Tag Archives: being

Boredom, the guide to mystery.

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Eric Hyde is an Orthodox Christian psychotherapist writing at Eric Hyde’s Blog. I appreciated his brief musing, on the increase of his understanding of boredom from reading Heidegger; he combined it with his own experience and that of his clients, in this post: “Heidegger’s ‘Profound Boredom’: using boredom to cultivate the soul.”

Heidegger names three levels of boredom, the most extreme which is profound. To many people, the idea of profound boredom probably sounds frighteningly close to deep depression — a condition to be avoided at all costs. But I have heard more than one person say that they welcome boredom — even if it is said half-jokingly, as in, “I wish I had time to be bored!” But there are various ideas out there about what boredom is, and theories about what to do about it, if anything. I’d like to learn more about the difference between boredom and acedia. So this probably won’t be my last post on the subject.

Eric Hyde writes:

“If you’ve ever sat alone at the beach, or in the mountains, or the country, or sat gazing at the fully illumined night sky and had that deep sense of your own smallness, of your own seeming triviality in the broad scope of existence, and yet rather than crushing your soul it gave you a sense of calm wonder, a sense of spiritual ordering, then you’ve likely had the experience of profound boredom as Heidegger described it.

“In short, what I found so powerful in the notion of profound boredom is that boredom has the power to grant a person ‘attunement’ to oneself and to existence as a whole—or more properly speaking, attunement to Being as a whole—in a truly spiritual manner. Rather than causing torment, boredom, if used properly, can be at once a guide to peace and a guide to the very mystery of being.”

I’m familiar with this attitude, because it is commonly taught in the Orthodox Church; offhand I think of books on prayer by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom.

Hyde gives three tips:

1. Don’t wait for boredom to find you—search it out.
2. Once there, allow boredom to reveal its message.
3. Repeat daily.

Poetry is on the side of being.

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A Touchstone magazine article from a while back ponders “On the Loss of Poetry as Necessary Knowledge.” In it Stephen Faulkner warns,

“Our modern poetry is in pieces…. This makes a defense of poetry difficult. But defend it we must, for poetic knowledge is an essential kind of knowledge. Without it, our understanding of the world suffers a severe distortion. It is as if we have grown up in an age of one-eyed men who have heard rumors that people could once judge distances, depths, and colors by the use of two eyes, but are now reduced by this flat, prosaic information age that relies on scientific analysis as virtually our only source of knowledge. We are a century of Cyclops.”

Though Faulkner wrote that in the 20th century, I doubt whether he would think the situation has improved in the 21st. In the same year as the Touchstone article, Czeslaw Milosz published this offering that is a form of therapy for our distorted vision: In the introduction to the anthology of poetry that he compiled, The Book of Luminous Things, he writes:

“Many poems that I like or admire are not in this anthology because they do not correspond to my criteria of size and accessibility to the reader.”

“My proposition consists in presenting poems, whether contemporary or a thousand years old, that are, with few exceptions, short, clear, readable and, to use a compromised term, realist, that is, loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible. I act like an art collector who, to spite the devotees of abstract art, arranges an exhibition of figurative painting….”

He also thinks we moderns are missing something essential to our soul’s health. Whereas Faulkner writes metaphorically of a problem with our eyes, Milosz says, also metaphorically but more generally, “We seem to be missing some vital organs…”

“I have written elsewhere of this deprivation as one of the consequences brought about by science and technology that pollutes not only the natural environment but also the human imagination. The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and the down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colors, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time, its minutes, days, and years. Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief.

“Poetry is quite different…. Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot — if it is good poetry — look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting; and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.”

Almost all of the poems are introduced with a line or two about what he likes about that one, as an example of good poetry. None of his own poems is included. Here is one from the collection with a teacherly comment from Milosz to introduce it:

Walt Whitman

“The strong presence of a thing described means that the poet believes in its real existence. That is the meaning of a programmatic and unfinished poem by Walt Whitman, ‘I Am the Poet,’ which rehabilitates a ‘naïve’ approach and rejects philosophy’s unfavorable opinion on the direct testimony of our senses.”

I AM THE POET

I am the poet of reality
I say the earth is not an echo
Nor man an apparition;
But that all the things seen are real,
The witness and albic dawn of things equally real
I have split the earth and the hard coal and rocks and the solid bed of the sea
And went down to reconnoitre there a long time,
And bring back a report,
And I understand that those are positive and dense every one
And that what they seem to the child they are
[And that the world is not a joke,
Nor any part of it a sham].

-Walt Whitman

Suspenseful, but not impossible.

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Wholeness was the plan, when God created the cosmos. Then, humans distanced themselves from their maker, the one with whom they had walked in the garden. Harmony between the man and the woman was broken, and they both lost connection with their true selves, which had been grounded in the Giver of Life.

C.S. Lewis imagines how an unfallen world might have looked, in his novel Perelandra, which I recently re-read. A scientist with a utopian vision comes from Earth to a strange planet — of course, we have plenty of this stuff to export! — to be the tempter of the Eve figure, the Green Lady. She struggles to maintain her natural and primal, essential oneness with her god, and the drama that ensues is full of suspense.

I suppose it is because of my non-fiction fallen-world perspective that I despaired of the Green Lady being able to withstand the arguments of the oily Weston, even while descriptions of the grace-full divine dance with humans lifted my hopes. I don’t think it’s in my power to say more about this book or the whole trilogy, and what I have just written probably makes little sense, but the story came to mind when I read the poem below. Because the Green Lady won’t remain firm unless the strength comes from knowing who she is.

In this in-between world, the time of waiting for the fullness of the Kingdom, we get moments and glimpses of unity and wholeness, an intuition of how it might feel to be in full communion with one’s own being and one’s Maker, and from there, with other people. But our parts are mostly disjointed and disconnected.

IMPOSSIBLE FRIENDSHIPS

For example, with someone who no longer is,
who exists only in yellowed letters.
Or long walks beside a stream,
whose depths hold hidden
porcelain cups — and the talks about philosophy
with a timid student or the postman.
A passerby with proud eyes
whom you’ll never know.
Friendship with this world, ever more perfect
(if not for the salty smell of blood).
The old man sipping coffee
in St.-Lazare, who reminds you of someone.
Faces flashing by
in local trains—
the happy faces of travelers headed perhaps
for a splendid ball, or a beheading.
And friendship with yourself
—since after all you don’t know who you are.

-Adam Zagajewski

Father Alexander Schmemann writes about this in The Eucharist:

“… nowhere is the darkness of ignorance into which we were immersed with our fall from God more obvious than in man’s staggering ignorance of himself, and this in spite of the insatiable interest with which, having lost God, man studies himself and endeavors in his ‘sciences humaines’ to penetrate the mystery of man’s being. We live in an era of unrestrained narcissism, universal ‘turning into one’s self.’ But, as strange and even terrible as this may seem, the more elemental is this interest, the more obvious it is that it is nourished by some dark desire to dehumanize man.

“The thanksgiving offered by the Church [in the Eucharist] each time answers and destroys precisely this not only contemporary but age-old lie about the world and man. Each time it is a manifestation of man to himself, a manifestation of his essence, his place and calling in the light of the divine countenance, and therefore an act that renews and recreates man. In thanksgiving we recognize and confess above all the divine source and the divine calling of our life. The prayer of thanksgiving affirms that God brought us from nonexistence into being, which means that he created us as partakers of Being, i.e., not just something that comes from him, but something permeated by his presence, light, wisdom, [and] love….”

-Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist