New Spiritual Musing: "A Way Out of the Darkness"

A Way Out of the Darkness

“There is but one truly serious philosophical

problem, and that is suicide.”

—Albert Camus

          I’ve been steered in this direction for quite some time now, especially this past week when I went online to research David Foster Wallace who wrote the best-selling novel Infinite Jest that stirred up the literary world with the promise of a new literary light; but D.F.W. committed suicide on September 12, 2008 at the fecund age of 46, just when he was coming onto his own as a writer, and I wrote a poem on the effect he had upon me:

The Way of Literature

Deeper and deeper into the mix,

he’s the zeitgeist behind the chaos

of a tortured mind, exposing himself

like a trench-coated compulsive proudly

showing himself to strangers, an aberrant

tick, never telling us why he is this way

(wearing a bandana because he can’t stop

perspiring), only doing what he must do to

satisfy his self-obsession. D. F. W., what 

a genius, what prophetic wizardry, what a

tortured soul you are; no wonder you chose

to exit to the other side, this world was too

much for your rapacious mind to process,

resolve, and understand, a joke, an infinite

jest; but your light will continue to shine

until another light shines brighter, and

there will always be another light from

the eternal fire of man’s struggle, a

new zeitgeist for a new time, for

such is the way of literature.

In David Foster Wallace I saw the existential dilemma of life writ large (writers have a way of magnifying the human condition), the same dilemma that the philosopher of the absurd Albert Camus (about whom I had recently heard on CBC’s Ideas, asserting to how much influence his philosophy still has in the world) explored in The Myth of Sisyphus, the dilemma of man’s inner and outer self, or what I came to see in my own journey of self-discovery as our false and real self; and despite his literary genius, which was acknowledged by most critics who reviewed his novel (he also received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997), David Foster Wallace, who saw life as an infinite jest, a joke played upon mankind not unlike Sisyphus’s fate, irrational and absurd, was unable to resolve the existential dilemma that finally drove him to suicide, a tragic fate that Camus considered the only truly serious philosophical problem—an act or courage, or desperation?

Of course, they blamed it on his life-long depression, for which he took medication; but despite all the medication and therapy that he received for depression and drug and alcohol addiction (which were central to his effulgent novel Infinite Jest), he still got swallowed up by his irreconcilable shadow and hung himself to put an end to his suffering, which leads to today’s spiritual musing—the dark shadow side of our ego personality, that aspect of human consciousness that is responsible for inducing the insufferable conviction that life is meaningless and absurd, that dreaded state of consciousness that we all experience at one time or another as our own nothingness and which in the annals of literature was given the most eloquent expression by Shakespeare in Macbeth’s much-too-blithely quoted, “Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

This is not an easy state of consciousness to apprehend (only poets and mystics can see it with some measure of clarity), let alone explain; but it is felt by everyone who suffers from life-long depression, like David Foster Wallace. And even those who do not suffer from deep depression experience it, because this state of consciousness defines the shadow side of our personality; but herein lies our quandary, because who wants to believe that our shadow self is real? It’s much easier to repress our shadow than acknowledge it, until it’s too late.

Three years ago I wrote my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway (I’ve just published the sequel called My Writing Life) in which I explored the dark shadow side of Ernest “Papa” Hemingway’s personality, because I wanted to flesh in this concept of the elusive shadow with the real life of my high school hero and literary mentor (this was twelve years after I wrote my novel What Would I Say Today If I Were To Die Tomorrow?, which so rankled the people of my hometown for revealing its dark shadow side that Penny and I had to relocate to Georgian Bay to get away from all the hassle), but even after all the fleshing in that I did with Hemingway’s shadow-afflicted personality, I still feel some apprehension as I write today’s spiritual musing on the reality of our shadow self; but I must be true to my calling, because this unresolved state of consciousness is responsible for the existential dilemma that can pull one so deep into the despair of their own nothingness that it can drive one to desolation and suicide, like it did Ernest Hemingway and David Foster Wallace.

