Music

Ain’t No Cure for Love – The Long Quest of Leonard Cohen, Part I

Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan in very different ways exploded the lyrical scope of modern popular, as opposed to classical, music. While I dived into Dylan, I resisted Cohen for a long time after disliking Songs from a Room in the early 1970s, although I loved covers of his songs “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy,” and “Bird on the Wire” by Judy Collins, Joan Baez, and Rita Coolidge. I also loved his moody “The Stranger” from the movie McCabe and Mrs Miller. And somewhere along the line I heard “Hallelujah.” About a dozen years ago I bought a double CD of Cohen’s songs that opened my eyes to how good he was when he had good musicians backing him, instead of just singing with acoustic guitar as on Songs from a Room

His concerts in his later years always started with ”Dance Me to the End of Love,” from 1984’s Various Positions.

Dance me to your beauty

With a burning violin

Dance me through the panic

Till I’m gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch

And be my homeward dove

Dance me to the end of love

Let me see your beauty

When the witnesses are gone

Let me see you moving

Like they do in Babylon

Show me slowly what I only

Know the limits of

Dance me to the end of love

It’s a quintessential Cohen song that’s an audience favorite. Cohen is half spiritual seeker, even ascetic, and half ladies man and hedonist, though one of his early albums is titled Death of a Ladies Man. He was a practicing Jew who didn’t play concerts on the Sabbath and an ordained Zen Buddhist monk who said there was no contradiction between the two because Buddhism has no theology. It’s interesting that he sings “Let me see you moving/Like they do in Babylon,” because Babylon is where some 7,000 Jews were taken into captivity in the sixth century BCE. It was the symbol of the Jews’ separation from their homeland and the temple in Jerusalem that was the capitol of the Jewish civilization and spiritual center of Jewish life and of the Jewish diaspora, until the state of Israel was established in 1948. Babylon was characterized as a city where sexual license prevailed. Cohen celebrated sex as well as romantic love in his songs. He doesn’t vacillate between the spiritual and romantic/carnal sides of his nature but seems to embrace them both in equal measure.

“Suzanne” captures the almost mystical approach Cohen takes toward women and love as he sings:

Suzanne takes you down

To her place near the river

And just when you mean to tell her

That you have no love to give her

Then she gets you on her wavelength

And she lets the river answer

That you've always been her lover

And you want to travel with her

And you want to travel blind

And you know that she will trust you

For you've touched her perfect body with your mind

The last four lines are a chorus that changes slightly after each verse:

And Jesus was a sailor

When he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching

From his lonely wooden tower . . .

And you want to travel with him

And you want to travel blind

And you think maybe you'll trust him

For he's touched your perfect body with his mind

And the sun pours down like honey

On our lady of the harbor

And she shows you where to look

Among the garbage and the flowers . . .

And you want to travel with her

And you want to travel blind

And you know that you can trust her

For she's touched your perfect body with her mind

For Cohen there’s always this yin/yang interplay in love between the heart and mind that’s poetically expressed in this song. I’m Your Man was the first album I bought after my Starbucks album. The title song expresses a frank willingness to be anything a woman wants him to be in order to win her affection, coupled with a clear recognition that begging won’t win a woman’s heart, or he’d be on his knees:

If you want a lover,

I'll do anything you ask me to.

And if you want another kind of love,

I'll wear a mask for you.

If you want a partner, take my hand, or

Want to strike me down in anger

Here I stand I'm your man

If you want a boxer

I will step into the ring for you

And if you want a doctor

I'll examine every inch of you

Refrain:

Ah, the moon's too bright

The chain's too tight

The beast won't go to sleep

I've been running through

These promises to you

That I made and I could not keep

Ah, but a man never got a woman back

Not by begging on his knees

Or I'd crawl to you baby

And I'd fall at your feet

And I'd howl at your beauty

Like a dog in heat

And I'd claw at your heart

And I'd tear at your sheet

I'd say please I'm your man

It's a classic Cohen song, whose lyrics chronicle the chase for love and continuing failure to find a lasting relationship. But Cohen is never self-pitying or complaining – he’s just committed to the pursuit as if it’s destiny, and he chronicles the ups and downs of relationships with unflinching honesty, often with a wink and a smile, mostly at himself. He also chronicles his growth and developing maturity in the process.

That maturity is eloquently expressed in “Waiting for the Miracle” from his 1992 album The Future. It’s his acknowledgement of the unreality and emptiness of the prince/princess illusion, the perfect someone who will be everything you ever wanted, and we’ll never hurt each other and live happily ever after – the miracle he’s waiting for that keeps him from seeing the real person he could have loved. The instrumental accompaniment is almost like a dirge, mournful but beautiful and compelling with a Middle Eastern flavor.

Baby, I've been waiting,

I've been waiting night and day.

I didn't see the time,

I waited half my life away.

There were lots of invitations

I know you sent me some,

but I was waiting

for the miracle, for the miracle to come.

I know you really loved me.

but, you see, my hands were tied.

I know it must have hurt you,

it must have hurt your pride

to have to stand beneath my window

with your bugle and your drum,

and me I'm up there waiting

for the miracle, for the miracle to come.

If anything sums up his attitude toward love, it’s “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” originally a prose poem that as a song with a good band behind him could have been a top-40 hit in the 60s:

I loved you for a long long time. I know this love is real.

