New Spiritual Musing: "Chemistry of the Soul"

Chemistry of the Soul

Inspired by the movie

The Light Between Oceans

Friday, April 21, 2017, not yet summer but nearing the end of what the poet T. S. Eliot called the cruelest month of the year, a dull grey dismal day too cold to sit on the deck to have a tipple or finish reading my book Paris Without End, The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife, so I asked Penny if she wanted to watch a movie on Netflix in the cozy comfort of my writing room. She said yes, and I found a movie called The Light Between Oceans, starring Michael Fassbender as the lighthouse keeper, whose portrayal of C. G. Jung in A Dangerous Method completely won me over, Alicia Vikander as the lighthouse keeper’s wife, whom I didn’t know, and Rachel Weisz who played the birth mother of the infant child in this poignant drama, and whom I fell in love with the first time I saw her starring with Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardner, and we cozied up in our two sofa reading chairs and watched the movie that so moved me to tears it stirred up the root of an idea that I’ve had gestating in my unconscious for several years, and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing….

I had unfinished business with Hemingway since I wrote The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway three years ago, or I would not have been called back to Hemingway by my relentless Muse to write the sequel My Writing Life, Reflections On My High School Hero and Literary Mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway; and all of my new reading on the iconic writer whose simple prose introduced the modern world to a new style of writing was giving me a deeper insight into the enantiodromiac process of Hemingway’s conflicted ego/shadow personality, which was brought to light with spontaneous delight when Michael Fassbender, who played the lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne in The Light Between Oceans, had to wrestle with a moral dilemma that he knew in the pit of his stomach would one day come back to haunt him if he did not choose wisely, just as Hemingway did when he was torn between his deep love for his wife Hadley and the other woman he had unexpectedly fallen in love with, Pauline Pfeiffer who ended up becoming his second wife.

“That’s it!” I exclaimed, when the lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne chose against his gut feeling to comfort his grieving wife who had just suffered her second miscarriage, jarring Penny from her comfort. “That’s the human condition in action! That’s the grinding of the soul that makes for great literature! That’s the chemistry of the soul!”

Penny was puzzled by my outburst, but I was excited, as I always am when an idea for a spiritual musing springs free from my unconscious, and I shot out of my chair and jotted down the title of today’s spiritual musing in my Indigo Hemingway Notebook that Penny’s sister had given me for Christmas— “Chemistry of the Soul.”

But what was the lighthouse keeper’s moral dilemma that set this idea free, a moral dilemma that by miraculous happenstance was no less soul-wrenching and life-changing than Ernest Hemingway’s marital dilemma that I was just reading about again in Paris Without End, The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife?

First, let me spell out what I mean by this exciting, gnosis-laden idea “chemistry of the soul,” and then I will explain how it was set free by the lighthouse keeper’s moral dilemma that instantly brought to mind Hemingway’s marital dilemma that I was all-too familiar with and coincidentally just happened to be reading about again in Gioia Diliberto’s biography Paris Without End, The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife.

The phrase “chemistry of the soul” just came to me out of the clear blue when I made the connection between the lighthouse keeper’s moral dilemma and Ernest Hemingway’s marital dilemma, but this is the phrase that my creative unconscious gave me to capture my spontaneous insight of what a moral dilemma can do to one’s soul, because I knew from all the reading I had done on Ernest Hemingway what his marital dilemma had done to him when he chose to betray his wife Hadley for his lover Pauline, which gave me the insight to foresee what the lighthouse keeper’s moral dilemma would do to him if he made a decision that went against his gut feeling; that’s why I burst out: “That’s the human condition in action! That’s the grinding of the soul that makes for great literature! That’s the chemistry of the soul!” Because I knew, I simply knew that the lighthouse keeper was going to put his soul through the grinding mill of life if he chose against his gut feeling, and he was going to suffer just as Ernest Hemingway suffered for choosing to go against his better nature when he chose to betray his loving wife for his seductive, inveigling lover.

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” said Shakespeare; but why? Why would conscience, man’s moral center and guiding star, make cowards of us all if not for the onerous responsibility that goes with making a decision that conscience demands of us?

