I’ve been listening to and reading poems seemingly forever, starting with nursery rhymes. When poetry was assigned in school, standard stuff like Shakespeare and Robert Frost, I liked it.
At some point, particular poets really spoke to me, as they did to other young people. One sign of when a relationship with a poet got serious is when a girlfriend noticed and so bought me a book of their poems for my birthday. I suppose I was wearing that poet on my heart and on my sleeve.
The first of the books I got this way is Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. That sweet girlfriend is long gone and far way, but I’ve never gotten over Dylan Thomas (why would I?). Lines from these poems still echo in my head from time to time, as recently as this morning: “In my craft or sullen art”.
Who was your first poet crush?
In My Craft or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas
In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art.
“No other personality is as old, as well known, or as widely distributed among the tribes as Coyote. He was the figure of paleolithic legend among primitive peoples the world over and, though he survives today in Eurasian and African folktales, it is among native Americans, perhaps, that his character achieves its fullest dimension.
In an essay on the psychological roots of the character, Stanley Diamond likened Coyote to a primitive essence of conjoined good and evil; at a time in the history of man when there was no rigid distinction between good and evil, Coyote was, Carl Jung, one of a number of thinkers intrigued with Coyote, wrote that he was “in his earliest manifestations, a faithful copy of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level. He is,” continued Jung, “a forerunner of the savior, and like him, God, man and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being.””
Barry Holstun Lopez, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America
AI
You know.
The smart money is on Coyote. If you are smart, you will try to learn from Coyote instead of AI. Coyote is unmatched in adaptability, no matter what is thrown at it, including constant attempts at extinction. Coyote is not only succesfully aware of and responsive to the environment and itself. It is the environment and itself. Compared to Coyote, AI should be AS—Actual Stupidity. Plus, Coyote talks and sings better than anything.
Book and movie people associate “Bonfire of the Vanities” with the 1987 bestselling novel by Tom Wolfe or with the box office bomb released in 1990 based on the book.
The historic background of “bonfire of the vanities” is explained by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post:
“For approximately four years, from 1494 to 1498, a Dominican monk and preacher was first the conscience, then the virtual king of Florence. His admirers, indeed followers, included the Neoplatonic philosopher Pico della Mirandola, the young Machiavelli and the painter Botticelli. His two greatest enemies were just as eminent: Piero de’ Medici, that feckless son of Lorenzo the Magnificent and heir to his father’s dictatorship of the city, and that charming arch-sensualist Pope Alexander VI, among the most notorious of the notorious Borgias. The simple monk himself would pass into legend as the scourge of the rich and corrupt, a fanatical moralist, an accused heretic and, finally, a martyr.
Nowadays, though, people tend to recognize the name Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) chiefly because he instituted the original “bonfire of the vanities.” In 1497, this crusading prior of San Marco (blessed with paintings by Fra Angelico) berated the Florentines over the fripperies they wore, the salacious books they read, the provocative paintings they hung on their walls, the gold and silver jewelry that flashed even in the half-light of the sacred cathedral, all the gaudiness, luxury and lasciviousness of their sinful lives. Away with these snares of the devil! And so, rather than celebrate the last day before Lent with a lewd carnival, Savonarola called for the faithful to cast their “vanities” onto a great pyramid of holy fire. And they did.”
For those with biblical tendencies, vanities are associated with the famous line that opens the Book of Ecclesiastes, known in the Hebrew Bible as Kohelet [Preacher]. In Hebrew:
Hevel, hevel, amar kohelet, hacol havelim.
In the King James version:
Vanity, vanity, says the preacher, all is vanity.
But translation of the Hebrew hevel remains a challenge to modern translators. A number of English words have been proposed including:
Absurd Futile Senseless Meaningless Breath Vapor
Each of these seems related to vanity, but each resonates differently to our ears.
Are we to burn the secular luxuries and distractions that pull us away from the divine, as Savonarola directed?
Or are we to keep those luxuries and distractions around—all of us are human and few of us are ascetics—provided we stay as unattached as possible, realizing that all of it is ephemeral. Like breath. And absurd. Like everything.
Oh, you don’t get me, I’m part of the union You don’t get me, I’m part of the union You don’t get me, I’m part of the union Till the day I die Till the day I die
Plenty of earnest Labor Day messages. Like this and this and this.
How about a song?
A 1973 song about unions that rose to #2 in the UK pop charts, by an unheralded band you’ve probably never heard of (only 17,000 listeners on Spotify), a song that became an unofficial anthem of the British trade union movement.
