Psychodrama as Symptomatic of Our Times

The message is that we are all broken.

We are all broken.

We are all broken.

I admire my sister greatly for her response to this message, which was (I paraphrase) "so you get up at some point and you just go on from there." That is real bravery, to say, "today is right now" and refuse to live 10 years ago, 40 years ago, 60 years ago, stuck at the moment when the vessel was cracked.

What I find appalling about people's opinions about emotions is that people look at emotions as they might look upon car crashes; they tend to focus on the damage, on the emotional life that is on the extremes of pain or excitement or danger. As if they were all emotional adrenaline junkies. I do not discount the fact that most people feel that sharing emotions is to share pain, for we live lives of stress and trauma. My disappointment is not with emotions, but with the imbalance.

Drama is a way of expressing a story. In drama, one watches actors and those actors must convey believable human involvement with the characters or something is lost, the story is no longer captivating. Jane Austen believed that the novel was the place to explore, not drama, but the evolution of a single human mind through different states. Many writers of the 20th Century used this powerful vehicle to explore differences in humans, from the pathological, to the sub-standard, to the eccentric. As it became more and more popular to explore psychological pathologies, I believe that people started to glom onto pathology as their own, sympathizing with it and wanting to heal themselves. Not only is this dangerous, but it is attractive to the degree that it is addictive for some people. Worse, yet, it is so attractive that the publishing industry has found, in pathology, a huge market.

I recently picked up two series of books to read: C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series. The juxtaposition of these two series gave me the opportunity to see the range of psychodrama in novels. Both series are best sellers, both writers went to the screen with great success, both writers are separated only by about thirty years. C. S. Forester was English, but he lived much of his life in the States. However, the differences between these two writers in time, in gender, and in nationality, influenced their writing styles. Let me be explicit now about my prejudice: I found Hornblower to be a joy to read and Bradley to be painfully boring, almost unreadable. Despite my own prejudices, it is important to note what is popular and why. Hornblower continues to be popular, but editors lean toward buying more material like Bradley's wildly popular Mists of Avalon. The reasoning behind this is that Bradley is what the market wants.

It is not my intention to talk about the market here, but psychodrama. I define psychodrama to be drama that is based on an emotional fixation in one or more characters that is potentially disabling to themselves or those around them. This can be a powerful tool, such as in Macbeth, Hamlet, or the Shining. There are types of fiction that depend heavily on psychodrama: some Romance, Horror and some Suspense/Mystery. I do think that psychodrama, like cheeseburgers is best when indulged in sparingly, especially when it is "supersized" as it is in the powerful book, the Shining. Unfortunately, it is so powerful, that it has become bloated and has poisoned popular fiction.



It astounds me that music missed this, dance missed this, even art dabbled with it and missed it, but what of fiction? Even movies are saved from it by the beauty of the scenery that often accompanies even the more horrific of tales. But what of the novel, what of the story? I am sad to see that too often action stories, space stories, Westerns, History and Fantasy are filled with psychodrama. I think that it is more powerful, when depicting some situation that is in itself tense and horrible or action-packed that if the emotional element is a bit downplayed it is more powerful. One does not have to focus on every blown-up soldier to appreciate the Napoleonic wars. One does not have to know the captain's torment with his dying wife to appreciate the story of his sub fighting off the Nazi U-boats. One does not have to be tormented by aliens to explore the galaxy.

What makes Hornblower work so well is that Forester downplays interpersonal drama. His captain goes mad, but it is referred to with a single line or two SHOWING us that the captain huddles in his bed and whimpers whenever anyone comes near him. Hornblower works as a character because he is intensely aware of his own failings so much so that he refuses to acknowledge them to the audience, both the reader and the men around him. With one short sentence, he dismisses his overwhelming fear of heights to climb up into the shrouds and perform a miracle to save a sail in the midst of combat. He does so because the action forces him to do so. He is the hero, he cannot stand by and worry, he must act. And so we believe his rise through the oppressive navy despite being poor and having no influential friends. We believe him when he burns his glove up putting out the fuse of a bomb that has landed on his ship because we know that no matter how he FEELS, he will act. We end up cheering him because we know that his feelings toward himself are those of a man broken, but he picks up, he goes on, and we know that he is braver than the man who cannot go on for fear. We know it. We feel it. We feel the uplifting of a MAN, a man who will go on from this moment, this now. It is a human thing to put aside the pain, the suffering, the past and to do what has to be done.

There is a time and place for both the stoic and the psychodramatic in fiction. I'm not sure that they should be mixed. I think that that is the failing of Bradley.

