This is a repost of a blog I did on my friend Carlos blog, http://woundedbybeauty.wordpress.com/ , which I have to reccomend to everyone who is interested in talking about Beauty.
Hello Everyone. Carlos has been trying to get me to write on his blog for a long time, so finally I have assented to the challenge. I would appreciate it if you would please pray for me. My general mood, due to winter, chemical imbalance, and lack of family living alone up north, has been growing darker. As a teacher, my job is fairly exhausting, and while I love my students and I think my students like me, that is no substitute for mature friendship.
I know that rigorous exercise would help, but it’s hard to summon the energy to do so, especially when you feel low already. Unfortunately, seasonal depression is a misty cloud over my mind and heart, an oblique obstruction to the sunlight reaching my soul. Even exciting things become bland sensations, sound and fury that seem to signify nothing. Tonight while on the phone with a friend, I noticed the beauty of this Icon of the Blessed Virgin on my wall, and I marveled at how beautiful it was, and wondered how I could have noticed it for so long and failed to notice the beauty. Still, the winters of life can teach some interesting philosophical lessons – even though they may seem like mere abstract intellectual exercise, sign without substance. That truly is what depression is for me, anti-sacrament – a life of sign without substance, tangent without the tangible, the experience of empty sign in my state of being.
The general grayness and ugliness of my life (perceived through the filter of my mental illness) has confirmed in me my belief about the relationship between the classical Transcendentals (Truth, Goodness, Beauty) and Being itself. The concrete connection between Beauty and Being becomes all too clear, (especially in darkness) since Beauty is the lifeblood of being, without which reality itself (in my concrete experience) begins to slowly slip into a hazy mirage of waking death, existence without life, order without design, fact without truth, reality without meaning.
Recently, I went to the wedding of someone very dear to me. While there, I witnessed some very authentic innocence. Not in the sense of clueless youth or naivete, I mean in the true sense of innocence, which means “radically open”. This IS a rare sight to see separated from childhood hope. Joy flowed so naturally through these people, from these people, and I was able to have so much fun with people I had just met. Just being able to be with them really brought reality back into focus, Beauty confronting me with Being.
There is a greeting people I know like to give to each other, “Namaste”. I have heard it the few times I was brave enough to go to one of my friend Megan’s Hatha Yoga sessions. I don’t know why I was foolish enough to try to twist myself into a pretzel. For me, trying to do “downward facing dog” was more like “upward facing whale”. Anyway, back on topic. My friend Megan (the one who teaches the Yoga classes) has told me that Namaste means, “the light (form) within me greets the light (form) within you”. I remembered that in the Meno and Phaedo, Plato made the assertion that our knowledge is actually all recollection, memory, (“Anamnesis” ἀνάμνησιν) of the perfect forms our souls had experienced in a past life. I don’t know about all that, but the theories lead me to a fascinating idea.
Plato assumes we only recognize some thing or idea that we have already experienced in our souls. Some people when they meet and seem to already know each other believe in reincarnation or previous lives, sometimes in a Gnostic or Hindu sense, others believing in déjà-vu or some kind of fated destiny. What if there is a simpler explanation with ample evidence in both Eastern and Western religious traditions? What if the matter is simply thus: familiarity comes from the fact that the light in me, (Holy Spirit) recognizes the same light in you. I wonder if this is the source of some of the unexplained familiarity in life, a familiar presence that wounds us, that tries to bring us back to the sense of what is real, calling to us through a beauty that brightens our world and also re-awakens us to our poverty. Our poverty being the truth that we can't sustain ourselves without this Beauty, this companionship with Christ. In a simple literal sense, one can't be a father unless he first has a father. One cannot generate without being generated. One cannot experience Being without first receiving it.
In the Gospels, Jesus, when he says, I am the True Vine, the True Bread, etc, is actually the Greek word Aletheia, which while translated as "true" is better translated as “Real”, in the sense of, “Hey, this is a REAL beer” (what a beer should be). St. John seems to invoke (to his Greek audience) the Platonic idea of the Forms to say that Jesus is perfection incarnate, the manifestation of the origin and order of all things (Arche, Logos) . In my depression, sometimes the world doesn’t seem real, like it doesn’t have any substance, reality, Being. But then, when I see real Beauty again, the world again seems to take shape beyond the shadows of immediate perception. It gives experience to knowledge (and therefore understanding) to the words of Christ, “You are the salt of the earth” / “You are the light of the World”. So these are my poems relative to my experience. They are dedicated to my friends Jake and Christina. They are not that long, but as a poetic theologian, their explanation was always going to be longer and less interesting than the poems themselves. But truly, it is only when I see Beauty that the world is renewed, and gets color to its cheeks, so to speak. Beauty raises the heart and mind to God, gives rise to the sense of the extraordinary, and provides some meaning to the ordinary things.
....the original version of the poem was a Haiku.
That which is, must be.
So therefore, if beauty being.
Thou art that which is.
…it evolved into the following poem.
"Awareness Stirs My Soul"
Cause and Effect, Life and breath
salt and sight and earth and light
Awareness stirs my soul.
I think. . .
That which is, must be.
And so it seems, if beauty being.
You are that which IS.
and that which is to be.
…the joy and beauty of the wedding inspired this one
“Inebriation at Cana”
Biblical Inspiration also from Luke Chapter 5:37-39: "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. "But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”
Cheap Salvation
seeks bottled water grace.
New wine can't be watered down,
lest so-called sobriety
drown our joy.
…one more poem, this one is dedicated to Jake, because he deserves one too.
"Clouded Sight in Need of Reflection in Light"
While daydreams delve the darkness deep,
when terror takes me to the streams
of waking waters, restless sleep,
where shadows sleek do smile and scheme.
to cloud the soul of all that seems.
Confusions Cannot touch the heart,
Beyond delusions kept within.
Illusions, shades must soon depart
Where truth and light may enter in.
Let colors, pigments paint the day.
Lest specters creep upon the dreams
Life’s luster more than shades of gray,
As sunlight bends upon the beams,
Amidst the clouds of all that seems.
No comments:
Post a Comment