It don’t matter how it all went wrong. That don’t change the way I feel.

And I can’t believe that time can heal this wound I’m speakin of.

There ain’t no cure, there ain’t no cure, there ain’t no cure for love.

I see you in the subway and I see you on the bus.

I see you lyin down with me and I see you wakin up . . .

And I call to you, I call to you, but I don’t call soft enough.

There ain’t no cure, there ain’t no cure, there ain’t no cure for love.

Love is Cohen’s Sysiphean rock that he keeps rolling up that hill, but he can never get it to the top where it will stay, and it just keeps rolling back down for him to start all over again. But he’s not deterred. He accepts it as fate and is committed to the quest like a Don Quixote. In “Tower of Song,” from I’m Your Man, he seems to have come to a degree of acceptance of his situation:

Well my friends are gone, and my hair is gray

I ache in the places where I used to play

I’m crazy for love, but I’m not comin on.

I’m just payin my dues every day in the Tower of Song . . .

I loved you baby, way back when.

And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed,

but I feel so close to everything that we lost –

We’ll never, we’ll never have to lose it again

Cohen doesn’t just write about love, and sex, which he is very frank about. His most covered song, “Hallelujah,” starts with biblical references to David and Bathsheba and Samson and Delilah in the first two verses, then moves into relationship territory before ending with themes of spirituality and honesty:

You say I took the name in vain

I don’t even know the name

But if I did, well really, what’s it to ya?

There’s a blaze of light in every word

It doesn’t matter which you heard

The holy or the broken Hallelujah.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn’t much

I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch

I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool ya

And even though it all went wrong

I’ll stand before the lord of song

With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

In spite of the fact that it talks about what “went wrong,” it’s a spirit-lifting and exuberant affirmation and celebration of life as life is. Cohen said of the song that "there is a religious hallelujah, but there are many other ones. When one looks at the world, there's only one thing to say, and it's hallelujah.” The chorus is sung by a choir of voices that gives it the feel of a whole people rejoicing.

“Democracy” from 1992’s The Future is another exuberant celebration, of exactly what the title says.

It's coming to America first,

the cradle of the best and the worst.

It's here they got the range

and the machinery for change

and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.

It's here the family's broken

and it's here the lonely say

that the heart has got to open

in a fundamental way:

Democracy is coming to the U – S – A!

Sail on, sail on

O mighty Ship of State!

To the Shores of Need

Past the Reefs of Greed

Through the Squalls of Hate

Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean

I love the country but I can't stand the scene . . .

But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags

that Time cannot decay,

I'm junk but I'm still holding up

this little wild bouquet:

Democracy is coming to the U – S – A!

The song is actually a march that starts with a martial drum line which continues throughout the tune with an almost joyous quick pulse that sounds like a victory march, recalling the spirit of Bob Dylan’s “Paths of Victory.” It’s uplifting in spite of the honest assessment of the state of the union: “the cradle of the best and the worst,” “It’s here the family’s broken,” “I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.” It’s full of hope and a tentative optimism “I’m stubborn as those garbage bags/that Time cannot decay/I’m junk but I’m still holding up/this little wild bouquet/Democracy is coming to the U – S – A!

Brett Nelson

Ain't No Cure for Love -- The Long Quest of Leonard Cohen, Part 2

Cohen recorded plenty of darker songs as well. He suffered from deep depressions at times until his later years, crediting Zen Buddhism with helping him leave that behind. “The Darkness” is a poem, as all his songs are, about exactly that condition.

I got no future,

I know my days are few.

The present’s not that pleasant,

Just a lot of things to do

I thought the past would last me

But the darkness got that too

I should've seen it coming

It was right behind your eyes.

You were young and it was summer

I just had to take a dive.

I don't smoke no cigarette,

I don't drink no alcohol

I ain't had much lovin yet

But that's always been your call.

Hey I don't miss it baby

I got no taste for anything at all . . .

I caught the darkness baby

And I got it worse than you.

I caught the darkness,

It was drinking from your cup.

I said Is this contagious?

You said just drink it up.

He’s got it, in spades. He sings with a low, dark voice, but there’s no self-pity. He knows where he got it, but he’s not into the blame game. It’s the hand he’s been dealt, and he’s playing it as well as he can. There’s even a little humor – “I said Is this contagious/You said just drink it up.” The implication is he knows he could have refused the cup, so he’s an accomplice in his own demise. He doesn’t feel pleasure at anything, a classic symptom of depression. Another verse says he used to enjoy the rainbow and the view, but the darkness from his lover took that all away.

“The Future” from the album of the same name is the apocalyptic vision of a psychopath:

Give me back . . . my secret life

It’s lonely here

There’s no one left to torture

Give me absolute control

Over every living soul

And lie beside me, baby

That’s an order!

