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Heroes of Spiritualism John Bedell 1. Iseult's Letters I have just stumbled across review of a little historical oddity, a collection of the letters of Iseult Gonne, and since I read it I have not been able to stop thinking. Iseult was the daughter of Maud Gonne, famous Irish nationalist and the great, unrequited love of W.B. Yeats. Iseult's life was haunted from the very beginning: she was conceived at the marble tomb of her dead brother because her mother thought that this way she could give birth to the reincarnation of her dead child. The father was Maud's French lover, cast aside not long afterward. The child grew up amid her mother's social circle, a group of nationalist agitators, artists, and spiritual questers always pursuing new forms of expression and new ways of approaching the divine. She wanted to be an artist but had no real talent, so she drifted through her youth as a hanger-on of artists and a minor presence at seances. She was Ezra Pound's lover, and Yeats proposed to her twice. She eventually married Francis Stuart, a now-forgotten poet, but in 1939 he decided that Nazism was the political expression of eastern spirituality and went off to Germany to help the fascist cause. Iseult retired to an English country house where she ruled over a dwindling circle of admirers, except for the two years she spent in prison for helping German spies. Iseult's story is fascinating in its own right, but it gains a deeper
meaning for me because of her connections with Irish nationalism,
spiritualism, and Yeats. Yeats is my favorite poet. I
can recite hundreds of his lines, from "I will arise and go now, and
go to Inisfree" to "Under bare Ben Bulben's head in Drumcliff churchyard
Yeats is laid." I love the singing rhythms, the words that flow
like water. But I also love Yeats because in his poetry I can be
moved by spiritual insights that I find hard to take in bald prose.
What does it mean? I'm not sure that I can put in simpler
words what it says to me--that death is not just an ending, that we are more
than flesh, that humanity has created something together that is more than
any one of us and lives on beyond any individual life. It speaks to
me of hope, and permanence. As a person with spiritual longings who
can't endure any organized church, I find a power in these verses that comes
as close to religion as almost anything in my life. And yet Yeats, one must admit, was a bit of a nut. He used
spirit mediums to contact the ancient Irish gods. He belonged
to several different spiritual societies--the theosophists, the Order
of the Golden Dawn, the Rosicrucians, and the Dublin Hermetic Society--not
seeming to care that the professed beliefs of these orders contradicted
both each other and other things he claimed to believe. He laid
out one version of his personal philosophy in a strange work he called
The Vision, which I have found impossible to read, let alone
understand. Ezra Pound called it "absolute rot." If he were
not such a great artist, most of us would dismiss him as a crank. Is there a way to reach the place of meaning and beauty that inspired
Yeats' art without succumbing to his occult obsessions, his mad eclecticism,
his complete indifference to logic, his airy contempt for the notion
of "truth"? I wonder, and so I write out my musings here. 2. Nationalism Yeats and his friends were nationalists as well as spiritualists.
To me these interests are connected, and my response to occult
spiritualism is colored in some ways by the politics of its practitioners.
I find nationalism to be an especially troublesome expression of unreason.
To me nothing is more stirring than Irish revolutionary music, and
the rhetoric of freedom touches something very deep in me. But
the line between patriotism and savage tribalism is hard to draw, and
the one can easily slide into the other, as the Irish revolution slid into
decades of hatred and terrorism. The wars of nations have been by
far our deadliest. What is a nation anyway, and what does it mean
for a nation to be free? In the case of Ireland, where most of the
people did want independence from Britain, there is surely something to
it, but the usual situation is much more muddled. For some reason
I have never been able to fathom, the United States supported the independence
of Croatia from Yugoslavia but not the independence of the Serbian part
of Croatia; why does one deserve to be free but not the other? I believe that freedom is a concept we should apply to people,
not nations, and that human rights are more important than national liberation.
