To be sane
in a mad time
is bad for the brain
even worse
for the heart.
The world is a holy vision,
had we clarity enough to see it.
A clarity that people
depend upon people
to make.
Wendell Berry
This is a difficult world to live in. This particular time in human history is full of uncertainty. To be a good citizen during these times is a daunting and powerful thing. Winding one’s way through the thicket of grief and joy makes such a present-time complex. The good and bad saturate this moment. Caring hurts. Awareness twists. The slippery dominates. A rare kind of vertigo arises.
During such a time it is easy, perhaps necessary, to lose one’s balance. This poem confirms this loss, while also affirming the underlying wholeness that sustains vision. There is a larger balance that can be found. It is a balance that relies on an assembly of human beings. The world is a holy vision that can be best seen together. This poem serves as a mantra that provides protection during an eclipse of coherence.
The age of modernity swells with chaos. The personal, social, political, and environmental are all under extreme pressure. An increasing speed of change, breaks everything down. The institutions are losing their integrity, and becoming untrustworthy. A great malaise blankets the land. It is a time when survival is in doubt.
This is the backdrop that humans must cope with now. Human life reels with the extra burden of this apocalyptic awareness. There are fewer silent and beautiful places left. To maintain any kind of balance in such a world asks one to live unbalanced. As the poet, and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen says, “The blizzard of the world is crossing the threshold and threatening the order of the soul.”
Living in this kind of maelstrom is taxing. The mind that has crafted this tangle cannot go beyond it.
It is “worse for the heart.” Feeling the ailment that besieges these times is like feeling a ghost-infested house. The body-snatching denial of the masses heightens the heartache, increasing isolation, and rendering madness a relieving balm. There is nothing so debilitating as being sanely mad, and insanely well adjusted. Just as a plant wilts when it is denied water, the human spirit shrinks when it is immersed in a fragmented world.
The life of our times is a good mirror, as the poet knows, reflecting back to us who we have become.
Human constructed reality falters under the weight of too much hubris. The human world is bleak — but beyond the knowing and certainty of this era, there is a light. It is an underlying miracle that manages, despite our distractions, to support Life. This light is obscured by the beliefs that define the age. The junkyard of throwaway values is hiding our true home.
To really see what shines beneath us all, requires being in the world but not of it. Collectivity provides its own sight. Alone one can sense obscurely the animating force, but that intuition is not clear and stokes a hunger that only true vision can slake. This vision is multi-faceted. It takes many eyes and diverse meanings to behold it. Clarity is a relational thing; existing only through the perceptions of many different viewpoints.
There is an opportunity that interdependence brings. Communal life is more than a safe place, more than shared values and shared behaviors — it is multiplied awareness, which provides revelation. Between the many there is a level of perception that is larger, more informed, and more sensitive than what is common. A greater portion of the whole awaits cooperative perception. The minds of many working in concert, magnify awareness, and reveal of the larger picture of mystery.
Reverence for what made us, and locates us here, comes from an essential recognition of our mysterious origins. There is an opportunity that our mutual dependence provides — an opportunity for collective sight. The Universe of relationships is alive to the mind that is large and multi-faceted. As the poet says, this is “a clarity that people depend upon people to make.” The inclusive mind is a mutual mind; the result of shared endeavor, of collective learning, diversity, and of people looking together into what is.
This poem captures the effects of two relationships that define our possibilities. The first expresses the way our experience of ourselves is linked with our cultural practices. There is another relationship that is evoked. The magic of our larger surrounding is hidden away, obscured by social distrust, and its resultant blindness. The gravitas of this poem is captured by the poet’s use of the word “clarity.” There is a fog, an impenetrable haze, which comes between people. This smog is produced by distrust, alienation and isolation. It paints the world with depressing grey-tones, while obscuring a view of what mystery has wrought.
To see further, to more accurately take in the many-faceted complexity of our natural inheritance, requires overcoming the blindness of the crowd. From learning to distrust the many — one must make the journey of learning to trust one’s self in the midst of others. Such a journey is a complex maneuver. By becoming a part of something larger, while maintaining personal integrity and identity, one becomes a facet of the multiple eyes that are necessary to see more clearly.
The relationship within is what enables the relationship without. Another way to say it, and to see the world more clearly, is that as self-intimacy grows, intimacy with one’s surrounding expands. The world comes freshly into view as the self does. The eyesight of the many is enhanced when some of them can see beyond themselves (because they can see themselves accurately). Community grows that capacity, providing the means.
The process of growing a lucid response to a mad world is based upon our relations with each other. Some are capable of depending upon each other, they are made ready by the rigors of relating, and they have learned to hold on to their uniqueness. When this happens the integrity of the whole collective improves, and a multi-faceted viewpoint is more assured. Many eyes enable the holy vision.
The poet knows that “the world is a holy vision.” This vision provides an antidote to the madness that infects us. That antidote is available through workshops, seminars, and groups — wherever two or more are gathered together. The development of immunity, however, requires a longer-term engagement, immersion in a more complex social situation. Surviving in a mad world requires a kind of mutual reliance that now needs to be re-invented. We are social animals, capable of feats of collaboration. The poet reminds us, we need each other, to perceive the holy vision.