. . . Take the only tree that’s left

and stuff it up the hole in your culture

Give me back the Berlin Wall

Give me Stalin and St Paul

I’ve seen the future, brother

It is murder

When they said Repent Repent Repent Repent

I wonder what they meant

There’ll be the breaking of

the ancient western code

Your private life will suddenly explode

There’ll be phantoms

there’ll be fires on the road

and the white man dancing . . .

and all the lousy little poets coming round

trying to sound like Charlie Manson

That is about as bleak and ominous as you can get, but in the middle of all this he sings “I’m the little Jew who wrote the Bible” and “Love’s the only engine of survival,” which sounds like he’s stepping out of the psychopath voice and speaking as himself. It’s an enigmatic and puzzling song to come from such an empathetic and sensitive soul, but he’s also an unblinking one. He knows the depth of humanity’s shadow. The song beats out a rhythm that’s like a pounding hammer. “The Future” contrasted with “Democracy” and “Suzanne” makes it clear that Cohen speaks with many voices.

Cohen is a serious man that writes songs with weight, but his sense of humor is one of the pleasures of his music. Usually self-deprecating but only self-disparaging when it feels like he’s puncturing his own inflated ego, it’s delightful in “Going Home,” from 2013’s Old Ideas.

I love to speak with Leonard

He’s a sportsman and a shepherd

He’s a lazy bastard living

In a suit

But he does say what I tell him

Even though it isn’t welcome

He just doesn’t have the freedom

To refuse

He wants to write a love song

An anthem of forgiving

A manual for living with defeat

But that isn’t what I need him to complete

I want him to be certain

That he doesn’t have a burden

That he doesn’t need a vision

That he only has permission

To do my instant bidding

Which is to say what I have told him

To repeat

Going home without my sorrow

Going home some time tomorrow

Going home to where it’s better

Than before

Going home without my burden

Going home behind the curtain

Going home without the costume

That I wore

He's apparently speaking as the artist who directs “Leonard,” a “sportsman and a shepherd,” to write what he is told to submissively and a bit grudgingly until he’s done and Leonard Cohen can go home relieved of his burden and his sorrow and take off his songwriter costume to be himself. Or is “Leonard” the actual Cohen who submits grudgingly to the artist to do his “instant bidding” until he can get off work and go home and relax without the burden of all this sorrow that he has to record for his taskmaster? Either way, it’s a delightful and humble song about a likeable “lazy bastard living in a suit.” I love and admire Cohen, but I also like Leonard a lot and I’m always glad to hear he’s “going home to where it’s better than before.”

“Never Any Good” is the mea culpa of a lover admitting he was never good “at doing what a woman really wants a man to do.”

I was dying when we met, I bet my life on you

But you called me and I folded like you knew I'd do

You called my ace, my king, my bluff

Okay, you win, enough's enough

I was never any good, never any good

I was never any good at loving you

I was pretty good at takin out the garbage

Pretty good at holdin up the wall

Dealin with the fire and the earthquake

That don’t count, that don’t count, that don’t count

That don’t count for nothin much at all . . .

I'm sorry for my crimes against the moonlight

I didn't think, I didn't think, I did not think

I just did not think the moon would mind at all

I was never any good at loving you

At doing what a woman really wants a man to do

You're gonna feel much better

When you cut me loose forever

I was never any good, never any good

I was never any good at loving you

He's likely overstating the case a bit, but he makes his point, conceding his defeat with a subtle humor. With a steady, relaxed drumbeat and electric slide guitar, he sings it like an “OK, you got me” confessional that’s fun to listen to. “Different Sides” is a more serious song that captures the feel of what relationship conflicts between men and women can be like.

We find ourselves on different sides

Of a line nobody drew

Though it all may be one in the higher eye

Down here where we live it is two

I to my side call the meek and the mild

You to your side call the Word

By virtue of suffering I claim to have won

You claim to have never been heard

You want to live where the suffering is

I want to get out of town

Come on, baby, give me a kiss

Stop writing everything down

Refrain:

Both of us say there are laws to obey

But frankly I don't like your tone

You want to change the way I make love

I want to leave it alone

“We find ourselves on different sides/Of a line nobody drew” sounds like a good description of something that ofen happens in relationships. It’s like a divide between the man and woman appears that neither suspected was there. “You claim to have never been heard” is a common complaint many women have about their men. “Come on, baby, give me a kiss” is how some men respond when a woman wants to “talk about our relationship.” And “Both of us say there are laws to obey,” but we find out we have different laws. And sometimes one partner wants to change how they make love and the other likes it the way it is. The particular conflicts may be different than the specifics in the song, but to me there’s a universal quality that it captures about the feel of relationship conflicts, even if they’re unspoken. The song has a slightly staccato reggae beat to it with an organ accompaniment that fits it nicely.

My favorite Cohen song is “Bird on the Wire,” originally from Songs from a Room.

Like a bird on the wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free

Like a baby stillborn

Like a beast with his horn

I have torn everyone who reached out for me

It’s a sober reflection on life written in Cohen’s mid-thirties by a man who recognizes his faults, owning damage done with a willingness to make amends, but uncertain how selfish he is in his quest for freedom. I’m quoting the lyrics as sung with slight changes by Judy Collins on Who Knows Where the Time Goes?, which is the best version, lyrically and musically, of many that I’ve heard.

There was a man, a beggar leaning on his crutch

He said to me “Why do you ask for so much?”

There was a woman, a woman leaning in a door

She said “Why not, why not, why not, why not ask for more?”

