The Starlight Ballroom

With a subtlety
bordering on flagrancy,
every outer contour
of awareness
opens to the great dance.

So many strive
against conformity
by conforming;
proclaiming their uniqueness,
they spiral inwardly toward implosion.

Can you keep a secret?

This world of light and dark,
of beauties seen and unseen,
does not feel any dominion we claim,
and only just tolerates our presence.

In ever expanding waves of motion,
patterns weave an imperfect math,
advancing the latest musical form,
one poised to rend the fabric of time
and make everything new.

Given the choice,
I would rather unravel
into starlit dance.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

The Very Latest in Death and Nostalgia

I know exactly where I was when I found out Robin Williams was dead. I was at home, having just posted on Facebook. Another friend had just heard about it on the news and posted what she had heard. Seconds later, Robin Williams’ death was “virally trending.”

I was hit hard by this news, and I know many people were, nationally and internationally, but particularly in California and especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Mr. Williams was raised and where he honed is incredible talent. This news was on the heels of other celebrity deaths, and followed by other celebrity deaths, as well as the shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, MO.

All in all, it was a very depressing week. Everything in social media filled a spectrum from “death and depression” to “cute animals” to “don’t judge what you don’t understand.” The newspapers were not far behind that mode of “trending,” focusing on failures of all sorts (building failures, political failures, police failures; in short, failures of judgment in all forms).

When I went to the grocery store, I could not help but notice that the magazine racks were filled with retrospective magazines on Elvis Presley (died, August 16, 1977), Jerry Garcia (died August 9, 1995), Bob Hope (died July 27, 2003), Princess Diana (died August 31, 1997) and others. Robin Williams will be the next honoree of one of these, I am sure. And I have to say, this is very sad. We loved these people who led very public lives, but the inability of our culture to let go after celebrities have died is really unhealthy.

We are being manipulated by this constant parade of celebrity deaths, and we don’t even realize it. If you think about just those stars listed above, you realize that most people 14 years old and younger have no idea who those people are, don’t know their contributions to culture, and what’s more, aren’t interested in finding out. Why should they?

But for those of us who do know and remember these people, the fact of their mortality is a reminder to us of our own.

Friedrich Nietzsche posited that our harboring of nostalgia is a way of using the past to forge an idea of the future. Never mind that any nostalgic view of the past is utterly inaccurate and could never pass muster today, much less be put to work tomorrow.

“But wait!” as the young set says, “that is exactly what is happening!” And, to a great extent, it is true. Nietzsche would be railing against the same things, if he were alive today, as in those years when he was alive and his thought was in full flower. And that is very, very sad, indeed.

What most people don’t realize is this is a psychological and philosophical condition, called by Nietzsche ressentiment. The condition is characterized by defeatist feelings, cynical attitudes, belief that institutions and individuals are hostile and indifferent; this condition results in expressions of fundamentalism on all levels, as if returning to a mythical past, characterized by either extreme authoritarianism or anarchy, would be the solution to every problem.

Look at the unrest in our world. You can see it in every tabloid, not to mention in the more legitimate news media. Celebrity wars. Male culture bashing female culture. Heterosexual culture bashing homosexual culture. Race wars, religion wars, wars of greed and ambition, ad hominem wars of indifference and stupidity are being waged all day, everyday, everywhere. We say to our dead heroes, “rest in peace,” while fervently praying for a peace we cannot hope to achieve on this planet while we are in the grips of ressentiment, where every gesture is negatively judged, where the innocent are blamed for the bad things that happen to them, where corruption seems to trump all those human values we claim to uphold, where we decide to join ghettos, rather than learn to live with in harmony others and the environment, so that we can get together to solve real problems.

When I see on Facebook side-by-side images of Hitler and a liberal politician, with nearly matching quotes, I think, wow! This is really sick! Can the person who shared this really believe the sum of that life is equal to the sum of this one?

Not only is it crude. Not only is it simplistic. It is malevolent. Unfortunately, I think some of the people who post these things really do believe them; some are highly educated people, but they are frustrated by something they cannot even properly articulate. There is a festering of impotent rage in our generation, and to a great degree this rage is an inherited legacy. “Teach your children well” to some people meant passing on a rageaholic culture of negativity to the next generation. As Nietzsche pointed out, this is an individual’s act of revenge upon society.

