The Last Reincarnation

Reinventing yourself at my age is no easy task. One of the reasons I left teaching was because I was beginning to feel like a dinosaur and didn’t want to change my values to fit those of another generation.

Now, one of the things I always liked about teaching was that I felt it kept me young. Constantly being around teenagers affects the way you see the world. If you’re lucky, it keeps you plugged in to the positive changes going on in the world. If you’re unlucky, it makes you view the world more and more pessimistically.

Fortunately, I liked most of the kids I taught over the years and sympathized with their viewpoint. Most of them seemed more positive and optimistic than the adults I knew. I enjoyed working with them, and they gave me hope that the world was becoming a better place.

Unfortunately, I began to lose that feeling the last few years I taught. It’s not that I didn’t like the kids just as much, I did. I even liked some of the kids whose attitudes I was no longer willing to adjust to and put up with.

More and more, students came to class with an “attitude.” They came with every intention of getting in the teacher’s face. Don’t misunderstand me, though, I’m all for “attitude.” I have “attitude” and always have had. Having "attitude" helps you to stand up for what you believe in a world that often doesn’t give a damn what you believe and would gladly steamroll you into some mindless conformity. But having an attitude doesn’t mean you have to show it all the time.

I spent most of my grade school years fighting because I had an attitude. When I get angry, and thank God that doesn’t happen very often, I have way more “attitude” than any sane man would want. I think I inherited it from my father who became an All-City tackle in Seattle by “getting mad” in games. It’s probably not entirely irrelevant that my favorite comic character is Donald Duck who’s famous for his outbursts.

As a teacher I enjoyed teasing kids and having them tease me back. It was often an easy way to defuse an emerging problem, and most kids thought it was fun to tease the teacher. Personally, I always thought school, and life in general, should have been a hell of a lot more fun than it was. After all, this was learning, not torture, and learning is what life is about. Isn’t it? So, why shouldn’t learning be fun?

But the last generation of kids I taught was different. They came in sounding like rappers, WWF clones, or spoiled athletes who think it’s cool to taunt their opponent. The simplest request was often met with belligerence, no matter how reasonable the request. Boy or girl, made no difference.

Sadly enough, I felt too old to adapt to this new style. I wasn’t willing to put up with it, no matter how much I liked a kid. I knew that it was just a fad, part of the current culture, but I wasn’t willing, or able, to adapt to the style, understand it or not.

Simply put, at some age it gets harder and harder to change your values and your ways of seeing the world. I’m afraid I’ve reached that age.

In a Dark Time

Here’s the poem this journal takes its title from:

IN A DARK TIME
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks-is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened. summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke’s “In a Dark Time” seems even more powerful today than when I first read it in 1965. It stands as a masterpiece in itself but takes on added depth when read within the context of Roethke’s entire body of works. When one understands the dark nature of many of Roethke’s earlier poems, poems like “Epidermal Macabre,” “Weed Puller, or longer poems like “The Lost Son,” the transcendence suggested in the phrase “and one is One” is amazing. In another sense, though, it is a “typical” Roethke poem because many of his poems attempt to move from despair to hope.

The first line of the poem suggests the essence of the poem, the idea that in a dark time, a time of despair, one begins to find oneself. Too often we lose ourselves in our despair and give up all hope, but the loss of the most important things in life can also help us gain insights that enrich our future life. Indeed, perhaps it is only in such moments of despair that we can find our true selves because they test who we are and what we truly believe.

When the poet sees his “shadow” he sees his alter ego, perhaps even the dark side of his soul, in this increasing darkness. The “echo,” though it may seem merely to reflect the idea of the shadow, instead seems to indicate a different idea, the idea that he finds himself reflected in nature, which is usually a source of insight and power in Roethke’s poetry. This idea of highs and lows is mirrored in the closing lines where he uses images of “the wren,” high, and, “serpents of the den.” low.

