14 posts tagged “lonliness”

Alright, I confess that having a movie entitled Ladies in Lavender on my Netflicks queue is a bit unerving. But I assure you the movie is innocent enough. Its main character, Ursula, dabbles in the unconventional briefly but she comes around in the end. Her crime in this movie was to fall in love and to be too old to do so. Or at least too old to do so with the person she falls in love with. As her affections are not reciprocated, what we get to see is a movie about heartbreak. Its beauty I suppose is in reminding us that the elderly have hearts to break.

Ursula, I gather from the lack of mention of a deceased husband in her life, has the unfortunate challenge of dealing with two heartbreaks at once and I suspect that this is why her feelings for the young Polish musician who washes up on their beach are so much more intense than those of her dear sister, Janet. Both sisters are fond of the young man. Both are missing something (or someone) in their lives. But Ursula deals with the absence of memories of such a person as well. She grieves for not only what she lacks but also for what she has always lacked. And therein, I suspect, lies the power of her attachment. The young Andrea is a solution to both a present and a past hole in her life. Although he is not a realistic solution. (Does anyone ever really care if a solution to a heart's need is realistic though?)

I thought that both Judi Dench and Maggie Smith played their parts quite brilliantly. I could believe them both. Their eyes. Their expressions. Their inflections. Their gestures. They speak of something that we all tend to forget. They remind us that human hearts may grow old but they do not thereby grow into something different. Whether you are 15 or 80, when this story is told, this story of “where did you go? I was attached to you?” it will be, or should be, told with exactly these emotions.

Question for Comment: Do you think you will be surrounded by all the love you need when you are old? Or do you suspect that you will be like Harry Chapin in Cats in the Cradle?)

The End of the Affair serves as an introduction to a writer who intrigues me. Graham Greene is a Catholic, or was at some point in time during his life, who seems to struggle with a paradoxical faith in and anger towards God. As Ian Thompson puts it in his article Graham Greene, Uneasy Catholic,

“In his three subsequent theological novels – The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951) – his gift was to locate the moment of crisis when a character loses faith, religious or otherwise, and life is exposed in all its drab wonder. By the time of his death in 1991, Greene had more than thirty novels to his name: he was a prolific chronicler of wretchedness and damaged faith.”

The novel, The End of the Affair, is, rather obviously, about an affair. More specifically, it is about two people who seem to love each other but the woman, Sarah Miles, converts to a more conscientious form of piety after a “miracle” saves her lover’s life during a Nazi air raid on London. She leaves him, despite loving him, having promised God in a classic foxhole prayer that she will give him up and go back to her loveless marriage if God will but spare his life. He, unfortunately does not know the cause of her “desertion” (Though when people dabble in affairs and in intentional neglect of spouses I suppose it becomes morally cloudy as to just who is being disserted where, by whom, and when).

In the final scene of the drama, Sarah dies and her love interest, Maurice, is faced with a dilemma. Sarah’s life has left Maurice with a mysterious conviction in the reality of God but at the same time an unmistakable resentment towards that God. Sarah serves as both the evidence that there is a God active in the affairs of human beings (no pun intended) and evidence that God cannot be trusted to supply us with what we want and sometimes even feel we need.

“I hate you, God.” Maurice writes at the end, “I hate you as though you existed.” Graham Greene appears to have struggled with very similar ambivalences towards God. As he once put it, “If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?” “They are always saying God loves us,” he once noted of people of faith that he knew, “If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness.”

It is a painful novel really. And messy, as is life. People make poor choices and it complicates the choices they must make after. One poor decision piles up on another, making it so that later “correct choices” leave people in pain with their hearts broken in such a way that one might almost conclude that correct moral behavior leads to ruin. It is about the collisions that occur when divine love and human love coexist in the same people.

“Pain is easy to write” Greene’s character, Maurice says, “In pain we're all drapply individual. Now what can one write about happiness?”