Having grown up among people who were trying to make the world a better place, one that is color-blind, equitable, and harmonious, I must admit this is disillusioning and disappointing. What kind of a world have I brought my children into? What sort of people are these that build a life and behave in it such that machines and money mean more than the lives of people?

The media that daily pumps out such negative drivel exists to bring us down, to keep us cowed, to amaze us with our own stupidity, to get us all fighting with each other. That must be the intent, otherwise, why publish it? If we are all fighting with one another, then it is easy to bring out the guns and fill up the prisons, is it not?

Faith is an empty word unless it leads people to build a temple to Love, inhabited by people performing good deeds and working at breaking down barriers, to nurture and feed the hungry, to employ the willing and able, to build people (all people) up to something better than what the past offered. I don’t know much, but I am sure we cannot rest in peace until we conquer our natural tendency to self-destruction. We cannot honor the dead when we are such a tortured mess of ambivalence and misanthropy that we cannot honor the living by doing right by them.

I see the very latest in the world of death and nostalgia, and I do not like it. It makes me feel shame for the whole human race. I do not want to go down that path—for the way is down, indeed.

I hope you feel the same way. I hope you will add yourself to movement and uprising. It could be that I mean “a movement” or “an uprising” – but what I am saying is do not go down. Go up, and bring someone along with you! Let us all rise to our very best potential, however we can. That is honestly the only way to honor the experience of life and all the wonderful people that have lived it.

I and Thou

So slow, aye, so slow, I,
plodding the repetition of my path;
nearly weightless, you wait much less,
zipping from branch to branch,
calling with a flick and a click,
until, at this very moment, that
until now, you slowed to hover,
level with my eyes, to gaze,
level, within our space.

Locking eyes, at this moment,
‘tis a case of I and Thou;
but so briefly synchronous,
then quickly out of phase, once more;
a moment of unexpected depth.

What you saw in me,
I hope you could enjoy;
I so liked what I saw in you!

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Note to readers: Have you ever locked eyes with a hummingbird?

Well, this happened in my life, on June 29^th of this year, and I have been trying to find a way to write about it, ever since. Such a small happening, fleeting. But it was unexpectedly profound. I may write more about it, but this is what comes to me now.

It reminded me of the work of Martin Buber, of his book, "I and Thou", which has had such an influence in the growth of my philosophical self-- hence, the poem's title.

Sonnet on a Poem by Ch'iu Wei

To this place, at the mountaintop,
have I climbed, in search of you and of truth;
my knock at the door echoes without stop.
Table and hearth are revealed in the booth,
but your presence is lacking, forsooth;
perhaps you fish the pools of the river.
In vain have I called on you, so uncouth

my need to know, guised to deliver

greeting. Instead, visited by shiver

of fresh rain on grass and murmuring pines,

thus I breathe in peace, sliver on sliver,

‘til purified, cleansed, emptied of designs.

Descending your mountain, light on my feet,

I know I’ve been met, and now am replete.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

A note to readers:

This sonnet is the result of an experiment. A hyperactive reader, I far too often (for the sake of my pocketbook) find myself in bookstores. I particularly like secondhand shops, as there are treasures to be found that are no longer in print; many of these are unlikely to ever be reprinted. One such treasure, a recent find, is a Chinese/English printing, entitled (in Chinese and English) “Three Hundred Poems of the Tong Dynasty.” It is a trade paper, sewn edition. Because I cannot read Chinese, neither do know the publication information or year, or the name of the translator(s). The only clue I have as to the book’s origin is the book seller’s stamp in the back of the volume: Hansan Trading Company, 28 Pell Street, New York, NY 10013; This business no longer exists.  

While waiting for my dental appointment to begin, I opened the book and started reading. One poem, not very far in, struck my eye. Thematically, the poem represents so much of what I feel life is like and about, for me and for many others: A trip through the wilderness, in search of answers.

