Pablo Neruda

I just got a present from a Chilean friend of mine.  It’s a brass key chain of a miner’s hat, now a tchotchke representing the miraculous rescue of the trapped miners.  And because I have poetry on my mind this month, I thought of Pablo Neruda.  I knew only two things about Neruda, he was a poet and he was Chilean. Off to the library I went.  Fully Empowered, translated by Alastair Reid, is considered to be Neruda’s favorite collection.

In Praise of Ironing

Poetry is pure white.

It emerges from water covered with drops,

is wrinkled, all in a heap.

It has to be spread out, the sea’s whiteness;

and the hands keep moving, moving,

the holy surfaces are smoothed out,

and that is how things are accomplished.

Every day, hands are creating the world,

fire is married to steel,

and canvas, linen, and cotton come back

from the skirmishings of laundries,

and out of light a dove is born –

pure innocence returns out of the swirl.

From Pablo Neruda’s Fully Empowered, translated by Alastair Reid, c1967, Library of Congress, p. 37

Walt Whitman

When I think American poets, I think Walt Whitman mainly because I studied Whitman in school within the context of ‘Great American Poets’.  What I remember is Leaves of Grass and that he self-published it and it was controversial. Leafing through a copy, here’s today’s poem.

Perfections by Walt Whitman

Only themselves understand themselves and the like of themselves, As souls only understand souls.

Poetry Appreciation Month

I’ve never really appreciated poetry, mainly because of bad flashbacks from Mr. Emma’s High School English class.  He made a valiant effort to get his students to appreciate Dickinson and Walt Whitman, however, it didn’t stick.  Hindsight says that I was too young and too inexperienced to understand the depth of emotion and nuance poetry represents.  For twenty years, I’ve been perfectly fine walking the earth claiming that I just don’t get poetry.  However, as with many things, it is about time and place.  A few weeks ago, while wandering around the library stacks, I came across Rumi.  I immediately remembered, in a weird and intensely exciting flashback, that I loved Rumi when I first read his poems as an Undergrad.

I picked up The Essential Rumi and skimmed through it.  Every page I flipped to resonated something in me.  His simple verse, written beautifully (mind you it’s translated) is full of emotion and passion that you can’t help but connect with his poems. I realized that poetry can be meaningful and touching and I don’t need to be an expert to connect with it.

In that vein, in July, I’ll randomly put up a few verses/poems that touch me.

MY WORST HABIT

My worst habit is I get so tired of winter

I become a torture to those I’m with.

If you’re not here, nothing grows.

I lack clarity. My words

tangle and knot up.

How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.

How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,

dig a way out through the bottom

to the ocean. There is a secret medicine

given only to those who hurt so hard

they can’t hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,

no matter whether that friend is moving away from you

or coming back toward you.

Soure: The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, Harper San Francisco, c1995, p. 52.

Angry Conversations with God by Susan E. Isaacs

For various reasons, life has been challenging lately.  There are uncontrollable external factors that of course lead to introspection about the meaning and purpose of life and the inevitable question of ‘who am I?’  In between, there’s God poking at me to figure out my relationship with him.  Many days I want to say ‘quit it’ and let me just get back to wallowing in bitterness and self-pity.  Instead, God just shoves harder.

It was the perfect confluence of events that led me to this book.  It was a bad day and things seemed to be going from bad to worse.  I’m not an overtly angry person; I’m more of a seethe inside kind of person.  I fume on the inside until it goes away or I write angry letters that will never be sent.  This particular day I was seething and looking for distraction when I walked into Barnes & Noble.  I browsed without really seeing titles, just wandering around trying to make sense of my life.  Then I felt a shove and the first title I noticed was Angry Conversations with God – a snarky but authentic spiritual memoir.  Of course!

The back page quotes imply that this is a funny book by multiple reviewers and while it is, it is not laugh out loud funny.  Instead it is angry and biting as Ms. Isaacs really wants to know why god doesn’t show up when she wants him to?  The memoir goes back from when she was bullied as a little girl to her heartbreak when her almost-fiancée unexpectedly ends their relationship. In order to answer this question, Ms. Isaacs works with a pastor turned therapist who moderates her angry conversations with god and Jesus.  She purposefully separates the conversations to include both God and Jesus as she has always felt Jesus’ love but has resentment towards God for the circumstances of her life.

Through her journey she strives to make sense of who she is and how God factors into that and ultimately coming to a conclusion that is most acceptable to her.  This memoir is at times fractured, however, the most interesting parts are the conversations between Ms. Isaacs, the therapist, God and Jesus.  Those transcripts really illustrate her inner struggles to make sense and are just the right amount of angry to be entertaining.  The stories surrounding those conversations add context to the person she is, her experiences and her background.

It was a good time to come across the book and while I haven’t had my own angry conversations with God – pleading does not count as conversation – it was a nice little shove from God.

The Question of God – C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex and The Meaning of Life by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr.

Is our universe a happy accident or is there a Creator?  This is a question that precedes religion.  This is the question that Dr. Nicholi, Jr. tackles in The Question of God.  As you can imagine by the title, this is a heavy one, not in size but in scope.  The author, a Harvard professor, has been teaching this course for over twenty-five years where he has his students debate the philosophical arguments of Freud, a devout atheist and Lewis, an atheist-turned-believer.  In short, Freud’s answer is “Grow up!” and Lewis’ answer is “Wake up!”

In an engaging and intelligent way, Dr. Nicholi, Jr. starts by examining the similarities between Freud and Lewis and takes us through how they formed their beliefs.  Both were incredibly intellectual from an early age.  Both suffered significant losses early in life.  Both were close to their mothers and had fractured relationships with their fathers.  Both had bouts of melancholy early on – Freud’s turned into depression and Lewis’, crediting his faith, turned into peaceful happiness.

Freud was born into the Jewish religion and raised by a devout Roman Catholic nursemaid who took him to mass.  He studied Judaism in his early life until he turned away from it during his tenure at the University of Vienna where he experienced intense anti-Semitism.  In his scholarly works, Freud refers to himself as “a materialist” and wrote that the idea of a Creator is “so patently infantile and so foreign to reality, that…it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never rise above this view of life.”

Lewis’ grandfather was a local vicar and Lewis’ early worldview was that religion was “silly”.  He embraced atheism until he experienced a radical change during his tenure at Oxford University, which took him towards profound belief in the Old and New Testaments. Lewis came to believe that not only was there a Creator but that Creator stepped into human history.  Lewis wrote, “Humanity could be divided into ‘the majority who believe in some kind of God…and the minority who do not’.”  He goes onto further divide the Hindus “who believe ‘God is beyond good and evil’” and “the Jews, Mohammedans and Christians who believe ‘God is definitely good or righteous, a God who takes sides who loves love and hates hatred.”

From there, The Question of God dissects the writings of each to arrive at their fundamental worldview in the context of conscience, happiness, love, sex and pain.

This book is for anyone who enjoys well-constructed arguments presented by intelligent men with strong convictions about who they are and what they believe.  It is natural to gravitate towards the argument that is more in line with your ideology.  For example, as a ‘believer’, I found Lewis’ arguments more informative and compelling and I found myself offering excuses (i.e. his life experiences) as reasons for Freud’s worldview.  However, this book offers an understanding of both sides and gives great insight into two brilliant men and how they experienced their lives while positing The Question of God.