Bradley tells action tales loaded with believable magic, usually of the psychic kind. What ruins her stories (this is my opinion) is that her characters do not participate in the story, but are constantly distracted by their brokenness. Now why excellent novels like the Shining work so well is that the situation is so, well, normal. King specializes in abnormal or paranormal characters in depressingly normal situations. What could be more banal and normal and boring than a family caretaking a hotel over a winter? Layer upon layer, King builds up the tension that is only inside these characters--the situation remains so quiet, so boring, that we are totally caught up in the nightmares. We want the flood of blood, the ghosts, the horror, because the situation is so bereft of anything interesting. Thus we can say, "if I were alone, stuck in a place like that, with cabin fever, stir crazy, yes, I would start seeing things too," and it WORKS.




Bradley has a remarkable set up in Darkover. She has a planet where people have evolved psychic powers to the extent that they can teleport and blow each other up. They call upon forces so strong that they are taken over by interdimensional evils and they fight each other to the death. Very like Andre Norton's Witchworld series. She has the Terran Empire try to exploit Darkover or interact with it, and she has complicated politics where one faction is trying to save the world by forbidding the use of these powers and another trying to cut themselves off from being exploited by Terra. The world is hostile and different from Earth. And what do her characters do? Worry about whether they are gay or not. Worry about whether they can handle marriage or not. Worry about whether their fathers like them or not. Worry about, well, you get the point, although I'm belittling it with sarcasm, they spend much of the book worrying. So much so that the action suffers and Bradley spends a great deal of time with characters standing around talking to each other about their problems.

One of the reasons that horror can work extremely well is that all the psychodrama is internalized to the point where the characters become afraid to talk to each other. Thus they make mistakes and cannot perform simple reality checks with each other. Bradley's characters end up in impossible situations where they cannot talk to each other (and thus solve some problem) because they worry that their father might misunderstand them or reject them. In an action story like Bradley has set up, she doesn't have time to lay the groundwork for a father-son exploration, but throws this in and we are left saying "why don't they just talk about it and we can get on with the story." After a while, the characters cannot DO anything at all, the action slows way down, and there is way, way too much dialogue and people spend all their time trying to figure out the other person's feelings. This can work in drama, if that is what the drama is about. Romantic comedy specializes in misunderstandings. Family dramas work if that is the focus of the story. In action adventure, there are too many loose ends, too much going on, and the psychodrama gets way, way too distracting.

I've noticed in the workplace, that in places where there is real work to be done, like restaurants, the workers tend to downplay psychodrama. They may shout, curse, stomp, rage, and yell at each other, but they have to keep cooking. Most of the time, the tense action of the work makes it so people just don't have time to sit around and wail about their feelings. In offices or in retail where the pace is sometimes so boring that you're about crazy, psychodrama tends to play too large a part. Personally, I have a distaste of indulging in emotional problems. I from a blue collar background where people had so many problems that the prevalent attitude was "deal with it." Boredom was relieved by the latest drama, but the emotions were downplayed. I've heard stories told of drunken husbands cutting open their wives and the wives going to work because they had to feed the kids told in a matter of fact voices that made them intensely believable.



But the strange thing is, that way, way too much effort is put into "getting along" or exploring how to deal with each others' feelings at work or in situations where one should be working. Like fiction, there is a place for this. I've often been in offices or stores that were crippled by someone's drama when there was work to be done. The work did not get done. We're so keen to blame Asia or Mexico for taking away jobs and ruining our workplaces when there is this huge enemy within that demands that people show their feelings and underlings or co-workers deal with them. Bosses can be broken and workers expected to empathize and commiserate instead of work. Communication about work slows way down so that people can try to untangle their feelings and the feelings of others. Action comes to a standstill. For the workplace, this is death.

I have to wonder if the popular preoccupation with feelings, especially the negative feelings, has made gluttons out of everyone. And what about the sublime? We get to laugh. We get to be excited. Sometimes the music or the scenery is sublime, but what about people? Do people get to indulge in their positive feelings in fiction? The editors say no, that that doesn't make for good fiction. A hero must have a hole in his heart. He must be broken.

I'm going to stand up and say, "I am not broken." If the vessel is a bit cracked, then I want, instead of frantically repairing it, to fill myself with light instead of mud. I desire the sublime. I desire that which elevates the spirit, that which makes me love my fellow man, that which makes me love being alive. I do not like horror because I do not find it cathartic like many do. I find it depressing. I like action stories like that of Hornblower because they make me feel that man can do what has to be done, on his feet, facing the giant, facing the problems, facing what he has to face to DO, to ACT, to live.

We do not need a war to make us struggle to survive. We only need to be like my sister or like fictional characters like Hornblower and say, "yes, that happened. Yes, I am ashamed of it. Yes, I am afraid of it. Yes, I am damaged by it. But so what?" Get real. Deal with it. What an incredibly admirable attitude. And how despised! Certainly, one has to know why one acts the way one does, but that is understanding motive, not living the psychodrama. I'm going on, but I think we need more examples of the sublime, of the brave, and of the path shining before us, so we do not keep looking at our shadows.