This is the poem, as translated (by Witter Bynner, I later discover) in the Hansan Trading Company book:

After Missing the Recluse on the Western Mountain

To your hermitage here on the top of the mountain
I have climbed, without stopping, these ten miles,
I have knocked at your door, and no one answered;
I have peeped into your room, at your seat beside the table.
Perhaps you are out riding in your canopied chair,
Or fishing, more likely, in some autumn pool.
Sorry though I am to be missing you,
You have become my meditation—
The beauty of your grasses, fresh with rain,
And close beside your window the music of your pines.
I take into my being all that I see and hear,
Soothing my senses, quieting my heart;
And though there be neither host nor guest,
Have I not reasoned a visit complete?
After enough, I have gone down the mountain.
Why should I wait for you any longer?

Digging around on the internet, I found this translation by Mike O’Connor (at https://www.unf.edu/mudlark/mudlark07/recluse.html):

On Failing to Meet the Recluse of West Peak

On the mountain top: 

one thatched hut,

thirty li 

from nowhere.

Knock on the door: 

no servant to answer.

Look in: 

only a table for tea.

The firewood cart 

is covered;

have you gone fishing 

in the autumn stream?

I looked among the pools, 

but missed you;

wanting to pay my respects,

they must go unexpressed.

Grass shines 

in the fresh rain;

pines murmur 

at evening windows.

Here, at this moment, 

a harmony deep and unrivaled;

the self completely cleansed, 

the heart, the ear.

Although there is no 

guest and host precisely,

I'm able to intuit 

your pure thought.

Purpose fulfilled, 

I head back down the mountain;

what need now 

to wait for you?

Looking further into the matter, I find out that this book is an iteration of the classic collection of poems from the Tang Dynasty (618–907), first compiled in the Qing Dynasty by the scholar Sun Zhu, around the year 1763. Ch’iu Wei or Qiu Wei or 邱為 lived from 694 to around 789, and his work is represented in this anthology by this single poem. The poem was written in a form known as five character old style or Gushi. I will leave you to investigate the form on your own.

While I was having my teeth cleaned, I was rolling this poem around in my mind, and I wondered if I could take this material, which had been translated into free verse, and work it into at least somewhat of a metrical setting. I don’t know why I selected the sonnet form—perhaps because the way the poem is presented in Chinese is in groupings of five characters.

As to the success or failure of my experiment, that is up to you.

The Rose and The Ladybug

The rose,
past its budding,
past its blush,
starting to wither and such,
yet still luscious of bouquet.

The hand,
wielding power,
wielding shears,
with intent to cleave and clear,
clipped the rose at its stem.

Raised it,
with its fading colors,
the fading bloom,
for a final salutary sniff,
a last draft of heavenly perfume.

A look,
within the drying folds,
within still silken folds,
unexpectedly revealed a nest
for a green ladybug.

For rest,
whilst seeking a cosy place,
seeking a haven safe,
a rose might be a handy spot
to stop for the night.

Sun touched,
awakened, the ladybug rose,
awakened, out she crawled,
this ladybug, lately rose tenant,
to greet the day.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Not Trinitarian, But Devoted to Trinity

In the calendar of the greater Christian Church, this past Sunday was Trinity Sunday.

I am not Trinitarian, and I personally believe the doctrine of the Trinity to be heretical, scripturally unsupported and socially destructive.

I won’t spend a great deal of time on this; for most people, this comes under the heading “churchy, boring, and who cares?” I mention it because I care.

I do not have much in the way of scholarly authority, but I do know that the notion of Trinity hangs on one slim line of scriptural text, Matthew 28:19: Go ye, therefore, and instruct all nations; and baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. There has been a great deal of argument, in recent years as to whether this sentence is spurious or genuine. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that baptism as recorded in “The Acts of the Apostles” isn’t described in a way that matches with the description in Matthew. It seems obvious that things happened one or more ways in the beginnings of the early church, after which changes were adopted then for some reason, helped along by the zeal to establish an orthodoxy of practice.

There are triads all over the place in mythology and in many other cultural manifestations. The formula of “thought, word and deed” appears in Christianity by way of Judaism from Zoroastrianism. Three is a magical and a basic number, and I have no argument against the loveliness of three.

However, what I find offensive about the Christian idea of Trinity, as it comes to us today, is how it treats the feminine aspect in the world.

