Buddha and Trump

I remember a song from the 1970s, composed in response to the unrest in Ireland which dominated much of the news at that time.  The words of the song went something like this: "You'd never think they'd go together, but they certainly do/the combination of English muffins and Irish stew".  Writing about Trump and Buddha, an even more unlikely combination, I came up with new words to the song, during an aural daydream, as follows: "You'd never think they'd go together, and they certainly don't/egotism's dirty puddles and wisdom's font."

Poison

In a recent article, I described what I call "The Pathological Pyramid".  We have an incompetent president at the top; for several layers below we find legislators who are afraid to contravene or even criticize him, lest they be voted out of office, The bulk of the pyramid is the many hard rocks that form its base, Trump's base, the many who still support him.  How can so many Americans continue to support a man, who, upon minimal rational reflection, is so glaringly unable to be president of our nation?  Why this is so and how Buddhist thought can provide a contrast and point in the direction of a solution to our current political malaise is the subject of this essay.

A relative of mine asked me some years ago why so many Romans accepted Christianity before Emperor Constantine forced them to in the fourth century. Several centuries before, many Romans were attracted to Judaism.  The Roman gods no longer seemed pertinent.  One such seeker approached Hillel at around the time of Jesus's birth and asked him  to relate the essence of Judaism while standing on one leg.  (The Roman apparently wasn't interested in such things as dietary laws, nor, presumably, did he look forward to being circumsised; he wanted only the yolk, as it were, not the rest of the egg).  Hillel famously replied, "That which is hateful to you do not do to another.  This is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn".

Approximately a century later, the essence of Christianity was summarized in the Saint John Gospel: "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him will not perish, but receive eternal life."

That's why so many Romans converted.  They wanted certainty and they (seemingly) got it.  Hillel's path required that those who walk upon it have to be more or less self-directed.  The Romans who converted wanted the certainty of knowing Jesus was walking beside them and would not only guide them on their way, but forgive them when they went astray.  The wanted a god who, figuratively and literally, delivered.

Thus, Christianity appealed to many who wanted an absolute answer without having to rigorously examine whether that answer is, in fact, absolute.  As Tertullian. a third century Christian theologian wrote, "Credo quia absurdum est,"  "I believe because it is absurd".

Trump's supporters are similar.  (A striking difference is,  of course, that Jesus was a very wise man). They have accepted Trump as their savior, as it were, and ignore all evidence that indicates that they have made a poor choice.  Trump is a good businessman, and we need a good businessman in the White House.  We need to shake things up, and Trump is the man to do it.  Trump is for the little man; Trump will drain the swamp. etc.  None of these statements bears scrutiny.  Trump is the choice of those who will not think.

The Buddhist Antidote

One of the earliest symbols of Buddhism is a footprint.  This sums up the essence of this Eastern way of removing suffering: Buddhism is a path.  There is no catechism to guide you, much less a good shepherd guiding his sheep form afar; there are only guidelines on experientially proven methods for spiritual progress.  Buddha's last words of advice were "to work out your salvation with diligence."  If one goes astray, there is no possibility of divine intervention to transport you back to the path.

The goal is to eliminate greed, hate, and delusion.  Walking down a path, one has to make choices on how to continue.  Perhaps the road les traveled is the one to take.  What if there were several such roads before one?  There is no sign that says "Follow Me".  If one has made a choice that proves to be wrong, one has to think of the reasons why this is so.  The path in question, which appears to lead nowhere, might be the right one, after all.  Should one continue for some time more and risk the possibility of having gone further astray?  Should one turn back?  One has to use Buddhist guidelines to come to a decision, a decision that might be wrong, but not irretrievably wrong.

This type of analytical thinking is too difficult for Trump supporters.  They do not analyze, they simply convince themselves that they are in the right.  They are on a stony path heading for an abyss, yet they assure themselves, perhaps to a bitter end, that they are on a red carpet heading for the New Jerusalem.

Their faith in Trump is alsolute and, like theistic faiths, absolutely unverifiable as well. 

Life is ambiguous and nobody has all the answers.  Just like Trump's ego, their faith is shaky; deep down they know they might not be right, and yet they cannot entertain the possibility that they might be wrong..  They therefore demonize those ho do not share there unnuanced views.  If you believe Trump is absolutely right, his opponents must be absolutely wrong.  Absolutely wrong, is, of course, another word for evil.  This is the source of the extreme partisanship of Trump's supporters.  The Emperor is wearing the finest silks--how dare you say he's a fat, old, naked charlatan?