So, what is this consciousness of our own nothingness? How does it come about? This is the mystery of our shadow self, the repressed dark side of our personality. The writer John Irving made a comment so arrogantly offensive that I had to respond to it by writing a spiritual musing, “Chicken Little Syndrome and the World According to John Irving,” which can be found in The Armchair Guru, my fourth volume of spiritual musings; he said, “You don’t choose your demons, they choose you.” This is why I was never attracted to read John Irving after reading the novel that launched his career, The World According to Garp, because the central motif of his writing was delusory, which I confirmed by quoting something in my spiritual musing that America’s greatest seer Edgar Cayce revealed:

“While we are all at different stages of development and may be working on different lessons, we do not make much progress until we can recognize our problems as opportunities. We begin to grow when we face up to the fact that we are responsible for our trials and misery. We are only meeting self. Our present circumstances are the result of previous actions whether long removed or in the recent past. So if we are beset with problems, blame not God, for they are of our own making. Our miseries are the result of destructive or negative thoughts, emotions, and actions. We can avoid trouble and misery if we live lives of noble thought and action” (Edgar Cayce’s Story of Karma, by M. Woodward, pp. 219-220, Bold italics mine).

In their remarkable book Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, editors Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams tell us why we have a problem, especially writers who are always trying to come to terms with the human condition and the existential dilemma of life, the seemingly irreconcilable problem of our paradoxical nature: “Our shadow self remains the great burden of self-knowledge, the disruptive element that does not want to be known.”  And why does our shadow not want to be known? The editors of Meeting the Shadow tell us: “The shadow is by nature difficult to apprehend. It is dangerous, disorderly, and forever in hiding, as if the light of higher consciousness would steal its very life” (Meeting the Shadow, Introduction, pp. XVII and XXI).

But didn’t Edgar Cayce say, “We can avoid trouble and misery if we live lives of noble thought and action”? Doesn’t this suggest that there is a way out of the darkness of our own nothingness? It certainly does for me, which is why I made this moral imperative the guiding ethos of my own life and writing; but then, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and unless one lives the life of noble thought and action one will never know.

          A tad presumptuous? But where does a writer go when they have come to the limits of their paradigm of meaning? Depression and suicide, like Hemingway and Wallace, both gifted but self-obsessed writers who wanted their cake and eat it too? “Literature is not enough,” said the writer Katherine Mansfield, who tragically died of tuberculosis at 34 at the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France where she sought out a teaching to expand her personal paradigm, as did I with the same teaching; but to expand the paradigm of literature by including the principles of karma and reincarnation as Cayce deemed would seriously tax the credulity of the literary world, which is why the light of literature will never be bright enough to resolve the consciousness of our nothingness, and one must imagine Sisyphus happy in his struggle as Camus did.

But we keep hoping against hope; because, as the dystopian writer Margaret Atwood said in one of her poems, “All we have is hope, but what hope is there?” And another brilliant writer will always come along, like the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard with his six-volume autobiographical novel that he ironically called, “My Struggle.”         

——

New Spiritual Musing: "The Purloined Teaching"

The Purloined Teaching

“Life is about growth and understanding.”

—Padre Pio

I didn’t want to, and still don’t, but the call to write this spiritual musing is persistent and I have to do its bidding; but I want it on record that I’m doing so under protest. So, what is so important about this imperative that I have to explore it in a spiritual musing?

I think I know, but I don’t really; because once I start a spiritual musing it takes on a life of its own, and what I want to say about a certain purloined teaching may not be what the creative spirit of my daimonic imperative has in mind; so why don’t I just go straight to the source and ask my Muse— “Why must you persist on this spiritual musing?”

“To shine a light in the darkness of this New Age teaching.”

“What am I, Diogenes?”

“In spirit, yes. To see the light, one must know the shadow; and you have been called to shed the light of clarity onto the shadow side of this teaching.”

“And how do you propose I do that?”

“Tell a story, and I’ll take it from there.”

“Fair enough…”

Shy and unassuming, he was born a Kentucky boy with a burning desire for truth, and to help satisfy the deepest longing of his soul the gods granted him the gifts of fast reading and a remarkable memory, and he read mountains and mountains of books and remembered everything that he read; and he became a prolific writer with a genius for assembling thoughts, ideas, and perceptions into a single truth that he had to share with the world.

