Toward An Inner Dostoyesky

Good to be reminded of the relevance of Dostoyevsky during the holiday season.  NYTimes.com piece, The Freedom of Faith:  A Christmas Sermon, by Simon Critchely, discusses the meaning of "The Grand Inquisitor" passage of The Brothers Karamazov.  In creating religious structure, custom, hierarchy (as Roman Catholicism embraced) have we not picked up the very same sins by which Satan tempted Christ--power, miracle, authority--after forty days in the desert, as the article explicates?

Then there is the theme of The Idiot, in Russia perhaps the most popular of Dostoyevsky's, of whether the saintly ego-free largely sinless as-you-can-get person can find a place in society without mucking everything up, better belonging to the asylum where lunatics and other people are kept, creatures of the self-fulfilling prophecies of human habit and custom and signals.

The man himself, Dostoyevsky, with his history, is as interesting as, and instantly, a part of his work.  We cannot divorce his experience and life events as the material of his books and his themes.  Which makes the later works all the more interesting, as they are more as parables, without the direct comparison, from actual life and events, of Notes from the House of the Dead.  (As Crime and Punishment is made up, extreme, so is the world of Alyosha Karamazov semi-fantastic and ideal, and yet, both are real to us, a capture of human realities.)  Does he, do any of us, achieve any kind of salvation, any kind of lasting dignity in and of belief?  Or, we ask critically, is it all a well-told story, but ultimately a crock, the result of some addiction to strange righteousness that anyway would evaporate as soon as one walks out the door into the real world?  And was it not rather unoriginal of him to rely so heavily on his own story tucked under the cover of fiction, or for him to take his own life events and assume a gravitas that allows him to draw such fine points as there lurks in Ivan's poetic fantasy of "The Grand Inquisitor"?  Is he ultimately like a kind of AA story, having stumbled, finding salvation, one that works for him, maybe not the rest of us?

This is where we must be readers.  This is where we must ask ourselves, does this Dostoyevsky stuff hold up for me?  And maybe, what can I draw out of it for my own life?  You will probably have your own version of it.  Mine, maybe largely imaginative, a bit fanciful, but perhaps it goes something like this:  we are, because of offenses, cast sometimes into prisons, prisons of various forms, and there we rub elbows closely with the human condition;  at a certain time, we are released, to an extent, perhaps figuratively, that release allowed to us for the dawning of realizations that come from reflecting on human nature and one's own;  that this then allows us to sketch out a better path, a better path for your own self, a better path for humanity in general.  Insights come, let's say, from having to work with people who are, let's say, repeatedly hungover on Monday mornings, seeing the effect this has (unhappily) on work, an egotistical revolving loop of stress and false release that leads back to the same stress, which irritates its victims so that they get a little stressed.  And so you come to see the point, that a tavern that takes in the wandering traveler and provides sustenance, warmth and relaxation, is not about the juvenile 'stress relief,' but points to the spiritual experience, the reality, the proper information within the general experience, that which is lasting.

It was probably sad, being in Siberian prison, for Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  Less so, the life of a barman (what else would I do with my time?) who is sentenced to be around drinkers, publicans and sinners too, people acting liberated for a time, as if they had pulled off some perfect crime.  For him the way out was being released, at which point it seems he went into the military, or back into it.  But the whole experience had reinforced, perhaps oddly, what he had started out to be, the writer, the writer that led him to flirtations with Christian Socialism that then got him into hot water in the first place, and now a grander and deeper writer, one capable of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov.

So, what are the visions that come to you, after your own years in prison?  What is it for you that can make you feel serious again, able to buckle down and go back to work after the distraction?  What is your spiritual vision, and how do you populate it in the absence of role models handy as Father Zossima, and how do you keep yourself on your own right track in the meanwhile?  "Yay, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..."  (All this without getting sick of your developing wisdom, as is the former cynical habit.)  Does it mean one has to abandon his social life and friends, all of whom strike him in some way as being prisoners of various types?  Does it mean one must abhor his own self and his own choices over the years, but not so much so that he will undercut his own capacity for change?  It probably takes a good deal of courage.  And this seems to be something Dostoyevsky had, though of course he too had his own very human problems with addiction that caused no small amount of woe in his life (gambling), about which it might be argued that brought him deeper insight after he kicked the habit.