Yes, all of us are broken, but all of us are sublime. I know which I prefer to have guide my way.

Angry Young Men

I was watching an interview with David Bowie (he's surprisingly articulate) he mentioned that when he was first starting out, he would have done most anything to get his message heard. He talks about how, when one is young, there is no future and that the message is everything, that you have something to say and you must say it.

It got me thinking about passion and a young man's right to be outraged at what he sees in the world. (Young woman's right, too!) As a teen, I was very outraged, political, idealistic and determined to talk about it. Most of the intelligent people that I have known go through a period of intense anger about the state of the world and strive to voice this outrage. Most of them try politics, which quickly deflates their passion into helpless, silent, frustration.

I grew up in the "cynical" seventies and my first political memory was of Nixon's resignation. It is hard for some people to understand what it was to be angry and outraged in those times. The movement to change anything was over and most of the kids I knew only wanted to party. Disco was replacing interesting rock, folk was for old fogies and anger was for people who couldn't get their coke connection. It was a desert time, a time when speaking up made you a freak. Well, most of my friends were freaks, but the new rage then was gay rights. Most of the political kids were fighting desperately for gay rights; one of my best friends had been dismissed as head boy when they found out he was gay. Some people assumed that I was gay because I was interested in people who were fighting for something--anything. To stand up and speak out was, to me, the reason to be there. To find solutions was a reason to read. To fight to the death was a reason to group together. But it was fighting a great gray cloud where our teachers told us that if we were not cynical we were fools.

How sad to ask a young person to be cynical. That is like asking a healthy person to act like they are sick. When I found myself growing cynical a few years later, I realized that I hated myself for it and accepted the consequences of refusing to "grow up" in that way. But David Bowie also said that it's too easy to be nihilistic. It's much more difficult to promote the good than it is to dismiss all the bad. I have always believed in finding solutions, not in wailing about the failure of mankind to overcome its self-destructive nature.

In the midst of the bleak party-party atmosphere, I found U2. At that point, they were a Christian band, and their fans were religious. I tried to be Christian, seriously Christian: carrying a bible, trying to believe, going to lay witness meetings, going to different churches. That died when I was fourteen. Although I knew that I could not believe as much as I might like to, I could not dismiss the religious, for I had known them to catch fire.

When I was down and out in LA and working two jobs, I used to take a week off every six months and make all my clothes. I find sewing boring as all get out, so I used to watch TV while running the sewing machine. At that time MTV had just come out and I found that watching music videos was about the right speed. In the midst of all the slick videos this band appeared on this video. I can still remember being absolutely awestruck. I remember the one thought I had, that someone had captured, on film, religious rapture. I realized that the boys in this band were so different from anyone else out there singing, that this was a band that could speak to me. I want to set the stage for this video because this is one of the only images I have seen in rock where a young man loses himself completely and remembers that he is a servant of god. I use religious terms here because it is appropriate. There are so few images of people who are overcome by joy, this is one of the best.



U2's Gloria

To my dismay, when I tried to show this to other people, they completely missed it. All they saw was a dorky group of rock musicians. I talked with a few who loved U2 and they were usually Christians.

It is hard to find words of what this band MEANT. They were down and out in Dublin, one of the worst cities in Europe, two of the boys had lost their mothers when teens, Ireland was still depressed and no one with any talent stayed there, and they had a long history of oppression and war. But this band was totally against war of any kind. They resented it when they came to the US and IRA sympathizers wanted to talk to them. They knew what it was to be in the middle of a war and they were fighting for peace as well as revealing their souls.

In this next video, the very first part of it, shows what I would enshrine as the "angry young men" or the heart of a youth who is trying to understand and protest what they see around them. This rallying cry I think is one of the best of any generation. There are many videos of this opening for Electric Co and most of the time Bono changes the lyrics slightly. But I think this video shows what I mean when Bono cries: "well I can't see why or what for! What for! What for!"

Cry/Electric Co

I am not a good fan. I don't fall in love with rock idols or movie stars. That's just stupid. Well, I think it is. So, you must excuse my going on about U2. I hate what they became later. I think their politics took a wrong turn, but I'm glad that they continued to try to fight. I like what they say later about being a band and how it was about the band and about the music. They are also articulate men. But I feel that I owe them a dept for being a voice in the desert of my own youth.

This last video I believe expresses the very best there is in a young man. It was made when U2 got popular and was on the verge of super-stardom. They still retain the edge that they had (pardon the pun) but the juxtaposition of the young boy's awe over the circus performers and Bono's desperate outrage is just wonderful. What I love most about this video is that they did not make it into a love song, but continued to show a greater love, a love of life.



Two Hearts Beat as One

U2's first three albums are amazing. The October album continues to make me shudder with the feeling of standing up and fighting. The War album was already patchy and later albums would grow in different directions, different feelings.