For me, three is the number that defines the basic family formula: Father, Mother, Child. Even in this modern era of wonderful families of two moms with a child or two dads with a child, it is still true that the only way for most kinds of children to arrive is by means of a fertile male component mingling with a fertile female component.

The oldest versions of words for Spirit or Wisdom are feminine. Ruaḥ is the Hebrew word for spirit (and Hokmah is the Hebrew word for wisdom; Shekinah is the Aramaic word for presence). Ruaḥ was translated into Greek as Pneuma, a neutral gender form, and the Vulgate has translated that into the Latin word Spiritus, which is masculine.

Just the other day, I wrote, in an Introduction to a collection of poems, “The more basic truth about words is that their accumulation constitutes the collective memory of our species, for better and for worse.” What I meant by that is that meanings and contexts can be and are lost through the avenues of translation. In terms of scriptural devices, the Trinitarian formula is invoked to make Yeshua into a super divine being, rather than a spiritually aware human. I’ll come clean and say I don’t think that is what Yeshua was about—Yeshua believed in YHWH, above all. Yeshua also believed that YHWH expected each person to respect, uphold and serve the holiness in every other person.

The Christian Religion has done a lot to ignore the recorded example of what Yeshua did during his ministry, opting to go its own way with generations of dogmatic hogwash and contradictory or even demeaning doctrine and theology, all of which has resulted in so much injustice and bloodshed. Indeed, most people who claim to be followers of Yeshua have no idea how many people were killed so that they can be materialist snobs, follow the ravings of ideologues, and revere commercialism during the Christmas season.

Getting back to that three-in-one idea, I have to say that I’ve never heard a single sermon on Trinity that has ever seemed anything but completely lame. But, we have to swear to it, because that is what came out of the Council of Nicea (in the year 325); a loyalty oath that was intended to build consensus throughout the church.

I’ll be honest and say that the only scripturally supported Trinity I can get behind is the one that Yeshua spoke as first clause of the Great Commandment: “Love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind.” The second clause is equated with the first: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Returning to an earlier thread, you might ask why I quibble over the translation of Ruaḥ? It is because I look around me and see that the feminine has been written out of the picture in exchange for a purely patriarchal understanding and mode of operation. I know that it just happened that way… one language was more masculine than the other when it came to matters of spirit. But I also know that men try to own spirituality. Men cannot own spirituality, but they try to do so.

Yeshua was for people, male and female; conversely, the church seems all about sacerdotal hierarchy, which is dominated by males. Not only true of Christian denominations, this seems to be a global enterprise. Even in this modern era, women pushed out of the picture, as much and as far as possible. Daily, I read about women being assaulted, cheated, kidnapped, denigrated, trafficked, enslaved and murdered. Hundreds of girls are kidnapped from their school! Who is doing these things? Some men are doing them. Societies, the world over, have allowed women to be treated as inferiors and as objects by some men. With the exception of a token few, women are not allowed to be identified as holy. And this priestly business has turned out so well, hasn’t it? The terms episcopoi, presbuteroi, diakonoi mean (respectively) overseer, elder and servant; these titles do not automatically imply priesthood at all, but a role in community rule.

But again I digress. Perhaps my meandering thoughts are no better than any sermon you have heard on the doctrine of Trinity, if you have heard any.

In the creation story that I read for our congregation, it says very plainly “male and female, He created them… God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” For me, this is the essence of what it is to follow the example of Yeshua: we must acknowledge that every being in this world is good, and we must respect, uphold and serve this truth with our actions. 

If there is a Trinity that must be respected, served and upheld, there is no mystery about what it is and what it means—it is the family unit: parent, parent, child. Everyone is both a parent and a child, worthy and beautiful: male and female, however they identify.

Peace be to you.

Meditations in Fast Times: Introduction

“Meditations in Fast Times” was a devotional writing experiment I took up for the Season of Lent in the year 2014. Each day during the season, I wrote a poem as a meditation, using as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing this seminal work and other writing.