Amongst the sets of choices we have, maybe it is possible to see in strangers, in friends, and even in one's own self, a kind of Dostoyevksy, a personal one, individualized, born into human form, the spirit, to observe life, live it, suffer it, enjoy it, cast down, set free, on one's own recognizance, a deeply smart being capable of reassembling from the randomness fragmented of life a kind of way to make a certain sense, or take a certain meaning.  Something to reinforce, that is reinforcing.  (Eliot's 'infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.')  A vision.  A glimpsed understanding of spiritual meaning and spiritual realities, that goes beyond the known, somehow deeply satisfying, and worth all the trouble.  And in a new year, with what might seem like, and indeed be, a fresh beginning, let that being happen.

Dostoyevsky tells a story that is meaningful and relevant to this day.  One of the first moderns, rightly a part of classics.  Once a thick mystery on parent's book shelves looked up at, worth the read.

There is a stretch of woods tucked in behind upper Georgetown accessible through Rock Creek Park below the great stone highway bridge of Massachusetts Avenue where I take my walks.  It's there where I scramble over rocks, taking an occasional perch, surveying the changing woods through the seasons.  Back along the parkway adding to the aerobic semi-workout I remember I don't it like as much, the gentle animal, freed and transported by the woods now feeling he is back running the modern gauntlet, ceaseless traffic, initially subtle smells of pollutions.  The woods have been liberating enough, lovely and deep as the poet says that I can hold on to the feeling, even as I lose the enthusiasm to write as I did while back in the woods, left with some vestiges of the thoughts had out at dusk with the moon fresh and high up above beech trees near a stream descending, as I return and sit down in my old apartment.

I guess you have to know great sorrow and feelings of near insanity in order to appreciate the moments of clarity.  The woods bring sanity, definitely, maybe not always, but often enough, as if they were there in their own way like a girlfriend to talk to and listen to.  Comforting anyway.  Climb over some rocks above a lazy stream, over leaves piled in rocky nooks, great networks of tree roots spreading like fingers holding to rock, and you'll remember the gentle being within, that manages to stay with you through all the great confusion of concerns of metropolitan life.

I sit on a rock, pondering for a moment Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, Prince Myshkin.  That idiot in all of us.  Who manages to be the center, freed of all the ego stuff, the multiple legion of voices that can come into your head.  Even the sternest and organized, most pious and professional people have enchanting ego voices inside their heads, voices that tell them what they must have and need.  Or perhaps they have found one ego voice of all of them that sounds the most logical and practical like that of the corporation they might be part of by which they earn their bread and butter and other things so that reasonably they can sleep at night, having solved all the major issues of life.  Well, by a good guess, those voices, not necessarily 'evil ones' (as voices in the head are sometimes portrayed, being the sole property of crazy people), are not who we are.  And one has the distinct perception that the gentle being  quite content to sit on a comfy rock and look over a stand of nature and nature's logic (water flow, rock placement, dirt banks, tree position, branch arch, leaf) is close to that being who is us, all of us.

I wrote a book sort of a thing, and the principal point therein was the enabling of this person to say something gentle and with no motive but that of life itself.  He brings flowers to this brat girl he has an affection for, as he has affection for all beings, and when told that he is crazy for doing so simply responds, "crazy to bring flowers to a beautiful girl."  In doing so he achieves that state of grace he has always been in, content with the way of the Universe.  Okay, he may be a total bumbler about all the logic of how to make things happen, but in his sudden freedom from motives (and all the motives people have put upon him like small charges of this and that) he discovers himself and therefore knows all the better what love, or "love," is, if that is the situation and the context that he is placed in.

So, what do you do when you are motiveless, when you suddenly find yourself in harmony with nature, warm under a coat and wool sweater taking in the woods at dusk?  What does this mean about career choices to be made?  But even that confusion passes out of you, ceasing to exist.

I think sometimes when I am out there on my walks of picture of John F. Kennedy walking off over the dunes, the one used by Chris Matthews for the cover of his biography.  You can sense how it was greatly gratifying for him to be there on the dunes.  He's looking off, a jacket under his arm, engaged in something very human, which is to find release and simply be as one is.

Now I am home, having stopped in a little grocery store, and I am a little bit tired.  But feeling a whole lot better than I was when my workweek was done, in a better state.  The past week provided a very clear example of why we don't just give out guns, put them in any old hand that can carry them.  People, having been divorced from their ego-free natural state, have voices inside their heads, egos that on a certain day might tell them randomly,  and somehow persuasively enough, to go and do something very bad.