For those who vehemently oppose Trump, one must not follow suit and demonize his supporters.  They are all human beings, let us not forget that. It is best not to get into heated arguments with Trump supporters; one should gently point out why you disagree, and if you're not getting anywhere, talk about something else. On the other hand, one should not avoid political discussion either, since our democracy is being threatened now perhaps as never before. Respectfully asserting that tax cuts for the wealthy will likely mean that we will not be able to fund infrastructure repairs, and will likely result in cuts to Social Security and to Medicare as well, two programs that are very popular among working-class voters. It is much more important to fight for our democracy by full involvement in the political process, and, in the long term, advocate for better education and less superficial entertainment. Everyone has a Christ within, everyone is a potential Buddha. No doubts about that!  Translating that into action for society and for ourselves is undoubtedly extremely difficult, given the degree that greed, hate, and delusion are present in the world.  But one has to begin or continue the good path beginning right where one is; there is no other choice.

First Addendum: What the Buddha Said

The following is taken from the Sutta-Nipata.  These excerpts provide a vivid analysis of why that toxic partisanship is not the way to make progress!

Enquirer:         Fixed in their pet beliefs,
                        these diverse wranglers bawl--
                        "Hold this, and truth is yours,
                         Reject it and you're lost".

                          Thus they contend and dub
                          opponents "dolts" and "fools".
                          Which in the lot is right,
                          When all as experts pose?

Buddha:             Well, if dissent denotes
                           a "fool" and stupid "dolt"
                           then all are fools and dolts
                          --for each has his own view.

                          I count not that as true                      
                          which those affirm who call
                          each other "fools"--They call
                          each other so, because
                          each deems his own view "Truth".,,

                         Delight in their own views
                         Make sectaries assert 
                         that all who disagree
                         miss Purity and err.
                         
                         These divers sectaries...
                         claim Purity as theirs
                         alone, not found elsewhere.
                         Whom should the sturdiest
                         dare to call a "fool,"
                         when this invites the like
                         retort upon himself


Second Addendum

Trump supporter: 

"If Jesus Christ gets down off the cross and told  me that Trump is with Russia, I would tell him, hold on a second, I have to check with the president if it is  true.  That is how confident I feel in the president".                   

Trump:          

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and                                 shoot somebody and still not lose voters".

Democracy:  

Yikes!

Three Views of "The Exterminating Angel"

First View: A Night at the Opera, November 3, 2017

My wife and I wanted to attend a performance of Adès’s latest opera at the Met, since we enjoyed a performance of his Tempest a few years ago.  It took some doing.  We left from Baltimore very early on the 3^rd, and traveled by bus to the city.  We walked all day, visited the other Met, the museum, and were a bit tired by the time of the performance.

Worse, I couldn’t read the program due to the dim light in the opera house before the performance began.  Worse again: Once the music started, I couldn’t obtain the subtitles, which in the Met are electronically transferred to the railing in front of one’s seat at the touch of a button.  Eventually, I located the German subtitles, then the Spanish, and finally, the English.  Maybe I need stronger glasses; I couldn’t read the subtitles quickly enough, especially those in German or Spanish.

I hadn’t read much about the opera, so there was no choice but to sit back and concentrate on the music.

I confess that before the first intermission, I was sometimes at the point of dozing off, not as a reaction to the music, which is anything but boring, but due to my exhaustion.

By the end of the opera, I was wide awake.  The music was wonderful!  Adès is a major composer, no doubt about that.

The only reservation I had was regarding the symbolism; a bit too heavy, I thought, and the staging a bit too static.  Did we really need to see all those sheep and listen to all those church bells at the befgnning, or the appearance of a bear who made a brief appearance later on?    

Second View:  The Film 11/6/2018

We wanted to see Biñuel’s movie before we saw the opera, but, due to all our activities, this was not possible.  Just as well, since this would have interfered with a performance that exercised our eyes and ears only, without reference to memory.

We hadn’t seen the film before; that it is considered a classic we knew, and were delighted to discover why this is so.  It is a surreal film, heavy on symbolism; the director, correctly I think, didn’t provide an explanation of the many ambiguities. Biñuel stated that he would leave the interpretation up to the spectator.  I accepted the fifty-five year old invitation.

This stunningly photographed black-and-white film portrays a dinner party at a mansion of an upper-class family in a Spanish-speaking country, possibly Franco’s Spain.  (If that were so, I thought, why are they all speaking with Latin American accents?  I later discovered that the everything was filmed in Mexico.  Franco was still very much in power in Spain at the time). 

The servants unexpectedly leave before the party begins.  After the sumptuous meal, the guests for some reason are unable to leave.  After a few days, all aristocratic niceties are left behind; the group degenerates into a bunch of selfish, increasingly desperate individuals, each fighting ruthlessly for his or her own survival.  Need has removed the masks from the upper-class faces, revealing monsters behind them. At one point, a bear, perhaps representing the uncivilized id, the beast within, runs loose among them.

Eventually, a woman reenacts where she was and what she said before all the trouble began.  The others follow her example, which somehow enables them to leave.  They subsequently attend a Te Deum mass to give thanks to God for their mysterious escape.  The three officiating priests, perhaps representing the Trinity, discover that they, like everyone else in the church, are unable to leave its confines.