“How?” he asked himself, knowing how short his life would be. “What did Jesus do? What did the Buddha do? What did Socrates, Lao Tzu, Shams of Tabriz, Ramakrishna and all the great spiritual teachers do?” They taught their truth and gave it to the world, and that’s what he would do; and he racked his brains for the perfect name for his truth.  

His truth was the truth of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Socrates, Lao Tzu, Shams of Tabriz, Ramakrishna and all the sacred teachings of the world that he had read and remembered and rendered with poetic genius into a single truth that he called “The Way of the Eternal,” and everyone who came to his teaching recognized the truth they saw, and they wanted more; and he gave them more with the purloined truth of imagined Masters who were the longest unbroken line of Spiritual Masters in the world, stretching into the foggy mists of antiquity and whose wisdom was unparalleled in the annals of spiritual literature.

I couldn’t believe what I read in The Far Country, which was dictated to him in private by his most completely fabricated staff-carrying Spiritual Master whose existence has never been empirically verified, a book that was imbued with instant credibility by the miraculous grace of serendipity that brought it to me in my need for a new path, granting me all the truth I needed to continue my journey of wholeness and completeness, and I devoured all I could in one sitting and could not wait to finish reading the following day, that’s how much his teaching satisfied my need to know; and I became a bona fide member of “the most direct path to God” for more than thirty years and then walked away when the archetypal shadow of this teaching could no longer hide its Janus face from me in the behavior of my fellow chelas, which became the premise of the closing chapter, “The Vanity of All Spiritual Paths,” of my novel Healing with Padre Pio that I was called to write just before walking away from this cleverly cobbled spiritual teaching called “The Way of the Eternal.”

I knew the way before I found this teaching, having found my true self by “working” on myself with “conscious effort” and “intentional suffering,” Gurdjieff’s most rewarding disciplines for giving birth to one’s soul self, and unlike the chelas of this New Age teaching I never bought into the concept of the Outer and Inner Master who guided his chelas in all of their decisions; I was Jungian in my belief, and all of my guidance came from experience and the “superior insight” of what the American Gnostic Ralph Waldo Emerson called “God within,” a concept that the clever modern-day founder of this cobbled teaching had also appropriated before transforming his teaching into a New Age religion to avoid taxes, and it pained me to see how my fellow chelas slowly forfeited their individual will to their spiritual leader who aside from being their Outer and Inner Master had also assumed the role of being their Dream Master, closing the gate of their mental prison, all the while teaching that the central tenet of this spiritual path was to become one’s own Master, an oxymoronic premise that became too much to bear, and I had to walk away from this soporific illusion.

But unlike so many chelas who had also awakened to the archetypal Shadow Master of this alluring New Age Religion of the Light and Sound of God and walked away from in bitter resentment and humiliation for having been played for a credulous fool, I have no rancor whatsoever, and I thank my lucky stars that this teaching came into my life because I was forced to see my own false shadow self in a light that I would never have seen had I not been seduced into believing in “the most direct path to God,” an elitist conceit born of a misapprehension that I could no longer suffer, and as humiliated as I was for my gullibility and self-deception, I cannot help but marvel at the genius of this purloined teaching. 

——

New Spiritual Musing: "The Sanctity of Individual Experience"

The Sanctity of Individual Experience

“Life is a journey of the self.”

—Padre Pio

One of the most difficult decisions of my life was dropping out of university in the second semester of my third year of philosophy studies, but I had to; I had been called to the gnostic path of my own individual way with Gurdjieff’s teaching, which the merciful law of divine synchronicity had provided for me with the serendipitous gift of P. D. Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous in my second year at university. I didn’t know this at the time, though; that’s what made my decision of dropping out of university so excruciating, because the humiliation of being perceived as a failure can be devastating.

I began to feel it around the middle of my second year of studies, a terrifying feeling of being cast adrift in a sea of endless philosophical speculation, brilliant but speculative all the same, and then I began to feel a growing sense of panic that I would be cast so far adrift that I would lose my way and drown before I found what I had gone to university to find, the way to my true self; and by the second semester of my third year I heard the call of the way so loud and clear in Gurdjieff’s teaching that I had to severe my relationship with academia because philosophy had done all it could for me, and that’s not where I was meant to be.