It ends by repeating the first three lines ending with the last line that’s the core of the song: “I have tried in my way to be free.” It’s a slow, wistful song that honestly assesses a life, autobiographical or not, and accepts responsibility but acknowledges the uncertainty of whether he should expect less or ask for more. It’s accompanied in later concert versions by wonderful electric guitar and organ plus Javier Mas on the bandurria. It’s been covered by many other musicians, including Rita Coolidge and Jennifer Warnes as well as Collins.

My favorite Leonard Cohen song after “Bird on the Wire” and “Hallelujah” is “Anthem,” a song from The Future that’s a hopeful call to peace and humane relations between people. Along with “Democracy” it’s a counterweight to the apocalyptic vision of “The Future,” which is still a perplexing song to me.

The birds they sang

At the break of day

Start again,

I heard them say,

Don’t dwell on what

Has passed away

Or what is yet to be.

The wars they will

Be fought again

The holy dove

She will be caught again

Bought and sold

And bought again;

The dove is never free.

. . . the killers in high places

Say their prayers out loud

But . . . they’ve summoned

They’ve summoned up a thundercloud

They’re gonna hear from me . . .

Every heart – every heart

To love will come

But like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack – a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

That the light gets in through an opening where something is cracked and broken is a paradox that contains a kind of wisdom we need, as opposed to trying to be perfect. On an individual level it’s a crack in one’s ego allowing light to shine on something that one couldn’t see before. I’ve experienced that clearly in my life more than once. It’s through the cracks in a society that light and a new vision can enter – if you read much history you see it happen over and over. It’s the breakdown of an existing order that often leads to a better society with an adjustment to changing conditions.

“Anthem” is an appropriate title for the song, because it has an anthem-like quality with a weighty theme but a lightness in the song’s mood of hope and how the pitch rises and falls and then rises again. The song has a determined tone that lifts the listener’s spirit. I love the lines “There is a crack – a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” A poem of mine inspired by the song titled “It Was the Crack in My Soul” ends with these lines:

May I stay cracked, just a little,

so I don’t die in the prison of my own wisdom.

Feed me now, and again and again

with always just a little more light than I have.

“Come Healing” is a hope and a plea, almost like a prayer, but not addressed to any deity.

Behold the gates of mercy

In arbitrary space

And none of us deserving

The cruelty or the grace

O solitude of longing

Where love has been confined

Come healing of the body

Come healing of the mind

O see the darkness yielding

That tore the light apart

Come healing of the reason

Come healing of the heart

I love the first stanza, especially the lines “And none of us deserving/The cruelty or the grace” – either one.

There are many more songs I could have written about, including “Boogie Street,” “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” “Everybody Knows,” “Tower of Song,” “My Secret Life,” “Alexandra Leaving,” and “First We Take Manhattan.” He had a huge output of music over fifty years, even though he wrote and rewrote songs/poems interminably at times. There are estimates of how many verses of “Hallelujah” he discarded that run to 80 and 180. The richness of his lyrics is unmatched, perhaps even by Dylan. He wrote eloquently about the simplest of emotions and desires in a way that is never sentimental. Despite his sober realism about love and life and writing a few dark songs-poems (they’re all poems), he was ultimately an optimist, always capable of hope.

Brett Nelson

The IDEA of God as an Element of the Human Psyche, Part 1

This essay is not a statement of belief about the nature of truth or a creed. It’s rather an account of a long contemplation of and struggle with ideas about who or what it is that orders the universe. And it’s an examination of the possibility that the idea of a world-creating and world-governing power is an inherent part of the human psyche that evolved with our species. It’s a contemplation that continues to intrigue me which as far as I can see is impossible to answer. My ideas evolve and fluctuate and always leave me on uncertain ground, but it’s never stopped being an intriguing conundrum, fascinating but not needing an answer, much as the scientist who wonders about the beginnings of life or the origin of the universe, with an insistent desire to know and understand that’s more than a detached intellectual speculation. I don’t have any conviction about the existence of some supreme being at the helm of the universe, but the fact that as far as I can determine every culture on earth and every culture that has ever existed has had a belief in a god or gods and goddesses testifies to its fundamental place in the human psyche. I don’t buy the proposition that it’s the opiate of the masses – that it’s the comforting illusion of the weak-minded human race that can’t face the terrors of the world or the unknown world of the hereafter without it. Why is it such an ingrained part of human nature?

I wrote a poem in my 20s called The Dream Glass, prompted by a meditative gazing at swirling wine in a glass, which expressed a vague yearning that I thought of as “spiritual.” It had nothing to do with religion or even the idea of God, but with something in my “spirit.” I couldn’t articulate what the poem was saying in rational terms and attributed its appeal to being mildly under the influence. But in a corner of my soul I felt like there was something right and true about it. I didn’t write poetry for another fifteen years until I heard poetry read aloud on a PBS series with Bill Moyers called The Power of the Word. A few years later I joined a poetry writing group. To my surprise I found myself writing occasional poems that were musings on the idea of God, of a higher power, higher self or higher consciousness, all terms that variously seemed to fit in a given moment. I already had a very personal take on what made sense to me, but the poems became an attempt to express what a deeper part of me thought and felt that didn’t necessarily correlate with what reason told me.

