TESTING THE CALENDAR OF THE SOUL

INTRODUCTION TO THE CALENDAR OF THE SOUL

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) wrote a verse for each week of the year and called his collection of verses The Calendar of the Soul.  Of the uses for this calendar, Steiner says:  "Let the soul be influenced by the life of the year as it changes week by week and it will rightly be able to find itself... [The calendar's verses] were designed with the thought in mind that, from a healthy feeling of unity with nature, a strong sense of one's being can arise, and also with the belief that, when the soul truly understands itself, it longs to experience the workings of the world through the means of such mantrams."[1]

Shortly after becoming aware of the calendar in 2003, as a result of a translation of the calendar from German by Ben Bingham, an investment adviser with Legg Mason, I determined to test Steiner’s theory:  I would organize my first twenty eight years of poetry (1975-2003) by week to see if my moods and themes tracked the moods and themes of the calendar.   

As I worked on the project, various ideas came to me.  If my feelings have some rhythm akin to nature, and if I could find that rhythm (objectifying my soul's experience[2] in cycles) then would I become better able to see more clearly, moving among those cycles, the eternal—the living spirit?  Is it possible that I could better grasp the miracle of consciousness, after a lifetime of immersion in the whirl of feelings recorded in poetry, by a kind of process of elimination of the transient?   Wasn’t my struggle now the struggle of Westerners for meaning and dignity?   With this thought, I came to see that I was working with the great ideas of the West; I felt as if I were leaving a lonely hallway and opening the door to a room full of Western philosopher-kin ready to challenge my thinking on the meaning of life, feelings and spirit.

After organizing my poems[3] by week, but before undertaking the task of comparing the poems and calendar, I considered what Westerners have imagined or claimed to have seen of spirit, and how they got there.  Please consider allowing the following summary, with its call for objectivity and attention, to serve as your preface to exploring the validity of the Calendar as you read the Calendar and poems.

THE 2350-YEAR ENGAGEMENT OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY & POETRY

Plato (427?-347BC) depicted things as imperfect copies of ideas.  Philosophy would discover and evaluate the original ideas.  Poetry, painting etc described trees, oceans that are physical copies of the idea-trees, idea-oceans.  So the imitative arts are a copy of a copy:  spiritual hearsay.  Aristotle stretched Plato--allowed that poets can copy the idea directly.  For Aristotle, though, the copy is incorporated into action--he considers only poems that have some dramatic element and how these poems reflect the idea-world.  Aristotle's successors further loosened Plato, until, by the time of the Romantics (i.e., poets who elevated the role of the imagination, beginning with Goethe, 1749-1832 and continuing with Wordsworth, 1770-1850, through Whitman 1819-1882), inactive ideas were not only being "copied" directly from the spiritual world, but were conceived as creations of poetry.

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) theorized that poets never claim to tell the truth, so poets (unlike astronomers, physicians and historians) never lie.  As the Romantics were just getting started, Kant (1724-1804), elaborating extensively on Sidney's theme, provided the controlling framework for modern science and for modern spiritual life.  If you accept his premise that faith (the spirit) stands on the one side, and science (nature) on the other, and that neither is capable of proof or disproof by the other, then you are modern.  For an example of the modern thinker, see I. A. Richards (1893-1979), the literary critic.  Richards distinguishes between words that speak truth in the ordinary strict scientific sense ("statements"), and words that appeal to the heart ("symbolic" words).  Richards says:  "A poem--or a religion...has no concern with limited and directed reference.  It tells us, or should tell us, nothing."[4]  This is Richards' version of the New Criticism:  determine the nature of the words (statements being provable by materialistic science; symbols standing as an appeal to feelings) and then judge the statement words on their truth and the symbolic words on their effectiveness as an appeal to emotion.  These distinctions--these ways of judging--form the basis for the movement known as positivism, in which thinkers "posit" (i.e., spell out) their assumptions in systems of relative truths, rather than leaning on Science or God to justify their standards and values.  The key value is full disclosure.  Pragmatists[5] value trial and error; Existentialists value living for the moment; Freudians value awareness.