In the 60's most of the rock stars and folk singers were protesting generations of abuse and cruelty. But what I continue to find amazing about U2 is that film was able to capture, in Bono, no matter how dorky they all were, his shining fire. Sometimes he was just crazy, but in some films, he is sublime. Contrasted with the Edge concentrating so fiercely on his music, the band comes across as HUMAN, or with soul, with mind, with spirit as well as the body. They show us in some of these videos, what it looks like to be human, to be on fire, to be outraged. While the earlier singers sang about it, this band often looks as well as sounds that force.

What this band also showed, which is seen so very rarely, is that there is a force in the three great mono-theist religions that is so often abused. What U2 demonstrates here is "jihad" a word often very abused, but simply means "enthusiastic love of god" that goes out in this force for good, to try to DO something about the world. The force of the young, the voice, the light, the spirit of outrage, but also of exuberant wonder. Later, we learn compassion and tolerance. But let us celebrate, let us stand up with the spirit of Bono and U2, let us get up and find that the door to god stands open!

blessed be

Trying to Reach the Heart

When I was young I was extremely shy. I was also very private. My mother, who was not only a performer, but a teacher, wanted to draw us out into the world, to nurture our talents, and to have us be fulfilled as creative people. This rather backfired in some ways in that, while I loved being creative, I was way too shy to show off. I got to the point that I wanted to hide what I loved from my mother so that she would not want me to turn it into a performance. Competition made it worse. My mother enjoyed and thrived on competition and I found it shameful and somehow sick, as if my work became sullied by the act of comparison. I was too young to understand this.

But the young learn to protect themselves. I ended up hiding my heart, or the heart of my work. I found that she was baffled by intellect, so I found safety in engaging my mind and trying to get more and more obscure in order to turn her off of what I was doing. This had several unfortunate consequences, but the worst was that I got to the point where I could not longer enjoy doing my own work, inspired from within, without feeling guilty. Creative work was for money, competition, and admiration, all of which I despised. But one had to do it in order to do what was expected. I never questioned that I had to perform, only that it was shameful and bad to do things in secret that might not appeal to other people.

I buried my heart and did some of my work on my worlds in secret. I was also an avid journal writer, in secret. Artwork could not be secret, but writing could. However, because I was talented as an artist, that was the pressure point. I might have wanted to be a doctor or a writer, but the expectation was that I would be an artist. I never felt I had a choice. I'm sure now that I did, but I never had to courage to face down enthusiastic people. I was a child who wanted to please others and to make them proud of me.

I found later that all of this agony over the arts messed up my ability to contact the heart through art. For art to be art, it must be from the heart as well as the body and the head. You can see art that is head art: protest art, style art, art that is interesting but not spiritually appealing. Luckily, I loved music. In music I found all the heart that I could not find in the graphic arts, or even in writing. Although I do not have the ability to believe in god, I found that, though music, singing in particular, I was able to access a spiritual dimension in myself that is essentially worship, or rapture. After being criticized, singing for me became an intensely private affair.

A little while ago, I found an interview with Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance, who expresses exactly what I feel about music. I have never seen or heard anyone else who came close to expressing what I feel about god, if I can feel that way without belief. This interview is profoundly moving, so much so, that I have to share it with you. She sings in the same range as I do and I feel very close to her pitch and tone.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRsptfVAwmw&feature=related

Although I cannot bear to sing around other people, I sing when I walk places by myself, or sing in acoustically interesting places like garages and underpasses and stairwells. I love the way the tone vibrates all through the head, almost as if you were becoming tone. I always feel an immediate connection to the godspace, if you want to call it that, and an immediate rapture, that I know takes people years to achieve in meditation. For me, it is a necessary part of my emotional life to express myself though singing. It has remained private, and it would take an enormous effort for me to perform. But watching Lisa Gerrard, I know that it is possible to achieve the space without doing the competition/performance/"look at me" thing. She is singing as a dedication, as a service to the spiritual, which is what art is, or can be.

A few months ago, I gave myself permission to abandon all attempts to make money doing writing or art. At first I was lost. I still am a bit. I had been driven for thirty years to publish and make money through publication. So much so that I was torn between what the market wanted and what I wanted, always. I could force myself to do things that would sell; the artwork I liked the least was always the most popular; and I hated myself through the whole process. I hated the process of drawing and painting when I knew that it was what other people wanted. I loved giving art away; it was a justification of it all if someone liked the art and I could be rid of it. I could not even see if the art was good or bad because the market does not care that much. Styles come and go and good and bad becomes popular or unpopular.

What a snarl! I realized when I went back to bookkeeping for money and freed myself from the quest for publication that I had little idea of what I wanted to do. I kind of knew, but I had no confidence, no compass. I was faced with the fear of exposing my soul only to find out that no one liked it. So what? I asked. So what. So what.

