighs in literately. So does a federal appellate judge. The poems range from good to bad; Samuel Menache, the lead poet, has an obvious perch in the hallowed halls of Harriet Monroe since he was awarded the "The Neglected Master's Award"--by Poetry, of course--in 2004. Let us say simply that this is one "master" who deserves neglect.

Of the book reviews we find only the usual suspects, those with books published either by Alfred A. Knopf or Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Small presses and prominent Net poets always go unrecognized in this august journal desperately striving to be current in a world of poetic Balkanization. The editors seem without direction, like the hundred-eyed giants of Greek mythology. In trying to see everything they concentrate on nothing.

It gives me some hope to note that Wallace Stevens' first book, "Harmonium," published in 1923, only sold 100 copies. This is how many lasting poets begin, their reputations only to be rescued in old age. Some break through in their own time, but I think current darlings Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan eminently forgettable, to name two. Where are the classicists? Where are the masters? Many lost to experimental blather, I fear, trying so hard to be original that they become grotesque. Naturally I have written about this at length in essays, but I won't bore you with links. You can always Google me, the new measure of relative cultural worth, where I hang around 20,000 references, if you must know.

To follow poetry in earnest nowadays is impossible, with probably a thousand literary magazines on the Net and who knows how many small press journals. This is why, no doubt, I prefer reading the acknowledged greats prior to 1960. Why waste your time on contemporaries when the judgment of history has already anointed those worth reading in the recent (as far as literary history goes) past? I read Poetry through each month and try to wrap my brain around what's good in it, but were I the editor, many of the poems would never have made it in. And when you look at the bios in the back, there are virtually no unknowns--almost every author has some claim to a prize or multiple books or some other sign of assigned greatness that evaporates when you read their work. Should I mention names? No, I do not wish to make enemies in an insular world where "never is heard a discouraging word." Still, in the freedom of a blog, I can post my own poems, which I think no less worthy than the fare in Poetry, where my reputation precedes me, excluding me from consideration for a lack of exalted credentials. Here's today's poem:


Blue Feather

The screech of a jay in a pinafore--
what that dark hole of dancing's for:
the blue feather at the crinoline core.

Take a pearl, how the dark seed of sand
swaddles itself in layers of pink hands,
the blue feather in the seed of sand.

My darkness doesn't advertise its blue.
I leave the Sherlock Holmes routine to you.
The blue feather of a cockatoo.

When Satan heard of the discovery
that dark was at the center of recovery,
the blue feather snapped his reverie.

The vulture circled above the humming flies.
The carrion was not a major prize.
The blue feather saw it in his eyes.

It's not a blue guitar, it's just a blade
of quills with some metallic undershade:
the blue feather of the Stellar's jay.


The informed reader will notice the obvious nod to Wallace Stevens in this piece, but I hope it is somewhat of an original nod.

When I say I am a Classicist I mean that there are principles to art: first, unity; second, meaningful substance; third, form appropriate to that substance; and fourth, a certain lyrical expectation of the language. I could list more but these four will do to exclude much contemporary verse.

I do not feel inferior to the poets in Poetry, except for their much-polished bios; my bio would likely include so many unheralded journals that the giants would laugh, but I encourage them to laugh. What Poetry does worst, what all the academic venues do worst, is to risk discovering poets on the Net or in small journals, as they may risk their reputation as exalted magazines. Just take a look at the bios in Poetry! In most cases these form a pre-qualification for inclusion.

I admit I've submitted to Poetry repeatedly but this provokes no jealousy on my part; what I see in the magazine does not impress me enough to think I am less for a relative lack of recognition. I do not recommend subscribing to Poetry unless you hunger for a snapshot of how little anyone can judge the value of a current poet's work. One should write for all time and not just for a time, but the popularity of many poets, as in the review of Fred Seidel, often depend on current references, though admittedly many of the poems in Poetry do reach for all time. Few attain it. Of the many poems included, I would cite Desiree' Alvarez and Katia Kapovich, with one poem each, as worth reading.

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Here on the Mendocino Coast it's sunny today, but we all know that can change in a minute; the ever-present fog bank is far out at sea, though still visible. I watched my wife work in the garden this morning with joy, our dog curled in the sun nearby. And soon I will see my brother, up here vacationing. Thank God for the little joys of life which poetry tries so hard to capture! (Though mainly it must fail.)

