The Gospel of Thomas

Although much of what I write about on these pages represents my values, even my spiritual values, I seldom talk about religious values per se
, not because I don’t value them, but, rather because I value them too highly.

Though ex-students and readers of this blog could probably sense some of my religious values from my discussions of literature, as a teacher I always considered it inappropriate to discuss my religious values with students. My job was to teach them how to think and make their own decisions, not to foist my personal values on them. (Of course, someone could have argued that I valued “thinking for yourself” above all; so, perhaps I really was doing nothing but teaching values.)

That said, after recently tackling the “big four” of modern poetry, I’m taking a short break from poetry and reading some religious works that probably reveal my personal values more than anything I’ve ever written about here, even the religious-quiz meme I shared a year or so ago. Perhaps, though, such personal revelations will help to put my discussion of poetry into a better perspective, because all reading of poetry seems inevitably to be filtered through our own personal values. In that light, you can take this discussion as a disclaimer that will help to explain why, say, I prefer Walt Whitman to Allen Ginsberg or Thomas Hardy to Ezra Pound.

The publication of Elaine Pagels’ Beyond Belief, inspired me to re-read The Gospels of Thomas, a work I had initially been impressed with when I read it nearly ten years ago but which has slowly faded from memory. Furthermore, when I originally read the Gospels of Thomas it was buried among various religious writings from Nag Hammadi, Gnostic works I often found bizarre or merely boring.

Before starting Pagels’ Beyond Belief,
I read The Gospel of Thomas
translated and annotated by Steven Davies. I must admit, though, that if had done my internet homework before I bought Davies’ work, I might have settled for reading the “Gospel of Thomas Commentary”
because I find the three different translations along with various interpretations quite helpful in forming my own interpretation. In addition
the exhaustive “The Gospel of Thomas Homepage.” makes it easy to thoroughly research The Gospel of Thomas for those so inclined.

There is, however, something to be said for a work that provides a consistent look at the Gospel of Thomas, because they are not easily comprehended. Though I’m not sure I always agree with Davies’ conclusions, I appreciate his attempt to prove that:

The Gospel of Thomas really is, I believe, the clearest guide we have to the vision of the world’s supreme mystical revolutionary, the teacher known as Jesus. To those who learn to unpack its sometimes cryptic sayings, the Gospel of Thomas offers a naked and dazzlingly subversive representation of Jesus’ defining and most radical discovery: that the Living Kingdom of God burns in us and surrounds us in the glory at all moments, and the vast and passionate love-consciousness ” what you might call “Kingdom-consciousness” ” can help birth it into reality.

Davies’ “linked reading of seven of the sayings” also provides the reader with an interesting way of seeing the work.

Though I started this essay by saying that I was taking break from poetry, some of the sayings remind me a lot of Walt Whitman:

77a Jesus said: I am the light above everything. I am everything. Everything came forth from me, and everything reached me.
77b Split wood, I am there. Lift up a rock, you will find me there.

and

113 They asked him : When is the Kingdom coming? He replied: It is not coming in an easily observable manner. People will not be saying, “Look, it’s over here” or “Look, it’s over there.” Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is already spread out on the earth, and people aren’t aware of it.

Perhaps my favorite saying, though, is the unique, as far as my limited knowledge of scripture goes, 97th saying:

97 Jesus said: The Kingdom of the Father is like a woman who was carrying a jar full of grain. As she walked along a handle of her jar broke off, but she didn’t notice. When she arrived in her house, she put the jar down and found it empty.

I wonder how many people have gone through their lives unaware of the imminent “Kingdom of the Father” only to realize too late what joy they have missed in thier lives. Somehow, Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown comes to mind here.

The World Imagined

I finally finished reading Stevens’ collected poems, all 477 pages of them, and, though they weren’t easy to finish, I’m glad I did. Unfortunately, there’s another 500 pages in the book, and I’m simply not up to finishing it right now. Although I’d like to read “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination,” I’m going to set the book aside and come back to it later. For me at least, reading Stevens is hard work, rather than an act of love.