Hemingway’s conscience demanded of him the moral imperative to be true to his wife Hadley, which meant that he would have to fight off his sexual/romantic attraction for Pauline Pfeiffer; but he couldn’t. He wanted it all, and he was too weak to fight off his attraction.

That’s what made the budding young writer, who would one day win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a coward. Ironically, his moral cowardice caused the fatal wound in his soul that gave him the daemonic fuel for some of his best stories; that’s what I meant by “chemistry of the soul,” because Hemingway’s fatal wound ground his soul from lover to lover until he could bear himself no longer and he killed himself, and I knew that the lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne would put his soul through the same grinding mill if he capitulated to his grieving wife’s desire to keep the infant child that they found in the boat with her dead father that had washed up on the shore of Janus Island in Western Australia where he was the lighthouse keeper; he knew in his gut that they should seek out the infant child’s birth mother, but they didn’t, and that decision came back to haunt them. A story that made for a great novel by M. L. Stedman, which became a great movie by the same title, The Light Between Oceans.

Ernest Hemingway left his wife for his lover, and that decision haunted him for the rest of his life, which he sadly owned up to in his bitter-sweet memoir A Moveable Feast that he was still working on just before taking his own life with his favorite bird shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho: “When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.” He was reflecting on the decision he made to leave Hadley for Pauline, and he regretted it so much that he would rather have died had he known what his moral cowardice would do to him.

  I watched The Light Between Oceans with anxious anticipation, because I knew that once Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel decided to keep the infant child and raise it as their own instead of notifying the authorities that one day life would call them to account for their moral transgression; and that’s what I meant by “chemistry of the soul,” which is a poetic way of saying that life has a way of grinding down the moral grist of one’s soul, and I was no less angry at the lighthouse keeper for not being true to his conscience as I was for my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway for betraying his faithful, loving wife Hadley for his calculating, seductive lover Pauline Pfeiffer. But then, where would we get our great literature from if not for the moral grinding of our soul?

———

New Spiritual Musing: "An Old Chinese Proverb"

An Old Chinese Proverb

There`s an old Chinese proverb, which is attributed to the Taoist Master Lao Tzu (author of the Tao Te Ching), that goes like this: “Those who know, do not speak; those who speak, do not know.” Tao means the way, and the way is what C. G. Jung called the secret way of life in his commentary to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the ancient Taoist text The Secret of the Golden Flower, and reflecting upon this proverb, which has taken me years to resolve, one can see that Lao Tzu was referring to a knowledge of the Tao, or way.

Given this, this cryptic proverb can be broken down into the following less enigmatic saying: Those who know the way do not speak about the way, and those who do not know the way speak about as it as if they know the way. Still, the unyielding mystery of this wisdom saying is the way; and this is the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

Ideas for my spiritual musings can come to me from anywhere, and today’s idea came from something I read in my weekend paper, Saturday’s (July 15, 2017) Toronto Star’s Book section, in James Grainger’s review of Fiona Barton’s new novel The Child. The first paragraph arrested my attention, and one sentence kept buzzing around in my head and would not go away, and this morning I felt compelled to abandon to my creative unconscious and explore this thought in a musing. I will quote the paragraph and highlight the sentence:

“In a culture where peace, political stability and relative prosperity have been the norm for over 50 years, the aspiring suspense or horror author may well ask: what is there left for readers to fear? Not only are people living longer, healthier lives, they’ve stopped believing in an all-seeing God who punishes their transgressions. The resounding answer, if the bestseller lists (and the plot lines of binge-worthy TV series) are anything to go by, is the fear of losing a loved one, especially a child.”

This is where we are today, then; locked into an existential matrix where human life is characterized by the mortal limits of our biology and not by an expansive spiritual paradigm that embraces the concept of an immortal soul that animates the body and continues to exist after the body has expired, as ancient wisdom teachings would have us believe, like the Tao Te Ching for example. It’s no wonder that fear of death has such power over us!

It was because of this paralyzing fear that I was called to write Death, the Final Frontier, which was immediately followed by my twin soul book The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity, to relieve the insufferable pressure upon social consciousness exerted by the existential dread of our mortality; but—and this is the BUT that gave me the impetus to take on the challenge of today’s spiritual musing—it has become painfully clear to me that man today does not want to know if there is more to life than our five senses, because the answer is more frightening than the fear of death, as difficult as this may be to imagine.

