01 August 2024
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least possible baggage, and discover the world.
It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property, triviality, to simply walk away.
That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.
Walking is the human way of getting about.
Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths, visible and invisible, symmetrical and meandering.
There are walks on which we tread in the footsteps of others, walks on which we strike out entirely for ourselves.
A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.
There are things we will never see, unless we walk to them.
Walking is a mobile form of waiting.
What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance than what I discover along the way.
To be completely lost is a good thing on a walk.
The most distant places seem most accessible once one is on the road.
Convictions, directions, opinions, are of less importance than sensible shoes.
In the course of a walk, we usually find out something about our companion, and this is true even when we travel alone.
When I spend a day talking I feel exhausted, when I spend it walking I am pleasantly tired.
The pace of a walk will determine the number and variety of things to be encountered, from the broad outlines of a mountain range to a tit's nest among the lichen, and the quality of attention that will be brought to bear upon them.
A rock outcrop, a hedge, a fallen tree, anything that turns us out of our way, is an excellent thing on a walk.
Wrong turnings, doubling back, pauses and digressions, all contribute to the dislocation of a persistent self-interest.
Everything we meet is equally important or unimportant.
The most lonely places are the most lovely.
Walking is egalitarian and democratic; we do not become experts at walking and one side of the road is as good as another.
Walking is not so much romantic as reasonable.
The line of a walk is articulate in itself, a kind of statement.
Pools, walls, solitary trees, are natural halting places.
We lose the flavour of walking if it becomes too rare or too extraordinary, if it turns into an expedition; rather it should be quite ordinary, unexceptional, just what we do.
Daily walking, in all weathers, in every season, becomes a sort of ground or continuum upon which the least emphatic occurrences are registered clearly.
A stick of ash or blackthorn, through long use, will adjust itself to the palm.
Of the many ways through a landscape, we can choose, on each occasion, only one, and the project of the walk will be to remain responsive, adequate, to the consequences of the choice we have made, to confirm the chosen way rather than refuse the others.
One continues on a long walk not by effort of will but through fidelity.
Storm clouds, rain, hail, when we have survived these we seem to have taken on some of the solidity of rocks and trees.
A day, from dawn to dusk, is the natural span of a walk.
A dull walk is not without value.
To walk for hours on a clear night is the largest experience we can have.
For the right understanding of a landscape, information must come to the intelligence from all the senses.
Looking, singing, resting, breathing, are all complementary to walking.
Climbing uphill, the horizon grows wider; descending, the hills gather round.
We can take a walk which is a sampling of different airs: the invigorating air of the heights; the filtered air of a pine forest; the rich air over ploughed earth.
We can walk between two places and in so doing establish a link between them, bring them into a warmth of contact, like introducing two friends.
There are walks on which I lose myself, walks which return me to myself again.
Is there anything that is better than to be out, walking, in the clear air?
It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property, triviality, to simply walk away.
That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.
Walking is the human way of getting about.
Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths, visible and invisible, symmetrical and meandering.
There are walks on which we tread in the footsteps of others, walks on which we strike out entirely for ourselves.
A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.
There are things we will never see, unless we walk to them.
Walking is a mobile form of waiting.
What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance than what I discover along the way.
To be completely lost is a good thing on a walk.
The most distant places seem most accessible once one is on the road.
Convictions, directions, opinions, are of less importance than sensible shoes.
In the course of a walk, we usually find out something about our companion, and this is true even when we travel alone.
When I spend a day talking I feel exhausted, when I spend it walking I am pleasantly tired.
The pace of a walk will determine the number and variety of things to be encountered, from the broad outlines of a mountain range to a tit's nest among the lichen, and the quality of attention that will be brought to bear upon them.
A rock outcrop, a hedge, a fallen tree, anything that turns us out of our way, is an excellent thing on a walk.
Wrong turnings, doubling back, pauses and digressions, all contribute to the dislocation of a persistent self-interest.
Everything we meet is equally important or unimportant.
The most lonely places are the most lovely.
Walking is egalitarian and democratic; we do not become experts at walking and one side of the road is as good as another.
Walking is not so much romantic as reasonable.
The line of a walk is articulate in itself, a kind of statement.
Pools, walls, solitary trees, are natural halting places.
We lose the flavour of walking if it becomes too rare or too extraordinary, if it turns into an expedition; rather it should be quite ordinary, unexceptional, just what we do.
Daily walking, in all weathers, in every season, becomes a sort of ground or continuum upon which the least emphatic occurrences are registered clearly.
