“Seems, madame? Nay it is; I know not seems.” – Hamlet
Helen Luke is not one of the easier writers to write about. She appeared as a guide in my life when I began to feel the difference between exterior and interior, fact and meaning, appearance and reality. These distinctions are not for everyone nor for all stages of life. But at some point you may find that marriage is not love, baptism not conversion, reputation not excellence, work not productive; and you may begin to wonder what reality is, and why all these things people spend their whole lives pursuing seem so strange and hollow.
The experience of reading her best work is like time spent in the desert, a stripping away of all superficies, a return to simplicity. She began writing only in her sixties, when many of the things that seem so important have already lost their luster. Her autobiography is astonishing in this regard: she requires fewer than eighty pages to cover the (then) seventy years of her life, and such seemingly significant details as the names and life-paths of her children are never even mentioned. And yet perhaps thirty pages of the text are devoted to narrating her dreams. She follows this autobiography with what she calls “A Diary of Vowels,” i.e. the voice without the consonants, the life itself stripped of details. Her topics are personal relationships with people in times of transition, dreams, overcoming ego-attachments, and wise sayings found in books.
For some this is hopelessly vague, and not helpful in overcoming the numerous practical obstacles of physical existence. Yet for many others for whom life offers such a wealth of details and so little meaning, and so much activity and so little satisfaction, or Luke’s writing is like an honest conversation in the midst of much pretense.
The source of most of this pretense is overrationalization, the reduction of human life to externals and the mechanical multiplication of those externals to cover the inner emptiness. The two traditional primary modes of sifting through this welter of superficiality are dreams and sex, because here the rational mind is least in control – whence most of modern psychoanalysis. The content of our dreams and the contours of our sexual desire reveal much that the mind effectively hides otherwise. Luke deals only indirectly with sex, which is deeply idiosyncratic anyway, although her thorough explorations of gender, marriage, and birth lead one to sex easily enough. Her main quarries for finding what is significant in human life are dreams and literature, from Greek mythology to Shakespeare to the oracular I Ching.
The approach is reminiscent of Joseph Campbell. Both Campbell and Luke were born in the same year and both were especially attracted to the work of Jung (both spent some time working directly with him in Switzerland). But whereas Campbell was an academic and focused on ideas, Luke is far more personal, valuing especially growth through personal crisis and relationship. In doing so she teaches “the way of discrimination:”
In relationship there are no rules, only basic guiding lines, and each tiny situation must be met as something unknown in which we must seek reality and love through a new effort of discrimination. (154)
For a wise life, this discernment must be continually employed. It is the process by which one looks past the rules to find the right, past the roles to find connection, past the merely important to find the essential. Luke wrote essay after essay of exploration on these topics, completely convinced of the need for perseverance and devotion. From “The Vows of the Interior Life,” on a life of devotion, be it marital, artistic, or religious:
There is plenty of adultery between very respectable married couples, for every mating is adulterous where there is no love and no creation. (184)
True imagination is born only out of the clearest possible discrimination of facts exactly as they are, and the penetration through them to the symbol beyond them. This is why the man or woman who is obedient to his or her imaginative vision inherits the earth. The down-to-earth facts of everyday life are filled with meaning, and transformed by the image, they too become truth. (187)
Her points on the need for constant creation in the marital relationship, and the continual birth of new life, particularly from sex, lead her to the most acute and perceptive attack on Church prohibitions on birth control I have ever read. But even more interesting is the mere fact that she writes so convincingly of the fundamental sameness of the life of devotion, either to spouse or art or God. From “Courtesy,” on true nobility:
Aristocracy means government by the “best,” the most noble, and in the mature psyche it means the preeminence of the objective, impersonal values over the little personal demands of the ego. So the royal quality, the aristocratic principle, is that which brings courtesy, is that which annihilates at once all feeling of superiority or inferiority between person and person. Only a true inner hierarchy of values can bring true equality of persons also, this equality – another paradox – can only exist where there is accurate discrimination of factual differences of ability and knowledge. In the counterfeit gentleman, high birth and breeding, or any outstanding quality, become not merely superior in their proper sphere, in their factual aspect, but are believed to constitute a superiority as person, and no degree of polished manners or correct behavior can turn that man into a real gentleman, a courteous person. (190-1)
Luke is especially hard on any type of mysticism that permits absent-mindedness, escapism, or vagueness. The above passage, which demands recognition of factual differences as a paradoxical prerequisite for equality, is perfectly indicative of her “marriage of heaven and earth,” her belief in incarnating spiritual wisdom in very physical ways. Any other approach would be pretense and condescension, which we feel when those who are smarter or richer or more experienced than we are try to disregard these inequalities. Similarly she refuses to accept any “wisdom” which, like Hamlet, makes us unequal to the facts of our lives: “for many [undiscerning seekers], the responsibilities and hard work of ordinary life fade and seem humdrum and unimportant. Then indeed, the end is a descent from the superhuman to the subhuman.” This is the classic type of the religious fanatic, for whom this world is of so little account. Elsewhere she speaks of a Buddhist monk who revealed his lack of enlightenment because he did not remember where he had left his umbrella.
Her essays about literature are unique because they focus primarily on the reality of the artist, rather than the fiction of the characters. Hence she looks at Othello and Iago not as two people, but as two interior realities of one man, which of course must be true, and the conflicts on the stage merely ciphers for what goes on inside. She treats the stories of the Bible similarly, which more often than not unlocks them: in particular her narrative of the life of spiritual Jacob and sensuous Esau, and sensuous Leah and spiritual Rachel, as all portions of one psyche, is representatively extraordinary.
Luke was an essayist, and her work was anthologized at several points, creating a patchwork of different collections rather than a discrete series of books. The above essays are from her book Kaleidoscope, which contains much of her best work; The Way of Woman is her most readily available collection, and it is excellent as well. But all her writings are from the same period of her life, and represent the same condensation of wisdom; some are more successful than others, but all are worth owning.
I was introduced to Luke’s writing by a wise woman of my acquaintance, whose copy of The Way of Woman I perused when I saw it on her shelf. I was astonished by it: it had been read and reread, and the various underlinings and comments, from various periods of this woman’s life, so clearly and perceptively identified major life-choices and internal crises, that I felt I could write this woman’s biography based merely on what she had reacted to in this one book. This despite the fact that I knew very few of the “consonants” of her life, and certainly none were to be found in this dog-eared paperback. This is Luke’s genius, that she expresses the great crises and conflicts, not just of hers, but of our lives: she has stripped down the externals of her own life to reveal a fundamental equality with her fellow seekers.
The intentional community she established in Wisconsin, called Apple Farm, has an interesting website which features some of her writings. Since so much of her work is about choice, and becoming more conscious of what we desire and what we are pursuing, let me put down a few of her thoughts on choice:
In our moments of choice how do we know that we are obeying the voice of truth? We can only do our best to discriminate our motives, free ourselves from conventional opinions, watch our dreams, use our intelligence, together with our intuition, weigh the values involved and the effects on other people, and then act wholeheartedly from the deepest level we know. If our choice proves to be a mistake, it will be a creative mistake – a mistake leading to consciousness. If it is a question of a big change in our lives, something almost always comes from without to meet the urge from within, and we have a chance to recognize our way – either by resisting a temptation or by accepting a new attitude. If our commitment to our “fate,” to the will of God, includes the willingness to pay the full price, we will not go astray – we will relate to the Spirit within, not succumb to possession by it. There is no rule to tell us whether this or that is the right attitude, the right way to behave in all circumstances. (262)
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