All too often, wars of liberation have led only to oppression by native
tyrants instead of foreigners. Yet the songs and stories of revolution
move me, and I hold to that feeling. I love to read about the
American Revolution and the Civil War, to ride with Paul Revere, to
converse with Benjamin Franklin, to stand with the Minute Men at Lexington
and the 20th Maine at Gettysburg. There must be a kind of patriotism
that holds its country to the highest standards; that is built from love
of home, not from hatred of enemies; that provides us with a solid base
for understanding the wider world rather than blinding us with provincial
scorn. Even though I fear and scorn the excesses of nationalism, I
love my country, and I derive great solace from our shared stories, symbols,
and dreams. A nation exists when enough people believe that it exists, and it
operates through the expectations and beliefs of its citizens. We
will our countries into existence. Yeats and his friends were
not the only nationalists with distinctly unpractical outlooks; many
modern nations were created by dreamers and prophets. A nation is
both a bureaucratic reality and a spiritual entity. The political
realm is a place where what people imagine can become real, where how people
feel about something can determine whether it exists or not. If enough
people believe themselves to be a nation, they can make their beliefs true.
There is something hopeful and empowering in this realization. And
yet, the dismal results wrought by some of the ideas that have gotten loose
in the modern world should caution us that our beliefs can have real and
terrible consequences. Perhaps the trenches of Verdun and the smoking
craters left by suicide bombers should make us careful about what we believe. 3. Fascism In the 1920s and 1930s, spurred on in some mysterious way by the immense slaughter of World War I, European nationalism mutated into fascism. Fascism is essentially militant nationalism elevated to a mystical plane, or a feverish pitch. Its advocates sought to harness the full power of human emotion and energy for the advancement of the state, especially the powerful impulses of brutality, sexuality, and spirituality. A fascist identified entirely with his nation, its tradition, and its leaders, loved its friends, hated its enemies, celebrated its victories and mourned it defeats no matter how long past. Yeats himself was not especially interested in fascism, but in this he was somewhat unusual for his circle. Not just Pound and Francis Stuart but many other people who shared their interests ended up on the Nazi side during World War II. Julius Evola, the Italian "traditionalist" much admired by Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and other fathers of mythical spiritualism, was an ardent fascist who scorned all talk of liberty or democracy. Some of my favorite German historians, the ones interested in peasant religion, Indo-European myth, and the ancient roots of medieval culture, were fanatical Nazis. People with my historical, artistic, and spritiual interests, I have to admit, were strongly drawn to fascism, and that sometimes gives me pause. If I feel ambivalent about nationalism, I hate fascism. I
hate the exaltation of the nation over the individual, the crude dismissal
of all pleas for rights, the worship of violent action. "Let us," said
Mussolini, "have a bomb in our hands, a dagger in our teeth,and
infinite scorn in our hearts." And yet I have to admit that modern
liberal beliefs cut us off from much that I find beautiful in Europe's
ancient heritage. War and nobility have been woven together for
millenia, and many of our ancestors would have trouble even imagining a
secular society. Freedom of religion, which I cherish, destroys the
religion of the community. We may have the right to think whatever
we want, but we will never know the joy of seeing our whole neighborhood
join in a ritual to honor God together. As free individuals, we belong
to nothing. Fascism provided its adherents with an identity, a purpose,
something to belong to much bigger than themselves. By promoting war
and genocidal hatred of outsiders, fascism worked great evil in the world,
but a fascist's life did have something that mine lacks. 4. Learning and Feeling As I think about Yeats and his circle, I run these themes around
each other, braiding and knotting them and then separating them again:
nationalism, fascism, the beauty of art, occult obscurity, the pursuit
of spiritual light. How, I ask myself, does one seek spiritual
understanding without either bowing to the dictates of some authoritarian
church or becoming the kind of person who can't distinguish between Nazism
and yoga? The horrors wrought by fascism, communism, and other theoretical
systems say something to me about the necessity of staying grounded in
the real, of not letting ideas carry us away from what we know to be so,
and know to be right. How can a rational person with a commitment to truth and sanity seek
an experience of the divine? To begin with I suppose I should say something about what I mean
by the spiritual. It was Aristotle who remarked, about the Eleusinian
mysteries, that people did not attend them to learn something, but
to feel something. I take my start from this text. The intellectual
path is rooted in knowing, the spiritual path in feeling. To explore
the spiritual is to seek a sense of the world and our place in it beyond
the bare facts of our existence. The mind investigates the world,
but faith incorporates our understanding into our souls. I do not mean by this that a spiritual approach means believing
what makes us feel good, or what we feel to be right. We can, perhaps,
change the rules of politics or the structure of our societies through
our efforts, but I do not think we can change the laws of physics or the
structure of the atom. Certainly our knowledge is very limited and our ignorance
vast, but there are things we do know and do understand. Living things evolve whether
you like the idea or not; walking on hot coals is a stunt, and levitation
is impossible, no matter how enlightened you are; there is a world
out there, and it is a certain way. Yet
there are important ways in which we do shape our world. Politics is one, but
not the only one. Even more important is what happens inside us.