I was also reading a lot of Carl Jung at the time, trying to grasp what I intuitively felt was a profound understanding of the scope of the unconscious psyche and the relationship of human consciousness to it. Far from seeing the unconscious mind as only the garbage bin of the repressed and unacceptable dark side of human nature as Freud characterized it, Jung saw in it also a vast storehouse of human potentials that included mental-emotional networks built up over the course of human evolution around experiences that are largely universal. He called them archetypes and framed them as non-rational (as opposed to irrational) potentials in every human being to generate predictable patterns of behavior and powerful energies in response to certain kinds of universal experiences. He believed these archetypes have the potential for motivating behavior and channeling energy in either positive or negative ways, depending on how we relate to and direct those energies.

These networks are wired into our brains and bodies. They’re not learned. They’re the hardware of the mind – learning and culture are the software. In Jung’s belief, we learn only the forms we channel these archetypal energies through, at times consciously, often unconsciously (“I don’t know what came over me!”). How they get expressed is sometimes cultural, sometimes individual. But they will express themselves, or we are likely to become depressed – even ghostly shells of what we can be if they are choked off completely. Jung showed that the language of the archetypes is the language of symbols: that symbolic images, visual and verbal, are what archetypal energies are activated by, and he identified examples of symbolic expression for many archetypes in a wide range of cultures.

The process of writing poetry, the language of images, allowed me to give voice to things I felt and understood that I couldn’t express in prose that would make rational sense. It allowed me to express doubts and questions that ultimately led to awareness of things I think and feel below the level of what my reason will admit – things I feel are right and true in spite of my inability to explain why I believe them. In Jung’s point of view, the unconscious knows things we don’t know we know.

In 1935, a down-on-his-luck alcoholic stockbroker named William Griffith Wilson was visited by an old drinking companion named Ebby, now sober through the principles of the Oxford Group, a popular nondenominational religious group that espoused spiritual self-betterment through a process of acceptance of God, self-examination and confession, making amends, and helping others. Uncomfortable with the exclusively Christian orientation of the group and its perfectionistic focus on absolutes, the stockbroker went on to co-found Alcoholics Anonymous on similar principles and was the primary author of its early literature. A sentence in “We Agnostics,” the fourth chapter in AA’s basic book Alcoholics Anonymous, reads as follows: “. . . deep down in every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God” (italics mine). Here is a striking correlation with Jung’s concept of archetypes. In fact, the man who brought the message of recovery to Bill Wilson’s former drinking companion was treated unsuccessfully for alcoholism by Carl Jung, who told the man after he relapsed that Jung’s methods were not enough to help someone whose alcoholism was as severe as his. Jung told the man, named Rowland, that his only hope was institutionalization. He then qualified that by noting that throughout history there were occasional recoveries by people who had profound spiritual experiences and recommended he seek spiritual help. Rowland acted on Jung’s advice and subsequently recovered from his alcoholism through the Oxford Group.

Jung and Joseph Campbell compiled extensive evidence for the universality of these archetypal structures (Jung) or mythological (Campbell) motifs across world-wide cultures, mythologies and religions, - primitive and civilized, historical and modern, and in all kinds of creative art today. So it is interesting that AA literature proposes the idea of God as something intrinsic in human nature. It’s indisputable that the idea of God or of gods and goddesses is universal in all cultures. It is easy to imagine that primitive humans tens of thousands of years ago who witnessed things beyond their control and more powerful than or incomprehensible to them (dangerous predators, violent thunder-storms and lightning, floods, fires, seasons, death, the sun and moon, the stars) imagined them as powerful spiritual entities – gods and goddesses, who could aid or afflict, even destroy them.

At some point humans with a philosophical bent must have started to wonder about the source of creation and the meaning of their existence. And we do find evidence of creation stories and belief in an afterlife in remains of ancient cultures even before writing, and current and recent indigenous tribes all have such beliefs. Even Neanderthals buried their dead with objects they might need in the afterlife. Why We Believe by anthropologist Augustin Fuentes relates the discovery of human remains carried into an extremely difficult chamber to get to requiring squeezing through very tight passages in a cave over 200,000 years ago, as well as other examples indicating ritual burials, one from 400,000 years ago with an “exquisitely carved” hand axe that was never used thrown in. Why is the idea of God universal? Is it because it is an expression of something universal in human experience, therefore not only an idea, but a fundamental element of the human psyche? Even a mysterious reality that is ultimately beyond what we can fully grasp but can only form images of that are bound by the limits of our imaginations?

With that awareness lurking in my psyche, I wrote poems to allow what I intuitively felt to surface, and to wrestle with what I found. I was surprised that I was more clear about what I thought, or about the questions that I couldn’t answer, in a deep part of myself than I realized. Even though I had always thought of myself as a spiritual person, I had long abstained from the voting about what the spiritual and creative power of the universe was. I found it impossible to think about those questions in any way that was rationally satisfying. But I recalled Anselm’s statement “God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. It seemed evident that any concept of the creator and prime mover of the universe that I or the most brilliant human being can grasp is woefully inadequate to encompass that reality. I can’t even grasp the number one million, let alone grasp the creative force behind the formation of trillions of trillions of stars and living cells, and grains of sand on Earth that no scientist can likely even estimate the number of. Whatever force formed and forms a universe that even my galaxy is only a minute part of is simply beyond human comprehension.