We then catch a glimpse of military police shooting at demonstrators outside. In the final scene, a large herd of sheep, shepherdless, scurries into the church and disappears.

How did I try to make sense of this brilliant film?  I thought of the Buddhist parable of the burning house—Buddha exhorts the ignorant inhabitants who dwell safely within the walls of  delusion to exit the deceptively comfortable house before it’s too late.  (In Biñuel's; film, the house isn’t burning; it is, however, coming apart and is no longer able to provide a safe environment. In my interpretation, the aristocrats were technically able to leave at any time; their comfortable delusions are what prevents them).

The elites are unable to get by without the working-class that serves them.  On their own, they deteriorate into helpless degenerates.  They live in a bubble in which they will asphyxiate without the constant supply of oxygen which workers provide.

The Church is a larger bubble into which the smaller aristocratic one is subsumed. Common folk in the form of sheep, exposed to the chaos outside, still rush into the church for salvation and refuge, relief which the Church cannot ultimately provide.

Biñuel is asking us to come out of our bubbles and to confront the world as it is.  The political situation of the world in the film has degenerated into fascism and violence, since the people of all classes have abdicated their responsibilities for building a just society.

Third View: Live Broadcast at a Local Theater. November 18, 2017

One gets a very different opinion of an opera when one attends a live-streamed performance at a movie theater.  This opera,  an ambiguous tragedy, but a tragedy nevertheless, benefits from observation of the singers/actors up-close. (At the Met, which was the case on November 3rd, our seats are usually in the Family Circle; the acoustics are great, but it's too high up to make out the faces of the singers).  In addition, the fact that this is an ensemble piece, with a dozen or so major roles, in which the music underlies the action rather than carrying it via melody and lyrical stretches, make seeing the drama from an intimacy of a small theater even more important.  You can sit back and enjoy the music of Fidelio, for instance; this opera demands that the audience pay close attention to the characters.

This is in one sense an advantage, and in another, a disadvantage.  As the opera began, I felt the vocal writing to be rather dry and declarative, while the music remained in a supporting role.  But as the drama progressed, I forgot about this and was completely absorbed in the action.  The libretto is for the most part, excellent.

Both Sartre and Kafka are pertinent here.  In Sartre’s Huis Clos/No Exit, the characters are condemned to a hell of their own making.  In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a strange thing indeed happens, Gregor Samsa wakes up from uneasy sleep to find himself transformed into an insect.  In both play and short story, the supernatural is not emphasized.  Samsa becomes an insect because he always thought of himself as being sub-human; the characters in No Exit are there because of choices they had made in life.  In other words, character drives the action in both instances. Once Samsa's transformation is over, the story proceeds in a naturalistic fashion; in Sartre's play, hell is hell on earth.

The opera, in contrast, emphasizes the supernatural element. Adès utilizes the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument used in horror films for years, to create a spooky atmosphere. (The screeching sounds of tiny violins added to the spookiness as well). Biñuel saw no need to emphasize the macabre. The elites are trapped in the hell of their own making, as in Sartre’s play; the exterminating angel, the way I see it, is inside themselves. I think the Twilight Zone atmosphere of the opera detracts from the power of the plot, which, surreal and symbolic as it is, is about real people in the real world nevertheless.

The politics of Biñuel are also missing in the opera; the film has a lot to do with people living in their own bubbles, which enables fascists to take over the outside world.  Biñuel’s film has a marked anti-elite bias.  I remember reading a book by the animal-loving French pianist Hélène Grimaud.  She stated that hours before the allied bombing of Freiburg, Germany, in World War ll, the animals knew something was up and began to panic.  In both film and opera, the servants share the same prescience; they inexplicably flee before the dinner party begins. Like Grimaud's animals, they seem to have had a sixth sense of impending disaster.

Both opera and film are peppered with a mockery of upper-class snobbery.  For instance, long after the situation has devolved into desperate circumstances, in which the inner beasts of the guests become manifest, one of the characters, Francisco, complains that the coffee is accompanied by teaspoons, not coffee spoons.  How can one expect an aristocrat to drink a cup of coffee without coffee spoons?  He would look like, horrors! a worker, a peasant.  Later on, after they slaughter and cook up sheep that have wandered in from the garden, one of the characters complains that the meat needed salt—He’s no cave man, he’s no worker; though he's starving, his tastes are still refined!

The film’s ending is very different. When the guests escape by reenacting their initial actions at the supper—which for me suggests that people can do things differently and turn their lives  around—they attend, as stated previously, a Te Deum at the local church.  Then the entire congregation discovers it can’s exit, while fascist police shoot into the crowds outside.

