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Sept. 3, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:02
1449 Arch' - A Poem

An analysis of a poem I wrote when I was 20...

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This is a poem called Arch that I wrote when I was twenty or twenty-one.
Arch. Under the shade of the spreading tree Where fruit unseen starved youth unborn A church was built by hunchbacks Who lay sad stone on jagged rock Mounting their steps with twisted feet Seeing no sun but their shadows,
unable to turn to the sky, they scolded the night born from their bodies, enclosed their worship in skies of stone, and jabbered inside as the rain fell in tears, soft erosion on their dreams of rock.
When the mists came, they gesticulated, their cloaks like the webbed wings of crows.
On their graveyard, a mirrored floor, they spun and grunted on footprints of fog, below the reflected perfection of heaven.
When women came, they scattered like pebbles, weighed her with paintings and pages of books.
When tall men came, they were taught to bear fruit.
Their backs were bent with armfuls of apples, their faces gray from the green and the red.
Outside, the crows flapped quiet in the wind.
Trees bent and dyed, unwatered by droning.
Inside they pinned each other to windows, stained tapestries lit with traces of crimes, and jabbered and wept as the rain fell in tears, soft erosion on their dreams of rock.
I really like this poem.
I really do. I think it's very evocative, and I really like the metaphors, and I remember Working on the metaphors quite a lot in the poem, and I'll tell you what I think it means.
It's hard to know. It's not like everything that's in a poem is conscious.
It's hard to know, but I'll tell you what I think it means, or at least what it means to me, and what the evidence for it is in the text, and I think it's really important to, if you like a poem, to really try and tease out the associations, because a poem is a kind of dream, and many poems, of course, do come from dreams.
So I'll go through this and tell you what I think it means.
So we start with the first line, under the shade of the spreading tree.
Now, that's interesting, because it's not a...
It's a...
Shade is something that is both good and bad, right?
So shade is good when it's sunny and you want to cool down.
But shade...
Shade is also a word for ghost.
I think it's Middle English, I can't remember, but it's a synonym of a word for ghost.
And shade is also, of course, the root of shadow.
And shadow, again, shadow is good if you're hot.
Shadow is bad, you know, there's something in the shadows.
And why do we think that shade might be a negative word in this first line?
Because the tree is spreading.
The tree is not growing. Under the shade of the growing tree, under the shade of the leafy tree, under the shade of the green tree, under the shade of the...
Dancing tree, you know, but the tree is spreading, and spreading is a little strange for a tree to do.
You know, spreading is expanding horizontally, of course, and so it means that the world is getting darker, because the tree is spreading, and under the tree is shade, which means that shadows are spreading across, well, you'd say the world, but across the poemscape, let's say.
So, under the shade of the spreading tree, where fruit unseen starved youth unborn, well, that's original sin, right?
This is a poem about religion.
And where fruit unseen starved youth unborn, of course, original sin is when Eve ate the apple.
And so unseen fruit is, there is no such thing as this invisible apple.
And of course, it's funny to see how these themes recur again and again, because 20 years later, after this poem, I'm doing a podcast on the invisible apple.
Not quite 20, but close enough.
And starved youth unborn, this is because the original sin, of course, strikes down the virtue of...
Of children who are not even born, right?
So what happens to you is, as you know, I'm sure, you are born with the sin of Adam and Eve.
And so, where fruit unseen, starved youth unborn.
And so when we put these two lines together, we have, under the shade of the spreading tree, where fruit unseen, starved youth unborn.
Right? So the shade is original sin, it is religion, which means the tree is religion.
A church was built by hunchbacks.
So, the church built by hunchbacks is just a descripting line.
I'm just introducing the two things.
One is that a church is built, right?
It means its height, right?
Its height, like the tree. But it is a height that produces shadow, right?
So, the difference between...
You build a church, and we talk about this later in the poem...
You build a church and the first thing that you do is you enclose the sky, right?
You close off the sky. And the same, so the tree is spreading and the shadow is closing off the sky.
A church is built by hunchbacks who lay sad stone on jagged rock.
And that's interesting because if you lay your foundations on jagged rocks, it's actually very unstable, right?
So... That's important that the church is built on a fundamental instability and a resistance of the earth and a lack of care for the earth.
Because if you're building something on jagged rock, it means, of course, that you're not taking into account the actual environment that you're in, right?
Which means that you're dissociated, which means that you're building this massive structure on a very unstable base, which means that you're just not empirical.
You're not aware or alert to your surroundings.
You don't have respect for nature, right?
So it would make sense. Mounting their steps with twisted feet, right?
So we go from jagged rock to twisted feet.
And what that means, of course, sorry, I should say of course, it's obvious for me because I wrote it, right?
But I don't want to say of course like it's obvious, but jagged rock to twisted feet means that the ground is strongly associated with the hunchbacks, right?
And of course, hunchbacks, the physical, they're bowed down, right?
I mean, and we get into sort of why later.
So the jagged rock and twisted feet means that the earth is...
So the tree and the church obviously are symbols for religion, and the rock is a symbol for the feet, right?
It means that there... If the jagged rock and twisted feet, it means that there's a...
It means that they can't see the jagged rock, in a sense, and say, let's not build here, or let's smooth out the jagged rock, because they themselves are twisted, right?
So you can't see twists in the world if you yourself are twisted.
And mounting their steps, because they're hunchbacks, rather than straightening themselves up.
And again, I understand hunchbacks in the real world can't do that, but we get into the metaphor later.
It means that they would rather build unstable structures to gain a little bit of height than straighten their own backs.
And so we'll get into sort of why is that later.
So, seeing no sun but their shadows.
Again, we're back here to the shade, right?
So, under the shade of the spreading trees, the first line of the first verse.
And so, the first line of the second verse is seeing no sun but their shadows.
And what that means is they're not able to look at the sky.
And that's really, really important.
It means that the source of their knowledge is not coming from the external world, but from inside.
So seeing no sun but their shadows means that they refuse to actually look at the sun, which means that they know it's there, but they're avoiding it.
And the only way they know the sun is there is their shadow, right?
It's outlining something darker.
And if the spreading tree is religion, and the shade that it gives is the horror of original sin, the only way you know that the religion is there is because of the damage that is being done.
So the only way you know something is there is because of what it is blocking or what it is...
It's like the only way I know I'm alive is I'm depressed.
The only sun that I can see is my own shadow.
And again, you can go real deep into this in terms of Jungian stuff.
The shadow is somewhat analogous to Freud's id.
It is the dark side of human nature, our manipulative, our aggressive in a bad way, destructive, violent side.
And so they don't see life except for the shadow, except for that which is ugly, and that, of course, is original sin.
As well, right? So you don't see the glory of human nature, you only see the shadow.
You don't see the sun of the soul, you only see the dark side of the shadow.
Seeing no sun but their shadows, unable to turn to the sky, because all they're doing is staring at the shadow, they scolded the night, born from their bodies.
And what I meant here is that religion...
You know, it has a hatred for the body.
It has a hatred for the body.
And I wanted to really point that out in the poem.
They scolded the night born from the bodies.
You know, the darker impulses, the negative impulse, and the sexual impulse, of course, in religion is...
Religion is very hostile to the sexual impulse.
They scolded the night born from their bodies.
And scolding is a word that I, you know...
I didn't say they conquer it, right?
They scold it. And scolding is a petty, finger-wagging kind of thing to do.
And the word scolding almost always is used ineffectively.
You know, that it's not working, it doesn't achieve anything, or it's entirely self-generated, it's not empirical, it's not reasonable, it doesn't work.
And, um, so they scolded the night born from their bodies, means they just hate everything to do with their bodies, and, uh, um, there is a, I think religion views the body with extreme distaste, because it, you know, it shits, it farts, it climaxes, it gives birth, it menstruates, it's, you know, it's messy, and it's sometimes unreliable, and so on, and, uh, the body is a, um, The body is the opposite of religion.
I mean, it's been my theory for many, many years.
Because it's the body that creates life, not God, right?
Where did we come from?
Our mother's womb, not God, right?
So, they scolded the nightborn from their bodies, enclosed their worship in skies of stone, right?
So, they would rather have, because they're addicted to shadows, right?
They're addicted to the darkness, because they can't look at the world.
They can only look at So, um...