OK – God as Incomprehensible Mystery – I can entertain that. But God as creator? What created God? What existed before the Big Bang? If it was an event in time that happened 13.8 billion years ago, which astronomers tell us it was, then what existed before that, unless you claim time was created then? But how and by whom or what? How can you claim time was created in a time where time did not exist? This is an insolvable riddle, (perhaps a waste of time?) that both science and philosophy still debate. Does that mean I can know nothing about the force that moves the universe? Perhaps it’s possible to experience and understand something, if only a small part, of the power which results in a creature who can sit here in this chair wondering what that power is.

My first awareness of something that felt spiritual, once I outgrew the jacket of religion that didn’t fit any more at age fifteen, was that sometimes I felt myself lifted into, dropped into or stumbling into an expansion of my consciousness that filled my heart and soul with deep feelings of love, awe, wonder, clarity, acceptance, contentment, or peace that I normally did not feel and rarely experienced. It was the depth of the emotion I felt that was so striking and set the experience apart. In that state I would feel more loving, generous, sensitive, appreciative, and uncritical and unafraid. I was awed by that. Then that state of mind would quickly disappear. The first time I read something that put this into poetic language, even though it was prose, was when I read William Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech as a college freshman. Faulkner believed that man

will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has

an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of . . . the courage and honor

and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.

I thought ‘Yes, I feel that intuitively – I do have a soul and spirit capable of reaching beyond my ego at times.’ I knew that there was a level of emotion and inspiration that I could sometimes rise to that was beyond my normal state of being. But most of the time I didn’t feel that. It was like a valve in my soul that I had no control over and no idea where it was, that unpredictably got opened by some unseen hand and just as unpredictably was closed. “The Dream Glass”, the first real poem I wrote, tried to put that experience into words.

The next experience that I would label spiritual was that of being relieved of an addiction to alcohol at the age of 32. After a few failed attempts, I was helped by feeling like I was really at the edge of a cliff and was sure if I went over that cliff I would fall into an abyss I could never crawl out of. That fear rendered me willing and teachable. But there was more to that experience than just getting scared sober and following a recovery process. Though I had no belief in God, I had to admit that my rational explanations of what got me sober didn’t explain how profound and thorough that transformation was, for which I felt a sense of wonder and gratitude. I didn’t attribute that to any supreme being and was even uncomfortable with and resistant to the words “Higher Power,” let alone the word “God.” But I did perceive a power in the community of people I had come to know and be supported by, a power in the capacity of human beings bonding together to support each other that allowed them to do what they couldn’t do themselves, which felt deeply spiritual to me. It was as if there was some sort of spiritual energy in the universe that is available to us if we are open to it – like the Star Wars blessing “May the Force be with you!” And that echoed Faulkner’s Nobel Prize address. So I tried to keep an open mind.

Another awareness I got from Faulkner came from his characters who had a kind of heroic capacity to endure and survive suffering, so movingly embodied in the black servant Dilsey who cares for the severely mentally disabled Benjy of the disintegrating Compson family in The Sound and the Fury, and in the escaped convict who rescues a pregnant young woman during a Mississippi River flood that they have to live with alone on the river for days before they can reach civilization again in The Wild Palms. It’s a conditional virtue predicated on the hope that there is something to endure for once the ordeal has been survived, but the appreciation of that quality has served me well personally. Sometimes we just have to endure something, without justifying it, until it changes or we realize it can be changed and can find the means to change it. Persistence in the face of difficulty and disappointment is a spiritual attribute, because it requires faith in better possibilities in spite no certainty about the outcome, whether that’s faith in God, in a higher power other than what we call God, in a higher self, in the support of a group, or in Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature.” It’s what gives us the capacity to weather life’s trials and to rebound from them – what we call resilience, the bounce-back factor.

But the question of what the source of this creation is, as for those first primitive philosophers, still hangs in the air. It’s pretty easy to ignore most of the time. But there it is, stubbornly hovering over our dismissal with no answer that even the best minds of the last century can find consensus on. How do I reconcile a godlike force capable of creating an incomprehensibly vast and powerful universe with the idea of a benevolent being that humans can pray to and receive what they pray for, like a cosmic Santa Claus? I couldn’t swallow the idea of a God who rewards virtue or punishes wrongdoing, or of crediting God with having a hand in fortunate coincidences in my life. I was very skeptical of the idea that a God might exist who would consider my life or that of any other individual human being important enough to attend to and intervene in. There are many who credit God for their good fortune without hesitation and with great certainty. Some people even view these sorts of events as rewards for righteous living, even as proof of their righteousness and God’s will that they are rich or powerful or famous. Don’t knock on my door with that one. But for most people the question of God’s existence or nonexistence is either a life-or-death matter, or it’s a given that they never question, as well as a bulwark against those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and a comfort to lean on.