A few of the quotes from the book stand out in my mind particularly starkly.

"...she had fallen asleep against my shoulder...the slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known."

“I wanted things I should never have again – there was no substitute." (114)

"...but when I tried to remember her voice saying 'don't worry,' I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn't imitate her voice. I couldn't even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous – just a woman's voice. The process of forgetting her had set in." (119)

Writing is a form of therapy;” Greene would write of his craft,

“sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

In many ways, I feel the same about blogging.

Question for Comment: Have you ever wished that God were more kind than loving? More willing to allow people to be happy short of their perfection than eventually blissful in a state of such, once refined?

A few months ago, a dear friend sent me a box of books to read and I have been dutifully making an attempt to read them. This, has not always been easy because when someone chooses books for you, it can be a bit like someone choosing your music for you. You might discover that you really enjoy the surprises but you might also not necessarily feel like you are eating what you would order yourself. It can go either way.

Still, I would encourage anyone reading this to take the risk sometimes. If you let someone else chose your path some times (just temporarily) you may discover things that for some subconscious reason you may have been avoiding.

So, today’s book was Charles Stanly’s Our Unmet Needs. This is a pastoral book – an anthology of sermon materials converted to book form – complete with the homiletic outlines in tact. Now the interesting thing about books of advise about deeply personal needs written from and for the pulpit is that the relationship between the pastor’s theology and the pastor’s personal experiences never deviate. There is a certain certainty that is conveyed when every personal illustration for the pastor’s counseling experience is preceeded by chapters and verses of his theological education. One would have to ask, seek, and knock forever to find an example of a verse, from any Testament, that was not perfectly illustrated by every experience an author like this has ever experienced.

People who have a affairs never wind up happy. People who fail to tithe never wind up financially secure. People who drink too much never live to not regret it, etc. etc. etc. It is consistent but somehow the lack of tension strikes someone like me, whose life has been filled with ideology v. reality paradoxes,  as somewhat sterile.

Having said that, this book is clearly a perfect book for someone who accepts the proposition that the Biblical narrative is a pre-telling of the narrative of every life. How it “works” then and there in the pages of the Bible is how it works here and now and for that reason, Biblical experience is a synonom for any human experience. Everything fits together there. That is the beauty of it. Simply acquire enough Biblical knowledge and any question can be answered in a way totally consistent with any other question. That is the beauty of it.

I think I will focus on one chapter of the book instead of dealing with it in its entirety (which I have read and appreciated). The chapter is entitled Ten Reasons We Experience a Delay. Its objective is to outline the various Biblically supported reasons why a person might not be experiencing the divine provision that he or she might otherwise be enjoying. Stanley suggests that delayed need fulfilment may be the result of

1.       Our Disobedience

2.       Our Doubt

3.       Our Attempts at Manipulation

4.       Our Wrong Motivation

5.       Our Lack of Responsibility

6.       Our Illegitimate Need

7.       Our Rejecting of God’s Method

8.       God’s Redirection

9.       God’s Desire to Teach Us

10.   God’s Desire to Bring Us to Repentence   

Now granted, some of these could be folded in together logically and some were the result of two Biblical passages that must have come to mind. Certainly it is convenient that there were exactly ten. What is frustrating, speaking as a needy person is that any one of the ten could apply to me I suppose. What is also frustrating is that I know people who don’t give a rip about any of these things who seem to live lives of perfect contentment.  In short, this is not a scientific theory. One cannot simply put oneself in a test tube and compare the results of isolated factors as compared to control groups of other versions of oneself. I cannot, for instance, KNOW with any assurance that God has or has not decided to bring me to repentance about something. I cannot know if God has decided to teach me something. I might easily come to believe that my need is the result of a failure to eat kosher food when in fact it is the result of God wishing to redirect me. I cannot know if what my conscience tells me is a perfectly legitimate method of meeting a need is actually causing me my frustration or if my human doubt about some Biblical promise has risen to the threshold of wickedness so as to deny me my petition.

