Cancer/writing Journal # 87

 This is what I have submitted for my writer's group for October, 2022

 

 

Unbound

 

"I hope to go into a poem sober and come out a little drunk."

Dannie Abse

What’s up with that? Reading poetry?  Writing poetry? A description of drinking habits? The man was a Welsh poet,  Prolific, judging by his Wikipedia entry. I think he’s talking about  What he wants writing poetry to do to him. I’ll get on board with him. Rules?  I want to break them. Give me a line;  I want to step over it. Put me in a place without restraint. Stagger through Dionysian tumult “Break china laughing”  As Jefferson Airplane sang. The cow jumped over the moon? I want to get to know that cow. And dine with the dish and spoon That ran away together too. Euphoria with an edge of perversity. Mess with the reader a little bit. “Are you being serious?” I smile and say nothing. Or say something foolish  and non-responsive. You can do anything with poetry. -------------------------------------------------------- You say, “This is alarming.  Late onset bipolar disorder?  He used to be kind of a judge.  And a church-goer.  What happened?”   Well, church sort of did this to me.  You’ve heard of “Holy Rollers?”  The closest I ever came to seeing adults actually roll was at church.  Go to a Charismatic church where the Spirit is moving and what you have is “Dionysian tumult”.   Greek drama puts into tension the Appollonian and the Dionysian.  The Appollonian is rational and reasonable.  The Dionysian is exuberant. (Nietzsche adopted the concept but that's a different story.)  A while back, I read about the play The Bacchae by Euripides.  The gist of what I read was that an excessive emphasis on the Appollonian, the rational, creates a vulnerability to the Dionysian.  An attempt to deny the Dionysian is fatal.   C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist, has a glorious Dionysian event toward the end of the second Narnia book, Prince Caspian.  There’s a parade with all sorts of cavorting around and jumping through windows etc.  No rule left unbroken.  Silenius, pal of Dionysius is in attendance, drinking and providing wine.  Pan is also there and the comment about him is made, “He could do absolutely anything!”  Which might include stuff dangerous and intended to inflict harm.  But the whole thing is overseen and approved of by Aslan, the Christ figure so Pan is held in check.  But never, never was there a scene in a book where people had more fun.  I marvel that Lewis is not a Charismatic Christian. How did he know all this stuff?  I said it was church that inspired me to write this poem but C.S. Lewis is partly to blame too. A little more about Narnia.  Aslan, a lion, is a figure of great dignity and majesty.  Everyone is on their best behavior when he is present.  However, in one of the books, The Horse and his Boy, he behaves like an absolute kitten, pouncing and jumping around in a very silly way all to get a striving horse who is very rule bound and concerned with the impression he makes, to loosen up.  And he does but it takes a while. Lewis in an essay, Chistian Apologetics, speaks of religions as being either clear or thick.  Clear religions like Confucianism have clearly enunciated principles to live by.  Thick religions, like indigenous African religions, for instance, are full of ecstasy and mystery.  Although he never referred to Appollonian and Dionysian, he sure could have.  He believed that Christianity had features both of the clear and of the thick.   I have spent time at the thick end of the pool.  Dancing in church, laughing with an intensity that would maybe have broken china if there had been any around and some staggering too.  In the book of Acts in the Bible, when the Holy Spirit fell on the Day of Pentecost and those gathered all spoke in tongues, outsiders watching the spectacle thought that those filled with the Spirit were drunk. See Acts 2:13.  I get it.  I’ve seen it.  I’ve done it.  My personal tendency is to be Appollonian–rational and reasonable.  For reasons I don’t understand, I have the capacity in church to go full bore Dionysian.  Although I have seen people that I suspected were faking, at least a little bit, the manifestation of spiritual ecstasy, I have never done that.  Got better things to do and better ways to try to impress people too if it comes to that.  Like the lesson of The Bacchae though, my Appollonian tendencies  are tempered by the Dionysian.  If you don’t believe me, read again the poem up above.