Rather than rewards for virtue, which makes God seem like the stern but benevolent parent that some people conceive God to be, the idea that there might be natural laws of the spirit just as there are laws of nature and physics was a more plausible notion to me. Maybe spiritual nature was just an unseen part of nature, I thought, just as scientists have discovered mathematical patterns in plant life that are not evident to the casual observer. For Instance, Fibonacci number series show up in the petals on flowers and the spirals in sunflower seeds and pinecones. When I was in high school everything was assumed to be made of protons, neutrons, and electrons in varying combinations, which was an advance on the idea that atoms were the irreducible components of matter. Now it’s proposed that everything is composed of quarks, and what we thought of as the rock-solid laws of physics don’t operate at the subatomic level. More will be revealed, perhaps even on the spiritual level. Science keeps reminding us “Never say never.” (Part 2 next month)

Brett Nelson

The IDEA of God as an Element of the Human Psyche, Part 2

When I experienced things that were so uncannily opportune and coincidental that they felt benevolently “spooky” to me, and when they have happened many times in my life and in the lives of people I know, I had a hard time dismissing it outright as just coincidence, even though any other explanation made no logical sense to me and went against every instinct in me that tells me there’s no scientific basis for it. Carl Jung called it “synchronicity,” which he defined as “an acausal connecting principal” and gave extensive examples of it. Even more strange is my repeated experience that fortunate coincidences often seemed to follow soon after I reached the end of my rope trying to make things happen the way I so intensely wanted them to. And I hear many other people relate similar experiences. It’s like the universe is telling me I can’t force my will on it, but if I go with the flow, things work out all right. I have even looked back at a situation in hindsight feeling thankful that I didn’t get what I wanted, because what I got was better than what I thought I wanted.

It seems that even at my age I still don’t always know what’s best for me. I had to consider the idea that there might be a different way to approach life, one more in the spirit of the Van Morrison song “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River.” I still need to steer the boat, but going with the flow works better than battling against the current. I can choose a direction and have goals and make plans, but I need to adjust my course when the current shifts or rocks appear dead ahead.

At the age of 36, for the first time in my life I had a career that was satisfying and rewarding, but it was yanked out from under me when my position was eliminated in a mega-corporation downsizing. I had been successful in it for several years, but I found only one job opening in ten months to apply for in that field, so I reassessed my direction and ended up going back to school for a graduate degree that led to the work I loved for thirty-one years until I retired. When I finished my last semester and asked the program director where I was working part time if she had any interest in starting a program like I was contemplating, she said she’d been wondering for a year how she could do that! Then after four successful years as an adjunct program to the treatment center, my program aroused the hackles of the hospital system’s behavioral health department, who felt I was encroaching on their territory, and it was dropped. It was deeply disappointing, but I was given some options: to stay and do other things, work part time, or leave for full-time private practice. I quickly decided on the latter, and I was even allowed to take my clients with me. When I left with the last boxes from my office in 1991, I turned on the radio, which I never listened to in the car any more (preferring tapes in the years before CDs), and it was playing a song from the sixties that was never put out as a single and I had never heard on the radio when I did listen to radio – Bob Dylan’s “I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More.” Synchronicity!

Everyone has seen examples of what are called “optical illusions.” One classic example is a black and white image that looks to some like a white vase on a black background and to others like the black silhouettes of two identical faces over a white background. When people look at it long enough, they start to see the other image. M C Escher’s drawing of stairs is another example. Science has taught us even more dramatically that appearances are often not what they seem. We are told that the human body is mostly water and that the steel in the hammer you drive nails with and the steel girders that form thousand-foot skyscrapers are mostly empty space with infinitesimally small particles called electrons whirling around clumps of protons and neutrons. And quantum physics says electrons are not particles but fuzzy potentials that are more like probabilities. I’ve experienced ample evidence that my mind holds far more than I am or can be conscious of, as depth psychology shows us. The universe is a mystery that elicits awe and wonder. Is God the universe? Is the universe God?

The universe is pervasive with things that cannot be seen with ordinary sight. This is true in a scientific sense, but also true in a psychological sense – in both the outer world and the inner world. I’ve repeatedly had the experience of things not being what they seem to be on the surface. Sometimes my perceptions of people and the world are accurate, but often they’re not, especially when motivated by fear. I can be certain that a friend felt hurt or angry at me about something I said and find out that they were angry at someone else or just very thoughtfully reflecting on what I said, even appreciative. I can get a medical bill that makes it look like I owe $800 and better pay up soon or it will be sent to a collection agency when it’s only a record of what was billed to my insurance (some provider’s bills are harder to decipher than others, I’ve found).

Our fight-or-flight response, something that was essential for survival for over 99% of the history of our species when we lived in a world rife with potential life-threatening physical danger, gives us a natural tendency toward paranoia. We don’t die from a danger we perceive that’s illusory, but the real danger that we don’t see can kill us. So being a little bit paranoid had a lot of survival value when we were living outdoors with predatory animals and potentially hostile tribes perhaps waiting over the next hill. But most people rarely if ever experience life-threatening physical danger in today’s world, even with the alarming rise off gun violence in this country recently. So the fight-or-flight response for many has become more a hindrance than a help, especially with PTSD.

For most religions, including those of primitive cultures, God or the Goddess or the gods and goddesses are the makers and the movers of the universe and its inhabitants. They’re the First Cause, for which no cause is presumed needed. Why? For the astrophysicist, everything begins with the Big Bang, the scientific First Cause. But the very idea of causation prompts the question of what caused the Big Bang, and what was there before the Big Bang? To say that there was nothing before the Big Bang or before God doesn’t end the conversation. The question that presents is ”How can it be that there was nothing, and then there was something?” If God created the universe, what created God? He (or She or It) always existed? How do you know? What was God doing before 13.8 billion years ago?