Kant and his positivistic descendents are balanced people in that they have one foot on each side of the abyss between science and spirit.  Not everyone has straddled the abyss.  Modernity renders spirituality irrelevant to materialists (Marx, 1818-1883) and science irrelevant to spiritualists (Nietzsche, 1844-1900).  We become "unbalanced" by choosing sides.  Sometimes it's hard to tell on which side of the split we stand.  A religious "fundamentalist" can be as materialistic[6] as an industrialist can be spiritualistic in her respective quest.  Balanced modernity straddles the widening abyss, anxiously awaiting the Fall, unaccepting of our power, life-by-life, to close the gap.

 AN INVITATION TO THE WEDDING:  POETRY AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

(joy of creative learning)

I stand beside you at the foot of a mountain of poetry.  There, just ahead, is a path of the crucified soul.  Feel the world's mob-confidence rejecting the path.  It's the poetic path of Christ--of Anthroposophy--avoiding one-sided spiritualism, one-sided materialism, and Kant's dualism (which apologizes for both sides), providing a new ways to look at art, fresh vistas from which to view the world--the one world--which is both physical and spiritual when we create it so in our hearts.  Let's hold the poets' hands and walk a ways together.

Sir Philip Sidney announces that "it is not rhyming and versing that maketh poetry," though he lauds rhyming and versifying as "polishing" speech, which he regards, next to reason, as "the greatest gift bestowed upon mortality."  His argument is that "those words which are fittest for memory are likewise most convenient for knowledge."  This is not knowledge in the present understanding of knowledge.  This is "idea" knowledge--poem as idea.  What "maketh poetry", Sidney says, is poetry's power to inspire to action.  He is not saying that the poem must contain action, as Aristotle would say; Sidney is saying that the poem should produce action.  In our time, that action may be as modest as our adjusting how we look at the world.  The twentieth century philosopher, William Barrett, says:  "In the technical era, when everything becomes an instrument at the service of the will, language is manipulated as a calculus.  Poetry resists this will and thereby reveals a more fundamental dimension of language.  Before the poem one must lay down one's self-assertion; one has to surrender oneself and enter the same circle of Being where poem and poet dwell."  He ends his book with:  "We have only to be open to the world, and it will pour its riches at our feet.  Before this winter I had not known that the bark of a tree, caught in yellow sunlight, could be enough to restore a life."[7]  Owen Barfield, though, argues that it's not just our passive openness to the tree--it's our active "making" of the tree in our consciousness, as children of God who have the Christ in us, that gives meaning both to us and to Nature[8].  Novalis:  We are the Messiah of Nature[9].  In making the tree, we experience a joy in purpose that may be the "restoration of life" sensed by Barrett.

Amalgamate Sidney, Barrett, Barfield, and Novalis, and you'll hear this:  Poetry gives pleasure and meaning to life[10]. For the remainder of this essay, we'll walk a little farther up the path (perhaps you'll go on beyond the path, coursing the gyre of Yeats's imagination), viewing this world of poetry from various perspectives.

 For Owen Barfield, writing poetry is awakening to self-hood--it's a way of initiation--of finding your ego by stripping away all that obscures that ego--by splitting the ego from what is not the ego, including mental habits.  He says, "...realize the gap [between matter and spirit] and live in it not as a creature caught in a trap [of isolation], but as the rainbow [of imagination][11] that spans it.  Then, within the rainbow...of imagination we shall find ourselves free to move...to turn either outward towards what we perceive or inward toward what we are."

Barfield's mentor, Rudolf Steiner, author of The Calendar of the Soul (which Barfield also translated) and founder of Anthroposophy, may not be in agreement with Barfield on turning inward/outward.  Steiner (in The Calendar and elsewhere) seems to say something like:  look outside yourself to see yourself; look inside yourself to see the world.  M.C. Richards:  "The insight of our century...is that inwardness is an aspect of the physical world."[12]  The insight came through Steiner, but it did not come out of nowhere.  Steiner lived in a world struggling in the shadow of Hegel with the passion of war[13].  Like Hegel, Steiner asserted his independence from Kant's dualistic practices, but unlike Hegel, Steiner did not remain in the world of ideas but put ideas to practical use[14].  Hegel celebrated poetry as the ultimate Art[15], and  Steiner's Calendar of the Soul is one expression of poetry, but  Steiner's life of conscious service seems to me, like the life of Christ, to have been a still higher Art.  Steiner called for a threefold separation of church (and all other aspects of cultural life, including education and the arts), state (the main purpose for which he saw as ensuring that no one starved or was deprived, for instance, of clean water and other essentials), and economy (which he and I both experienced as the realm of brotherhood in work), and employed Art in his effort to educate the world to this ideal:  "Artists do not bring the divine onto the earth by letting it flow into the world; they raise the world into the sphere of the divine."  Michael Howard supplements Steiner's claim in terms of the beautiful:  "Beauty is another name for the spiritual within the physical."[16]  Do you tear your clothes and shout "Blasphemy!" upon hearing these claims?  Or do you want to explore the possibilities?