The rock, and this is again an allusion to the Christian church, upon this rock I will build my church.
So the church is a dream.
The rock is a dream. And the rain, to me, this represents the patience of two things.
And again, I'm not saying this is obvious in the poem, but the patience of two things, which is nature and the unconscious.
And what that means is you can force a belief upon the unconscious, but it will simply make you depressed, it will make you dissociated, it will make you unhappy, it will make you Unlovable.
It will make you aggressive. It will make you weird.
It will make you miserable.
And so, the rain, and the rain, of course, comes from the sky, right?
And this is what they're avoiding.
The actual sky is, you know, the sun of truth and empiricism and reality, right?
This is straight out of Plato, right?
That... The unwise only see the shadows of things.
They don't see the things themselves, right?
So the rain comes from the sky and continues to erode the reality of what it is they're doing.
So this is another indication that the church is unstable from the bottom because it's built on jagged rocks, which is not safe and won't last.
And also that from above, The rain of the ever-present drip of reality, of empiricism, of the fact that there is no God, right?
What is coming down from the sky?
Not God, not Muhammad, not Jesus in a fiery chariot, but simple, empirical, natural rain.
And it continues to erode.
So the church is unstable at the bottom.
It's being eroded down from the top.
So they jab it inside as the rain fell in tears, soft erosion on their dreams of rock.
And rain fell in tears is, I mean, obviously a pretty trite metaphor, but it means that this is internal to themselves, right?
The church is a dream and the rain are tears, right?
So the church is the religious faith which is being eroded by the drip, drip, drip of empirical reality.
And it's all an internal state, as religion tends to be.
So, when the mists came, they gesticulated.
It's the next stanza. They're cloaks like the webbed wings of crows.
So they're outside. Sorry, we don't know that they're outside.
So it says, On their graveyard, a mirrored floor, they spun and grunted on footprints of fog below the reflected perfection of heaven.
So, when the mists came, they gesticulated, and gesticulation with religion is a kind of magic.
I wanted to get a sort of witch doctor how primitive it is.
It's a kind of magic.
There are cloaks like the webbed wings of crows.
Well, they're...
So they...
Crows, of course, is an image of death.
I don't think it's actually a metaphor for death itself.
But the crows gather when someone is dying, like vultures.
So definitely it's an image of death.
And I just, I really liked that image that they were hunchbacks with these, as they moved, you know, the cloaks of the monks are like the web wings of crows.
So it says, on their graveyard, a mirrored floor, they spun and grunted on footprints of fog below the reflected perfection of heaven.
So they're outside now, because the mists come, right?
So, because they never want to see the sun, because they avoid truth, they can only go out when the mists come, right?
So they mists come, the dissociation comes, And they become animated, right?
More animated. On their graveyard, a mirrored floor, they spun and grunted on footprints of fog, below the reflected perfection of heaven.
Well, I wanted to point out something that sort of was interesting to me, always has been interesting to me.
It's the degree to which people can introspect, the degree to which people can be curious and open and empathetic about things in themselves that they don't like.
It's always easy for us to be empathetic with the things in ourselves.
Oh, look, I'm feeling happy at seeing a puppy.
We don't have any problems with that stuff.
It's the stuff that we dislike. And the one thing that I have found to be extremely true with religious people is they have almost a complete inability, and in most cases an extreme hostility towards introspection.
It's just brutal what they do with regards to introspection.
And why? Because religion itself is...
It's an illusion. It's a delusion, right?
And if you introspect, you bring the truth of the world into yourself, and you compare your inner states to facts and reason and evidence.
And so, you go deep within yourself.
But these people can't go deep in themselves.
On their graveyard, right?
So a graveyard is where you dig and you bury, right?
So there's going deep.
They can't go deep because it's a mirrored floor.
It only reflects back themselves, right?
This is a kind of narcissism, right?
Because the original Greek myth was, I think, Narcissus, which is also a flower.
He leaned over. I mean, he was so beautiful.
He leaned over and he caught sight of himself in water, right?
Which reflected him back, and it's a very old myth, probably comes even from before there were mirrors, and loved himself so much that he kept looking at himself and admiring himself.
I think he starved to death or something, but died, right?