We live in our minds, and our inner lives we can, to some
extent, shape to our liking. Whatever the world is like, how we
perceive it and how we feel about it are at least as important to us.
Within our thoughts and feelings we do shape the world. We do
understand through symbols and metaphors; we can choose what some
things are to us. The realm of relationships is very much about
how we perceive things and what we feel, and relationships define our
world as much as physics does. Not just nations but friendship,
love affairs, and marriages are things we imagine. We make them
real, experience them, and destroy them entirely within our minds. When it comes to what we sometimes call the big question, I think
the spiritual has less to do with what we believe than how we feel about
what we know and believe. Cosmology and quantum physics are our
best guide to what the universe it, but what should we do with the information
they provide? To contemplate the immensity of the universe in space
and time, and how insignificant our little lives are to the whole pageant,
fills some of us with awe and others with despair. It is a spiritual
approach that helps us understand which is right for us. Reason can sort
our what we are, but only faith can teach us whether we matter. 5. The Rational Spiritualist I am by nature a rational, skeptical person, and I delight in dismantling
the fabrications of untruth. I love to feel my brain working,
to study the world, to analyze, to comprehend. I have enormous respect
for the powers of the human intellect, and I think our science is one
of our most glorious and beautiful achievements. To me, though, the world of intellect is not enough. It does
not answer the questions of meaning and purpose; it cannot tell us
how to live, or why to live at all. Our secular art is a shabby
scarecrow compared to the art made by earlier ages to exalt the divine
and probe the demonic. To me, that says something about the role
of spiritual understanding in human life. Yeats, the mad prophet
of pseudo-philosophical nonsense, gave more beauty to the world than any
of the millions of sensible writers who have lived since then. Science
tells us much of the biochemistry of sex but little of the part we should
give to love in our lives; evolutionary theory can lay out the mathematics
of kin selection but not explain what kind of loyalty we owe our friends
or help us find right mixture of patriotism toward our nations and mistrust
toward our governments. As I said, I cannot tolerate organized religion, because to be
handed answers only provokes my skepticism. That leaves me searching
for my own answers, along a path I clear largely by myself through
dense thickets of confusion, worry, and doubt. As I seek my own
understanding, I think about risks involved. I worry about being
ridiculous, about losing my grounding in what we know about the world,
about being suckered by sweet words, about giving up my independence
of thought and the free working of my mind. I want to find a way
to relate to nature and to history that does not distort the truth of either.
I want to understand the important relationships in my life in ways
that uplift me while staying true to who I and my friends are and to what
we want and need. I want to be a loyal citizen of my country but
also a good citizen of the world. I want to feel that I have a place
in universe, in my community, in my own family. I want to know who
I am and to feel satisfied with that knowing. I want to explore both
the world of things and the realms of feeling, to be a person of good sense
and mystical enthusiasm. Perhaps I am asking too much; perhaps I
will never find any satisfactory answers. Yet I have no trouble
enjoying Gothic art and paleontology, physics and symbolist poetry, Leonardo
and Richard Feynman, and so far I am enjoying my attempts both to learn
about the world and to transcend what I know. Can I ask for anything
else? September, 2004 The Spirituality Quiz John Bedell Just when you think you might be inventing problems and not giving
the world enough credit, along comes Time magazine to remind you
that things are every bit as bad as you feared. This week their cover
story is "The God Gene," and the whole section is full of nonsense, silliness,
and insults, reminding me of why I feel so alienated from the spirituality
industry. I particularly scorn a quiz titled "How Spiritual Are You?"
This little item fits perfectly with the theme of my latest essay,
because it assumes that you can't be spiritual without being some kind of
New Age flake. There are twenty statements you are supposed to mark
True or False, including: October 23, 2004 |
From
the Commonplace Book Be you still, be you still, trembling heart; --W.B Yeats Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that
imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive.
Departments Thoughts
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