When one has done art since one was a pre-schooler to appease people and do what they want, that so what? is a powerful phrase. I realized that I had no ability to defend myself and my art from criticism. Rarely do artists have this ability. If they did, we would see better art out there. I had seen, over and over, art that was on the right track get messed up by well-meaning publishers, editors and teachers that feared that it would not be popular enough to justify publication. This happens even more in writing and music. I knew that it was wrong to judge any art by the one criterion of "will it sell?" but knowing that and feeling it are two very different things.

I started looking at art to see what I liked, not what I thought was good. You may wonder at this, but it is one thing to judge art by how many hours you know went into it and how skilled the artist is. I had to see what appealed to me on a deeper level--what art appealed to me as art I would want to do.

I wanted to do art that would cross boundaries. I have never felt that I was separate from reality. I felt that when I touched a tree, I was that tree. Outside, I feel that I am outside. There is no "me" to speak of, but only the action of living. In my mind there is no way to separate out things and say, "that goes over here and is called this, and that goes over there and is called that." When Lisa Gerrard stands under a highway and listens to the cars and starts singing with them, she IS those sounds. You can tell immediately by the way she can harmonize into them. I wanted that feeling in the visual art that I did, the feeling of overlapping.

The music that I find appealing is this same sort of overlapping, music like rounds. I love the Celtic knot art where they see the world as interwoven and overlapping. Things float to the surface of awareness but are quickly buried again and overlapped by something else. But I also wanted to animate this feeling, not to abstract it, but to show it with living images.

This is the result.



This is a photo of a painting (did not photo well) from my world of Anieth. It shows the Raven Dance done at midsummer for the Alder people. The man in the picture is a shapeshifter. I have tried to interweave the ravens, the alder tree, the raven skulls and the alder cones with the dancer. The picture also is very symbolic with my layers of meaning that I like to do in writing. The number thirteen is balanced with the number three, the colors are that of the Alder people, and so on. But mostly I wanted to show that Bleid here is not separate from the ravens or his world.

I'm hoping that I can continue to find the heart. I'm writing a new novel in the Anieth series struggling toward that goal. I can achieve it in poetry, which I will write about, and maybe in painting/drawing, but to achieve heart in fiction is also a challenge after years and years of writing groups and publishers and trying to market writing.

Wish me luck!

"Here There Be Dragons"

(This is an old post from my old web site.)

Who, in hearing the wailing notes of the cantador punctuated by the staccato of heels and the buzz of castanettes, has not felt the stirring in their blood of la vida tenida, or life possessed? Life held, life clung to, life tenuous and yet wholly lived? The Flamenco is where the Classical met the Wanderers, where the rigors of the mind crashed into the crying soul, and was born a dance of death. If a person does not understand Spanish, this dance looks like a dance of sexual passion; yet, to listen with understanding, is to suddenly be let into a world where love is torment and the darkness of the soul is set on fire. You can see by the attitudes of the bodies that it is "la danza orgullosa" or a dance of honor, arrogance, defiance and pride. Even those of the Americas who have never heard the cantador, immediately recognize the call of the soul; it is in the blood, that cry of death, to death, in spite of death, of the life grasped and held.

The Northwest, being not a body culture, but a verbose culture oriented around the mind, has its own form of "la danza orgullosa" which lies, not in the music, but in the lyrics. There are as many different forms musical lyrics as there are forms of mind, of course: the call of the heart, weeping, overflowing with joy, puzzled or hurt or inspired; the call of the body full of the sexual dance or drummed up on drugs or merely that tune to which you can't stop tapping your toes. However, the genius of the West is not in those favored expressions of music, but in the seepage of words and thoughts that get into the mind through this vehicle, often distorted, yet more often remembered for a very long time. What is it about the lyric that is easy to remember that the glut of prose lacks? It is my belief (but it may be a mental prejudice) that we invented poetry as a mnemonic and so, the lyric, is a very powerful tool.

Kings among the poets are many, but the poet who has the ability to instill the mind with a controversy of ideas is the king among kings. Often in a band like the Beatles, one of the lyricists will be a heart type or a body type, opting for lyrics that are easily remembered, sweet or sad, and universal. Such is Paul McCartney. Yet, even as a child, I took one look at Mr. Lennon here, and new that there was a mind. It was easy for me, even as a young teen to listen to the Beatles and say to myself, "ah, that was John." In my portrait of John Lennon here in Sgt. Pepper mode, I gave him that mind quality, that way of looking that said, "now, now, take me for a fool, will you? I grew up in the streets of Liverpool, where fools die common deaths." And John, as he is here, represents a kind of Brit with a heavy Celtic background who spawned language as they strode on stones, twisting and turning the word into a knife, a sneer, a political bomb, or maybe just a way of saying, "yeah, sure". This form of Brit, from Cockney to Dublin-down-and-out, is the mental backbone of the old Empire, the dragon's breath of those islands, and the reason that the British, were, well, the British. It was not so much the "stiff upper lip" that made the Brit so distinguished, but the disdain, the skepticism, the cynical look of "yeah, right." And the word infused the dragon fire with pungence, so that British humor, today (when it is not Bennie Hill) is so twisted and dense that most Americans look at it as if it might explode, not knowing whether to laugh or run away.