No matter how you frame it, God or Big Bang, it ends in a mystery that defies explanation and logic, that begs some sort of mystical acceptance of a belief about the nature of the mystery at the core of everything, or a simple acceptance of the uncertainty. It seems that “God” simply refuses to be pigeonholed. Whether you are a scientist, a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, or atheist, you’ve chosen to trust some view of reality that makes sense to you without the possibility of proof. In other words, you’ve put your faith in some belief that defines the mystery, in some explanation – scientific, religious or philosophical – or in something you look to for guidance, wisdom, support, strength, and/or meaning. If you believe something I don’t believe, I have no assurance that you’re wrong.

For many of us the experience of beauty is evidence of a spiritual dimension in the universe. We find it in nature, in literature, art and music, in the joyfulness of a child, in religious services and practices, in love, in the form of the human body or the grace of the athlete. Some find it in science and the pursuit of knowledge, even in the elegant beauty of mathematics. I feel it physically as an expansion in my chest or a gasp, and variously with awe, joy, love, gratitude, delight, excitement, wonder – most especially wonder. I literally gasped the first time I saw the Rocky Mountains as I was driving toward Denver when I broke through the haze and they suddenly appeared large and full blown from thirty miles away, as if they were formed in that instant. For me the experience of beauty is perhaps the deepest of all spiritual feelings.

Twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous are spiritually-based, and members frequently talk about their relationship with and reliance on God or a Higher Power of some sort and refer to it in conversations about how they live their lives. It’s commonly mentioned in reference to a specific situation they are coping with, but commonly in a brief and almost offhand way, never proselytizing and never paraded as a mark of virtue. Members never probe subtly to check if someone believes what they do and rarely even mention what their religious orientation is or if they attend a church or house of worship. And there‘s complete tolerance for anyone who’s agnostic or even atheist. Although hardly anyone ever professes outright atheism, people who do talk about their difficulties with belief in a higher power in meetings are not addressed directly about it, other than someone saying how they dealt with having the same difficulty and never offering it as a should. It’s simply recommended that members choose a higher power that suits them, even if it’s just the group or the program as a whole.

All cultures throughout the history of humankind, including hominid species other than ours, show evidence of belief in supernatural powers. Anthropologist Augustin Fuentes, in his book Why We Believe, cites evidence of spiritual beliefs going back more than 100,000 years. Maybe it’s not an intellectual inheritance passed down through millennia by culture, but instead something wired into our brains by some accident of evolution, inherent in us like the capacity for language. That we have a need to explain the unexplainable, especially things that affect our safety, I can easily accept as a fundamental part of the human psyche. So we have always created stories about the arcs of the sun and moon and the seasons and the weather, the rumblings of the earth in earthquakes and volcanoes, and the miracle of birth. That doesn’t necessarily require attribution to superhuman beings driving chariots across the sky. Stories about such things as natural phenomena could do the job as well. But I do understand the experience of things being more than what meets the eye. How is it that a caterpillar turns into a butterfly? How is it that an acorn can become an oak? So I try to live by Rilke’s advice to a young poet:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to

love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books

that are written in a very foreign tongue. Rainier Maria Rilke

Everyone dies but life goes on. Is life eternal? What does that mean? What is eternal? The eternal is a mystery. The mystery of it is what has power for me. It awakens wonder, interest, curiosity and awe. That’s the essence of spiritual, and for some people religious, experience. It asks us questions: What inspires and awes you? What is the source of the order in the universe? How was the world created? Where do we come from? Where are you going? What is your purpose for being here? What gives you strength, hope, direction, guidance, meaning? So what seems inescapable is that uncertainty and mystery are pervasive aspects of life that we may as well make our peace with if we don’t want to live in a fantasy of dogma that we have to fight continually to defend against contradictory evidence. If I can let go of the need for certainty and “learn to love the questions themselves” as Rilke recommended, the mystery of existence can become intriguing and exciting, awesome and inspirational, which frees me to trust the universe as it is. “Bad things happen to good people,” as the old book title says, but that does not mean the universe means to do me harm.

everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar

of the tornado swears there was no mention ever

of any person, or reason – I mean

the waters rise without any plot upon

history, or even geography. Whatever

power of the earth rampages, we turn to it

dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever

the name of the catastrophe, it is never

the opposite of love.

Mary Oliver

Poet Robert Bly told a story at a 1990 conference of an adolescent boy whose father didn’t like his long hair, so he held the boy down on the floor and forcibly cut it off. The boy was enraged. The boy’s grandfather didn’t take sides in the conflict, but instead took the boy out to the ocean and told him “See this ocean? This ocean is going to be here for you, whether you have long hair or short hair.” Wonder is the emotion of excited and loving curiosity. For me, the wonder and mystery of the universe, which I can continue to explore and discover more about as long as I live, is going to always be waiting at my feet, no matter what hardship, grief or tragedy I may experience.

So the Idea of God becomes a Great Mystery I can never fully comprehend but I can continue to explore and perhaps gain more understanding of, and trust that the universe does not mean me harm. That’s as good as I can come up with, and it suits me fine. My Creed, if I would need to define a creed – I believe in the Idea of God in the human psyche, the mystery and wonder of the Universe, and in living my life in the act of exploring the mystery. But then I don’t believe in creeds.

Brett Nelson