Alan Catlin: Essay

Belief

What do you believe? Such a simple question, so difficult to answer. The implied assumption in the question is religious: Do you believe in God? Or are you affiliated with a religion that has a specific system for believing in that God? Or are you a non-believer (in God)?

I think of myself as spiritual, as opposed to religious.  If places, objects, people, are imbued with special deep meanings it is because we, the people, give them meaning other than what they inherently possess. Clearly, some people are superior to others intellectually and physically. These gifted people contribute more to society, either by deed or example, than others both positively and negatively.

As herd animals we follow leaders wherever they may take us according to our beliefs.  I hesitate to be specific though it seems historically accurate to see that many belief systems, organizations, be it churches or political ones, begin with a benevolent motive. Over time these organizations, become corrupt, then degraded, as people within the systems exploit them for personal reasons such as fame, power, money, all the usual grifts. The Chinese understood that man’s basic nature is self-serving and subject to corruption, which is why they incorporated corruption into their political system that lasted for 2,000 years.

Man, the presumed rational being, may be pure of spirit, in the abstract but in reality, man the herd animal is not. Lesser animals do not understand the concept of revenge or retribution. They are selfish in ways that support the basic instinct for survival, a dynamic that simply states: kill or be killed. An animal cannot be good or evil, while we can easily demonstrate that the human animal is capable of extreme versions of both.  World history, since the beginning of time, is an endless loop of conquest, subjection and oppression. I would also suggest, a case could be made that centuries of English literature centers around the rejection of one religious orthodoxy and the advancement of another belief system in its stead.  The constant remains human nature is the same in Shakespeare,, as it is in Chaucer, as it was in Euripides, as it is in world literature today. The names change but, in the end, it is all a Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Answer to questions of belief, are totally subjective, are directly related to the phrasing of the question. Words matter and I believe in words. I believe in what language can tell us and equally as importantly, what language does not tell us. Recently, I wrote a series of poems that began as reactions to Water in the Sky: a dictionary of 2,000 Japanese rain words that illustrate for me what words can and cannot express:

 

A misting rain
conceals

the difference
between night
and day

We live in a world of light and shadows, as the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki observed in his philosophical study In Praise of Shadows. Inherent in this shadowy study, as it is in his fiction,  are deep meditative states of self-discovery.  Furthermore, deep personal self-reflection, as the Dutch mystery writer Jan Willem de Wetering detailed in his memoirs of studying to be a Zen monk (A Glimpse of Nothingness and The Empty Mirror) reveals there is much inside us that can be understood but not articulated by words. One can conclude from reading his non-fiction, and his noir murder books, that all life is a mystery.

 

Rain that comes inside

A glimpse
of nothingness-

an empty
mirror reflects

interior rain

The cycle of life and death are studies in variations of rain:

A little light rain

Light Spring
rain

recalling all
those who

passed before
us

……………………….

Rain after a religious festival

After the outdoor
wedding

rain consecrates
the union

…………………

 

Never ending autumn rain

After the funeral
incessant

rain on a tin
roof

……………………..

Wearing a dead
man’s clothes

I visit the place
where my father’s
ashes were spread

Spring rain
accompanies me

I believe in both the shadows and the light. Especially the shadows where all the variations on light can be found, the deeper meanings, the essence of the ineffable. And the concrete. The stuff of life that determines how we see, how we be is the concrete and life has a way of intruding n our interior life:

Whine of dentist’s
drill-

outside
rain on tree
buds

Perhaps, I have always lived too much in the abstract, looking for the spirit of something in the essence of simple objects from the real world. Countless slow night in nightclubs, neighborhood taverns, cellars bars, I would stand and look at the café candles burning down inside their glass containers and try to see beyond where I was. In many ways I have never left these places.

Wisteria Rain

Spring scents
muted by wind
and weather

Somewhere in the night
trouble lights
disrupt wisteria
rain

Even the jukebox, that infernal machine, reminds me the elements are inside us as much as the weather is outside the place where I am working

Merciless rain and wind

Like Sinead
singing in the rain

the voice of
an angel

besieged by
demons

I believe these things because language has revealed them to us and lives have illustrated them.  Dreams are a temporary respite as much as they remind us that both the shadow and the light is everywhere, even in the deepest places we can only visit but never truly understand.

Dozing in late
Spring under

flowering crab
apple tree

a light rain
alters my dreams

…………………….

Rain in the sunshine

after the downpour
white blossoms

falling from damaged
tree limbs

softer than adream
lover’s skin

……………………….

 

 

insubstantial
dream rain

feels unreal-
nothing gets
wet

Life intrudes as it always will. Our thoughts are nothing except what we can express in words. As the George Harrison song suggested, “Life goes on within and without you.” Mostly it goes on without you.  When it’s over, it’s over but while I am here, I believe in my words.

Walking in the Rural Cemetery

during the pandemic
crematory smoke

in light
Spring rain
………………………………………..

Shelter in place
bus stop in a plague
year has new meaning

might be better
to get wet than
to be outside

 

In this time of war, of madness and antichrist Christians, the kind of people Jesus threw out of the temples, the Molochs and the madmen of industry and war, in order to survive words are all the can sustain:

Summer of blood
red moon rising

when will
the war end?

………………….

Wind chimes
and funeral bells-

March wind
music

……………………………

After Fukushima
harvesting dead
fish

inedible crops-

a radioactive rain

……………………….

Memorial Day

Rain beading
on flag draped
coffins

 

 

With thanks to Amanda Bradley who facilitated early versions of Belief