A stick of ash or blackthorn, through long use, will adjust itself to the palm.
Of the many ways through a landscape, we can choose, on each occasion, only one, and the project of the walk will be to remain responsive, adequate, to the consequences of the choice we have made, to confirm the chosen way rather than refuse the others.
One continues on a long walk not by effort of will but through fidelity.
Storm clouds, rain, hail, when we have survived these we seem to have taken on some of the solidity of rocks and trees.
A day, from dawn to dusk, is the natural span of a walk.
A dull walk is not without value.
To walk for hours on a clear night is the largest experience we can have.
For the right understanding of a landscape, information must come to the intelligence from all the senses.
Looking, singing, resting, breathing, are all complementary to walking.
Climbing uphill, the horizon grows wider; descending, the hills gather round.
We can take a walk which is a sampling of different airs: the invigorating air of the heights; the filtered air of a pine forest; the rich air over ploughed earth.
We can walk between two places and in so doing establish a link between them, bring them into a warmth of contact, like introducing two friends.
There are walks on which I lose myself, walks which return me to myself again.
Is there anything that is better than to be out, walking, in the clear air?
—Thomas A Clark, 1988
POETRY AND THE SACRED
Don Domanski
A Ralph Gustafson lecture, 2005
My talk this evening is about poetry and the sacred. It's a theme I've kept going back to for over thirty years now. For me, there's an intimate connection between the two, so intimate in fact that I can't really separate them out, one from the other. It's been the reason why I have continued to write; otherwise, I don't honestly think I would.
There's an umbilical point somewhere that nurtures both, like twins fed from the same source. By sacred, I don't necessarily mean religious, or spiritual in the New Age sense of that word. I mean the fundamental experience one has with time and space, with the seemingly endless corporeality that flows into our consciousness. I mean how each thing holds a mystery, simply because it exists, because existence itself is sacred. The fact that something exists at all has continued to amaze me, and the forms, as well, have amazed me. I don't mean this in a sentimental way; true amazement asks far more from us than the recognition of beauty and form. Amazement also demands that we see the darkness inherent in everything, that we see the destructiveness implicit in creation and its attending grief. Poetry helps to enhance and deepen our experience of existence, not just by the use of words, but by the fact that despite their use something else is carried along with them.
At the heart of poetry is a pre-verbal reality, a calling forth from a core within our being. There is something in poetry that pushes us beyond language. It's as if the language used negated itself and opened up well beyond linguistic meaning, into a realm that has far more to do with communion than communication. Poetry derives its energies and interests, to a great degree, from an extralinguistic view of itself and its meaning. It transcends what is written on the page. Poetry carries us, not just on the backs of words, but also on the spaces between the words.
This is why some teachers have a difficult time teaching poetry; they are always looking for meaning, while sometimes driving their students to distraction with the search. It becomes a game of Where's Waldo, but poor old Waldo isn't there. There is no objective meaning. Meaning is what you bring to the poem, not just what the poet has written. Meaning is very arbitrary. In the end, the poem is the integrity of a moment lost in the enormity of that moment and found again on the far side of any linear meaning. The words themselves point to where no words can go, where the textual intent becomes secondary to where the poem is directing us.
As Buddhists say, you shouldn't confuse the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. In other words, you shouldn't think that believing in the teachings of the Buddha means you're a Buddhist, but rather you should look to where the teachings are pointing. Believe in the moon, not the finger. Poets, the politics of poetry, the prizes, etcetera, are meaningless in the face of the moon itself. Often, the moonlight is lost and we forget why the poems are there, why we're standing outside, looking up at the night sky.
The poem, as Archibald Macleish said, shouldn't mean but be. Creating being is the Great Mystery re-enacted on the page and in the psyche. Once it was considered stealing fire from the gods; in our society, it's keeping a sacred fire alive amid the destructiveness and greed that is an ever-present darkness we must navigate daily. Donald Hall once said that poetry in this culture is a revolutionary act. Not just the writing of it but the reading of poetry as well, an act of rebellion in a world so bent on hiding the experience of the sacred.
Mindfulness, one of the main components of poetry, has become a subversive act in a civilization so fixated on the self. It's a sad commentary on our society when opening up our hearts and eyes has become seditious behaviour. Without mindfulness, there is no poetry, no art, no spiritual development, only the barrenness of a self separated from the rest of existence.