Thine in Truth and Art,

C. E. Chaffin

On Existential Psychoanalyisis

I've recently read some Kierkegaard, which I wrote about here briefly, and I just finished Sartre's "Existentialism and Emotion." Though I have often called myself an "Existential Christian Taoist" (in part to form the acronym for Electro-Convulsive Therapy which I have twice endured), my understanding of Existentialism has been more second hand. In the book Sartre spends the last two chapters on "Existential Psychoanalysis," showing how it might differ from traditional psychoanalysis. Fascinating though somewhat dated stuff.

In my Logopoetry I essay I substituted "Existential" for "Post-Modern" as the dominant philosophical core of poetry since roughly 1960. I stand by my pronouncement; the key problem of the Post-Moderns has been the problem of the self, perhaps best typified by the poetry of Mark Strand, but certainly also owing to the psychological research of such luminaries as Kohut and Kernberg.

In any case, how does existential psychoanalysis differ from traditional analysis? In Existentialism, existence must precede essence. Our essence, our configuration of personality, derives from our choices, and not to choose is as much a choice as to choose. Thus our personalities are not powered by unconscious material but by conscious choices, and whatever we become conscious of no longer belongs to the unconscious. Thus an existential therapist would not be interested in potty training, rather what the subject could remember about the choices in such a struggle--which of course doesn't have to be a struggle at all, since training often goes smoothly. The individuation of attachment to mother can also be seen as a choice, a choice that leads to other choices of independence--or not. There are no excuses in Existentialism; what you see is what you get. To say, "I would have been a doctor if only I'd had the money" is equivalent to choosing not to be a doctor. To say "My mother dominated me" means you chose to be dominated. In this Existentialism somewhat resembles Renaissance paintings where children are represented as little adults. Adolescence is a creature of the post-industrial world. That choices may be harder to make in adolescence perhaps makes them even more important. But there is no excuse for one's behavior. It is freely chosen in the face of circumstances and despite circumstances, and the resulting path fits best with the transactional analysis concept of "life script"--the drama we live out from our repeated choices, what in pure analytic terms might be named a "complex."

Naturally the existential approach simplifies analysis. Begin with today's choices and work back if necessary; or let the therapist proclaim to the patient that they are entirely free to choose differently at once. In this it would resemble the educable notions of cognitive-behavioral therapy, re-shaping the thinking and choices of a personality rather than trying to understand the underlying unconscious impulses.

Nevertheless, people do get stuck in the complexes of their past choices, as in a life script, why women who are abused often pick abusive boyfriends, why all the sisters in my mother's family chose alcoholic husbands. Can such unconscious choices really be explained by earlier capitulations in development, or do they more deserve the mercy of extended analysis as the basis for choice? In my experience, putting a life under the microscope of choice does not sufficiently allow for the godlike influence of the parents on the tabula rasa of the infant. We do not choose our parents, our circumstances. How does the boy born in a Bengal slum secure the hope of bettering himself? How do the rich and privileged end up in rehabilitation centers? The course of adult development never did run smooth, and there are jerks and suprarational progressions which occur in all of us that simple choice cannot explain. What choice does a seven-year-old have in sexual abuse? Little or none. Who thinks of resisting their father at that age? So the existential approach, like transactional analysis, seems too simple and limiting for the task of helping human self-understanding. In this I think Sartre is wrong and unwittingly aligns himself with B. F. Skinner and extreme behaviorists.

To put Existentialism on its head we must declare that essence precedes existence, that some inborn nature, our DNA in short, has a strong effect on development. Take my inherited illness, for instance, manic-depression. If identical twins are raised separately from birth and one develops full-blown manic-depression, the chances the other twin will have it are 75%. What does this have to do with choice? Or in anoxic birth insult resulting in cerebral palsy? Or in Turner's syndrome or any amount of genetically determined defects? Obviously Sartre didn't have such science at hand when he penned his book, but he was wrong. I think essence precedes existence. I think the constellation of our DNA predisposes us to certain choices and life patterns. We have too many biological choices already made for us at birth--not a tabula rasa but a precondition and tendency towards certain choices, why boys play with trucks and girls play with dolls.

Thus existential psychoanalysis appears to me a crock. What is needed is understanding and forgiveness both for the choices we freely made and those incumbent upon us from our birth natures and unchosen circumstances. Dwarfs don't do well at basketball, in other words, no matter their choices. As imperfect beings we need help with our natures and the choices that issue from our natures, not a bald declaration of our responsibility for everything. Strangely, Sartre steals a passage from Dostoevsky when he says, "You are responsible to everyone for everything." What a burden to assume from birth!

When I say I am an Existential Christian Taoist, what I mean is that I believe in free will within the limits of genetics, that I believe in the Christian approach to failed humanity, and that I also believe in the flowing nature of reality, that reality as much comes to us as we choose it, that often it is best to go with the flow of one's appointed life than resist it maniacally, though sometimes such resistance is needed. Sometimes you must be a rock in the river of life, as the river is going the wrong direction for you.