In the opera, Leticia, the opera singer, sings an aria of faith and thinking about others instead of oneself, which breaks the spell of The Exterminating Angel—at least for a while. Everyone is reunited outside the mansion, but Leticia alone looks anxious.  Perhaps she knows, as the program stated, that “Their freedom will not last long.”  But, as I interpret Biñuel, it will be the internal beatings of their hearts—their characters—and not the spooky external sounds of the ondes Martenot that will imprison them once again.

All the singers were first-rate.  The tessitura of the vocal writing is very high; for instance, Audrey Luna, who sang the role of Leticia, hit the highest notes in Met history.  The high range of the vocal writing gave the opera an occasional hysterical quality, an effect, no doubt, that was deliberate.  There were some quite lovely lyrical moments, but not many.  The drama was what was most important in the composer's mind, a strategy that was, for the most part, successful.  The orchestration was quite impressive.

I enjoyed the opera very much. Whether the opera is a masterwork or not, time will tell.  The fact that the majority, if the informal poll I took while listening to the audience members as they exited is valid, seemed to dislike it doesn’t mean much.  The premiere of La Traviata, was, after all, a fiasco. I recall reading what the Austrian Emperor said to Mozart after the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro, arguably the best opera of them all:  “So many notes, Herr Mozart!”  “Yes, Your Majesty, but not one too many.”

Hopkins and Whitman

In preparation for a series of four lectures entitled, “A Dozen Perfect Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins,” I came across the following excerpt from a letter of Hopkins to Robert Bridges from1882: “But first I may as  well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like mine than any other man living.  As he is a very great scoundrel, this is not a pleasant confession.  And this always makes me more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not.”

I was taken aback; who would have thought Hopkins and Whitman were soulmates?  Hopkins’s turning a compliment of another into a weapon to disparage himself is consistent with his personality, since self-acceptance was not part of his inner makeup.  Aside from the fact that both wrote great poetry, when Whitman comes to mind one thinks of a joyful acceptance of things as they are, a love that even had a place for evil, and for which a belief in God, at least in the traditional sense, was not necessary.  These traits seem to be the polar opposites of the qualities of Hopkins’s personality, such as shyness, self-denial and orthodox belief. 

What did Hopkins have in mind when he wrote those lines to Bridges?  We will explore several possibilities in the first part of this essay, including a trait common to both which Hopkins may have had in mind; in the second part, we will briefly discuss why Hopkins chose a radically different path from that of Whitman, in order to escape what he could not accept.

Originality

Hopkins and Whitman have a great affinity here; both were innovators.  Each author developed a style radically different from that of the poetry written at the time.  The two poets, in their own ways, invigorated poetry by combining the rhythms of spoken English with the artifice of composition.  Hopkins, as one might expect, did this in a more formal way.  He invented a system called sprung rhythm in which each line in a poem had the same amount of stresses  but had a varying amount of syllables associated with each stress, giving his poetry a freedom that traditional poetry, with its limited number of choices of metrical feet, lacked. The gregarious Whitman was more directly inspired by the speech he encountered in daily conversation, and subsequently interspersed his great poem, Song of Myself, with sections of great lyricism, along with descriptive sections, bordering on prose.  (His style here reminds me of classical operas, in which lyrical and/or dramatic arias are introduced by recitatives.)  Both Hopkins and Whitman possessed great ears, that is, both had an acute sensitivity to the sound of poetry. 

Hopkins was undoubtedly aware that both he and the American master were innovators, but this commonality cannot be what he meant when he wrote that “he knew in his mind” that he and Whitman were so similar.  Originality was certainly not the factor that caused Hopkins to consider Whitman “a very great scoundrel.”

Personality

Not many similarities here.  Whitman's libido was more like a male lion's rather than a monk's; Hopkins penchant for self-denial made them polar opposites in this regard.  (As we will see, there were libidinous similarities between them as well; the difference is that Hopkins spent his life trying to deny the sensual side of his nature.) One sang of the body, including its desires; the other sang of grace, and admitted to students at the end of his life that he was still a virgin—no, not much similarity here.

Views Regarding Class

Whitman was a “people’s person;” he associated with persons of all classes.  He was just as comfortable with famous people as he was with carpenters and trolley conductors.  Most people in the United States today live in communities segregated not only by race, but by class as well.  Whitman would have had none of this.

Hopkins was much more bookish and reserved.  In his one political poem, Tom Garland, his political naivete is striking.  He asserted that workers were happy because they worked so hard and thus had little time to be pensive.  Hopkins's political views were conservative; he asserted that as long as the poor had food to eat, class distinctions should be preserved. One could imagine him, if he were a contemporary American, being a registered Republican.  If alive now, Whitman would undoubtedly be appalled about such things as the lack of universal health care, the failure to raise the minimum wage, and the rigid interpretation  of the Second Amendment.