“What am I doing here?” I asked myself in the darkness of my bedroom of the house that I shared with three other men in the winter of my second year of studies, but I persisted in the hope that I would find the path to my true self in philosophy; and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing, the path that we are called to in our journey through life.

I didn’t want to write this spiritual musing, because it meant dredging up all those excruciating feelings of dropping out of university; but, as Albert Camus said in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (though I did not agree with his conclusion that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”), “crushing truths perish from being acknowledged,” and only by coming to terms with my humiliation for dropping out of university will I resolve those still-anguishing feelings; but let me first explain how I came to be called to today’s spiritual musing…

I went on YouTube the other night and came upon a video that caught my attention, “The C.G. Jung Foundation presents: The life and work of Dr. Anthony Stevens - Dr. Anthony Stevens at 80, " which I watched with growing fascination when I learned that Dr. Stevens had serendipitously come upon his life’s path through his research on attachment behavior in infants for his doctoral thesis, which in turn brought him to the Jungian therapist who analyzed him when he was a student because he wanted to ask her if Jung’s theoretical approach of the archetypes would help him in his doctoral research on infant attachment behavior, and he was so taken by what she said that this led him to become a Jungian analyst himself and the author of many books on individuation, starting with Archetype: A Natural History of the Self.

Dr. Stevens set free the idea for today’s spiritual musing (though the title that came to me was “One of the Most Difficult Decision of My Life,” which I changed instantly when I heard the phrase “The Sanctity of Individual Experience” in a follow-up video because it honored the gnostic wisdom of personal experience);  and when I finished watching the tribute to Dr. Stevens, I went on Amazon.com and put Archetype: A Natural History of the Self on my wish list; but because serendipity had provided Dr. Stevens with the discovery of his life’s path in Jung’s psychology of individuation just as serendipity had provided me with mine in Gurdjieff’s teaching of self-transformation, I felt compelled to watch a video of a talk on synchronicity by Frank Joseph, which gave me exactly what I needed to help make the point of today’s spiritual musing: the disconcerting realization that the only truth we can really count on in life is the gnostic truth of our own experience.

That’s why I dropped out of university. I could no longer trust what the great thinkers of the world—Sartre, Nietzsche, Camus, Schopenhauer, Kant, Russel, Kierkegaard et al—had to say, because it finally dawned on me that that was their truth and not mine, and in the final analysis it was all very personal and speculative; and for me to find my true self I had to build my life upon the only truth that I could count on, and that was the truth of my own life; and I could only do that by going out into the world and living my life with the guidance of Gurdjieff’s teaching, because the call of his teaching was strong enough to severe me from the path of philosophy that I had grown to distrust. But why not pursue my degree in philosophy and still employ Gurdjieff’s teaching to help me find my true self? Wouldn’t that have been the prudent thing to do? Then my efforts would not have been for nothing.

That would seem reasonable, but I couldn’t do that. I went to university because that’s where my quest for my true self had taken me, and in my second year down the lonely  philosopher’s path the merciful law of divine synchronicity introduced me to the gnostic way of life through Gurdjieff’s teaching, because in its infinite wisdom the omniscient guiding principle of life knew that this was the path to my true self, and even though I did not know this consciously, I felt it so deeply in my soul that I had to leave; that’s why it was so painful to drop out of university in the second semester of my third year.

I knew that if I pursued my philosophy studies I would have gone down a path that was no longer right for me; and this brings me to Frank Joseph’s riveting talk on synchronicity, which was drawn from his book Synchronicity and You: Understanding the Role of Meaningful Coincidence in Your Life…

As original as Frank Joseph’s paradigm-shifting synchronicity experience was, it did not come as a surprise to me because I’ve long been aware of how the omniscient guiding principle of life works, and the wilful young atheist was summoned to his gnostic path of self-discovery by a mind-blowing meaningful coincidence late one afternoon while driving home from work in the spring of 1992 in Chicago where he lived and worked as a courier.