The power of John's work, like that of American Hip Hop, is that of the oppressed man. I find it a shame that brains are so beat up in American schools, where, in Britain, the brain survived the British school system. Yet, even on the playground, the wit can escape the ravages of peer pressure. In this day and age, I push teaching children the scathing comeback and the critical mind as tools of effective defense against all those who would come chasing dragons. St. George is alive and well, so better get that fire stoked! And I have this picture of Mr. Lennon on my wall, to remind me that fifteen hundred years was not enough to defeat the fiery edge of the word.

Poetry in Translation

(This is an old blog from my old web site.)

Níl cosaint ar an mbás agam;
gabhann an lasiar i ngreim ar a bhfuil lamuigh na huaire;
cuireann an bás m'anam ar lasadh;
is mé an cleite agus is amhlaidh an sciath.

An Hala Havac
by A. R. Stone

"If we set our Souls on Fire, would we Bleed?"

The Celtic languages provide for me a way to directly connect to the mind of the ecstatic. Let me repeat, I have no ability to believe, in god, in afterlife--in anything. This does not mean that I don't think gravity is real; I have the expectation of gravity working, but no belief. The above lines from the poem are a way of describing a state of living which is celebrated in ceremonies like the Japanese "sepukku" or some Catholic ceremonies involving torment of the body. It is well known that, at the point of no return, the mind suddenly clears, as if a huge wind has swept across it, and the jumble of concerns about the body, about one's state, about all the trivia of input that occupies our daily thoughts, is completely gone. It is a very freeing feeling and often associated with a group of experiences: extreme clarity of mind, heightened awareness, sensory overload, feelings of time stretching out and vanishing--much of the same sorts of experiences of a drug trip or an advanced bout of meditation.

There are many, many things I don't understand. One of these is: if one experiences a mental state by accident, why cannot one then have access to it at will? I have found that the experience of any mental state is an opportunity to load that into my selection and to call upon it at any time. I find that the mind is what it is willed to be. Yes, there are the distractions: exhaustion, hunger, distress, and etc.; yet I find it possible, barring no extreme circumstances, to call up any mental state I choose. What I don't understand is why this is hard. I suspect that it is merely a matter of will and maybe people who report the difficulty of doing this do not want to do it, for whatever reason. Madness, ignorance, fear--there may be a number of reasons. However, one of the easy ways (for me) to call up mental states like the one above is to tie it to a language or a set of words, or, of course, music.

Yet part of calling up a mental state is knowing it. The above state is a bit dangerous to experience for the first time. Often people will go to extreme lengthsto recall it. It is a state closely associated with death, usually death by violence. However, it is also associated with religious ecstasy. I find it to be much more common among the confederation mythology as the berserk or poetical frenzy. Our ancestors were much more comfortable with frenzy than we are. Yet, as people who meditate realize, this state can be one of great calm as well as "the edge of adrenaline". The above poem translates something like this: "I cannot ward of death; everlasting glory has consumed my mind; because of death fire fills my soul; I am the feather and so the wing." It is a common form in both Japanese and Celtic poetry to set up one kind of state and fling the mind into the true state with a juxtaposition of an unexpected thought. Irish Gaelic works extremely well for this kind of set-up and works equally well for talking about the "flaming soul" or the skull of Baba Yaga. This state works best to "change" the shape of the mind, especially if one is stuck in a certain mind set.

All languages can be ecstatic or melancholy or express the nuances of scientific thought. However, the languages descendant from the confederations are exceptional at expressing heightened states of awareness such as the berserk. Their cultures "grew up" in extreme conditions where life-expectancy was short and men were eager to die in battle and ashamed to die of disease. Julius Caesar speaks with great eloquence on the battle madness of these people and their joy in near-death situations. Some have decided that the cults of worship associated with this kind of mind were caused by drugs, yet I believe that it was simply part of their culture. So, in modern German, you can evoke images of the "übermensch" which in English sound a bit embarrassing. In Irish you can summon up images of bloodthirsty headhunters and sound poetical rather than just crazy.

The converse is also true. In the South, death was very closely tied to sex and in the North death was closely tied to ecstasic berserker frenzy. So in Southern languages one can more easily express grief, pain and dying of love, which in Northern languages sounds a bit less macho. One should die on the hurling field, not in a woman's arms, so to speak. The love of battle is not so prevalent in the South, where battle and religion are handfast and battle becomes a holy duty, not a rough and tumble drunken party. One cuts one's arm off, not in love of battle, but in love of unrequited love. God becomes love, obtainable and painful to experience. The Northern hammer and eagle gods wielding their lightning spears become, in the South, the god tormented, sacrificed and wept over by his women.