Part of the Union by the Strawbs
Now I’m a union man Amazed at what I am I say what I think, that the company stinks Yes I’m a union man
When we meet in the local hall I’ll be voting with them all With a hell of a shout, it’s “Out brothers, out!” And the rise of the factory’s fall
Oh, you don’t get me, I’m part of the union You don’t get me, I’m part of the union You don’t get me, I’m part of the union Till the day I die Till the day I die
Us union men are wise To the lies of the company spies And I don’t get fooled by the factory rules ‘Cause I always read between the lines
And I always get my way If I strike for higher pay When I show my card to the Scotland Yard And this is what I say
Oh, oh, you don’t get me, I’m part of the union You don’t get me, I’m part of the union You don’t get me, I’m part of the union Till the day I die Till the day I die
Before the union did appear My life was half as clear Now I’ve got the power to the working hour And every other day of the year
So though I’m a working man I can ruin the government’s plan And though I’m not hard, the sight of my card Makes me some kind of superman
Oh, oh, oh, you don’t get me, I’m part of the union You don’t get me, I’m part of the union You don’t get me, I’m part of the union Till the day I die Till the day I die
Once steaming hot It shrinks to cold last gulp More bitter less invigorating An afterthought a chore To finish You do
Whether you made it yourself or the effort of others, the coffee before you, once a magic elixir, comes down to a tepid puddle in the cup. Things to do people to see, you gulp it down, barely tasting. So you go.
30 Rock (2006-2013) is an all-time great TV comedy series. Created by Tina Fey, it combines non-stop absurd jokes and characters with sharp points about American society, culture and entertainment.
In the episode Idiots Are People Two (2012), Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), star of the TV show-within-the-show, is found to have performed an offensive stand-up bit. People protest Tracy and the show.
When his boss Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) calls him an idiot, he organizes a protest of the network.
Tracy: Which is why I’m going to do exactly what they did and organize a protest of this network.
Liz: A protest? By whom?
Tracy: By idiots!
A protest crowd gathers in front of NBC headquarters. Tracy addresses them.
Tracy: The so-called idiot community will not be silenced.
Liz: For God’s sake, Tracy.
Tracy: We are legion. We are America. Frat guys, DJs, loud-mouthed old bitches, investment bankers, the tramp-stamped, parrot-heads, anti-vaccination crusaders, and people who won’t shut up about scuba diving. And now celebrity spokesperson, actress Denise Richards.
Denise: That’s right. I’m an idiot. Surprised? Well, I am. For all intensil purposes.
Tracy: Our community is mobilized now, L.L. And we’re not leaving until we’re heard. You can’t ignore us, Liz Lemon. We will be out here every day, misremembering movie quotes. Because as Braveheart said, “you can take our freedom, unless you take our lives.”
Liz and her boss Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) meet.
Jack: I would, however, like to ask you why Tracy is outside cursing this network on a megaphone.
Liz: It’s a good one, Jack. Tracy has organized a protest of NBC by his fellow idiots.
Jack: He what? No, no, no, no, no. We need idiots. You certainly need idiots. Who do you think is watching your show?
Liz: Funky taste-makers?
Jack: Black nerds, Jet Blue passengers who fall asleep with the TV on, pets whose owners have died, and, uh, idiots.
Don’t follow leaders Watch the parking meters Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues
Psychedelics, including marijuana, have been part of our contemporary culture for decades. When we talk about them and act, personally and institutionally, we get some things right and some things wrong.
Jack Webb created the TV police series Dragnet twice. First during the 1950s, then revived in the late 1960s. Dragnet was famous, and sometimes mocked, for its deadpan dialogue and its hard-nosed establishment take on law and order in Los Angeles.
The first episode of its revival as Dragnet 1967 was The LSD Story. It opens:
“This is the city—Los Angeles, California. It’s a fine place to enjoy life. There are places reserved just for kids…when they’re young and feel young. Places they go when they’re young and feel old…beginning the big search for something that often doesn’t exist in the places they look for it. They might find it here [church] or here [synagogue] or maybe here [church]. They could try looking here [Griffith Observatory]. Their search might end with a college degree. One thing’s sure—whatever they’re looking for—it cannot be found inside a number five capsule. When they try, that’s where I come in. I carry a badge.”