For no apparent reason, as he was driving home the name Salman Rushdie popped into his mind and would not go away. “Rushdie, Rushdie, Rushdie,” over and over again, and he couldn’t figure out why the author of The Satanic Verses, which had stirred the ire of the Muslim world enough to threaten his life and forced him to go into hiding, would pop into his mind and not go away until he willed it to go away; but just as he willed it out of his mind, a dark blue Buick drove up along the off-ramp on his right and pulled out in front of him, and that’s when he had the synchronicity experience that set him on the course to his new path, because, believe it or not, the licence plate of that Buick read: RUSHDIE.

The odds of those two events—the name suddenly popping into his mind for no apparent reason and then reading it on that licence plate—were astronomical, if the event was even mathematically possible, which after much research on the principle of synchronicity led him to believe that it was not a random event at all but providentially designed, and this compelled him to pursue his new path of self-discovery wherever it took him.

Without going into detail, which he does in his book Synchronicity and You, after he had that meaningful coincidence with the licence plate he kept a journal of his own and other people’s coincidences, and after six years of recording all those coincidences he was inspired to write a book on the subject, and as he wrote about these coincidences he began to see a pattern emerge out of every person’s coincidence experiences, which blew his mind again because the pattern of each person’s coincidences spelled out the script of their life story, as if one’s life was being choreographed by an invisible guide; and that’s when Frank Joseph shed his atheism and became a believer in a benevolent guiding principle, and I couldn`t help but smile to myself when I read this, because that was the same conclusion that I came to and wrote about in my twin soul book, The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity…

Robert H. Hopcke, the author of There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives, wrote: “…our lives have a narrative structure, like that of novels, and at those moments we call synchronistic this structure is brought to our awareness in a way that has a significant impact on our lives.” And in The Power of Coincidence: How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know, David Richo wrote: “Synchronicity shows us that the world orchestrates some of our life events so they can harmonize with the requirements of our inner journey.” Which was the same conclusion that Frank Joseph came to while writing his book Synchronicity and You (to be followed with The Power of Coincidence: The Mysterious Role of Synchronicity in Shaping Our Live)s; but this begs the question: what does the narrative structure of our life lead to?

We all have our own individual story, and these authors came to the conclusion that the imperative of our story compels us—in the words Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with A Thousand Faces—to be true to ourselves and follow our own bliss; but all this means is that one must be true to the path they have been called to live, like Dr. Anthony Stevens and Frank Joseph were; but again, why?

This is the real mystery, and not until one gets to the end of their own story will one resolve it as Carl Jung did, which was confirmed by a dream he had several days before he died and which became the premise of my own story that I wrote about in The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity but need not expound upon here; suffice to say that the more honest and true one is to their own path, the more they will grow in gnostic wisdom and personal meaning. This is why I dropped out of university. Philosophy wasn’t giving me what I needed to satisfy the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness, which is why I chose the title “The Sanctity of Individual Experience” for today’s spiritual musing. As Jung said in The Red Book: “The way is and always will be an individual path.”

——

POSTSCRIPT

This is pure conjecture, but as I reworked this spiritual musing to make it as reader-friendly as possible (not easy to do, given the subject matter), it dawned on me why the name Salman Rushdie popped into Frank Joseph’s mind the day he had his life-changing experience. Everything happens for a reason, and synchronicities don’t just drop out of the sky for nothing; they happen to startle our mind and wake us up to the deeper mystery of our life’s purpose, and Frank Joseph’s life needed re-alignment. In effect, his outer life had to be brought into agreement with the destined purpose of his inner self.

Salman Rushdie was a confirmed atheist and gifted writer who had the courage to be true to his calling, and he was called to write The Satanic Verses that shocked the Muslim community out of its spiritual complacency; but that’s what writers do, shine the light of creative insight into social consciousness to break up inflexible patterns of thought to help expand old paradigms of meaning that have long served their purpose.

That’s why Rushdie’s name popped into Frank Joseph’s mind, his higher self gave him a symbolic, albeit ironic imperative in Salman Rushdie’s name to explore a different path to his true self, because his defiant path of atheism had blinded him to his destined purpose of wholeness and completeness as it had done to Salman Rushdie, and he was ready to move on to a new path which he discovered as he dug deeper and deeper into the mystery of synchronicity.