The truth about words is that they accumulate through time, first in the mind, then as markings on clay tablets, then on papyrus, palm leaves, amalgamations of plant fibers, parchment, vellum, then wood pulp. Words fill scrolls, palimpsests, books, and electronic storage units. The more basic truth about words is that their accumulation constitutes the collective memory of our species, for better and for worse. To the extent that we collect and care for our accumulations of words, they are our children. Words are also ancestors, parents and teachers to us; we interact with words in our nightly dreams and in our daily lives, we share words with one another. Words do not live by themselves; they live because someone remembers them, references them, ponders them, speaks them, exchanges them, agrees with them and lives by them, or disagrees and rearranges them to something that could be lived by in a proper context.

This last notion is vitally important, particularly in this “digital media era”, in which ownership of words (and everything else), is constantly at issue. Perhaps the most difficult aspect toward an understanding about accumulations of words is that they can constitute unique thoughts, in certain situations, while in others what they express is universal. Day by day, there are people who want to challenge the notion that one’s innermost thoughts are private. There are people who want to own the publically expressed thoughts of people long dead, and to have control over them. This is a deadly impulse. “My thoughts are not your thoughts; my ways are not your ways”, yet we should be able to freely exchange ideas and to have these influence our range of ideas and thinking in a communal way. There is a real threat that ideas will disappear from the landscape of information available to the average person, and this goes against everything for which the Encyclopédistes and founders of public libraries stand, when it comes to literacy, politics and social integrity.

Although the ownership and control of ideas is a philosophical position that has economic and social implications too deep to explore in this introduction, I will venture to posit that words and their accumulation are so fluid that it is impossible to own and control them the way some people would like. The accumulations of all expressed, notated and stored thoughts have, to some extent, made us into the people we are, now or at any given moment. The way in which a person thinks is a direct result of the words that have been passed on to the individual, throughout a lifetime of parental and societal nurture, combined with personal and highly individual exploration.

All words lead to all other words. One book is never enough—to read one is to be led to read another, if not ten or a thousand. It is very possible that I have, between what is inside my home and garage, a few thousand books. I may not have read them all (indeed, quite a lot are dry instructional manuals), but I have certainly consulted most of them, and the presence of each volume is an indication that I intended to read it, or it was given to me as a gift. Actually, all the books have been a gift; each is a gift of time and effort and thought someone else put into a printed accumulation of words. Literature is the fluid legacy of all thought throughout time.

T.S. Eliot understood this about the legacy of literature, and in his various writings sought to interact with the legacy, as well as put his own imprint on it, even to the extent of exerting a deliberate social influence on the intelligentsia of his time, through his writing, teaching and publishing activities. In particular, his poetry is an intertextual exploration and internal thought exercise. His writing is clearly infused with the ideas that came from a lifetime of reading, and his work references, mostly consciously—although perhaps also unconsciously—other writing and ideas that he experienced and admired.

For my own intertextual experiment, I used T.S. Eliot’s “The Four Quartets” as my primary source, secondarily considering current events from the newspaper and other literature that came to mind as I meditated on passages from Eliot’s seminal work.

The technique I used may be similar to the technique Eliot used, although he never described it. The first step for me was to take a copy of “Four Quartets” and annotate it with what I guessed to be source materials for bits of his text. (Of course, I had read all the texts that I associated with Eliot’s passages, which is why they would come to mind!) I also consulted the “Annotations to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets” by Servotte and Grene (iUniverse, 2010), Eliot’s “The Sacred Wood; essays on poetry and criticism” (Barnes and Noble University Paperbacks, 1966), “T.S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets” by John Xiros Cooper (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Helen Gardner’s excellent study, “The Composition of Four Quartets” (Faber and Faber, 1978), a work that is rather difficult to find, but a copy of which now rests on one of my shelves at home.

Reading the scriptural texts from the daily office, I would hit upon one that resonated with a passage from “Four Quartets”, and the meditations on those passages, often with reference also to an item from the daily newspaper, resulted in the forty poems that follow. I also annotated my own work, so that anyone reading it might know what ideas I had included in my thinking. Taken together, this collected work constitutes a species of dialectical journal, as well as a spiritual exercise.

Elisabeth T. Eliassen
14 June 2014
Alameda, CA 

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To see the first of the 40 poems see this link, and work your way forward through all 40, if you are interested!

http://songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com/2014_03_05_archive.html