John Keats

I think John Keats, an English Romantic poet, long dead, has still something to offer us. I do see him as part of a rebel force, if not exactly Luke Skywalker; in his time, not unlike ours, the Romantics were heroically fighting against philosophical, cultural, bureaucratic, and commercial attempts to portray life as a three-dimensional space filled with dead objects. Though I readily admit that Keats’s poetic language can feel exotic and archaic and difficult to read, our realities are comparable. We are similarly surrounded by forces that make it so effortful to be effortless, that dull us out of our innate spontaneity. We are treated as a bio-chemical apparatus. As a cog in some larger machinery. A billiard ball at the whim of cause and effect. As a recruit for an ideology. As a consumer demographic greedily swallowing products, in accordance with the nebulous economic “utility.”  Or we’re depicted as cognitive computers driven by algorithms, eventually to be replaced by better robots. We are predictably categorized and diagnosed.

The English Romantics intentionally pushed back against some similar pressures, because they believed we’re better known by our passions and our spiritual and experiential awareness. For me, as a therapist, oil painter, and occasional poet myself, John Keats, above all, epitomizes a resistance fighter.

What Are We About in the World?

            How would you spend your time if you were likely to die in a year or two? Or in two months? Would you continue as you are, conform to unquestioned rules and obligations? Or would you seek as many pleasures as you could? Buy more possessions? Empty out a bucket list of adventures? Would you pursue increased status, obtain the next certificate for your wall? Would you work ever harder to become someone before you go into that good night? Afterall, you want your obituary to speak highly of you.

That was not an abstract question for Keats’s. He was educated as a physician, TB was rampant at the time, and he was courageous enough to face his dire circumstances. Thus, he inquired carefully, “What is worth pursuing in this short life?” His decision was to cultivate his art and to give expression to his developing wisdom.

In a letter he wrote—your English teacher probably cited it— he described life in developmental terms, as a mansion where you progress from one stage to the next, like moving from one room to another. The first room is where we “remain as long as we don’t think.”^[i] He’s not criticizing the uneducated, so much as seeing that too many of us don’t fully live with Inspiration, though many of us are well informed and cultured, capable of nailing down with precision the details of the details, immersed in the particularities of the latest technology or new cryptocurrency. As he means this phase of not-thinking, we are uninterested in deep reflection. Uninterested in history, even our own personal history, the most sophisticated among us, can be disturbingly out of life, frozen in a culture, a job, an addiction, a set of rules and roles, and a personality, like a fixed scene painted on an ancient urn.

 Keats sorrowfully noted that the mass of humanity does not see beyond the façade and so settles into comfortable if oppressive castles. Most of us are “infants or dreamers,” rather than artists determined to be awake to our too brief, ever-changing, incarnate, implicit, fully embodied experience. Just to be clear, this is not a naive vision, nor was he a caricature of a bleeding-heart poet. He recognized that those who are awake are “sharpening one’s vision into the nature and heart of Man.” And they will grow to face the truth that “the World is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness and oppression.” He called that “the burden of Mystery.”

Poetry is Not Myth

If you’re still with me, if you’ve made it this far in this discussion of Keats, then I suspect you are willing to consider something off the main road, and you understand that any meaningful trail will not be straight. It takes some time and wandering to arrive somewhere new.

Keats was a diligent, enthusiastic, and undeniable master of language. So, let us wonder why two of his greatest works, Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, ground to a halt and were never completed. What obstacles did he collide with? And how might that be a mirror to our own blockades?

 In Hyperion-A Fragment, Keats tells the Greek story of fallen divinity. He starts with Saturn, the deposed king of the gods. You may recognize the plot of this story. The Titans are overthrown by a new supra-human force in town, the Olympians. It’s not irrelevant to know that Keats wrote this work while he nursed his dying brother Tom. We can imagine he was filled with a potent mixture of youthful resolve and unspeakable grief as he set out to portray a realm beyond our knowledge—forces beyond our ken.

To be clear, Keats was not writing myth. I imagine the original myth (in its time) conveyed an embodied and emotional apprehension of life that largely eludes our carefully crafted and detached reductionist depictions of things. How we might grasp the Hellenic myth has no resemblance to what these narratives meant to ancient minds. I imagine myth (in its time) was joined with music, accompanied by drums and other basic instruments, other voices in a powerful rhythm. And it played to a very different psyche than ours, more silent and interactive, less distracted, more sensual, a mind implicitly receptive to the melodic energies all around it.

I imagine the music-words of spoken myth engaged an intimate community of active beings, impacting them bodily, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, in a way that eludes us in our separateness, in our contemporary well-documented isolation. It was meant for a I-Thou to which we are largely deaf.

As we look at Keats’s long poems in the next couple pages, the story of Saturn will tell us little about that original mythical experience. The poet’s vision becomes then a re-visioning, a piecing together of shards, fragments from unknowable history, washed up on the beach of Keats’s imagination in his moment. Inevitably, to make sense of it, he had to re-sense it, if he was ever to make it speak to us.