“It was Tuesday, March fifteenth. It was fair in Los Angeles. We were working the day watch out of Juvenile Narcotics. My partner’s Bill Gannon, the boss is Captain Richey. My name is Friday. A powerful new drug capable of producing weird and dangerous hallucinations had found its way onto the streets of the city. It had fallen into the hands of juvenile experimenters. We had to try and stop it.”
Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb) and Officer Bill Gannon arrive at MacArthur Park and find a teenager with his head stuck in the ground. Half his face is painted blue, half yellow. He identifies himself as Blue Boy. They discover he is under the influence of LSD, the newly popular psychedelic drug that was about to be declared illegal. Blue Boy is released. In the end, they go to an acid party he was hosting and find him dead from an overdose.
The LSD Story was not the last time Dragnet featured LSD. The following year, an episode called The Big Prophet included a lot of talk about the subject. In fact, the episode has no action and is entirely a conversation between Sgt. Friday and Brother William Bentley on the subject. Bentley, a Timothy Leary stand-in, had founded the Temple of the Expanded Mind (like Leary’s League of Spiritual Discovery) to promote the use of LSD:
Bentley: You talk about young people in America. I don’t recognize them. I don’t think they exist. I think your kind creates them. You force them into little molds, and pop them out like little plastic figures off a production line. You stuff them full of preconceived ideas, praise them for turning out so well. But they’re not people, they’re machines! Then you wind them up like little tape recorders, and send them out into the world to spread another generation of lies. “This is the best of all possible worlds… this is a recording.” And the ones who escape your assembly line, the rare ones, you call them delinquents, weirdos, hippies, pillheads, freaks, potheads. You tell them they’re sick. They know better. They’re not satisfied with a little change. They want it all! They want it now! And they know they can’t change the world, so they change themselves. They seek others who believe as they do. They start communities, tribes. They grow, they share, food, shelter, and most importantly, love. All they ask is the right to live the way they want to live, without being harassed, without being told what they can or cannot do. Now, is that too much to ask, Mr. Policeman?
Friday: No, if that’s all they ask. But it’s not. They’re not asking to be left alone, they’re asking for a handout. If they really believed what you say they believe, they’d do something about it besides panhandle in the streets and use narcotics to escape reality. A lot of people started with an idea, and they’ve made it work, but not by begging or stealing or standing in line to get paid for not working. The Amish did it in Pennsylvania, they built self-supporting communities. The Mormons did it in Utah, they built a city. The Jews did it in Israel, they built a nation. But they were willing to work for it!
Bentley: We tried in San Francisco.
Friday: Yeah. Well, you learned something, didn’t you?
Bentley: What’s that?
Friday: If you’re gonna live with the rest of us, then you’ll have to learn to play the game by the rules. And in case you’ve forgotten the name of the game, we call it democracy.
Speaking of words of Greek origin like democracy, the word iconoclast comes from the Greek word eikonoklastēs, literally “image destroyer.” We now use it mean someone who criticizes or opposes beliefs and practices that are widely accepted.
Today marijuana is legal in a majority of states (though still on the federal schedule of illegal drugs). In Colorado, criminal penalties have been removed for possessing and using psilocybin mushrooms and some other psychedelic drugs (distribution and sale are still illegal). Psychedelics are widely discussed as a boon to creativity. Research continues into the therapeutic use of psychedelics.
None of which is to say that psychedelics, from marijuana on up, are good or bad, right or wrong. Like all powerful tools, their use is situational: good for some people and situations, less good or very bad for others. It is the way we think and talk about them that should be as open, well-informed and careful as possible.
One thing The Big Prophet did get right. Ultimately the problem Sgt. Friday/Jack Webb had is that psychedelics are powerful tools capable of destroying social and cultural icons: “If you’re gonna live with the rest of us, then you’ll have to learn to play the game by the rules.” Which means that along with real health dangers, mental and physical, they are dangerous to social and cultural norms. That is something that scared the keepers and beneficiaries of the norms in the 1960s.
That is still their potential, for better or worse: to smash icons. This is not to endorse or recommend any psychedelics for anyone under any circumstances. It is only to acknowledge and recognize the relationship between two things. Psychedelics are a powerful tool. And certain icons could be, or should be, smashed.
Talking about James Hillman, as I did in my last post, got me thinking about other iconoclastic thinkers that have influenced me. Ivan Illich came to mind. Summarized as “priest, theologian, philosopher and social critic”, he was well-known in the 1970s, but has fallen off the screen since. He deserves more attention than ever, since much of his criticism has proved out as circumstances have gotten more challenging.