I suppose it is one of the paradoxes of human existence, and of that existence within society, that the only real guides we have are the ones who are free of ego, or freer, rather than those who have bought into ego.  Unfortunately the latter type are always the louder ones, always the kind to make sure that they get what they want, generally of the convincing type, and often leaving other types out in the cold.  As long as we know that, and can be on guard about it, maybe, who knows, things will work out.

One might have naively thought the big corporate egos telling us what's good for us would somehow have been obliterated by the ancient wisdom of the objects in the sky that is the reset of the Mayan calendar.   But here's the old NRA guy singing for his well-compensated supper on behalf of those who manufacture guns of the assault type, telling us that guns are good for us, glorifying gun culture, we should all have one.

The good news is that not everyone's buying it, that people are beginning to do something about it.

And here's another informative piece about dietary culture from io9, a piece by George Dvorsky, "Why  You Should Probably Stop Eating Wheat," found through Google News, Discovery News and hopefully elsewhere out on the web.  The piece points out that wheat has been severely hybridized over the last fifty years to the point it has bad stuff in it.  Wheat, and glutens, it turns out just aren't good for at least a sizable part of the population.  Of course a significant amount of it is ceaselessly pushed our way with all its addictive qualities.

There are times, in certain moods, when it is hard to put a happy and sanguine view on things, hard to put a positive interpretation on life's events and the way you handled things.  Sometimes you only see all the things you messed up, all the mistakes you made, the lack of decisiveness, all the things that leave you feeling lonely and alone and seeing that such a condition is only going to worsen, despite all the hopefulness you bring earlier on in life.  You feel you did something wrong, and you don't quite know where to pinpoint it.

Is it that you are different somehow?  An arrogant thought.  Work, groceries, dishes, laundry, naps, wine...  what else is there to save you?  How do you cope?  Walks in the woods?  A bike ride?

What you can't do is turn the clock back and make amends.  And everyone will tell you, there isn't any point in dwelling, in living, in the past, which is obviously true, but not always easy advice to take up.

You're doing the same wrong thing over and over again, it seems.  You don't know how to get out.  You're not taking care of basic needs, not standing up for yourself.  I suppose a writer faces the same thing an athlete faces.  Obscurity, lack of a financial safety net and the sense of a valid career.

I can understand the psychological pressures upon Suzy Favor Hamilton, the need for escape, for what feels like excitement, a "coping mechanism" to counter depression.  And I wonder if a job like tending bar isn't too terribly far from elements of being an escort sometimes, to exaggerate slightly.  I don't blame her one bit.  And that's probably the Christian thing to do anyway.

And while we're at it, here's another really good piece about a really good person being honest about being human...  (I have to wonder if she has Type O blood.)  Someone that brings to us a real situation. One can only have the greatest kind of quiet gratitude and applause for such an athlete, such an individual.  I'm sure many people will be able to reveal more about themselves and their own coping mechanisms, make the psychological more an accepted form of talk.  "Former Olympian" is very human, commendable on many levels.

Former Olympian Cites Depression for Taking Job as Escort

By JERÉ LONGMAN

The thought reminds me of Twain.  He didn't say it, out loud, not that I know of.  "If you could blame what you wrote, instantly and directly, on other people, there would be a lot more good writing out there."  Currently, as the set up goes, what you wrote, well, you're kind of stuck with it, like, for the rest of your life.  This, plainly, discourages creativity.  Hemingway, by the way, would add, to the part of who to blame, or when, or how long, "lastingly."  That sounds like a word he would have wrote, as least as far as my thoughts go.  And he was a brave guy, because he wrote stuff and had to stand by it, and people could have easily said, reacting to it, "oh, that's weird, really not...  no, I, can only see that as vulgar... and disturbing," even though people, lighted up by Freud and other developments, instantly saw that writing was a lot like psychotherapy, a way of getting things out, through symbol, the kinds of things you think about that haunt you that you know you need to somehow get down, put down on paper, get out of the bag...  Which made reading instantly attractive, as if the cathartic process of whatever art the human being had ever come up with from cave painting to tempera, from saga, bard, playwright sonnet maker was able to evolve and develop to meet what ever the times threw at the forms of art and the basic drive behind art.  And the times threw a lot in the face of humanity in, say, an event like WWI, the coming home of the ghosts of colonialism (and thoughtless industrialism) on mass scale at the door step of Europe, such that it would never forget.