Every path in life serves its purpose, and when one’s path can do no more to satisfy the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness the merciful law of divine synchronicity kicks in to reconnect one with their destined purpose, which is how I found my new path in Gurdjieff’s self-transformation teaching through the serendipitous gift of Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous when I realized that philosophy could do no more for me, just as Frank Joseph’s belief in atheism could do no more for him and divine synchronicity kicked in to save him from himself.

It’s sweetly ironic that the cynical atheist Salman Rushdie should pop into the defiant young atheist’s mind that day, but that’s the playful side of synchronicity, which Frank Joseph was blissfully unaware of. Nonetheless, his is an amazing story of self-discovery, just as are all life-changing stories of synchronicity, one of my favorite being how the pattern of meaningful coincidences wrote the script of Sir Winston Churchill’s life to become the Prime Minister of England who saved his country from the Nazi war machine; but that’s an idea for another spiritual musing, if I’m ever called to write it.

New Spiritual Musing: "The Eyes Behind Her Eyes"

The Eyes Behind Her Eyes

“The poet is the seer,

the poem is the act of appropriation.”

—Joyce Carol Oates.

          I knew I was being called to write a poem as I watched an online interview with Iris Murdoch on the program Modern Philosophy, hosted by the erudite and eloquent professor of philosophy and author Bryan Magee, the topic being “Philosophy and Literature,” but I wasn’t called by what the Oxford philosophy tutor and novelist Iris Murdoch had to say about philosophy and literature, but by the beguiling look of her eyes, a look I have seen often in deeply shadow-afflicted people, but never as pronounced as it was in Iris Murdoch’s wary blue eyes that inspired my poem “The Eyes Behind Her Eyes” that I’ve been summoned by my Muse  to expand upon in today’s spiritual musing…

The Eyes Behind Her Eyes

She had four eyes, two eyes

to look, and two eyes to see,

and she could not tell which

eyes were which.

Oxford Professor, writer, wife,

and childless by choice, a fluid

woman like no other, and the

breach of her eyes grew wider.

Tutoring young Oxfordian

minds by day, she stalked the

corridors of culture by night

to appease her hunger.

Danger abounded as she looked

for what she could not see,

and the harder she looked, the

more the danger grew.

Novel after novel, essay after

philosophical essay, but the

breach grew wider and wider

as her mind grew darker, —

And she died of Alzheimer’s.

The magic of poetry is its power to see into the mystery of life, and I had no idea what my poem was trying to tell me; all I knew was that the first two lines of the poem came to me unbidden and I had to work out the rest, which I did. And I went online and did some research on Iris Murdoch’s life, and then I did some thoughtful editing and rewriting; but this did not alter the essential insight of my poem which had to do with giving visual clarity to the Jungian concept of the shadow that I saw in Iris Murdoch’s eyes, it only enhanced the poetic imagery. This is how the cognitive mind works with the writer’s creative unconscious.

Actually, the first two lines of my poem were not what they turned out to be in the finished poem; the first two lines that came to me went like this: “She had four eyes, /two up front, and two in the back.” This is how my Muse captured Iris Murdoch’s shadow, which was so obvious to me that I could see her shadow as another persona with its own mind and emotions and distinct identity, hence the four eyes; and when the first lines of a poem come to me, I have to unpack them to see what my Muse is trying to tell me. Nonetheless, I had to change the first two lines, because they created the wrong impression of having a set of eyes at the back of her head instead of having eyes within her eyes which was more accurate.

This is what writers mean when they say they write to seek out the truth of life. As I came to realize after many years of writing, our creative unconscious is infinitely wiser than our cognitive mind, but the cognitive mind has to do the work, and when the first lines of a poem come unbidden (sometimes, though rarely for me, a whole poem comes to me unbidden), I have no choice but to explore the given lines with thoughtful reflection, because if I don’t I jeopardize my gift for writing poetry; which only means, really, that I’d have to work a lot harder to pry out of my unconscious the glimmer of an insight.

But not with my poem “The Eyes Behind Her Eyes.” This poem was easy to write once I had the first two lines, because those lines told me everything I needed to say about the shadow self that I saw in Iris Murdoch’s eyes. Which isn’t to say that I was specifically given a poetic imperative to explore Iris Murdoch’s shadow self, which I did anyway by going online to research her life, but because the creative imperative of this poem was to introduce the idea that the shadow can be seen in a person’s eyes, and I had never seen the shadow as distinctly as I did in Iris Murdoch’s eyes. That’s why I had to write this poem.