Relationship to Nature

In an essay written in 1865, On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue,’ Hopkins reveals a knowledge of flora that reminds one of a botanist’s.  He was a close observer of nature, of which his poems provide ample evidence. Images of both fauna and flora, as well as examples of inanimate nature, such as bodies of water, occur in his poems; a strong condemnation of civilization’s desecration of nature occurs as well.  His eye for nature was keen, as this phrase from Pied Beauty, one of his most celebrated short poems, attests: “For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim...”  When I first read this I thought that the two words, “that swim” were just there for the rhyme, and thus a defect.  (Even Hopkins nods.) Later I read that, upon death, trout lose their rose moles rapidly.  “Swim” rhymes with “trim,” but the two words didn’t constitute a facile rhyme.  The image of a living trout reveals how exact Hopkins’s observation of nature was.  Whitman, in contrast, was a city dweller, and his imagery reflects life in an urban environment.  One would not find a lament regarding the felling of trees in his poetry, in contrast to Hopkins’s famous poem, “Binsey Poplars”—in Whitman’s world, the trees had already been removed to make room for the city.  Whitman's acuity of vision was directed at humanity, not nature.

Spirituality

Both poets evinced a very deep spiritual life.  Hopkins, however, chose a dogmatic version of Catholicism--we shall see why soon—while Whitman’s spirituality wasn’t dogmatic at all.  Can you image Hopkins ever writing such lines as:

Creeds and schools in abeyance,

Retiring back a while sufficient at what they are, but never forgotten,

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,

Nature without check with original energy.
                           
                                       --from Song of Myself

Lines like these might well have brought Hopkins to the conclusion that the American poet was a “very great scoundrel” indeed.

Sensuality

They had much in common here, except for a very essential fact: Whitman celebrated his senses, while Hopkins did his best to deny his sexuality; he saw “mortal beauty” as a threat to salvation, as he made clear in a later sonnet entitled, "To What Serves Mortal Beauty?"

In Whitman’s world, sex is everywhere.  Can one ever imagine Hopkins comparing the mystery of rain to the mystery of ejaculation?  “Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,/ Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven"--from Song of Myself.

Being a very sensual man himself, sexual imagery occurs frequently in Hopkins’s works as well, but these references are much less explicit, even subconscious in origin.  (one of many instances: the monster who is attacking Andromeda in the eponymously named poem is described as being “lewd”; the mythical monster thus becomes a sexual predator.

Why did Hopkins do his best to deny his sexuality?  This we will briefly explore in the last section of this essay.

2. The Possible Source of Hopkins’s Asceticism

In the first edition of Hopkins’s poem from 1918, Robert Bridges included two early poems.  One from 1866, is entitled, “The Habit of Perfection,” the subject of which is denial of the senses in order to lead a life suffused with divine grace. In the poem, Hopkins enumerates each sense in turn, followed by the spiritual benefits of denying each one.  Of taste he writes,

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,

Desire not to be rinsed with wine

From these and from the poem in general, one is impressed by the author's sensuality; we can infer that his giving up the joys of the senses for God was not going to be easy.

Two years earlier, he wrote the following poem, also included in the first edition of his poetry:

Heaven-Haven

A nun takes the veil

   I have desired to go

        Where springs not fail

To fields where falls no sharp and sided hail

    And a few lilies blow.

    And I have asked to be

          Where no storm comes,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

     And out of the swing of the sea.

As I have pointed out on several occasions, there is a marked autobiographical element in nearly every one of Hopkins’s poems.  In addition, a good case can be made of the author’s use of females as alter egos. This poem is a good example of both.  Hopkins is the nun of this poem, imagining an idealized  future of peace, once his earthly desires are left behind.  Getting “out of the swing of the sea,” however, is not an easy task, and is, in my opinion, in most cases, futile and self-destructive as well.  Nuns who take the veil bring their inner conflicts—and we all have inner conflicts—with them; they are not post conflict post vows.  A more insightful quote comes from Horace: Caelum non animam mutant, qui trans mare currunt, “Those who travel across the sea change the sky above them but not their personality”.  An obsession with self-denial usually does not end well, as it didn’t in Hopkins’s life.  What is the source of Hopkins’s desire to end all desire; what is the source of his “self-loathing,” a word which Hopkins used in reference to himself at the end of his life?

Another early poem, this one from 1865, providess an important clue:

She schools the flighty pupils of her eyes,

With levell’d lashes stilling their disquiet;

And puts in leash her pair’d lips lest surprise

Bare the condition of a realm at riot.

If he suspect that she has ought to sigh at

His injury she’ll avenge with raging shame.

She kept her love-thoughts on most lenten diet,

And learnt her not to startle at his name.