And so if, instead of going deep, they look down and all they see is a mirrored floor.
And it only happens when the mists are out, when they're dissociated.
And so they can't dig deep.
They can only regard themselves, right?
Because religion is a form of projection, you know, in my sort of amateur way of looking at it.
And so their graveyard is a mirrored floor.
They can't bury anyone, they can't go deep, and they can't look into death, right?
Because they are scolding the night born from their bodies.
And what is the ultimate night born from our bodies is death.
So they can't look into it.
Whenever they try to look deep, all they see is their own shallow reflections.
They spun and grunted on footprints of fog below the reflected perfection of heaven.
Well, what is their perfect heaven?
Well, it is no sun because the mists are out.
It's dissociation. It's fog.
It's absence. It's shallow self-regard of looking down and seeing yourself.
And Footprints of Fog is nice as well.
I like it because, again, it's impermanence, right?
We have the church that meets the earth on jagged rock, which is impermanent and unstable.
And, you know, if you've ever sort of stepped on a mirror or put your hand on it, you lift it back up in that sort of sixth sense way and hand on the table.
So, the next stanza is, I honestly can't remember what scattered like pebbles means, but what it does...
Oh, I know, I remember what it means.
So scattered like pebbles is...
Well, pebbles don't scatter. If I said scattered like dandelion fluff, or if I was a really bad poet or something, I would say something like that, or scattered like startled crows, or whatever.
But pebbles don't. Scatter.
And so it means that women push them away.
Women push them away. And they are inert in the interaction, which means it's perfectly reactive.
They are completely inert in the reaction.
Scattered like pebbles. Weighed her with paintings and pages of books.
And this to me is the problem that religion has with femininity, right?
Because As I said, the real source of life is a woman's womb and a man's semen, right?
I mean, that's the egg and the semen.
It's nothing to do with God.
In fact, it's a whole lot messier than these idealistic, dissociated, abstract perfectionists would like.
And so the innate instinct of the religious mindset is to turn everything that is meaty and deep and whole and natural and good And powerful into something that is manipulatable and abstract and empty and depressed and so on.
And so they weighed her with paintings and pages of books.
It means that they're turning her into something abstract.
And you can see this quite often that the greater the idealization, the greater the punishment, right?
So at the same time as women were being venerated, Through the concept of courtly love, or shortly thereafter, you have the witches, right?
So, the same time that women are being venerated in the form of the Virgin Mary, you have these witch hunts and these burnings, and women are being unbelievably and brutally oppressed within society.
So, when women came, they scattered like pebbles, weighed her with paintings and pages of books.
And the ways are down, right?
If you're idealized, it's a burden to you.
I mean, if you are ever idealized, it is an incredible burden.
When tall men came, they were taught to bear fruit.
Their backs were bent with armfuls of apples, their faces gray from the green and the red.
And so this is how men are turned into hunchbacks.
This goes back to why are they hunchbacks?
Well, because originally men were more tall and more healthy.
And by that I sort of mean, you know, the Greek and the Roman religions, which to me were a little, much more humane than the viciousness of the Christian religion.
Now, I'm not saying that I believe that 100% now, and I would have to do more research, really.
But at the time, this is sort of what I meant.
So when tall men came, they were taught to bear fruit.
In other words, they are given these...
Where fruit unseen, starved youth unborn, they're given original sin.
Their backs were bent with armfuls of apples.
And... This means that the apples have been plucked and the apples are dying, right?
So they're laden down with the death and the heaviness and the crippling weight of original sin.
Their face is gray from the green and the red.
It means that they've become depressed because of the florid metaphors of religion.
Religious metaphors are incredibly powerful, right?
I mean, coming back from the dead, walking on water...
Infinite love, heaven and hell, it is such a wild overstimulation.
To me, religion is the heroine of the deep brain.
It just so wildly overstimulates people, and it empties them out, because the human personality can't stand in the face of such apocalyptic Metaphors.
You can't have delicacy of feeling, ambivalence, contradiction, self-knowledge, all of the ecosystem stuff that I have talked about here.
You can't have it in the face of this apocalyptic, world-reaching battles of gods, devils, angels, demons, and blah, blah, blah.
So the green and the red is the very vivid metaphors of religion, but it turns humans gray.