Perhaps it is a sign of 'manhood,' adulthood, when the being becomes more attuned, focussed, aligned with whatever he finds sayable and worth mentioning.  You can indeed work long and hard finding something worthy of putting down on paper.  (You can work long and hard, and then find what you have to say ill mannered, unintelligent.)  And you can indeed find things that you really think are vital observations, and these happen in very personal spaces, leaving you to conclude that this was why you started messing about in the first place.

All those sorts of 'fictional thoughts,' thoughts taken from the imagination as little or steady voices, allow one to find a way to think what he/she really thinks.  The form those thoughts take is interesting to mark.  Some paint.  Some make films.  Some take up music.  Some write in certain ways.

And it might be said, that the deepest, or truest, of thoughts are something one has to think about, as they come out as puzzles in a way.  Or as something seen by a very deep and daring mind who is able to move symbols in incredible and mythological ways.  Celebratory, not pessimistic.

"The world is full of ghosts, and such is exactly what each individual represents," the thought might go.  And so then we get on that thin ground that might break beneath our feet, yet knowing in an instinctive way that such is true, true on all levels, symbolically, religiously, poetically, figuratively, literally, metaphysically, as true as we know a push-up works the chest and shoulder muscles.

Of course, such thoughts come into play when we encounter certain minds, effected by the poetry of such minds.  In Emily Dickinson land, we get her nature odes.  In MacGowan land, we get a line of ancient Irish schooling and ghosts.  In each, our own sensitivities pick up what antennae tell us.  And so, we deserve our fascination with Abraham Lincoln, a channel, if you will.

Characters, ghosts, Lears, poems, book depository sixth floor cardboard boxes (as if to predict how cardboard box delivery--and airplanes with metal caskets--would come to rule our present lives), famine haunted dunes of the sands of beaches in County Mayo, Buddha ghosts, candles, reverberations of the thoughts of Twain and Faulkner, Joyce claptrap, Kerouac, the whale mouth sieve technique of writing, the haunted Carolina rocking chair of Kennedy, well-read Kennedy who knew history, the puzzles of old Maupassant's short story taken internationally, around the world, into the depths of deep China, Hamlet too stiff for us, too unyielding, too impersonal (as princes are), but perhaps the best modern speaker of the final truth of the Universe blown into being.  Joyce had gift of language, poor working stiff does not have, but smelleth the same ghosts on shingle beaches though far away.  Worn out by conversations, just as he is enlivened and enlightened by them, an inner eye seeing the friendly ghosts behind everyone's life, like that weird film of the fallen angel in Berlin hanging about, Wim Wenders style.  Yes, Berlin is somewhere I would show up, if I were a ghost.  "Definitely," as people say.

Dedication, to work, what is it?  We must first abide by our ghosts, by the sweet ghosts of the creativity of all our thousand human ancestors (7000 years ago, like taking to Facebook, the kids made cheese in pots now fragmented.)

Daniel Inouye is honored, lies in state in the Capitol rotunda, veteran of Monte Casino.

Writing... you'd rather blame it on someone else.  Not my fault.  Just a tradition.  Somehow good for us, good for our health.

And we should know, despite the show, that everyone and things related is a ghost of something, and in that act, becoming something real and present.

It's always a matter of ghosts versus empire.

All this...  I cannot blame on anyone else.



Just a little sensitivity,
not too much,
not too much time alone
wondering about things.
Laying the sweet memory
of your father down
like a hugged child at night,
to bed and come back
with wakened day.
My old man.
Pop.
Sweet gentle dad.

Pogues accordionist and author James Fearnley gives a portrait of Shane MacGowan in his account of life with the band, Here Comes Everybody.  There's a lot of drinking.  MacGowan is hard to deal with, sometimes bullying, quite often wasted, unreachable, on a long slide.  For anyone wanting to learn more of MacGowan, this makes for hard reading.  Though capable of quips of wisdom, often of a practical nature, like how not to get beaten up in Northern Ireland, this is not a person you'd want to spend much time with.  The question is asked, genius or idiot?  Does he come up with songs inspired by his habits, or despite them?  The creative song writing process of MacGowan's world is shielded, perhaps guarded, happening independently of interaction, and we are left with a portrait of a bore intent largely upon drinking.  It's kind of sad, of course, and things seem to get worse over time and touring and heroin.