Considering that I came to his work with a prejudice against it, I’m actually surprised that I liked it nearly as much as I did. Though I don’t think I really accept his view of the importance of imagination, I did find his ideas stimulating, and fear I may have more sympathy for his ideas than I’d like to admit. Of course, if I wasn’t sympathetic to the importance of imagination, I seriously doubt that I’d be spending so much time on poetry.

Somehow, the following poems from the section entitled “The Rock” provide a better summary of Stevens’ philosophy than I ever could:

NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry–It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Perhaps I like this poem because it reminds me of one of my favorite poems, Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” a poem I’ve mentioned earlier. If that’s true, it is indeed ironic, because it would be hard to imagine a poet more different from Hardy than Stevens. Hardy admired and elevated the common man, while Stevens seemed to disdain him. In answering the question “As a poet what distinguishes you, do you think, from an ordinary man?” Stevens replied, “Inability to see much point to the life of an ordinary man. The chances are the ordinary man himself sees very little point to it.” As I read Stevens, I realized just how biased I am toward a particular kind of modern poetry, the kind of poetry that made Hardy the first “modern poet.” Although Hardy’s poetry was soon to be eclipsed by the formal poetry of Eliot and others, it is still that strain of poetry that I find most moving.

“Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour” almost sounds as Stevens wrote it to make his final statement on imagination:

FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous,

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one “
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

The line, “The world imagined is the ultimate good.” could almost serve as the thesis for Stevens’ Collected Poems and Prose
, as could “We say God and the imagination are one”” This seems to me to roughly equivalent to Descartes’ famous line, “I think, therefore I am.” I’m not sure I’m any more impressed by Stevens’ position than I was by Descartes’ argument when I read it in college.

Still, I find it difficult to deny “How high that highest candle lights the dark.” I cannot even imagine how sad it would be to live without the inspiration of imagination. My world has been shaped by the imagination of great writers, and thankfully so. Still, I am no “Miniver Cheevy,” trying to escape the reality of my everyday existence by living in an imaginary past that never truly existed but in the mind of great writers.

Stevens “Auroras of Autumn”

Stevens’ “The Auroras of Autumn” is a rather short volume of poetry published in 1950. It, like the immediately preceding volumes, is dominated by long, meditative poems on the relationship of reality, imagination, and poetry. While I’m often struck by individual lines or even individual poems in these long poems, the poems as a whole simply do not resonate with me, probably because I still remain unconvinced by Stevens’ view of the relationship between reality and imagination.

Whether you agree with his overall point of view or not, Stevens’ poems often force you to consider your own view of reality.

BOUQUET OF ROSES IN SUNLIGHT

Say that it is a crude effect, black reds,
Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are
To be anything else in the sunlight of the room,

Too much as they are to be changed by metaphor,
Too actual, things that in being real
Make any imaginings of them lesser things.

And yet this effect is a consequence of the way
We feel and, therefore, is not real, except
In our sense of it, our sense of the fertilest red,

Of yellow as first color and of white,
In which the sense lies still, as a man lies,
Enormous, in a completing of his truth.

Our sense of these things changes and they change,
Not as in metaphor, but in our sense
Of them. So sense exceeds all metaphor.

It exceeds the heavy changes of the light.
It is like a flow of meanings with no speech
And of as many meanings as of men.

We are two that use these roses as we are,
In seeing them. This is what makes them seem
So far beyond the rhetorician’s touch.