Barfield says that poetry's key function is to enliven our world through strangeness and change.[17]  Pleasure is always there in poetry--arising from the growth spurt in consciousness (not from the dead wisdom you retain from what you read, which you can hear, often, in lectures, but from the fluidity).  Sometimes there is pleasure in poetry, too, as a result of the effects of sound--the rhythm and music--or even from the "architectural pleasure" of obscurity.  You can safely say, "No pleasure, no poem."  Almost none contend, though, that giving pleasure is poetry's primary purpose.

Vaclav Havel said:  "I am interested in language as something that fashions destinies and worlds..."  Again, think in terms of a language of newness and strangeness...your excitement on encountering Locke, Marx, Jung, or Rush Limbaugh for the first time.  This is how I felt about the language that came to me as poetry before I read the Calendar, at least in terms of fashioning my own destiny and world.  And this is how I felt reading Bingham's translation of Steiner's Calendar.  Christy Barnes cites Havel as she relates her understanding that the first capacity that makes a poet "is the ability to open oneself to the world...with that gentle opening of the soul which we call wonder."  Wonder is to the heart as curiosity is to the intellect.  Wonder is a desire, marked by "warmth, an inner brooding, a humming musical world," to explore the "essences and origins."  Wonder leads to pondering the world's beginning, she continues, how something came of nothing, and how we can tell about it.  Men chose words, for which he had physical gifts.  Men chose vowels (the musical) held in place by consonants, and these are the sources of poetry's power.[18]

Jane Hirshfield:  "The writer turns toward the things of the world…and these seem to give off meaning like a radiant heat.  But that heat of connection is in us, as well as in the things.  In the moment of writing, the eyes of ordinary seeing close down and the poem rushes forward into the world on a mysterious inner impulsion that underlies seeing, underlies hearing, underlies even words…The condition is akin to the sexual…All writers recognize this surge of striking, in its energies the substance of the outer, actual world are made new..."[19]

Havel, Barnes, and Hirshfield all point toward a source of power operating within poetry that is also called upon in the Christian prayer, recited aloud at services, that goes "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven":  the power of the creator at work.  The things around us, our relationships, the old prayer--none of these live except as we make them new.  The Jewish founder of the Christian religion, on the cross, in agony, called up an old poem[20].  "Why hast thou forsaken me?"  is the beginning of David's psalm that ends with an "It is finished" (i.e., "He has done it").  I remember my mentor in the practice of law, when I visited him while he was dying, reciting the beginning lines of Byron's “Destruction of Sennacherib” (another “He has done it” poem!) that he had read as a student more than a half century before.  I remember writing a poem (May 1, 1989) as my father was dying, then my praying for him as he was passing--praying to Jesus on the cross who knew what it was like to suffer in this world.  And never will I forget our experience of the Christ--my father's experience, as he passed through his fears at the threshold, and my experience, blessed not just to feel, but to see Christ's white-winged Being there, accompanying my father.  Not only going into death, and coming into life, but in the middle of our time here, there can come a moment, looking into the eyes of children (and knowing something of what they have been through) that you see "the abyss of distrust they traverse like angles for hope," and feel that same sacrificial love enter your heart to answer them.  The writing and speaking of the poetry that attends to these experiences can resurrect the dead--can upraise earth to heaven.