But perhaps, as with any story of an artist, there is missing space in the puzzle, and perhaps on top of that, things that may not make logical sense.  In interviews, discussing his views on, say, Irish music being akin to rock'n'roll, or about music in general (to paraphrase, "music is everywhere, in the ground, in the water, in the rain, and we just put it in boxes"), or about Irish literature, or on remembering Ronnie Drew, MacGowan comes across with glimmers (at the least) of being informed, well-read, possessing a bright intelligent mind, as he does in his imaginably long-suffering girlfriend's account of conversation with him,  A Drink With Shane MacGowan, a vehicle for his philosophizing.  (To say nothing of the primary evidence of a thoughtful mind in some particular songs, the poetry of his account of being a kid in North London working for Meals on Wheels, "NW3," for example.)  There are times when spending time considering his raw works seem a little more justified while the world goes about its serious business trying to right itself.

Enter the NY Times' recent piece piece on concentration, the focus of the mind, reached through meditation, through getting rid of all the random thoughts running through the head.  And one begins to see, perhaps, how the great thinkers do it.  They effectively stop thinking, clear the mind.  (The piece seems to veer off into a discussion of abilities with multi-tasking, but obviously this is ground worth exploring.)

For MacGowan's part, one wonders, is his 'meditation and mindfulness' gained through simply getting wasted, which would seem a bit like cheating maybe.  Is his access to creativity a token of an Irish nature, stubbornly clinging to the old ways rooted in lyrical tradition, spirituality and rooted humanity?  MacGowan was, once upon a time, a bright kid, Eliot's poem, "Preludes," a favorite of his.  As his songs suggest, one wonders what happens to such people.  Perhaps the territory raised up for us by Konnikova's piece isn't entirely frivolity, say what you will about those who attempt to be practitioners of it.

And for an artistic person (as an afterthought here), while it is painful to remember the times when one was unwittingly in a general creative mode, engaged in a kind of 'not thinking,' in moments where it would have been a lot better to be thinking quite practically and 'on one's toes' as far as life goes, there lies within such a consideration of thought and liberated brain power a gentle understanding apology.  It's just how thinkers/artists/scientists are sometimes, a habit to tolerate.  And perhaps for an artist to tolerate himself he must further allow himself entry to the mode of 'mindfulness' to keep that which must be taken as worries of a practical sort for a time at bay.  A kind of feedback loop emerges in which the mode is more necessary for survival and well being, else one would get too down on himself.  Reasonably assuming that with age comes greater worry, the importance and vitality of deeper thought patterns might naturally emerge.  And in full adulthood, as a consequence, perhaps one does, like a Jesus, end up taking on a large part of the carefully constructed empire that makes modern life possible (viewed from the lens of the self-fulfilling prophecy rule-abiding empires seem to be fond of imposing.) While a MacGowan doesn't seem like the kind of person to be judgmental about certain kinds of behavior, there is a certain kind of politics he supports, one generally against the excesses of empire.

JFK and Churchill took naps, allowing the meditations of rest inform and develop their sensibilities, enabling them to enter into modes different and broader from the conventional military/diplomatic views of a LeMay or a Chamberlain, and often involving the raising of questions rather than the acceptance of a known status quo.  I fear the same is true with respect to poets, who share the same interest in craft as the academics who do well teaching about poetry, but have a fondness too much of their own poetic modes and mindfulness to be comfortable with the conventions of professional academia.  (Some are able to do both.)  It's not a question of will and rational thought and logic, but of a deeper choice, one the individual may not be so happy with in terms of conventional happiness, a matter of conscience.

As with everything else, an artist is vulnerable in chrysalis stage, in hatching stage, in transformation, in development.  That is the hard part, surviving the coming out, the first steps.  The struggles, inner and outer become a good part of the art.   Perhaps an artist cannot be blamed for whatever in their human judgment is defense mechanism.  Music is clung to for survival and sanity for the life playing music creates.  (No wonder Mr. MacGowan's musical compositions are from a younger time.)  "I wanted to be a professional musician," Mr. McGowan is recorded as saying in documentary.  "Thank God I become one."

http://thequietus.com/articles/10794-shane-macgowan-interview

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/lunch-and-several-drinks-with-shane-macgowan-8297816.html

OPINION

The Power of Concentration

By MARIA KONNIKOVA

Published: December 15, 2012