Crisis 22
Political Modes of Being
Connections - Keats - Eliot - Snowflakes
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Connections
On the previous page I noted how Whitman copes with everyday problems and with the horrors of fratricidal war by using the same strategy: being both in and out of the game. His strategy is uniquely expressed yet it has much in common with ideas advanced by Keats, Eliot, and Aurelius. I might also note here that in Gospel & Universe (my study of agnosticism) I connect this strategy to critical thinking and to a variety of thinkers — see Critical Distance, Locke’s Double Key, Montaigne’s Balance, Pyrrho’s Equilibrium & Zhuangzi’s Pivot, Hegel’s Dialectic, Whitman’s Cosmos, Byron: Carrying Sail, and Keats’ Negative Capability. Critical thinking is the attempt to contextualize an issue, to see it in the light of its historical and cultural context, its possible definitions, and its possible outcomes. In this sense critical thinking is an integrative way of looking at issues. It’s an effective way of at once dealing with an issue and distancing yourself from it. It can be done at any scale, from thinking about which film to watch to examining which philosophy to follow.
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Keats
In getting at a mental state of simultaneous engagement & detachment, one might also consider Keats’ twin notions of 1. the chameleon poet who engages with both good and evil and 2. negative capability which encourages critical thinking and psychological openness. Combined, these concepts present a Romantic model of 1. how to maintain an engaged and rational approach to life, and 2. how to maintain a stoic detachment in the face of uncertainty. This second part, the stoic detachment, is perhaps the most difficult — although the ease with which some people ignore or minimize the present crisis is a difficulty of a different type …
Keats’ definition of negative capability suggests a deep relation between accepting things as they are — with all their difficulty and uncertainty — and finding a place within ourselves, deep in our perception of things, which releases us from the burden of those things, all the while not averting our eyes from them:
I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
Like Byron, Keats entertained a Romanticism that prefigured the Transcendentalism of writers like Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. Both Keats and Byron accepted the Age of Reason with all its science and technology, but also kept the door open to emotion, spirituality, and Beauty with a capital B. Unlike Blake, they didn’t disparage the rational or the empirical in any way. Yet like Blake, they felt that “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
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Eliot
Being in and out of the world in Whitman’s poetic and mystical way is also reminiscent of what T.S. Eliot calls “the still point of the turning world.” Eliot is closer to Whitman here, in that he sees a specifically theological dimension to this experience. Byron and Keats on the other hand tend to think in secular terms of psychology, aesthetics, and myth. Where Byron and Keats find Beauty, Whitman and Eliot find the Beauty of Being and God.
Eliot writes about the still point in his long poem Burnt Norton, which he first published in 1936, three years before the start of WWII. The connection to religion and to God — or to what Aurelius calls the universal mind — is subtle, especially at the beginning of the poem, where the still point and the dance merge, suggesting a paradoxical order. This order, with its hint of spiritual essence, is one that appears lost amid the chaos of conflict these days. Eliot suggests however that it can always be found — at the point between past and future:
at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
— Burnt Norton II (Part 1 of Four Quartets)
Thinking deeply about the Ukraine War is harrowing, yet it might also be a difficult rehearsal for dealing with the relentless and at times overwhelming flow of life. It might become a sort of meditation, yoga, or phenomenological exercise allowing us to see where we are now. To hold the present still for a moment. To see that the moment is all we really have. Whether we can find in this moment a greater design or universal mind may not be as important as arriving at this still point, and looking for something, even if all we find is the hint of a rhythm, a dance, or a connecting link between our experience of the past and our prospect of the future. In this moment, we’re aware, in an expansive state, looking for connections and solutions.
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Snowflakes
It’s for this reason that I chose a snowflake as the icon for the name of this page, ❄️ Political Modes of Being. In the 2020s we’re in a new version of the old Cold War, yet the flake that falls through this coldness is beautiful in itself, in its still state, which corresponds to our inner selves, the “Me myself” that Whitman writes about. We might even see the freedom of this state of awareness as a microcosm of the larger freedom we want for nations and for the world.
This awareness also makes us aware that we’re falling, falling into whatever transformations await us, from icy height to expanded flake, to rain, or crashing to the ground. That is life, the living moment before the inevitable fall. We can hold that moment, and see within it a movement, a dance, a slight turning of the wheel. Whether we call this awareness Heraclitan, Buddhist, Existential, mystical, poetic, or phenomenological, the name we ascribe to it isn’t as important as the experience, that is, as the fact that we feel, think, live the moment, in all its dimensions — awareness, conception, thought, feeling, reason, intent to act — and in the full knowledge of its transience as well.
In coping with war, it may be helpful to read poets like Eliot, who suggest a liberating dimension within us. Or we might listen to bands like Pink Floyd, who in “Us and Them” give full scope to simple words like “Down and out / It can't be helped, but there's a lot of it about. / With, without / And who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about?” Or we might listen to Bryan Ferry’s “Reason or Rhyme,” with its majestic scales descending and ascending, and its musical complexities falling deep into our emotions and then riding a current back into the sky, up into the atmosphere, and out into the heavens. Ferry doesn’t deal with the ups and downs of politics or war, yet he gets at the fundamental ebb and flow that can be turned into rhythm and dance, urging us to seize the moment:
Why must you shed such tender tears
In the evening of your years?
No other love could stem the tide
Of the loneliness I hide
Inside out, upside down
Obscured by clouds, or underground
The sun and moon and all the stars
They bow down to you whenever you pass
Wherever you are, whenever you speak
These are the moments in my life that I seek
No reason or rhyme, by chance or design
Just a dance to the music of time
By condensing the complexity of life — whether it’s full of conflict or love — into simple terms and symbols, poetry can help us gather our dispersed thoughts and feelings. It can bring them, from ocean or galaxy, to a place that’s right before us and within our grasp, thus helping us come to terms with them.
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Next: 🦋 The Tao of Putin