GUEST LIST

From this place on the path, we have seen the pleasurable consciousness-raising capacities and powers of poetry.  These capacities tempt poets to become one-sided.  This is the point at which the crises in philosophy and poetry merge:  in the lives of the "mad poets"--the possessed poets who live for art--who give up everything to bring art to the world.  Michael Howard (in the article previously cited above) says:  "To be passionately driven by creative impulses, however exciting or even spiritual they may seem, is inherently unfree."  Steiner calls the "art is my life" approach Luciferic (to him, evil had two poles--Luciferic, which is the overly spiritualized approach that results in intellectual strangulation by doubt[21]--and Ahrimanic, which is the materialistic approach of the Positivists and results in prejudice and war[22].  Steiner is advocating that we become aware of how Ahriman works (in percepts--when we perceive something[23] without conceptualizing it), how Lucifer works (in concepts, when we perceive concepts in fantasy), and how we unconsciously mash the two together when we perceive, and suggests that we study how we think about thinking.  Steiner says that thinking about thinking is a good way to develop a benchmark for experiencing things.  He suggests that we change things by our sense/imagining of things--by becoming one with things--and by so changing things, change the world.  We can do this because the "I Am" became identified with man awhile ago, to the alarm of Caiaphas and others who thought it sacrilegious to assume the goal of becoming creative children of God.  God creates.  We create by joining God's creation, not standing above it or below it as observers, like Lucifer or Ahriman, who really are as much outsiders as God used to be.  When Michael Howard compares Luciferic vices like recklessness with Ahrimanic vices like cowardice, and says that people get courage by using one against the other, though, I think of Ahriman and Lucifer, their suffering, their alienation, and am loathe to use them--I want instead to cry out:  "Forgive them.  Behold the Christ!  Follow Him!"

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Georg Kuhlewind[24] contends that "attention" is the essence of the human being.  Giving attention is the key, because "having" is unknown in the spiritual world, so giving and receiving is all that happens there--a swirling nightmare for the uninitiated, because there is no compass of materiality to orient us.  It's like God's breath--the seed of the Logos and of our attention...never finished...writing on water...YHWH (he creates).  He goes on to say that one becomes what one perceives, and the more elevated the quality of perceiving, the more one assimilates oneself.  Thus, he says, our task is to cultivate the word in two directions:  through perceiving the created world, in which the Logos appears, attentively; and through perceiving the primal revelations in new ideas, attentively.  Finally, he notes that perceiving archetypal phenomena doesn't require intellectual interpretation, because the interpretation is within itself, like the arts (where you install concepts into percepts created for others).  In the arts, we are like angels, giving, breathing out only, as when we speak.  After death, we'll have plenty of time to breathe in.  We'll breathe in, he says, to speak as we inhale the Logos.  "If any man speak, let him speak as the word of God."  1 Peter 4:11.   "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."   Gal 2:20.  The poet gives attention, and receives crucifixion[25].  But the poet need not see this as death, because the act of sacrifice--the giving of attention--is the creator of life.

SUMMARY

The Calendar of the Soul purports to tell us how our feelings and efforts will change with the weeks and seasons each year, and such a tool should help us to see, by process of elimination, what is eternal in us (i.e., our spirit).  A reader should be able to test Steiner's theory by studying the feelings and efforts, expressed in writing, art, or music, of people unfamiliar with his work who kept a record of the dates when their works were done.  The reader's objectivity in considering the validity of the Calendar will be prejudiced if the reader is stuck in a Kantian world-view that denies that one can understand the spirit and its purpose for existing (i.e., if the reader is closed to the possibility that feelings and spirit can be studied as a science).  Poetry, since God gave us the power through Christ to form and harmonize the world by giving our attention to the world, gives us a tool for seeing spirit and exercising a joyful, sacrificial creativity which can be a purpose in life.  The reader who gives attention to this study is looking through a peephole in a wall of doubt and prejudice to a world of feelings and spirit.  Western philosophy and poetry confirm that world’s existence, often urge us to seek it, and sometimes provide means to attain it.  Working with the Calendar was a key, for me, to advance once more into the life-stream of Western thought.  The active reader can begin to break down that wall of doubt and prejudice to enter creatively into the world, and entering, memorably experience a joy and purpose in life.

******************************************************

A SUGGESTION FOR EVALUATING POETRY

Listen to a poem as you would "listen to wind", then study the poem as you would "study cell structure."[26]  Ask the following three questions of your spirit, body and heart, respectively:

Is it true?  That is, does the poem allow sight of something eternal (this could occur, in lyrical poems, through clarification of feelings)?

Is it beautiful?  That is, is the poem creative?  Does it give attention?  Does it appeal to you where you breathe...in your veins...in your gut?

Is it good and just?  Does it protect children, if it is meant for children?  Does it love?  Is it memorable (use of rhyme and meter)?

Many of these poems precede the poet's involvement in Anthroposophy, but the questions should be applicable to any poem.

No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without the express written permission of George Reitnour. 

Copyright 2005 George Reitnour     All rights reserved.