In this very autobiographical poem, Hopkins once again assumes a female alter ego. The subject of the poem is the ”love that dare not speak its name” and the  necessity of concealing it, which, if discovered, would result in “raging shame.”  That Hopkins is talking about his own difficulties with his sexual orientation is clear.  If we take this poem literally, it makes little sense.  If a man discovers that a woman is attracted to him, he is hardly going to feel injured; when he discovers that it is a male, however, both “injury” in the one and “raging shame” in the other would have been a likely result of this discovery at the time.  The outer world—especially its Catholic version—condemned and still often vociferously opposes homosexuality; Hopkins’s inner world viewed it as sinful as well. (We must not forget that the term "homosexuality" was not in use at Hopkins's time; this hardly means, however, that Hopkins believed that "sodomites," to use the Victorian term, hadn't gone sinfully astray). His attraction to males was strong. There is much documentation supporting this proclivity. On one occasion during his Oxford years, for instance, he slipped off to a church to get a good look at a handsome choirboy.  One of the reasons he gave up painting was the realization that painting male nudes would be far too stimulating for him.  On another occasion, he wrote in his journal that he was disturbed by imagining a male friend in the nude.

Shortly after the "raging shame" poem was written, Robert Bridges introduced a distant relative to Hopkins, Digby Dolben.  He thought that Hopkins could acquaint the younger Dolben, who was interested in studying at Balliol College, with life at Oxford.  This brief encounter was of great significance for Hopkins; one critic described Dolben as “the love of his life.”  This love was, however, apparently not mutual.  Hopkins wrote many letters to him, but received few replies, and when one came, Dolben was indifferent and unresponsive.  The following year after the brief encounter at Oxford, Hopkins had a crisis of faith, which he resolved, at least temporarily, with his conversion to Catholicism. Two years later, he vowed to become a Jesuit, in preparation for which he burned his early poems, in the belief that writing poetry was not consistent with his new, austere vocation.

If an intention to become a Jesuit, however, is based not on a desire to serve, but on a desire to escape, peace, if it comes at all, will likely come “to brood and sit,” as Hopkins wrote in a poem from 1879.  Hopkins did not have a talent for teaching or for parish work.  (In one of his sermons, for instance, he spoke of the Church as an enormous cow with seven teats, each one being a sacrament.  Hopkins would never have used such a silly image in his poetry; that he did so in a sermon is an indication of his futile attempts to reach working-class Catholics).

Hopkins’s asceticism turned out to be an indelible prickly pear.  He was overworked doing tasks that did not bring joy,  Kindly disposed Jesuit superiors didn’t know what to do with him, which explains his frequent transfers, none of which worked out  His last position, that of professor of classics in Ireland, was his most prestigious employment; regarding his emotional well-being, however, it was disastrous.  His increasing isolation and sense of alienation at the end of his life resulted in despair, as his Terrible Sonnets testify  Why, he wrote to God in one of his last sonnets,

Does/ Disappointment all my endeavors end?/Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend/How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost, /Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust/Do in spare hours more than I that spend/ Sir, life upon thy cause…”

He wasn't out of the swing of the sea as his nunself had hoped; he was drowning instead. Despair resulted in a severe distortion of his self-image, even of his worth as a poet, as this line from his last poem, attests:

Sweet fire the sire of the muse, my soul needs this;

I want the one rapture of an inspiration.

Posterity hardly agrees with this pathological self-assessment.  Too bad for Hopkins that his poetry received so little recognition during his lifetime!  

The tragedy of Hopkins’s final years reveals the importance of self-acceptance, the importance of friendship, the folly of viewing one’s sexual orientation as sinful, and the importance of doing what you love and receiving at least some recognition for one’s efforts.  A hard fact for the faithful is illustrated here: if these factors are absent in one’s life, it is unlikely that one’s God will remove them.  Whitman was lucky enough to recognize the importance of these factors and the wisdom to practice them. 

Both men, as is the case of all poets, had rich inner lives.  An inner life, however, without sustenance from the outer world, withers as surely as a plant does when transported from a spring garden to a dark basement. Hopkins might have indeed been correct in his judgement that both poets were, as it were, soulmates.  Whitman’s choice to celebrate life, in contrast to Hopkins’s attempt to escape it, however, hardly makes the American poet “a very great scoundrel.”  

                                  *

This concludes the last of my five essays on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.  The titles of the previous four are as follows: 1. Ten Unforgettable poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Part l; 2. Ten Unforgettable Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Part ll; 3. St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, alias Gerard Manley Hopkins; and the penultimate essay, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Present Absence of God.  All the essays, including this one, can be located on the internet by googling the title in question along with my name. 

I hope this "labor of love" has been of some interest to you.  Comments welcome!

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Present Absence of God

The great nineteenth century English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote some of the finest religious poems in the English language. A Jesuit priest, he was indeed a man of faith, but that faith became problematic as he grew older.  Although he continued to believe, religion provided little consolation in the last years of his life.  He thought God could intervene and alleviate his increasing sense of desperation, but came to the conclusion that grace and consolation were not forthcoming,  Once a transcendent god recedes beyond the clouds and is no longer felt to be present below them, traditional forms of theism becomes- problematic indeed.  We will examine in this little essay Hopkins's inner journey from joy of God's presence to despair of His absence; two poems, one written at a time of exuberant faith, the other written two years later as doubt that God would help him began to set in, will help guide us in our understanding of that journey.

