I slwalk,
yet still practice my art. (I can!
Can
I still travel with walker and cane?)
My secret
is happiness: I still love! I still
breathe! Yet
the knives
in my knees haven’t crippled my heart.
What a privilege
it is to be humble! What a privilege it is to believe.
Thomas Dorsett, Colombia, 2024
My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort that I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you, unforseen times rather--as skies
Betweenpie mountains--lights a lovely mile.
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In this poem, Hopkins gives himself good advice, which he unfortunately never heeded. Hopkins was, of course, very religious in the conventional sense; but he got, in my opinion at least, the message of religion only half-right. The commandment of all religions is to love one’s neighbor as oneself; attempting to love one’s neighbor while despising oneself is always misplaced. We can look at the great commandment then not as a commandment at all but as a statement of fact: One loves one’s neighbor only to the degree that one has love for oneself. Hopkins once wrote this beautiful line: “There lives the deepest freshness deep down things.” If one couldn’t find that deepest freshness deep down things in oneself, one wasn’t looking hard enough or was looking in the wrong direction.
It is well
known that Hopkins had a strong carnal nature. His sexual orientation was
basically homosexual. He once wrote that he decided not to become a painter or
sculptor because he would have to deal drawing naked men, which presumably caused him much
grief and even panic. He decided that
the only way for him to overcome his self-disgust was by giving himself up to
God--The god of the Catholic Church, which strictly forbade homosexuality and
masturbation.
We’ve learned
a lot since Victorian times. Homosexuality is no longer synonymous with sin for
the very reason that gays are able to love--one must agree with the current pope
that in this regard, “Who am I to judge?”
I do not
wish to psychoanalyze Hopkins’s sexuality here; I just present it as a potential
source of his self-disgust. That he was a very unhappy man and rejected
himself is obvious from reading his poems, especially his later poems, when
God didn’t deliver that which he expected: peace and joy. Obviously, you don’t
have to be gay to suffer from an animus against the self; family pathology,
peer rejection, and insistence in getting from the universe what the universe
is unable to deliver are other frequent causes of self-rejection.
Life is a rare phenomenon in the universe, advanced life even rarer. We have all won the lottery, as it were, and are incredibly
lucky to be alive. Most of us realize this; the genius Hopkins apparently did
not. Let us now turn our attention to Hopkins’s great sonnet and indicate why
his noble idea to be less hard on himself ultimately failed. Notice the obsession
with self; the poem begins with ‘My own heart.’ He admits that he is ‘comfortless' and finds
no way out from the hell he is in.
He refers to himself as 'poor Jackself’ who is 'sad' and ‘jaded’—not a good start. One gets the impression that Hopkins at this point in
his life saw himself as a mess and threw himself on the mercy of God for relief.
But God, for whatever reason, remained silent, which abetted Hopkins’s despair.
The poem ends with one of the most beautiful
images in all poetry. Hopkins acknowledges that joy does indeed come sometimes,
but it arises spontaneously. It ‘lights a lovely mile,’ as sunlight does when
breaking through clouds. Whenever I read
these lovely lines, I seem to see sun breaking through; a beautiful
image. That the clouds in his internal sky were largely self-caused, however, Hopkins
would have probably denied. Too, too bad.
One has no right to reject oneself. If you
share Hopkins’s despair, fight, fight, fight for your right for a happy life. (Humility and despair are polar opposites.) Remember what nuns and priests used to say, and perhaps still say, "God loves you just the way you are." Some of us moderns might say instead, "The universe accepts you just the way you are," not the way your ego insists how things should be.
A beautiful poem about a man who is stuck in a hell of his own making.
Two of my poems, along with the work of many other poets, appeared in the current edition (Vol. 10, Vo, 1, 2023).
The editor is Esther Cameron, who lives in Israel. She is an old friend. The subject of the curent edition was announced as, "The Soul."
Consummation
A shriveled prune accepts its pit.
Mouse on a glue trap, why resist?
Phantoms burn; limbs toss and turn,
Face mind's mirror: who exists?
Silence is also communication.
Expect nothing at all from death.
God hasn't sent you a postcard'
Answer it! Answer it!
Nature's unsigned letter is enough?
Advanced age lacks consolation?
It's never to late to meditate;
What joy it is to finally give up!
The Soul
--for Esther Cameron
Everything is nothing to a star
Not to little you or me
With soul we thrive
Without it we flail
Even Leonardos nod
It's not in the pineal gland
With it we rise
Without it we fail
Martin Buber was right
Between us almost nothing yeasts
Despite lean and angry years
We're still at it
Whatever it is
It is
At Earlam we'll offer in each aging hand
the outstretched palm of Shiva, dancing
the it-doesn't-matter--though it-really-does
sidesteps of late middle-age.
On the telephone he tells me
half of Richmond
thinks he’s a terrorist,
while those
on campus whose idol is diversity
think he’s
very special since he’s brown.
He received
the mint chutney I sent him;
he broke up
with Ivana from Prague.
He switches
the subject to beef in French fries
and, not
that they should, but can’t they tell
a mullah
from Saudi Arabia
from a half
Catholic boy from Madras?
Shiva
intervenes with the sound of creation,
static. It bristles with loneliness.
Feminists,
curries, Foucault.
I tell him,
we’ll be there in June—
He, tossed
between drums and fire;
We, falling
beneath Shiva’s foot.
We arrive
at Earlam sixteen hours late.
He has a
new friend. Everything’s fine.
That night
she shows us new moves she’s taught him.
Right, left, one, two—We join in the dance.
Note: I'm putting together my sixth book--it may well be my last-- and found this poem in an old file. The subject matter concerns our dear nephew Ranjit, who passed away last year. At that time in our lives, the time of the poem, Nirmala and I were in loco parentis for Ranjit. He came here about 25 years ago, and stayed with us for about a year. After much applying, he was accepted at Earlam College, a liberal college in Richmond, Indiana. The poem has to do with our subsequent visit to Earlam for Ranji's undergraduate graduation. The reference to beef in French fries has to do with a controversy at that time when, after years of assuring the Hindu community that there was no beef in Macdonal's French fries, they had to admit that beef fat was used to prepare the fries.
I forgot about Ivana from Prague, one of Ranji's Earlam friends!
Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, is, of course, Shiva. I have been heavily influenced by Shaivite Hinduism, a.k.a. vedanta. There are many references to Shiva on my blog.
Oh, and thanks to Sudhir, Ranjit's uncle, for supplying the photo.