The line “What’s madness but nobility of soul/ At odds with circumstance” seems particularly poignant considering the number of times Roethke was committed to a mental institution for treatment. Certainly if anyone could understand the “purity of despair” he could. “That place among the rocks-is it a cave,/Or winding path?” forces us to wonder how many times in the midst of this tormenting “fire” he felt he saw a way out, like Yeats’ spiral path, only to discover that was a source of greater despair, the cave of the “serpents of the den.” In these moments of despair, he seems to be constantly walking on the edge of the abyss.

In this “dark night of the soul” he receives many “messages,” literal or symbolic. It is a night when the birds, often used to represent the soul, fly away, as if suddenly disturbed by some force or as if leaving the body behind. The complex symbol of the “ragged moon” suggests “lunacy” or loss of imagination, while the eclipse suggests that the dark side is prevailing and that all hope is lost. The “unnatural light” reinforces the idea that the forces of darkness are at work here. Worst of all, there are no tears, as if no one really cares what is happening, even the poet himself.

The poet, a “heat-maddened” fly desperately buzzing at death’s door, simply wants to die. And miraculously, at this very moment of the “death of the self,” the poet finds himself and God, becoming one with One, and he is suddenly “free in the tearing wind,” free in spirit, no longer held by the flesh. It’s almost Zen-like, or perhaps the kind of merging with God that Christian Saints felt in mystical moments.

This final transcendence seems more convincing because of the powerful images of despair that precede it. This is no easy victory, no easy transformation promised in a book. This is the record of a hard-won victory by this man at this moment.

And, if Roethke can win his victory over the forces of darkness and despair, there is hope that I can too.

Here’s a number of Roethke resources on the web.

A Scott Ruescher essay on Roethke’s collected poems.

A Roethke page at the Academy of American Poets

This site is a touching dedication to Roethke

Eleven of Roethke’s poems are included here if you want some background. “The Far Field” and a “Journey to the Interior” might shine the most light on “In a Dark Time.”

A Blog’s Limitations?

Speaking of form and the limitations necessary for art, writing about May’s book has made me very conscious of the limitations of a blog. In fact for a moment I almost, but not quite, missed the classroom where I could have a dialogue with students about a book rather than just “lecturing” to myself.

Having written the summary of the first two chapters of The Courage to Create, I resisted writing more summaries (as you could probably tell if you came back for several days in a row). Although I admire Philosophical Investigations’ attempts to discuss Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations online, I personally find it very difficult to discuss a long work in my blog. The first time I tried to discuss a philosophical book, I posted an entry but then later deleted because I couldn’t figure out how to finish it online.

I find that quite frustrating because novels, and other full-length works, have been just as influential in shaping who I am as poets or musical artists have been, and I would like to deal with them in this blog. Although they aren’t as easy to deal with as a poem or a song, they have sometimes been more influential in my life. Books like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure have been pivotal in shaping my “world,” to use Rollo May’s term.

I’m convinced that the philosophy that has emerged from my interaction with the “real” world and the world of ideas that I encountered in literature have allowed me to cope with my experiences as effectively as possible and to avoid, though neither unscathed nor unchanged, the life-crippling despair and bitterness that many of my friends have experienced when they experienced similar situations.

One of many reasons I became a teacher after my experiences in Vietnam was the belief that the young soldiers I served with in Vietnam has not been prepared for the “world” they met in Vietnam. To the contrary, they came to the war with an idealistic view of America’s role in the world that was belied by most of our actions in Vietnam. These recruits came expecting to gloriously rescue the “good” South Vietnamese from the “evil” North Vietnamese. Instead, they encountered a peasantry that, at best, was indifferent to the Americans, and, at worst, was fighting at night to defeat us.

Many of these young soldiers reacted very differently to the war than I did, and I’m convinced that in many cases it was because I had a different background than they did. After four years of reading modern literature in college, I was more skeptical of America’s war aims. Books like Camus’ The Stranger and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead gave me a different expectation of war than the patriotic, distorted high-school history classes these young men had taken. They had been told about all the great ideas America stood for and about our noble deeds in the past. Unfortunately, the media and their teachers had ignored all the bad things we had also done, like our treatment of the American Indians or America’s questionable practices in South America

As ill-prepared as they were psychologically, little surprise many of them simply couldn’t come to terms with the reality of what was going on in Vietnam. They couldn’t reconcile their “world” with the “real world” of Vietnam.