1, The First Poem: The Windhover

Gerard Manley Hopkins, the eldest of nine children, was born on July 28, 1844 into a devout, artistic Anglican family.  His father was a successful businessman, but like so many on both sides of the family, was artistically gifted as well.  In his lifetime, he published three volumes of poetry, far more publications than his son had during his lifetime; the first collection of Gerard's poems had to wait until Robert Bridges's edition of 1918--and it took a few decades after that for his poetry to gain critical acclaim.  The major theme of Hopkins's father's poetry is that the more you delved into nature, the more the presence of God becomes apparent. Gerard's poetry follows this tradition, a worldview especially evident in the poems written in the years immediately after his first great work, The Wreck of The Deutschland--e.g. God's Grandeur, Pied Beauty and the one we will now discuss, The Windhover.

The Windhover

to Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
in his ecstacy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
     Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
   Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

   No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
   Fall, gall themselves, and gash god-vermillion.

This is one of the most beautiful religious poem in the English language.  Written in 1877, nine years after Hopkins's conversion to Catholicism, (we will discuss possible reasons for this conversion in a later essay), the poem exudes the joyous experience of faith.  Hopkins, who studied to become a Jesuit beginning in 1868, was at the time of this poem soon to be a fully ordained Jesuit priest, having solemnly professed a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  (His ordination took place in September of 1877.)  This was a happy time for Hopkins, the overwork and waning enthusiasm of his many assignments were all in the future.

We will concentrate on the content here, in accordance with the subject of this essay, and ignore the poem's dazzling technique, which, admittedly, is not easy to do.

Hopkins not only adored the God behind nature, but nature as well; both loves are in evidence here.  In the octet, we are confronted with an unforgettable image of the windhover soaring above both Hopkins's and the reader's heads.  It is a fine example of what Hopkins referred to as inscape, a dazzlingly unique phenomenon of nature.

The windhover is a symbol as well, a symbol of transcendence. The majestic bird is like an angel, soaring above the fray of human suffering, closer to God indeed, yet below the holy person who has passed through the ordeal  of inner and outer temptations with his soul intact.  Its transcendent beauty is, however, breathtaking.  "My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird"--it is not an exaggeration if we see Hopkins referring to himself here.  That his heart is in hiding can refer to the inner, recondite nature of the poet as well as to the disappearance of individuality as one forgets everything except the blissful image above one.

The wings of the windhover remind one of the Holy Ghost as depicted in the final three lines of Hopkins's great poem, God's Grandeur:

   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

In the sestet, however, the windhover is identified with Christ.  Christ is a "billion times more lovelier and more dangerous," because He comes down from the sky and suffers like the rest of us.  The weight of the Cross crushes Him, but as it does we see, with the eye of the spirit, resurrection, symbolized in the poem by  the gash of gold-vermillion as blue-bleak embers fall.  This flash of golden light is the very essence of life, the Zen center of reality, far superior to the wondrous vision of the windhover, soaring above us in innocent majesty.

A profound poem, a joyful poem, a dazzling poem indeed.

We will now compare it to a poem that Hopkins wrote two years later, in 1879.

2. The Second Poem: Andromeda

Now Time's Andromeda on this rock rude,
With not her either beauty's equal or
Her injury's, looks off by both horns of shore,
Her flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon food.

Time past she has been attempted and pursued
By many blows and banes; but now hears roar
A wilder beast from West than all were, more
Rife in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd.

Her Perseus linger and leave her to her extremes?--
Pillowy air he treads a time and hangs
His thought on her, forsaken that she seems,

All while her patience, morselled into pangs,
Mounts; then to alight disarming, no one dreams,
With Gorgan's gear and barebill/thongs and fangs.

This poem, written in 1879, two years after The Windhover illustrates Hopkins's waning optimism.  In my view, as we shall see in a future essay, Hopkins became a priest to chiefly to curb his sensual nature.  Plagued by guilt by his sexual attraction to males at a time when there was a good deal more social opprobrium relating to what we now call homosexuality than there is now, Hopkins sought refuge in grace from God, obtained after conquering his desires through obedience, chastity, and poverty.  By 1879, he was discovering that the hard, time-consuming work as a Jesuit left little time for his first love, poetry; not only that, he was beginning to discover that he did not have a calling for parish work or even for teaching. 

This poem has been interpreted by many as an allegory depicting the trials of the Church, awaiting redemption in an evil world.  I very much disagree with this view.  As I have pointed out on several occasions, nearly all of Hopkins's poems have strong autobiographical elements; the poem under discussion is no exception,  Andromeda is best understood as an allegory of Hopkins's inner life as well as an allegory of he human condition as he saw it.