It makes them depressed because you fade into insignificance in the face of such a wild panoply and canvas of hysteria.
So, we're back in the church.
They only come out when the mists are there.
So, the last stanza is, Outside the crows flapped quiet in the wind.
Trees bent and dyed, unwatered by droning.
Inside they pinned each other to windows, stained tapestries lit with traces of crimes, and jabbed and wept as the rain fell in tears, soft erosion on their dreams of rock.
So, outside the crows flapped quiet in the wind.
The outside has been abandoned.
The tall men have been broken into hunchbacks with original sin.
The women have been brutalized with hysterical metaphors and imagery.
And the world is empty.
Everybody is in the church.
Trees bent and dyed, unwatered by droning.
It means that the religious are not taking care.
Of the world.
They're not out there in the world renewing it, right?
They're inside this fantasy instability of church metaphor, of religious metaphor.
And the world outside dies.
The droning, of course, is chanting, monks chanting.
And this, of course, means this is a metaphor as well, right?
That the church is the religious personality and the world is everything outside it.
And it's my...
A tree's bent and died.
To me, this is relationships, right?
There's nothing emptier to me than a fundamentally religious relationship.
It's not a relationship, because it's fantasy.
As I've always said, we can only meet each other in reality.
We cannot meet each other in fantasy any more than you and I can have a dinner date in a dream.
So... The trees bent and died are mortared by droning.
It just means that when people are talking about Jesus and they're praying or they're, you know, going to Mecca, they're just doing all these things that have nothing to do with each other.
It's complete fantasy. It's internal.
It's nothing. It's the scar tissue of brutalized lies.
And your relationships die in religion.
It's the lack of intimacy. It's the lack of contact.
It's the lack of connection that is one of the things that I find so horrible about religion.
It's the lack of connection.
If you've ever seen, I think it's Jesus Camper.
These kids, they can't talk to each other because all they're doing is being herded, you know, like broken sheep through this deadly veil of fantasy and left there.
They can't connect with each other because they're full of these apocalyptic images that don't exist, of things that don't exist.
They can't connect with each other because we can only connect with honesty and with openness and with vulnerability and religion is dishonest.
Because religion is dishonest and fills people with lies, it cuts them off from each other.
Inside the church, they pinned each other to windows, stained tapestries lit with traces of crimes.
And this is stained glass, right?
So in religious, in church, you always have stained glass.
And the stained glass will often have, you know, the Bible stories, but you can always see traces of crimes in the stained glass.
At least I could when I was a kid, right?
There would always be someone with a sword, or there would be a crucifixion.
So, the traces of crimes, and the traces of crimes, of course, is original sin.
That's a trace of a crime.
But the real crime is being told about original sin, being told that it's true.
And because they can barely remember it, or there's only a mild trace to it, they have to act it out.
We reproduce the trauma in the world that we have not processed, that we will not acknowledge, that we have not accepted.
And so we will portray crimes that we have not processed.
And so, because it's only traces of crimes, they're making stained glass and tapestries and all that, because they won't acknowledge that they live in a falsehood.
And Jabin and wept as the rain fell in tears after erosion on their dreams of rock.
And that's how you know that the trees that are bent and dyed, unwatered by droning, are not actual trees, because it's raining.
So unwatered by droning means that the trees are the connections that we have, that are not valid.
What I think is a problem is that I'm talking about the tree as religion, and here now I'm talking about the tree as relationships.
I think that should have used a slightly different metaphor, built it more delicately, but that's...
That's alright. It's an old poem.
Soft erosion on their dreams of rock.
It just means that the world will always...
Undo fantasy over time, that you can be as hysterical as you want in your pursuit of fantasy, but the world and empiricism and reality will always undo it over time, and that's why it's sort of pointless, fundamentally, to fight against it.
So, I hope that makes sense.
The reason that I used the word arch is that arch is man-made, right?
And arch is...
You have under the arch, the arch itself, and over the arch, which is inside the church, the church, and outside the church, the real world, which is religious fantasy within the personality, the defenses against truth, right, looking everywhere except the sun, and then the real world outside.
So I'm still pleased with the poem many years later.
I think it's a good poem.
And so I hope that you liked it.
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