No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Even if you find the compacted words
and tortuous sentences difficult to understand, you will grasp that this poem
is a cry of extreme mental anguish. The poet's own pain extends to include all
the suffering in the universe, the 'world-sorrow' that holds every living
creature in its vice. If happiness is random (see Happiness, my post for December 2013), suffering is not particular
either, and is more certain. Every one of us goes through its wringer at some
time.
The mind that can conceive of great
things, like mountains and heavens, also plunges us the other way, into the abyss.
Stories of Satan's fall from heaven into the hell of perpetual rejection, of Adam
and Eve's original Fall from Grace and expulsion from paradise, are metaphors
for profound emotional distress when whatever you thought was holding you up or
holding you together turns out to be not there, or not enough.
The poem hints at an even more
ancient story: of Prometheus, who knew what it was to hang staring into the
depths of suffering. Prometheus is chained to a mountainside as a punishment by
the gods. Every day an eagle comes to tear out and eat his liver, which is nightly renewed so that the torture
can begin again the next day. 'In ancient Greece, the
liver was thought to be the seat of human emotions,' Wikipedia tells us, and
the image of an eagle ripping into our innards is an apt one for expressing our
experience of inner suffering. When we are in great emotional pain, we feel
almost physically tortured, or as if literally hammered on that ancient anvil.
All the cheery business of life and stream of distractions that serve to keep
our lives bobbing along, all the wonders and beauties of the world that we tell
ourselves should make us grateful and happy, cannot save us from those moments
when we see past them into the pit of futility, shame, helplessness, loneliness.
A
Course in Miracles echoes Manley Hopkins in its perception of our lives as
essentially painful. It is not among those religions and philosophies which
urge us to look at the marvels of the universe and rejoice. It would have us
see that our efforts to 'look on the bright side' and to 'think positively' only
postpone true awareness; much as the father of the Buddha built walls around
his paradise palace gardens to shield his son from all knowledge of poverty, sickness,
old age and death. Look, the Course
tells us, look, as the Buddha did, and see what the mind has made. Until we accept
the power of our minds to create our experience, we will not realise our power
to choose again.
At least, the poet observes, there
is a limit to suffering. We can endure only so much. It may be 'fell', devastating,
while it lasts, but pain must either ease eventually, or kill us. The Course,
too, says that suffering must finally extinguish itself. Tolerance for pain may be high, but it is not without limit. Eventually
everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way. As this recognition becomes
more firmly established, it becomes a turning point (T2 III 3).
This phrase without
limit recurs frequently throughout the Course. Truth, love and joy are
without limit in their nature and their effects, and there is always room for
more patience, more trust, more forgiveness. But pain is, in every sense, a
dead end.
So is the poet's despairing
conclusion. He admits it is a wretched cop-out, but when our appeals to symbols
of spiritual help and guidance, such as the Comforter (Holy Spirit) and Mary, or
whatever God you pray to, are met by the silence of an indifferent universe, the only comfort we can hope for are moments
of blackout when we sleep, and when we finally die.
But the Course dismisses the tempting idea that death, or
sleep, or any retreat into denial and unconsciousness, offers anything more
than the illusion of escape: There is a risk
of thinking death is peace... death is opposite to peace, because it is the
opposite of life. And life is peace (T27 VII 10.2).
'Life' here does not refer to physical
life, but to the indestructible life of the spirit. When the mind is directed
by the spirit, it is in a state of peace, it is fully alive and well. It is not
torn between opposites, it does not swing between extremes, it knows neither
mountains nor pits. Peace, truth, love are everywhere at once; there is nowhere
to aspire to or fall from. Real freedom for Prometheus - that is, for each one
of us - does not depend on the whim of the gods, but on his own change of mind.
When he wakes to the realisation that his whole story of defiance of the gods,
of individual heroism, of prolonged and repeated agony, and even his eventual
reprieve, is just that, a story, a way of seeing, a dream of suffering, a
construction in the mind in which he is at once the god, the victim, the eagle
- then his imagined chains can fall away.
How
else can you find joy in a joyless place except by realizing that you are not
there?(T6 II 6).
Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, and the Course too uses
Christian language, but the radical difference between the teachings of
Christianity and of the Course is this emphasis on the psychological. Pain is
not punishment, except in the sense that it is a form of self-inflicted
punishment, of the mind, by the mind. It is an effect of the divided perception
that sees you as other than me, this as different from that, conscious as apart
from unconscious. Pain in any form is the pain of loss, a reminder of our lost
completeness. There is no Comforter who can step in and make all well. The
Comfort is that individually and collectively we can at times step out of the perceptions that are causing
us pain, until we can see again, with a whole vision. The mind can move
mountains, because the mind put them there.
...Which amounts to our purpose in this life. Next workshop, Your Special Purpose, Saturday 1st March 2014. See details under Workshops, also on www.annapowell.com.