The poem is not a favorite in the canon of the poet.  Its allegorical nature renders it less direct; it needs interpretation more than other poems of Hopkins.  Although the poem evinces the poet's great musicality, the last line, however, can fall a little flat on the ear at first.  Once the initial mystery of "thongs and fangs" are removed, however, the beauty of this poem in its entirety becomes apparent.

This is the only major poem by Hopkins whose subject is derived from Greek mythology; we begin with a brief summary of the Andromeda myth.

Andromda, was he daughter of Cepheus, an Ethiopian king, and his wife, Cassiopeia.  When her mother claimed that Andromeda was more beautiful than the Nereids, nymphs sacred to Poseidon, the latter, in order to punish Cassiopeia's hubris, sent the sea monster, Cetus, to ravage Ethiopia.  Cepheus has his daughter chained to a rock as a sacrifice to Cetus, hoping to thus appease the monster and prevent further destruction.  Perseus, however, arrives just in time; he slays Cetus and saves Andromeda.

As mentioned earlier, I consider this poem to be a metaphor of the poet's inner life.  Hopkins saw himself as a human being threatened by a host of devils, whose only hope was the slaying of those demons by divine intervention.  A female alter ego makes a frequent appearance in Hopkins's poems--a critic, for instance, has asserted that the Margaret in Hopkins's famous "Spring and Fall" poem is the poet himself. (I will provide a more striking example of the cross-identification in a further essay.)

Andromeda depicts Hopkins's troubled inner life.  He/she is "Time's Andromeda" since the troubles that beset him/her are temporal; if the trials are overcome on Earth, eternal, trouble-free life awaits.  Andromeda is, however, completely powerless to work out her salvation by herself, a plight which is symbolized by her being chained to a rock.  She has endured and defeated demons in the past; now however, she is in mortal and perhaps even in immortal danger.

What is the identity of her present nemesis, the "wilder beast from West?"  Perhaps this beast represents several entities, such as the onslaught of science and the decreasing power of dogma and tradition, as well as decreasing inhibitions, especially sexual inhibitions, as Western culture becomes more and more secular.

It is important to note that the "her" in line eight refers to the beast and not to Andromeda.  I interpret the feminine pronoun as referring to Hopkins's sensual nature.  She is no ascetic; she is not even Catholic, but is a lawless beast.  Note, the sexual reference: she is lewd.  She is everything that Andromeda, as it were, secretly desires, desires which so frighten her that she, as it were again, becomes a priest.

Andromeda/Hopkins is in dire straits.  Will Perseus/Christ linger and leave her to her extremes?  The concluding lines leave everything in suspension.  Perseus/Christ is able to slay the dragon with the Gorgan's head/Cross, but why the  tortuous delay?

By means of his magic sandals, the hero floats on the "pillowy air" above the chained prisoner.  He represents Christ, the windhover of the first poem, a majestic being hovering overhead.  In the first poem, however, Christ comes down to Earth, suffers and redeems humanity.  Not here; the savior figure, still all-powerful and able to defeat all enemies, remains a transcendent vision overhead, poised to intervene in suffering humanity, but for some reason does not do so.

(A possible solution to Hopkins's increasing spiritual crisis, as well as to our own, is indicated by the "then" in the penultimate line of the poem.  "No one dreams" that help is possible in a state of extreme anxiety, such as that of the woman portrayed in the poem.  I am reminded of the final words attributed to the Buddha: Seek your salvation with diligence.  It is impossible to proceed along this path in a state of unbearable mental duress.  A degree of equanimity must be obtained first.

The last line brings home Hopkins's view of his own abandonment and that of besieged humanity as well.  Perseus's weapon in the sky is opposed to the bare bill of the monster on Earth; the thongs--the winged sandals--the means by which Perseus can come down to Earth, sre opposed to the fangs threatening Andromeda.  The desperate situation demands an immediate intervention; yet the poem leaves us with the assertion hat "no one dreams" that it will come anytime soon.

Thus, for practical purposes, God might as well not be there.  Perhaps the belief that God can intervene but won't is even worse, since abandonment at the hands of a loving and just deity can increase a sense of unworthiness and guilt on the part of the one who feels hopelessly lost.  Hopkins had faith in the Catholic God to the very end of his life; however,  that God, as Hopkins's final sonnets attest,  became a remote entity to whom he wrote "dead letters" and "who lived alas! away."

Hopkins's needs for a balance between flesh and spirit, recognition and solitude, were not met.  His life became increasing afflicted by self-loathing.  One imagines that with a little bit of loving, mortal intervention might have brought much relief to a man who saw himself as Andromeda chained to a rock, about to be devoured by a monster.  His poems, however, including the ones in which he expresses despair, remain as great works of art.  It is unfortunate that this great poet died without an inkling of the joys that his poetry has provided to generations that came after him, delights it shall, undoubtedly, continue to provide to generations to come.