First Take

With the grandiosity of youth, he committed to reveal Truth and Beauty. Beauty, Truth. In Hyperion, Keats set out to convey an all-encompassing vision in the manner of Milton’s Paradise Lost or Dante’s Divine Comedy. But he was not writing a Christian epic. His understanding of the world was more like ours. Like ours? By this, I am assuming that the reader has left the first room of the mansion, capable of thinking for yourself, even if you hold to some Christian or other familiar notions, you approach them less literally, more willing to be filled with mysteries.

Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud . . . .

But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity.

This is a portrayal of Saturn who has been overthrown by the Olympians. It elicits the reader’s empathy (for those who are still capable of empathy). I think Keats accomplishes here what art does at its best. Poetry can change us a little, bring forth a fresh imagination and a unique language born in the dancing mind, exciting us, stirring us awake so we can see our own life experiences anew.

As I read the lines above, I discover that all of us know Saturn. Certainly, there have been a lot of fallen gods in my life, in my childhood, in the places I’ve worked, in schools, in my therapy office. I’ve also been Saturn at times. Filled with angst. Consumed with anger like my father and miserable depression like my mother. Most of us have experienced some very dark periods, when we are deadened, our peace, our joy, our worth abruptly taken from us. We cry out like Job because we don’t deserve such misery. And most of the time I believe that is true. We are human. Make mistakes. Circumstances unfold. A lover leaves us. Other important relationships end. Some badly. We get debilitatingly sick. A cherished career moves out of reach. Even when you realize that you have been living out patterns that are self-sabotaging and hurtful, I don’t think you can be blamed if you have been largely unconscious. We just need to wake up.

In this story, the reason Saturn was ousted was because he was born a Titan—at a time when a more advanced race of gods evicted the older model. And, so, we (the reader so well drawn into the travails of the fallen god) will never know the reason he has fallen, not in any way that could satisfy us. It is unjust. It makes no sense, even as we suffer from the results with him. The unfolding events are truly tragic, the very definition of tragedy: a bigger force intercedes, overthrows him, without any concern for what is right, logical or what is aligned with the human heart.

Saturn vividly renders what many of us experience. Some of us live with unfathomable suffering for days, months, or years. Certainly, if we have been traumatized, we know Saturn’s heartache. Of course, we are driven to cry out when unwarranted pain has been inflicted at the whim of some indifferent godlike force. But this is not the “point” Keats seeks to convey. So, what was the point?

Since we know that Keats embraced a developmental framework, Saturn as the old king of the Titans must be representing in his story the abstract idea that our “infant” earlier stage will be outgrown (overthrown) as we evolve into a more conscious, mature life in which we carry our “burden.”  But, when I read such evocative language in his poetry, I can’t hear Saturn’s despair as a theoretical concept. Can you? Unless the Heart has grown dangerously cold, we will have a sympathetic response to the displaced Titan’s human misery.

For myself, the poetry suggests some Divine savagery is in play. Saturn has suffered almost total annihilation from a superhuman being, a God that as far as I can tell from this text doesn’t even seem interested in the injuries inflicted, raising significant questions about how you could understand or even defend yourself against a supra–human force that seems so indifferent. Since incomprehensible tragedy was not Keats’s message, the poem gets stalled.

Vision and Revision

Second take. In The Fall of Hyperion-A Dream.

I suspect Keats recognized, after his first draft, that using this mythic narrative from another time and place, which doesn’t naturally give rise to the modern insights he seeks to express, created more challenges than he first imagined. In response, he pivoted. He retold Saturn’s fall from the point of view of a poet, “Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse/Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known/When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.” The central story is now clearly human-sized, presenting an artist consuming the “potion” of Inspiration. Because he is not a member of the dreamer tribe who “vexes the world” but a true poet who “pours out a balm,” he is granted a vision by Moneta—an immortal priestess and figure of wisdom. She reveals that artistic understanding comes through suffering, enlightenment comes from experiencing “the Giant agony of the World.”

We’re meant to comprehend this as a “dream” given to us from the muse, a creative visualization bestowed from beyond our conscious mind, as larger forces operate through us. In the vision (a revision of his original poem) we again see Saturn and hear a bit of the character flaws attributed to the race of Titans. And then we witness Hyperion (Apollo), a creative and provocative force evolving into a power beyond our comprehension. Keats makes it clear that human beings can’t go to that elevated dimension Apollo enters. We are left in Saturn’s world. The human world.

Then the poem ends abruptly.

It’s incomplete for much the same reasons as Hyperion. It’s a fascinating fragment, an impressive mythic epic-attempt depicting the torturous growth of a poet, but we still cannot make sense of Saturn’s suffering. Maybe Apollo has some super-human way to account for life’s tragic pain? For “the Giant agony of the world.” But the young artist has no answer.