Happily, there is much more to life than what we experience with our five senses, which the more intuitive among us can discern, as Psychologist Teresa DeCicco points to in her timely book Living Beyond the Five Senses: The Emergence of a Spiritual Being (which, as coincidence would have it, was the inspiring factor that called me to write Death, the Final Frontier), and the creative impulse of today’s spiritual musing beckons me to spell out why man fears to expand the parameters of our existential paradigm of personal meaning.

It happened innocently enough, as these kinds of insights usually do. I was having a chat with my retired neighbor, who was out walking his two little terriers and saw me reading on my front deck and stopped by to say hello, and he was telling me about his wife’s early retirement and all the time she would have on her hands, and by happy coincidence I had just read a review in The Walrus magazine of a book called The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life that Matters, by Emily Esfahani Smith, and I tore the page out of the magazine for his wife to check out; but before long Lenny, my neighbor with his feisty little terriers  and forlorn look of repressed sadness in his pale blue eyes, revealed (whether it was a defensive response to the book I suggested his wife look into, or from a deep feeling of emptiness that he hoped would be filled by the good life he and his second wife were embarking upon in her early retirement, I don’t know) that he didn’t think there was an answer to life’s big question. “This is all we got,” he said, reigning tight his aggressive little terriers.

“Not so!” I reacted, with the instincts of a mongoose. “There is an answer, Lenny. I know there is, because I found it. But no one wants to know what it is because with the answer comes the responsibility of living it, and that scares the hell out of people…”

I startled myself with my instinctive response, and Lenny was taken aback also; but this has happened before, many times in fact; as though I’m instinctively reacting to the pernicious archetypal shadow of the soul-crushing spirit of man’s nothingness, which was best expressed by Shakespeare’s famous, albeit lugubrious soliloquy:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

          But if William Shakespeare, whose perspective on life the eminent scholar Professor Harold Bloom called a “breathtaking kind of nihilism more uncanny than anything that Nietzsche apprehended,” could not expand the existential paradigm of life beyond the values “that we create or imbue events, people, things with,” then what hope was there for the average person to see the light at the end of the tunnel? No wonder people are crushed by the weight of existential dread. But I could never imagine Sisyphus happy, as the philosopher of the absurd Albert Camus did, because there is meaning and purpose to our existence.

That’s the irony. But when one finds the way, one refuses to speak about it. For two reasons: 1, for fear of scaring people; and 2, out of the knowledge that one will find the way eventually when life has made them ready, because that’s the way life works.

That’s what Lao Tzu meant by his puzzling saying, and why I said to my friendly neighbor with his much too feisty little terriers that people don’t want to know the answer to life’s big question because the responsibility would be too great to bear. I could have told him that one would find the answer eventually, but I didn’t want to introduce the concept of reincarnation which would only have opened up a whole new conversation and scared him further. And yet, the mystic poet Rumi, who knew the way, shouted with clarion certainty: “Tell it unveiled, the naked truth! The declaration’s better than the secret.” Which put me into a terribly quandary, because I didn’t know whether to speak or keep silent…

My neighbor plucked up his courage, as his two littler terriers circled around his legs anxious to walk some more, and asked me the dreaded question: “What’s the answer?”

“Consciousness,” I replied. “The purpose of life is to grow in the consciousness of what we are, and what we are is more than our mortal body; but to grow in the consciousness of our spiritual nature demands more than we’re willing to pay. That’s the premise of a book I wrote called The Pearl of Great Price that was inspired by one of Christ’s most misunderstood parables. But we’re getting into deep waters here, Lenny. Just rest assured that there is an answer, and one day, believe it or not, it will all make sense to you.”

Again, he looked at me quizzically. “Well, I can’t see it.”

“Few people can. But it’s there, I assure you.”

“Would you stake your life on it?” he said, with a grin.