My ECT designation allows for inherited tendencies and informed and uninformed choices, with a philosophy of eternal redemption attached. Here Christianity does Existentialism one better: Every choice in life leads to damnation or salvation. Choosing one's self over all others is the path to damnation; choosing one's self and others, or in relation to others, respecting in them the same spiritual center that all men share, is the path to salvation. And the path to salvation is not the lonely, haunted, desperate path Kierkegaard paints; it is rather the joyful submission to a process in which our choices are informed by our best beliefs, chief among them "Love your neighbor."

Still, extremism does not obtain here; before becoming a Christian one must first become a person, preferably an adult. If religion (esp. fanatical devotion) is introduced too early in a child's development it can be stunting, leading to fear and closed mindedness. Christianity is meant as a blessing, not a curse. To love and be loved are its central constituents. To do good works is an outgrowth of this spiritual contract. To pursue healing of others, as Christ did (and the first hospitals were established by Christians), is witness to the fact that we are not whole, that we bear diseases we did not choose, that there is something essentially wrong with a world where beings capable of salvation are subjected to suffering not of their choice.

I agree with Sartre that man's chief desire is to be God, and that this lies at the center of many of our choices--the wish to control everything, the infant's wish to control its mother, the broker's wish to control the stock market. These are infantile longings that nevertheless seep into our adult consciousness and cause continual havoc. Sartre argues that in our wishing to become God, God is relegated to the limit of our powers, a "god of the gaps" if you will. I agree with this in part, as does the Bible, where the Fall originated from a desire on man's part to become as God. Yet in Sartre's formulation God is no longer necessary, he is only a symbol of the pinnacle of man's striving, beyond which we feel the need to posit a god.

But it's much simpler than this. The process of development is a ceding of the imagined, narcissistic powers of infancy in favor of individuation and socialization. This happens whether we like it or not, and here choices can be revealing, as in the unpublished poet who considers himself the greatest undiscovered talent in the world and sneers at editors who have rejected him. Such a one has been able to maintain his imaginary centrality and importance in spite of experience. But in most cases experience chips away at our narcissism until we see others as equal in value if not ability. This is the necessary and normal education of this life. And if in this experience one feels a lack, an abiding need for something or someone greater, it is also natural to adopt a religious stance, not as a defense but as a hope for the best in us.

Religion is not a defense against insignificance; it is not a band-aid for suffering; it is not a reward for good behavior or good works; it is a necessary longing for transcendence that religionists believe is natural to man and his development.

To make it absurd, what would the Existentialist say to a risen Christ? That he chose to be resurrected? A priori, Existentialism does not allow for miracles except those that are achieved through our choices and work, perhaps with a little luck. An Existentialist could pass his fingers through Christ's wounds and say, "How interesting! What choices did you make to attain this?" There is no room for the supernatural in Existentialism, indeed no room for fate as we understand fate as the intersection of natures and events. If I encounter a bar room brawl I will likely try to end it or take up one side of the struggle. Others might retire to the safety of the bathroom or outdoors. Just these sort of encounters put the lie to pure Existentialism, as our choices flow from our natures and our natures derive ultimately from our inherited biology, secondly from circumstances over which we have no control, as in our parents' treatment of us. Being the second-born son in my family, in addition to my inborn sense of justice, makes me take up the defense of the innocent, always tempting me to join the fight. My brothers are more peaceable than this.

Should I remove "Existentialism" from my acronym? No, because I think as one matures, the primacy of choice becomes more dominant. What one chooses at forty differs immensely from what one can choose at twenty. Experience tempers hope, hope informs experience, and no forty-year-old is going to take off for a career as a professional baseball player--that choice would be absurd. One has the freedom to make absurd choices but the wisdom of experience tends to narrow such choices to the bounds or reality as we move forward.

Here's one: Did I choose to be a poet or was I chosen? I go into this a bit in my essay in Pif, "How I Became a Poet." I was already making up songs and poems before I could read. I wrote poetry from an early age. Why? It was part of my nature. In the essay I refer to people and things that discouraged me from poetry, but I could never stop reading it or writing it. Thus a poet is both born and made. We suffer our natures and our choices. When our choices are most in accord with our natures we are most happy. Then happiness is not a concern of Existentialism, rather integrity--the integrity of acknowledging one's choices. I say choices pre-exist in us according to our natures, that essence precedes existence, and if in saying this I no longer qualify as even a junior existentialist, so be it. I have made my choice.

2 Kilobunnies,

CE