So, how did I know that she had such a distinct shadow self? What made it stand out for me? What was its most distinguishing feature? What gave her shadow away?

This is almost impossible to answer, but I will try; and the best way to resolve this mystery would be to provide a context that will allow for the shadow to be seen in a person’s eyes, a context that took me years to work out and which I creatively explored in my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and its sequel, My Writing Life: Reflections on My High School Hero and Literary Mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway.

In effect, then; like a mystery writer who knows the solution to his mystery before writing his novel, I will resort to the old saying that you can always tell a tree by its fruit. Let me say up front then, with all the gnostic certainty of personal experience and all the reading and writing and years of stalking the elusive shadow (my own primarily), one’s shadow is the unconscious persona of one’s most private, most selfish nature; and it follows that the more selfish and self-centered a person is, the more shadow-afflicted one will be, This is what inspired The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and its sequel three years later, and what gave Iris Murdoch’s shadow away in her conversation with Bryan Magee.

Blind selfishness is the essential nature of our shadow self, and all of its consequent behavior (the most bitter fruits of the shadow tree are insensitivity, arrogance, and self-deception), which I immediately saw in Iris Murdoch’s eyes that set free the first two lines of my poem; so, I wrote my poem while I was in the grips of my inspiration and then went online to research her life so I could flesh in my poem with personal details that would confirm and add to the clarity of my intuition, like the detail that Iris Murdoch had numerous sexual affairs before and after her marriage to the literary critic and novelist John Bayley, casual and passionate affairs with both men and women that were later confirmed by her private letters.

I learned that Iris Murdoch was “gender fluid,” as they say today, so I added the phrase “a fluid woman like no other” in my poem to reflect this identifying detail of her private life, a detail that spoke to her selfish sexual desire that she had to gratify over, and over, and over again. “Memoirs by her husband, John Bayley, and Richard Eyre’s film Iris, in particular, defined her life around the poles of her defiant insistence on following her sexual desires where they took her,” wrote Sarah Churchwell in her review of Murdoch’s novel The Sea, the Sea.  But this isn’t to judge her morals, that doesn’t concern me; all that mattered to the imperative of my poem was the selfish nature of the private self, because the more rapacious one’s shadow is, the more distinct its identity will be, and I could see Iris Murdoch’s private shadow self as distinctly as I could see her ego personality.

In my research it did not surprise me to learn that the basic themes of all her novels were “good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious,” because the more shadow-afflicted a person is, the more morally-conflicted they will be, and Iris Murdoch was a very conflicted woman which was revealed to me by the “breach of her eyes,” the distance between of her two sets of eyes that was later confirmed by my online research into her life, both private and public. “Iris Murdoch is an odd and difficult subject. Both in artistic and personal terms, she is a one-off. She does not fit comfortably into any literary history and her life was a series of contradictions,” wrote Bryan Appleyard in his review of Iris Murdoch: A Life, by Peter Conradi.

Ironically, I have never read any of her novels or philosophical essays; but I did see the movie Iris based upon John Bayley’s first two memoirs of his wife, starring Kate Winslet as the young Iris and Dame Judi Dench as the older Iris who was ravaged and died of Alzheimer’s, a poignant portrayal of a philosopher/writer’s life who creatively explored the truth of life through her novels, as novelists tend to do; and all I wanted to do with my poem was to give the reader a glimpse into the creative process of truth-seeking through the act of writing poetry, which can be eerily revealing when inspired because there is often much more to a poem than even the author can see, and in this curious poem I caught a glimmer of an insight into the possibility that Alzheimer’s disease may be as much psychologically induced as it is biologically based, but that’s an insight far beyond today’s science; suffice to say that I wrote this poem because it came to me unbidden, and I’m happy that my poem caught the shadow out, because the shadow self is next-to-impossible to see.

Our shadow self is who we are not, the repressed unconscious and unresolved karmic energy of our ego personality, and what creates the distance between who we are not and who we are was what my Muse was trying to tell me in “The Eyes Behind Her Eyes.” 

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