Neither poem was published while Keats was alive.

Saturn’s Big Lie

Tortured and angry, Saturn keeps my therapy office filled. Saturn is everywhere and distinctly human, “emptied of thyine hoary majesty.” He asks in grief and bewilderment, “Who had power to make me desolate? whence came the strength?”

Why is there such desolation? How unfair! Such tragedy and torment. But familiar because we have all had these almost mythic, hellish moments. We wonder (at least some voice in us wonders) if we live in a fallen condition. Life, itself, sucks. We inhabit an overthrown existence, impacted unjustly by unstoppable powers that toss us into the dirt.

“Oftentimes I pray’d/Intense, that Death would take me from the Vale.”

Keats wasn’t a religious prophet. He was not writing a theology wrapped in metaphor and musical language. He can’t explain away sorrow in the way Dante or Milton can. In his evocative portrayal of Saturn, he seeks to move us beyond this mask of a fallen god, calling forth what is deeper and deeply human, inviting us to grow, even as the structure of the Hellenic myth fails him.

Super-Sized-Stimulus Stories

I hope to make a point here. Like Keats trying to make use of an ancient myth, I think we have been trying to work within too many “stories” (structures of stories, fragments of multiple stories, uninformed notions) that keep us stuck in erroneous plot lines. Confused by the wrong themes concerning our life. Caught in theories that won’t allow our best poetry to flower. Left-brained certainties especially are more dead than alive, with little reality and dismissive of our passions. Abnormal. They have misled us as certainly as the half-baked notions my father told himself and passed along so generously. Work hard. Shit happens. And, so, my father sought to dig a big swimming pool in our backyard, because maybe that would bring him happiness.

Only when you stare into a hole where everything has filled up with muddy water (again), then, it might be ok to break down and look for things that are designed to help; but don’t be surprised if you get laughed at. Or pummeled. So, it’s better to keep your head down.

Of course, some stories are grander, more epic, more imposing, and pervasive, than my father’s comparatively harmless clichés. You see these told repetitively on movie screens and in television series and political debates. Some are apocalyptic, where the world is ending from some disaster or another, leaving no hope or way to change it. Some are dangerously authoritarian, where only the strong will survive, and we must protect our race, or sex, religion, socio-economic status, our genetic superiority etc. Some are religious and bound to the history of a particular faith. God gives and takes away. Etcetera.

            These big stories are sneaky because they can so easily seduce us to follow a grand (more than human, so extraordinary as to be inhuman) path to fulfill our human-sized needs. The tales of greatest magnitude come with detailed maps written by someone “special.” These stories can come with perks like fan club events we can attend in person where we can hear the familiar hits and feel like we belong to something. They offer popular podcasts and probably will also sell items to decorate our house or yard. Uniforms. Hats. Secret handshakes. All the while promising salvation from this or that. They might just distract us long enough, provide enough sense of meaning and purpose, that we can get through this life without ever having to face our most vexatious challenges and deepest fears.

            These Big stories are very sneaky because we have been taught them by caretakers when we were young or by the loudest (maybe most aggressive) voices. Such tales are often invisible and cannot be easily questioned. It can even seem dangerous to doubt them. They are powerful and seductive. They point to a path and grandiose plan—someone else’s plan. And you may be already well on your way to “something significant,” a hero in the grandest story ever told. That will make any underlying narrative harder to dispute. Afterall, you may have a lot of time, maybe years, invested in this.

Through this lens, the traditional mental health and addiction models are only another Big story, particularly when they tell us that our human suffering can be best addressed with medication and maybe some cognitive behavioral therapy. Our biology is the real issue, or we lack technique (communication skills for instance, or behavioral management). Work hard. Lower your expectations. Give credit where credit’s due and give me your credit card number and stop blaming your parents.

And that’s all ye know on earth.

Of course, this doesn’t invite us to question the narratives we use to describe a problem. The stories prompt us to ask certain questions but not others, and this “creative neurosis” can keep us trapped in roles, hedged in caged light, stuck at a low-quality level and robbed of a solution. You might consider what questions you could pose if this was a suspected psych-ops, a psychological operation to convince you to swallow it all unquestioningly. What does this distract me from inquiring about? What fears does it raise? What presuppositions does it support? What would I benefit from understanding more about? Who benefits from believing that Saturn’s privileged position in this hierarchy has been unfairly taken away because he deserves power because he is …what? Who must silence themselves in their supportive role and thus keep their deepest understandings to themselves or risk being cast out of the Titan community? Why have other characters have been reduced to bit players in his mythology? Why does it feel so helpless, and why is the apparent Higher Power, Apollo, so separated from human life?

Not wishing to stay stuck as a fallen Titan, rather than sitting in hopelessness, let’s take this as a challenge and explore other ways to attend to this. Let’s deconstruct the Titan myth. Let’s be more daring and creative. Let’s use what Carl Jung called Active Imagination. Let the unconscious speak or the muse work through us.