Stevens’ insistence on seeing the roses as they are, or at least as they are sensed, rather than as metaphors for “love,” etc. rings true. Not everything, even in a poem, is a metaphor for something else. When we look at a painting of roses, we are more apt to see them as “beautiful roses,” to perceive them through our senses, than we are to judge them as metaphors or symbols standing for some greater, though more abstract, “truth.” Perhaps the same should be true in poetry. Surprisingly, though, the main emphasis in the poem isn’t on the physical reality of the roses, but, rather, on how our “sense” of them changes: “Our sense of these things changes and they change,/ Not as in metaphor, but in our sense/ of them.” Thus, our senses, which seems virtually synonymous with “imagination,” take precedence over “rhetoric” and over reality itself.

This idea of the “sense of things” rather than the reality of things, is further developed in:

THIS SOLITUDE OF CATARACTS

He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

Through many places, as if it stood still in one,
Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,

Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.
There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,

Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time.

As one who is particularly attracted to water, and to rafting rivers, this poem rings particularly true, though perhaps not in quite the same way that Stevens intended it to ring true. Despite his anti-Romantic stance, this poem certainly seems to me to have romantic overtones, with Stevens’ own twist, of course. Ironically, in light of our first poem, this river seems to be more metaphorical than sensual, a metaphor for a constantly changing awareness of our surroundings. It is this feeling of unending change that makes the cataracts so attractive. Of course, the man’s perception of the river is rather different from the true nature of the river, “There was so much that was real that was not real at all.”

Although it is this feeling of constant change that attracts the protagonist, he wants to feel this “same way over and over,” which, of course, is just the opposite of constant change. This constant flux makes the protagonist want “his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest/ In a permanent realization.” Because constant change also brings death, the ultimate change, people dream of being “a bronze man,” “released from destruction.”

Maybe Mustee Should be Spelled Musty

Because I find it difficult to read poetry when I’m pissed off, I decided to get this rant off my mind before turning to the next chapter in Stevens’ Collected Poems. It also explains how I’ve spent some of my time the last week.

A little over two years ago I spent $5,000 to have my bathroom remodeled (read, have a new, slightly larger shower installed). Well, a little over a month ago I noticed that the ceiling below the shower showed signs of a leak. After a little sleuthing, I was shocked to discover that there was a crack in Mustee’s Durabase fiberglass shower floor.

Naturally I called the contractor who was sympathetic and in turn called the plumber, who, while sympathetic, said that it wasn’t his fault but, rather was a defective shower floor. He said there was a one-year contract on the part, but that he would call the manufacturing representative to see what could be done.

The manufacturing representative called and said that he didn’t need to look because there was a one year guarantee and NOTHING could be done.

Well, it turns out that this must not be an uncommon problem because Washington State just recently passed a law requiring a two year waranty on all such installations.

I wonder if homeowners realized that there was only a one year warranty on these products whether they would opt for a piece of shit like this instead of looking for a better alternative. I know I hadn’t planned on spending another $5,000 on a new shower this year. Even a $400 to $500 price increase for a better product would have been a wise investment.

I realize this is a disposable society, but replacing your shower, or, worse yet, the ceiling and walls around the shower, every year is simply ridiculous.

Of course, when you go to Mustee’s web site, you’ll notice that the prefix “DURA” is prominently displayed, suggesting that they want any professional dumb enough to buy their product to believe that their products are going to last a long, long time, not a year or so. After all, “dura” does suggest durable doesn’t it? I guess that’s why they avoided ever actually using the word durable in their copy, though.

Of course, when you go to their warranty page there’s nary a mention of “durable.” Instead you get phrases like, “Our liability under this Warranty shall be to either repair or replace the product with an identical or reasonably equivalent product. In the alternative, we may refund, in full, the actual purchase price if the repair is not commercially reasonable or possible within a reasonable time and we are unable to supply a replacement product. We shall not be responsible for any labor, damages or installation costs.
” That’s hardly worth the bother, since most of the costs are in the costs of installation.

Musty, indeed, if I were going to remodel my bathroom I’d make sure that I avoided any products from Mustee, professional or not, and ensure that my contractor was using a better product than this if I were planning on living in the house more than another year.