How exactly would I know if my “need” was illegitimate? How many thousands of people are going to bed tonight perfectly happy with their lots in life having never once in their entire lives tithed a dime to any church whatsoever? Would a ten thousand dollar gift to United Way count? What if their tithe simply lined the pockets of some vapid manipulative televangelist?

Sigh. It’s all so formulaic. And discouraging. It is entirely likely that all ten of these reasons could be made to apply to me. I suffer need. And unlike Charles Stanley, my life experiences and my understanding of the Biblical world view do not always contra dance with one another. I wish there were a lever I could pull and the offenses keeping me from the fulfillment of my needs would line up like cherries on a Vegas slot machine.

But with that, I find myself wishing to close my critical eye. The book reminds me of how much I miss those days in my life when I felt like I was the well cared for sheep of a good shepherd. I should like to, I think, find that place again.

Question for Comment: When you feel needy, do you tend to think the answer lies in somehow aligning yourself with a divine power outside the “system” that provides answers to those needs? Or do you simply regard it as your responsibility to find and access the sources of what you need directly? Have you ever been frustrated in the application of one or the other of these strategies?  

I woke up at 2:30 in the morning and couldn't get back to sleep so ... I decided to watch the NOVA special on Sir Isaac Newton (Newton's Dark Secrets). The connections to the work I have been doing on Michelangelo are well stated in the conclusions the documentary draws about this enigma of the human brain's potential to see the universe in new ways:

NARRATOR: A year after Robert Hooke died, Newton published his second great masterpiece, Opticks, which expanded on his work with light. At the end of this book, Newton finally wrote up some of his key ideas about calculus, 40 years after they were conceived. And although he had given up alchemy, he continued to devote himself to theology.

ROB ILIFFE: Right up to his death, he tried to keep his heresy as secret as possible, and he thinks, "There's no point trying to convince these people of, of what I'm doing, because the time is not right. These people aren't fit to receive the kind of word that I'm giving out."

NARRATOR: Newton died in 1727. He was 84 years old. He was buried among kings and queens in Westminster Abbey, beneath a monument to his scientific achievements, his alchemy and passionate, but heretical, religious beliefs virtually unknown.

Now, two and a half centuries later, a new picture of Sir Isaac Newton is emerging, along with a new understanding of the roles that science, religion and alchemy played in his life.

JAMES FORCE: He sees his world as one world, he sees his pursuit of truth as one pursuit, and whether it takes him to books of theology or to books of nature, whether it be books of astronomy or books of alchemy, it doesn't matter to him.

SIMON SCHAFFER: What Newton does is brilliantly use the tools appropriate to every field in which he worked. He's an ingenious and energetic builder who's astonishingly brilliant at composing gorgeous monuments of the most intensely clever design. Sometimes these appear as great books like the Principia itself. Sometimes they appear in experiments. But we would be wrong to look for a single key which unlocks the whole mystery of Isaac Newton.

WALTER LEWIN: The man was a complete genius. I mean people like Newton, if I shoot off the hip, maybe once in 500 years, at best.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3217_newton.html

Its interesting that the last sculpture that Michelangelo did was a self-portrait of himself as Nicodemus, a man who felt that he had to keep his most controversial beliefs a secret. I find it particularly fascinating that people like Newton and Michelangelo had to figure out how to live within social systems that could not possibly see with their clarity of vision what was "out there". they themselves were constantly learning, observing, trying to connect the dots. These guys could, in a matter of months, put more pieces of a puzzle together than whole cities.

I would never put myself in the same category. I mean, these guys had Cray super-computers for brains but I do know the feeling of working on a puzzle for days and weeks on end - of seeing those pieces come together and having it just blow your mind how simple the picture is when you are done. You sit there looking at your project saying "Of course. why didn't I see it at the beginning?"