I just visited some books by him and about him. In this interview he is talking about water:
“There, in a dark, subtle, deep way, we also conceive stuff, that stuff which can gurgle, and chant and sparkle and flow and rise in a fountain and come down as rain. In other cultures, that stuff not only comes down as rain but also comes down as the souls of women who have died and who seek reincarnation. That’s how it’s imagined among the Lacandon Indians in the south of Mexico. In India that stuff flows around the sun as soma.
That’s where a distinction comes in between stuff and surface qualities, sparkle or stench, perhaps. It’s a distinction between that which, at least in old times, people believed they could actually sense with their inner senses, their phantastikón, their inner eye, ear, touch, ability to embrace, and, on the other hand, that which appears to their outer senses….
Now I want to do this history of stuff, because I believe that in this world into which I see the young generation now moving, it is not only their voice they are losing — by imagining themselves according to the model of the computer — it is also that they are emerging as a generation rid of stuff.
Now water is one of the traditional four stuffs from which our Western universe is made. There are other universes, in other bodies, world bodies, which are made of five or of seven elements. Ours is made of four, and water is one of them. In this little booklet, I wanted to raise a question about the historicity of stuff and the possibility of studying it….
I sat down and wrote, for a friend of mine, a little pamphlet, a long letter, which was then published as H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. I tried to trace the history of the stuff of water, and to get at the age-old ambiguity of water, which is a surface and a depth, which can wash off dirt from the skin, by flowing, but also purify the depths of the soul with just a touch. These are totally different activities, washing and purifying. And this gave me an exceptional opportunity to speak about a stuff which at this moment is escaping us socially.
I find it very strange to go to a tap, from which something comes out that is still called potable water but children are told, “Drink from the bottle in the icebox, don’t drink that stuff from the faucet,” and then to take this and baptize a child with it. That’s how things are. That’s what it means to live today surrounded by people baptized in that stuff. I’m not questioning baptism. I’m simply saying, Look at how humiliating it is, how horrifying it is, to live today. You will then learn how to appreciate the moments of flame and beauty….
Other people worry about the human organism not being able to find, sometime in the middle of the next century, any more of the appropriate kind of H2O to make it work. I’m talking about the deadness which sets in when people have lost the sense to imagine the substance of water, not its external appearances but the deep substance of water.”
What Illich is calling stuff might be called the soul of things. Soul is central to Hillman’s vision, as in anima mundi, the soul of the world:
“Let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image—in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street.”
Soul has many meanings, but that imprecision does not mean we don’t know it when we see/experience it. Both Illich and Hillman recognize what it is and when it is ignored or unsensed.
I believe that our wisdom traditions—religious, spiritual, philosophical—and our arts are ultimately and ideally intended to get us past the surface to “that stuff which can gurgle, and chant and sparkle and flow and rise in a fountain and come down as rain” (Illich), “its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image—in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality.” (Hillman).
In this week’s Time Jamie Ducharme asks “America Has Reached Peak Therapy. Why Is Our Mental Health Getting Worse?” She writes:
“The U.S. has reached peak therapy. Counseling has become fodder for hit books, podcasts, and movies. Professional athletes, celebrities, and politicians routinely go public with their mental health struggles. And everyone is talking—correctly or not—in the language of therapy, peppering conversations with references to gaslighting, toxic people, and boundaries….
But something isn’t adding up. Even as more people flock to therapy, U.S. mental health is getting worse by multiple metrics.”
I’ve featured the psychologist James Hillman before. He has been called “the most lively and original psychologist we’ve had in America since William James”. Among his many valuable works is his published dialogue with journalist Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse (1992).
No easy way to sum up that book, or the breadth and depth of Hillman’s thought (see Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman for an overview). Hillman says in We’ve Had a Hundred Years:
“We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse. Maybe it’s time to look at that. We still locate the psyche inside the skin. You go inside to locate the psyche, you examine your feelings and your dreams, they belong to you. Or it’s interrelations, interpsyche, between your psyche and mine. That’s been extended a little bit into family systems and office groups—but the psyche, the soul, is still only within and between people. We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what’s left out of that.
What’s left out is a deteriorating world.
So why hasn’t therapy noticed that? Because psychotherapy is only working on that “inside” soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.
You know, the soul is always being rediscovered through pathology. In the nineteenth century people didn’t talk about psyche, until Freud came along and discovered psychopathology. Now we’re beginning to say, “The furniture has stuff in it that’s poisoning us, the microwave gives off dangerous rays.” The world has become toxic.”
Bob Schwartz 