I, on the other hand, suddenly understood Camus’ The Stranger, a novel that seemed incomprehensible when I encountered it in college five years earlier. Existentialism itself became clear. Kiekergard’s despair became my despair, but at least it didn’t come completely unexpectedly. I must admit, though, that sometimes even I was shocked to realize that just a few years earlier I had been sitting on a college campus reading poetry and watching all the beautiful young ladies walk by.

When I came back from Vietnam, I couldn’t believe the changes I had undergone. I was even half-thankful that I had gotten a “Dear Loren” letter before I left because I didn’t think the girl could possibly recognize me as the same person I was when I left, for I hardly recognized myself.

The point is that books have played an integral part in developing my philosophy. If I’m going to continue to blog and explore who I am online, I need to find a satisfactory way of dealing with long works so that I don’t bore the hell out of myself and anyone else who just might drop in to see what I have to say on a particular day.

If you have an opinion, drop me an email.

On the Limits of Creativity and Passion for Form

Most of us are frustrated by the limits put on us, whether they are the limits of our own body (God, I’m personally disgusted by the limits imposed by my recent surgery) or the limits imposed by society. However, Rollo May argues, “that limits are not only unavoidable in human life, they are also valuable” and “that creativity itself requires limits, for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.”

May’s major argument is that “ conflict presupposes limits, and the struggle with limits is actually the source of creative productions.” In a very real sense, this parallels the reason I chose “In a Dark Time” as the title of this blog for I believe people often grow stronger by facing crises. May goes on to argue that, “The limits are as necessary as those provided by the banks of a river, without which the water would be dispersed on the earth and there would be no river-that is, the river is constituted by the tension between the flowing water and the banks. Art in the same way requires limits as a necessary factor in its birth.”

I found May’s argument that poetry by the very limits imposed by form generates its own creativity quite convincing:

When you write a poem, you discover that the very necessity of fitting your meaning into such and such a form requires you to search in your imagination for new meanings. You reject certain ways of saying it; you select others, always trying to form the poem again. In your forming, you arrive at new and more profound meanings than you had even dreamed of. Form is not a mere lopping off of meaning that you don’t have room to put into your poem; it is an aid to finding new meaning, a stimulus to condensing your meaning, to simplifying and purifying it, and to discovering on a more universal dimension the essence you wish to express.

Of course, I might find this so convincing because I love poetry. However, the same argument can easily applied to my other great love, photography. Without the limitations of the “frame” photography would be next to impossible. At its best, the frame forces us to isolate an object and actually look at it. Without the limitations of the frame, there would only be “reality,” not art.

This idea that limits are necessary naturally ties in with May’s argument that there is a human “passion for form.” All of us, not just artists, have a compelling need for form:

The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are driven to construct the remainder of the scene. To fill the gaps is essential if the scene is to have meaning. That we may do this in misleading ways-at times in neurotic or paranoid ways-does not gainsay the central point. Our passion for form expresses our yearning to make the world adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance.

I know that this is certainly true for me. Of course, according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator I am an INTP (Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiver) and beginning “ with only a vague intuition, an INTP can construct a whole new world of ideas.) My main purpose in writing this blog has become to make some sense out of my life and to give my life a greater sense of order and direction.

According to May, this, too, is a form of creativity. Imagination and creativity are a part of all of our lives, and in order to be self-fulfilled we have to participate in creating our own reality.

This passion for form is a way of trying to find and constitute meaning in life. And this is what genuine creativity is. Imagination, broadly defined, seems to me to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding – can participate in the constituting of reality – only as they are creative. Creativity is thus involved in our every experience as we try to make meaning in our self-world relationship.

According to Rollo May the creative process is, finally, “the struggle against disintegration, the struggle to bring into existence new kinds of being that give harmony and integration.”

Those who would like to read more about May can do so at:

http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/may.html

http://www.apa.org/journals/may.html

http://www.westga.edu/~psydept/os2/os1/may.htm

http://www.meaning.ca/meaning_therapy/rollo_may.html