And then you look around you and you realize that you can never really get others to see what you have seen without helping them to make the same journey you have made to it. Unless you learn to teach better, you will always and forever then on be alone in the world. The man who cataloged Newton's papers after he died put all Newton's alchemy work in a file labeled "Not Fit To Be Printed". Even in their graves, people like Newton sell their souls for membership in their communities. Sir Isaac Newton too was a Nicodemus.

Question for Comment: How does one teach the ability to make connections? Are some brains just more adept at it? Can the ability to find patterns in seemingly random data be taught? Are people who think on the level of Michelangelo and Newton and Bethoven pre-destined to be lonely, putting distance between themselves and the communities of people they need every time they spend time alone thinking?

The lyrics to the Gladiator theme song NOW WE ARE FREE are playing in the background as I write:

Anol shalom
Anol sheh lay konnud de ne um
Flavum
Nom de leesh
Ham de nam um das...

La um de
Flavne
We de ze zu bu
We de sooo a ru
Un va-a pesh a lay
Un vi-i bee
Un da la pech ni sa

Aaahh

Un di-i lay na day
Un ma la pech a nay mee di nu ku

La la da pa da le na da na
Ve va da pa da le na la dumda
La la da pa da le na da na
Ve va da pa da le na la dumda
La la da pa da le na da na
Ve va da pa da le na la dumda
La la da pa da le na da na
Ve va da pa da le na la dumda

Anol shalom
Anol sheh ley kon-nud de ne um
Flavum
Flavum
M-ai shondol-lee
Flavu Lof flesh lay
Nof ne
Nom de lis
Ham de num um dass
La um de
Flavne
Flay
Shom de nomm
Ma-lun des dwondi.
Dwwoondi

Alas sharum
du koos
Shaley koot-tum

Translation:
Almighty Freedom
Almighty freer of the soul
Be free
Walk with me
Through the golden fields
So lovely
Lovely

We regret our sins, but...
We sew our own fate and
Under my face I remain feeble
Under my face, I smile

Aaahh)

Even alone/afraid
Under my face I will be waiting

Run with me now soldier of Rome
Run and play in the field with the ponies
Run with me now soldier of Rome
Run and play in the field with the ponies
Run with me now soldier of Rome
Run and play in the field with the ponies
Run with me now soldier of Rome
Run and play in the field with the ponies

Almighty Freedom
Almighty freeer of the soul
Be free
Be free
And imagine
Free with peace at last
It's lovely
It's lovely, this land
No one can believe or understand
How far I came just for my lovely family
I should have been there
with them when the world crashed down
But now they rest with me.

I'll never forget
How I felt that moment
I became free.




"How far I came just for my lovely family." I am not sure anyone can really understand the power of this instinct to find a family who has never lost their access to it. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the explorer, Robert Walton expresses in a letter to his sister how deeply he feels the lack of a companion. In some ways, his search for discovery and fame is a substitute for that which he would most desire: As he puts it:





"But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavor to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother! I am too ardent in execution, and too impatient of difficulties. . . . Now I am twenty-eight, and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavor to regulate my mind."

Clearly, it is precisely this sort of companionship, this "family of the mind" that Frankenstein's creature himself seeks so deeply. He is excluded from it because of the aesthetic challenges he must live with and because his creator will not provide for him the counterpart in the flesh that he seeks. It is this deprivation that sends him into such a perpetual rage.


In so many respects, alienation from this sort of communion is a trauma and the song Now We Are Free speaks (at least to me) of the depth of human emotion that is reserved for this instinct.


I myself can often feel the pain of this loss, this separation, this tearing apart of family. It is not simply the absense of a pleasure we wish we had. It is the constant presence of a pain that really physically hurts almost all the time. I would wish it on no one. Not even my enemies if I have any.

Question for Comment: What plays a more essential role in your life? Your families of blood or your families of mind? Is there a way to make them both the same? Or is that just being idealistic?