Here is a poem from the Wim Wenders angels movies, "Wings of Desire" and "Faraway, So Close" to show what I mean by the angels working in German, but not well in English:

Als das Kind Kind war,
wüsste es nicht, dass es Kind war,
alles war ihm beseelt,
und alle Seelen waren eins.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.

The real problem is with the word "seelen" and "beseelt", a cognate. In German there is a COMPLETELY different architecture for the words "spirit" and "soul" than there is in English. This is one of the reasons Max Stirner is hard to translate, because his primary point is over the word "Geist" which has a different architeture or cognate structure than the word "ghost". This is where things get interesting. English although descended from a Germanic language, was heavily influenced, not only by French, a Romance language, but also various forms of Goidelic and Brythonic. Both these Celtic influences upon English have been downplayed, mostly due to the politics of the Normans. However, to be brief, the influence of Latin thought AND, more importantly, Celtic thought, upon understanding the soul and spirit, encouraged a completely different way of talking about these two subjects than one finds in German. This difference in thinking has led to a mess of misunderstanding between the Germanic peoples and the Anglo-French that exploded in war twice in the last century. However, for our little translation, the difference in thinking is profound, but hopefully won't lead us into war!

In English, we have the word "soul" which seems like it would fit the word "seele" and appears in dictionaries thus. Our word is from the AS word "sa-wol" which means "having life" but is related to the words dealing with "sowing" or "sawen" all implying the setting of seed as related to having life. The world "wol" means "disease", so given the Anglo-Saxon drudge mind (they were so literal and so prosaic that it makes me blush to be related to them), "sa-wol" probably meant "without disease" or "capable of siring children". Well, something happened between "sa-wol" and "soul", probably when the foreign word "espiritu" or to breathe, came in to give us "anima" or life imbued with breath. In the Celtic languages, the language of life is the language of breath. Now, in the Celtic world, "anam" is basically "life" and related to breath. But the older word for soul, used in more cognates and compound phrases (how you get an older word) is "intinn" which is "brain" (inchinn) and "mind" but cognates with "tinne" or "fire". So the Anglo-Saxons could be with seed and the Celts could have minds enfired. Two really, really different people. But let's continue. The Latins were basically with breath, or animated, but the Greeks were with breath "pneumos" but also "psychic" giving the English borrows another set of words. So, for the Celts, life was in the head, the seat of the soul, and for the Classical peoples, life was in the breath or the chest or the heart of the soul. What about the Germans? Does "seele" mean merely "not-diseased"?

Like the English, the Germans have ten different words for the meaning of "soul", all of which change in different contexts. Like most Europeans, they don't know whether the soul is the heart or the mind, but the word "seele" is not the prosaic word it is in Anglo-Saxon. Like the English word, it has evolved into a word deeply connotated. But, the architecture went a different way. The word "seele" stayed close to the word "animus" and is popularly used in psychology. In cheap dictionaries, the word "seele"translates as "soul" but let's see what happens when we understand the MEANING of the word in it's architectural surroundings. Here's our poem again and the translation:

Als das Kind Kind war,
wuüte es nicht, dass es Kind war,
alles war ihm beseelt,
und alle Seelen waren eins.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.

Let's do some translation based on understanding the German context of the words and not just using the dictionary.

While the child, child was
he did not grok that he child was
everything to him was alive
and all living were one.

However, this translation still is not right, in that you can't say what is implied in German, which is a very simple idea, carried all through the movies, the idea that while one is living innocently, one can't see the separation: all is soul, all is life, all is breathing all in one. So the words are tied to the Fall, or the awareness of being separate from the world, or individuated, the theme of the movie. The angels are beings who are all beings, and then they "fall" into life "literally" and are dismayed or delighted to find that they are separate beings from life, or self-aware, a gift of humanity as controversial as mortality and maybe tied to it? So the religious would have us think that to die, one joins again into the un-distinguished "oneness" of life.

One of the points in this discussion, is that in German this is said very succinctly and eloquently in this short verse, where in English it took a long time to wind around into it. Even when I took liberties with the translation, it didn't work very well, and the translation of Hanke's says little of what is implied in the German.

Does this mean that translation means that the translator has to be on the same page as the writer? You bet, but there is still the problem that even with a good translator, the connotations of the word may defeat the argument presented in the orignal language, especially when the throughts vary so much, as in the nature of the soul. And I haven't even got into the implications of German in capitalizing all the nouns and the fact that the neuter tense of "das Kind" further strengthens the innocence of the child. However, to be fair to Hanke, the ENTIRE poem (about sixty-five lines) translated into English begins to build a word picture that points better in the direction of the original German, however, so sadly, the music of "als das kind kind war" is completely lost. :(

Poetry in Translation

(This is a reprint of an old blog made to my old web site.)