“I did already. That’s the price one has to pay to find it,” I replied, and broke into an ironic laughter that puzzled my neighbor even further…

——

New Spiritual Musing: "Wounded with Wonder"

Wounded with Wonder

Three years ago I wrote The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, a memoir which I thought would bring resolution to my lifelong fascination with Ernest Hemingway who called me to writing in high school, but apparently I wasn’t done with him yet because on March 1, 2017 I was called to write a sequel which I completed on June 7, 2017, a private journal called My Writing Life, Reflections on My High School Hero and Literary Mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway, and now I’d like to write a spiritual musing on my experience…

In her book A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, Siri Hustvedt explores the question of where authors get their ideas in an essay called “Why One Story and Not Another?” And the conclusion she came to, as tentative as it may be because it seems to her that nothing is ever conclusive when it comes to the body-psyche relationship, was that “there are clearly unconscious processes that precede the idea, that are at work before it becomes conscious, work that is done subliminally in a way that resembles both remembering and dreaming,” further adding: “I argue that a core bodily, affective, timeless self is the ground  of the narrative, temporal self, of autobiographical memory, and of fiction and that the secret of creativity lies not in the so-called higher cognitive processes, but in the dreamlike configurations of emotional meanings that take place unconsciously” (A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, pp. 388-9). And I don’t disagree, but with qualifications.

But why one story and not another? Why was I called to write The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and then a sequel three years later? Why did the idea for my literary memoirs come to me when they did, and with such a compelling need to write them?

“Every good novel is written because it has to be written. The need to tell it is compelling,” writes Siri Hustvedt; but this can be said of any genre, be it novels, short stories, poetry, plays, memoirs, or personal essays like my spiritual musings: when an idea comes to me, depending upon the urgency of the need to give it expression, the compulsion is determined, and my compulsion to write The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway possessed me with such daemonic intensity that I HAD to write it just to get it out of my system, just as I was compelled to write the sequel My Writing Life.

But why? Why was I possessed by the idea to write these books? Siri Hustvedt is a novelist and essayist with cross-disciplinary interests, and her compulsion to write possesses her as it does every writer who is called to their art; and herein lies the mystery, the call to one’s life path which speaks to the individual nature of one’s destined purpose…

Over coffee the other morning, Penny and I got into a discussion on this mystery of being called to one’s life path, because it was my conviction (drawn from years of being possessed by ideas that had to be given expression through novels, short stories, poetry, memoirs, and spiritual musings, not to mention the countless books that I read in my quest to find my true self that spoke to this issue) that to be called is to be ready to begin the journey of self-reconciliation, and to Penny’s disconcertment, I said: “Not everyone is called to their life path. I was called to writing in high school by Hemingway, but my call to writing was supplanted by a higher calling to become a seeker when I read Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge in grade twelve; but I was ready to be called. Not everyone is ready—”

“I don’t agree,” Penny jumped in, contending that every person is on their own path no less than any writer, artist, doctor, or whatever the discipline; and I spent the next twenty minutes of our coffee time before she got ready for work explaining that a calling to one’s life path presupposes many lifetimes of experience in one’s calling. “It took many lifetimes for Mozart to become Mozart, and the same with Albert Einstein. Reincarnational memory and genetics work together. This is the mystery of being called,” I explained, which just happened to be the preoccupying theme of My Writing Life that I had just completed; but Penny still couldn’t see it, which is why I was called to write today’s spiritual musing…

My fascination with Ernest “Papa” Hemingway called me to writing in the early grades of high school, but in grade twelve our English teacher assigned our class to read Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge, and so moved was I by Maugham’s hero Larry Darrell’s quest for the meaning and purpose of life that I was inflicted with what Professor Harold Bloom called an “immortal wound” which set my soul on fire, a wound of wonder that supplanted my call to writing and launched me on my quest for my true self; and I devoted my best and most creative energies to my quest until I found the “pearl of great price” which I finally wrote about two years ago in my most intimate memoir, The Pearl of Great Price.

Despite my calling to find my true self, I never gave up on writing, and whatever energies I had left over from earning my daily living (I started my own contract painting business after I left university where my quest had taken me) and seeking the “pearl of great price,” I spent on writing; and my fascination with Hemingway grew in proportion to what he taught me about the craft of writing. He was my high school hero because he called me to writing, and he became my literary mentor because I never stopped learning from him; but my quest for my true self initiated me into the sacred mysteries of the secret way of life that parted the veils that shroud poetry and literature, and my two callings became one.