Adam’s Game

Now I know how Adam felt
Walking woods alone
Naming pairs that
Always came in sets
Until he began missing . . .
Or was it, brother Adam, aching
For the counterpart he’d never seen.
Indeed who was not even there yet.
I have to think that the task
Began as such a blast.

“Sun” God had said pointing at the round thing in the sky.
“Moon” God had said, pointing at another round thing later.
“Sky” God had said, pointing at the blue heavens.
“Land” God had said, pointing at the ground.
“Sea” God had said, pointing at the water.
“Ish” God said pointing at Adam

“Now you try” God must have said to his bright-eyed pupil.
“Worm” said Adam, pointing to the ground.
“Oh Good,” said God. “Jolly Good! We’ll call that little thing a worm. Do it again.”
“Zebra” Adam must have exclaimed all proud of himself.
“Zebra it is,” God laughed. “Excellent”
And then he would have pointed to a female Zebra and named that too,
Adding the feminine suffix.
“Ez” [goat] said Adam. “and ezah” God responded.
“Nesher” [eagle] said Adam. “and Nesherah” said God.
“ahh,” Adam would have noted after working through the process for several animals.
“How cool is that!” Everything has a counterpart.”
“Shual . . . and shualah” he would have said looking at a pair of foxes.
“Dob . . .” said Adam, looking at the brown furry thing in the brush.
“. . .  and dobbah” he chuckled a moment later when he caught a flash of
the same brown fur on the other side of the clearing.
“Dob and Dobba it is then,” said God laughing, “Brilliant. Exactly. Can you find another pair?”

And so the game went for the rest of the afternoon.
Oh Brother Adam, brother Adam!
When did the game stop being fun for you?
How many of those animals did you name before
The game became a search for isha?
The bone of your bone.
The flesh of your flesh.

Counterpart.

Eyes peeled, brother Adam.
Don’t settle for a barnacle.

----snip----

What if I AM the barnacle?

THE PREACHER RUMINATES BEHIND THE SERMON
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.

Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of his importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit's gaze.

But who walks with Him?--dares to take His arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?

Perhaps--who knows?--He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.

Question for Comment: Some would regard the notion of God being lonely ... or of just wanting to enjoy a beer with buddies as suspect if not sacrilegious. can you conceive of God in these terms? Why or why not?

Simple Song by Marge Piercy

When we are going towards someone we say
you are just like me
your thoughts are my brothers
word matches word
how easy to be together

when we are leaving someone we say
how strange you are
we cannot communicate
we can never agree
how hard, hard and weary to be together.

we are not different nor alike
But each strange in his leather body
sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands
and loving as an act
that cannot outlive
the open hand
the open eye
the door in the chest standing open.

The Story by Lisel Mueller

You are telling a story;
How Fire Took Water to Wife
 its always like this you say
opposites attract
They want to enter each other,
be one,
so he burns her as hard as he can
and she tries to drown him
its called love at first sight
and it doesn't hurt.
but after a while she weeps
and says he is killing her
he shouts that he cannot breath
underwater.

"The poet sheds his blood in the ring and calls the pools poems." George Barker

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the readers recognize as their own" Salvatore Quasimodo

"Poems are like dreams. In them you put what you do not know that you know.'"Adrienne Rich

Question for Comment: Are you going towards someone or leaving someone right now? Are you finding this first poem to be true? What causes people to  close that "door in the chest" the poet speaks of?

Give All To Love

Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the muse;
Nothing refuse.

'Tis a brave master,
Let it have scope,
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope;
High and more high,
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent;
But 'tis a god,
Knows its own path,
And the outlets of the sky.
'Tis not for the mean,
It requireth courage stout,
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending;
Such 'twill reward,
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;—
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor,
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, for ever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
Vague shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Do not thou detain a hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho' her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

Emerson-

Question for Comment: Do they really? When half gods go, lonliness arrives it seems more like to me.