Poetry is difficult to translate. Two of my favorite poets, I don't read in translation. I'm going to try to set out explaining why. Here is a verse from one of my favorite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke:

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäbe keine Welt.

A wonderful image of Rilke's most of his work, showing clearly the apasionada (which I'll explain). Here are some translations:

His gaze has been so worn by the procession
Of bars that it no longer makes a bond.
Around, a thousand bars seem to be flashing
And in their flashing show no world beyond.
(Walter Arndt)

His gaze those bars keep passing is so misted
with tiredness, it can take in nothing more.
He feels as though a thousand bars existed
an no more world beyond them than before.
(J. B. Leishman)

His vision from the passing of the bars
is grown so weary that it holds no more.
To him it seems there are a thousand bars
and BEhind A thousSAND bard, uh, no world.
(M. D. Herter Norton)

His sight from ever gazing through the bars
has grown so blunt that it sees nothing more.
It seems to him that thousands of bars are
before him, and behind him nothing merely.
(C. F. Macintyre)

His weary glance, from passing by the bars,
Has grown into a dazed and vacant stare;
It seems to him there are a thousand bars
And out beyond those bars the empty air.
(Jessie Lemont)

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bards, and behind the bars, no world.
(Stephen Mitchell)

Yeah, I heard you swear "holy moly!" under your breath, I did out loud. Actually I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. For those of you scratching your heads, bear with me. Okie dokie. This is like the gardening issue because in all of these translations, the poets thought to try to rhyme. (big loud noise) Lets look at Rilke's beautiful, wonderful writing again:

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäbe keine Welt.

Poety is meant to be heard. It bears repeating: Poetry is meant to be heard. What do we hear? Why is there no breath, no consciousness, no love, but only self-consciousness and hubris in the translations? They seek to possess, to own, to make the poem their's. Rilke is Rilke. To know Rilke is to love Rilke, to be passionate about Rilke, so much so that the German words resound in the breath like a moment without a moment before or after. Rilke, Paz and Houseman are all poets who are THERE. Let's go there. It's a conscious journey, so take the plunge.

tye TE te toe toe TU tay te te TAH te
to TEU te TOE te TAH te TE tay TE
te te tah toe te TAH te TE te TE te
tu TE te TAH te TE te TE te TE

Here is the scan. If you try to say it, ignoring the consonants, you hear the rythmn. Unamerican. Yah, you betcha. No iambic pentameter nothing. What's repeated? Look at the poem. What consonates? (tin, tin or tan, tun). Which are slender vowels, which are thick? Are they set off by slender or thick consonants? German, like English, is a breath language, so what
is hissed and spat and coughed and what is sung? Let's look:

zz ayn k sst ff om ff ee ayn sst ayb (with some uhs in there)
zz oe ee oer ss k tss ay el tt
eem sst all zz oeb sst ow sst sst ayb ayb
oon thh een tt tt au sst sst ayb kk ayn eel tt

If you're like me, you suddenly see a sound picture of that hissing panther rubbing the bars that hem him in with that abrupt "tt" sound. Sibilants and fricatives and the long vowels cut off over and over. hiissserrryyowllhiisclankclunkshut. Arndt is the only one who shuts off the panther in the first translation and some let him free. But the trochee battle cry of that last line is what makes this verse work which Arndt completely loses, and thus loses the poignancy of the image.

What is obvious here is the lack of what I call apasionada or acting completely so in love that the self is lost, the self that holds back, that can hold back. We are so used to holding back--HOLDING BACK!!! Some of it is necessary for civilization, but in poetry? In a garden? In a painting? In music? You hear it immediately in sung music where the singer is singing, aware that he is singing to someone. What I mean by apasionada is something done in god. Let me explain a little. I lack the capacity for belief in god. For me, there can never be any god. But I firmly swear that my every living breath is practiced, is lived in god, or apasionada, in love. The word apasionada is Spanish. It shows up in dances like the flamenco, which is not a dance of sex, but a dance of death, of grief. Apasionada may be too Catholic for most of the West, too, well, grief-striken. But we are human. The feeling is grief, but though the consciousness of the moment it is joy, it becomes joy only in the total throwing of the self into the ACT of god or loving without thinking of the act of love, but only being moved to love. For a garden to have integrity, for a poem to have integrity, it must be an act of god, to god, moved by love because of grief. The call of the cantador is a wail of grief but it is love that the wail becomes, great and terrible beauty, beauty so arresting that the moment expands into life--into breath.

Where is god in Rilke's poem? Where was god in these translations? Where was the apasionada?

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäbe keine Welt.

His glance overpassed by bars
so weary grows, never free to halt.
To him as if a thousand bars
a thousand bars and no world to walk.