So I owed a debt to Hemingway who called me to writing, and to Somerset Maugham whose novel The Razor’s Edge inflicted me with the immortal wound of wonder; and though I thought I had resolved my obligation to my high school hero and literary mentor with my memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway (in which I did my level best to shed light on his paradoxical personality), I had not done with him yet, nor had I even addressed my debt to Somerset Maugham for writing the novel that set my soul on fire; that’s why I was called back to Hemingway when I received an Indigo Hemingway Notebook for Christmas from Penny’s sister three years after I had written The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, and I HAD to write a sequel and resolve my debt to these two great writers who affected the course of my life and set me on the path to my true self.

I would never have parted the mystifying veils that shroud poetry and literature had I not found my true self, but the quest for the “pearl of great price” opens up pathways to one’s destined purpose, which is to become one’s true self; and in my journey of self-discovery so many pathways opened up to me that I finally came to see the archetypal pattern of every soul’s journey through life, which is to realize one’s own individual identity.

Jesus called this final phase of soul’s journey through life being “born again,” but this is much too abstruse for today’s scientifically oriented mind, and the only way to convey the gnostic wisdom of the secret way of life would be through what C. G. Jung called “the process of individuation,” the natural course of soul’s evolution to wholeness and completeness, as Emily Dickinson implied in one of her most mystical poems:

Adventure most unto itself

 The Soul condemned to be;

       Attended by a Single Hound—

                                                 Its own Identity.

Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge launched me on my quest for my true self, and in my quest I discovered the secret way to the most precious treasure in the world, the secret way of self-reconciliation. Jesus called it making the two into one, our inner and outer self that psychologist call our essence and personality, philosophers call our being and non-being, and mystics and poets call our real and false self, which was a price much too dear for the shadow-afflicted Ernest “Papa” Hemingway to pay, and way beyond the reach of William Somerset Maugham who did not believe in God or the immortal soul; that’s why I had to write a sequel to The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway. I had to thank them both for their life-changing inspiration with the incredible story of my own journey of self-discovery.

This is the mystery that shrouds poetry and literature, the incomprehensible journey of self-discovery that we are all condemned to by the archetypal pattern of our essential nature, a journey that takes us through one lifetime to the next until we are ready to take evolution into our own hands and complete what nature cannot finish; only then will one be called to the life path that will initiate them into the sacred mystery of their own identity…

 I finally got Penny to see that a call to one’s path is a call to one’s own life, but a life that has evolved in its essential nature and is ready to begin its journey of self-reconciliation; and it doesn’t matter what path one is called to—religion, art, science, medicine, psychology, politics or whatever, that’s the path that one has earned over the course of many lifetimes, the path that Socrates referred to as “soul gathering and collecting herself into herself.”

 “As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck,” said Carl Jung, and we all get stuck despite our best efforts. Ernest “Papa” Hemingway got so stuck in his shadow-afflicted personality that he blew his brains out with his favorite shotgun, and William Somerset Maugham got so mired in the soul-crushing nihilism of his hedonistic philosophy of life that he got tired of life altogether and just wanted to fade away into oblivion; but I prefer Emily Dickinson’s poetic perspective over Carl Jung’s, because it’s a little closer to the mark: we are all condemned to become our true self, and getting there is what life is all about. That’s what I tried to say in my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, and what I tried to bring to resolution in My Writing Life.

——

New Poem: "The Making of an Atheist"

The Making of an Atheist

She stared out her living room window

lost to the world she knew and loved, three

hours later she returned from the farthest

regions of her mind where the great void

swallowed her whole, and she gave the rest

of her life to helping others, founding a home

for unwed mothers and an AIDS hospice for

gays among many other charitable causes,

and all because a drunken driver had run

over her golden boy. She went to church and

knelt for hours begging God to tell her why

her twenty-year old son had to die, but God

did not respond and she walked away with

her unyielding pride leaving her simple faith

that she had inherited from her caring mother

and philandering father who had abandoned

her when she was twelve behind her. “Saint

Joan,” they called her, for all her good works,

and they named a street after her when

she died of inoperable cancer.