New Spiritual Musing: "My Land of Lost Content"

My Land of Lost Content

          Today’s spiritual musing was inspired by a question that talk show host Charlie Rose asked the eminent Professor Harold Bloom: “What poem do you think will be in your heart when you draw your last breath?” And Professor Bloom replied by quoting (he has a “scandalous memory”) a little poem by A. E. Housman, “Into my heart on air that kills” — 

Into my heart on air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

“It’s an amazing little poem, but it’s astonishingly profound,” said Professor Bloom. “It covers the universal longing that we all have for the unlived life that is one of the four or five reasons for great literature.” And he went on to reference great works of literature like Don Quixote by Cervantes to illustrate a literary exploration of the unlived life (however fanciful it may be); but Professor Bloom got me thinking about my own life, and I asked myself the dreaded question: “What is my land of lost content?”

And I reflected, and reflected, and reflected…

I have many regrets for things I should have done, and could have done, and which always always always give rise to my deepest lament, my wish to have had a mentor to guide me in my life, someone who would have taken me aside and put me wise to the ways of the world; but I had no such mentor, and for every foolish mistake I made I paid dearly. This was my inspiration for my book of spiritual musings Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God.

But it was my lot to blaze my own trail, no doubt because the trail I had to blaze no one had blazed before me; and what mentor could have put me wise to that?

In Plato’s Apology Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and it could equally be said that the unlived life is a wasted life, and there was a time when I would have agreed with both of these points of view; but not today. Today I have a different perspective, and that’s what I’d like to explore in today’s spiritual musing…

After I got this musing started, to the point where I felt I could proceed without serious digging (because I had found my entry into the idea that inspired it), I drove into Midland to get my weekend Globe &Mail and National Post, and as serendipity would have it, I picked up the August 2017 issue of Harper’s Magazine which had an article by Helen Vendler (I’m currently reading her book on Emily Dickinson) that was titled, “American Expansion, The innovations of A. R. Ammons,” and she quoted  a poem by Ammons that spoke directly (will these coincidences never cease!) to today’s spiritual musing: —

Easter Morning

I have a life that did not become,

that turned aside and stopped,

astonished:

I hold it in me like a pregnancy or

on my lap as a child

not to grow or grow old but dwell on

it is to his grave I most

frequently return and return

to ask what is wrong, what was

wrong, to see it all by

the light of a different necessity

but the grave will not heal

and the child,

stirring, must share my grave

with me, an old man having

gotten by on what was left.

That’s what A. E. Housman’s little poem speaks to, “the land of lost content” that A R. Ammons calls a “pregnancy” and “lost child,” the unlived life; and even though I have many regrets for things I should and could have done, I did fulfill my soul’s longing for wholeness and completeness; but still, I have a melancholy feeling for my land of lost content, and even though I look back on my life now “by the light of a different necessity,” I cannot help but feel that I could have done more, so much more.

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New Spiritual Musing" "The Essence of Cool"

The Essence of Cool

I really didn’t want to, but I jotted the idea down in my notebook just in case I ran into a dry period (which happens rarely) and needed an idea to explore just to keep the creative juices flowing, and I forgot about it until this morning when I noticed the highlighted passage in David Brooks’s opinion piece in the folded newspaper page that I had on my desk which I intended to explore but never got around to until it caught my eye this morning.

Brooks’s piece is titled “What Has Replaced Cool in America” (The New York Times International Weekly, Wednesday, July 30, 2017), and I highlighted in blue marker the passage that inspired the idea for a short spiritual musing on the essence of cool: “The cool person is stoical, emotionally controlled, never eager or needy, but instead mysterious, detached and self-possessed. The cool person is gracefully competent at something, but doesn’t need the world’s applause to know his worth. That’s because the cool person has found his or her own unique and authentic way of living with nonchalant intensity.”

How cool is that? Given that description of what a cool person is, I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to be cool; but that’s why the idea for a spiritual musing on cool seized me, because not everyone can be cool. That’s what makes one cool, if one can appreciate the irony. But just in case, let me explore the irony of cool in today’s musing…

For some reason known only to the omniscient guiding principle of life (which I’ve come to recognize as my oracle, or guiding inner light), I was nudged to browse through one of the bookcases in my writing den yesterday morning, and as I sorted through the top shelf I came upon The Seasons of the Soul, a collection of poems by Hermann Hesse previously unpublished in English, translated and with a commentary by Ludwig Max Fischer, with a forward by “spiritual activist” Andrew Harvey, and even though I had read it already I felt  strongly nudged to read it again, which I did throughout the day in the pleasant comfort of our front deck; and this morning I was called to read My Belief, essays on life and art also by Hermann Hesse, which I had read two or three times already, and only upon reading the introduction again did I make the connection with Hesse and the idea for my spiritual musing on the essence of cool, and I had to smile at the remarkable “inspired” coincidence.

I had highlighted one more passage in David Brooks’s article, a single sentence that summed up what I felt to be the essential quality of a cool person, which popped into my mind while reading the introduction to My Belief, and I knew instantly why I was called to re-acquaint myself with the writer I had read many years ago while on my own spiritual quest like Hermann Hesse. The sentence that I highlighted said it all: “The cool person is guided by his or her own autonomous values, often on the outskirts of society.”

That was Hermann Hesse, a man guided by his own autonomous values and on the edge of society, a definition which, at the risk of sounding immodest, applied to me no less than Hermann Hesse, because my whole life I’ve always lived by my own guiding inner light which set me apart from everyone; so, there it was then, my reason for being called to write a short spiritual musing on cool—to demystify the je ne sais quoi of this elusive quality.

In truth, I already have a gnostic awareness of what constitutes the essence of cool; but it would be presumptuous to state this up front without providing the context that gave birth to my realization of this alluring character trait, because it’s in the context of my own quest for my true self that pulled Hermann Hesse into my life with his book Journey to the East first and then his novel Magister Ludi, also known as The Glass Bead Game.

I had already highlighted the passage, in yellow this time, but it jumped out at me again as I read the introduction to My Belief this morning: “Hesse maintains that the idea of the underlying unity of all being is a synthesis that can be achieved only through a reconciliation of conflicting opposites. This dialectical process shows up over and over again in Hesse’s novels.” This passage speaks to what C. G. Jung called the “individuation process,” the founding premise of his psychology (it can’t be a coincidence that Hermann Hesse underwent Jungian therapy during his most trying period); but not until one learns how to reconcile the conflicting opposites of their personality can one achieve what Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self.” That’s why Hesse became a cult figure for the mind-expanding, paradigm shifting counterculture movement of the mid-1960s, because his novels spoke to the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness.

Hesse’s best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946; and it was his search for a way to synthesize the conflicting opposite aspects of one’s ego/shadow personality that preoccupied both Jung and Hesse their whole life.

This is the context that awakened me to the secret way of life that both Jung and Hesse had become aware of, which Miguel Serrano alludes to in his short memoir C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse, A Record of Two Friendships; and like Jung and Hesse, I came to the same realization that self-reconciliation is the only way to one’s true self, and I embarked upon this perilous journey to authenticity that essentially makes a person cool.

In short, the more true one is to oneself, the more cool one will be; but it wouldn’t be cool to reveal this, and that’s the irony of being cool.

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