It takes a great deal of effort to see what's in front of you, whether that's a stone, a mountain, or another person. After much watching, after much witnessing of the metamorphoses from object to presence, you find that everything is self-luminous. If you observe something long enough, its being comes forth, the isness of the thing is made manifest. You end up feeling the sacredness of its presence in time and space. In Ulysses, James Joyce says it well: "Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods." What you're experiencing is the being of what has been attended by your sight and patience. What you're feeling is a connective pulse, the conjunction of seer and seen, the prime ritual of the sacred. This is what the great Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart meant when he said, "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." The watcher and the watched are one and the same, as the poet and the reader are one when their spiritual centre of gravity has been altered by the poem. The poem can allow us a perspective beyond the culture and iconography used to create it. The poem has no culture or language to steadfastly support its framework; it is more an act of nature, operating outside the constructs of a given society.
Art, in the end, will save us from "culture," from the rigid notions we have of the world and our place in it. The forgotten dimensions of our lives are given back to us; we are returned to our deeper selves, shown again our interconnectedness with the universe at large. That nuclear moment can happen while viewing a painting, reading a poem, listening to a piece of music, etcetera. It can also happen while seated on a hill overlooking a landscape, or staring into the night sky, or simply watching someone drink a cup of tea. All you need is mindfulness, openness to the moment offered. Poetry comes from these moments, from the longing to reanimate them, to give them new life and energy, to capture at least some of the wonder they contain. They come from our desire to cross over, to connect and interact with a larger view of reality, to break out of the confines of our small definition of the self, that claustrophobic fear of leaving the comfortable routines that define us. To these moments, language is an impediment, the weight of cliché, common usage, etcetera, pressing down heavily on each line written.
Metaphor is one way to re-establish our relationship with the textual possibilities; it sidesteps many of the pitfalls that lock language in a low, weak orbit around the individual. If the cliché that poetry allows us to see with fresh eyes is true, metaphor, to paraphrase Eckhart, is the eye that both the world and the poet use to see each other. It creates sight where there was none; it releases us to new expectations. Reality shifts and we are carried along with the movement. "Metaphor," to quote Cynthia Ozick, "is the mind's opposable thumb." It allows us to grasp meaning in one of the mind's darkest places, in that gap between the meanings themselves, in that fissure created by polarities, where light falls to blackness. To find the connection between dissimilar things is to place a flame there. In that deep chasm lies the consecrated space, the sacred ground of all spiritual traditions. The poet can bring back to our modern consciousness much of what has been lost during our journey towards mechanized existence. From the pilgrimages poets make, we are reminded of the heart's great need for wonder, its longing for a transpersonal dimension in our lives. Inside each of us is a desire for expansion outside of our ordinary self, to extend our understanding of nature, the universe and other people. Poetry is one way that this can be realized.
Our brains have evolved to exist and navigate in a narrow range of reality. For example, we see things as solid, when in fact they consist mostly of empty space. Few of us are aware that we are living on a planet travelling at 105,000 kilometres per hour through the vastness of space, and that our galaxy, the Milky Way, travels at 210 kilometres per second. We see only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum; we live within the scale and orders of magnitude that present themselves to us. We judge all of this as normal and often pride ourselves on being realists. The truth is, like any other creature, we have strict limitations on what we can perceive.
Likewise, language itself seems real, something we can depend upon. We think with it, we communicate with it, we use it to have imaginary conversations with people, even with people who are dead. We rely on the solidness of words, but like objects, they are made up mostly of empty space. They don't define, they indicate, they suggest reality. Language and reality are always in a state of becoming. Neither reaches formation, neither is ever totally realized. Actuality is always elsewhere. We move towards it, but it keeps well ahead of us. What we have as human beings are possible moments of a larger dimension. Most of us trust only to our five senses, the five reasons that hold us to a view of the self as something distinct from the rest of existence. Poetry tries to reach out and connect with more than our senses allow, attempting to discover what lies beyond the confines of our narrow perspective.
Poetry asks that we reshape ourselves, and in that reshaping discover the sacredness of what surrounds us. It lies everywhere and in everything. Christ says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, "Break a stick and I am there." A monk once asked a Zen master, "What is Buddha?" He answered, "A stick of dried dung." The divine is every place where we open our eyes. You can think of it as emanating from God or nature; it doesn't matter, because there are no words or concepts that can contain it. The poet can only point to it with what exists between the words he or she writes. That contradiction is the beating of an angel's wings; it's the presence of the lover, the ecstasy of dogs running, the readiness of your name to release you. The poem is affirmation that there is more to reality than what we are taught to perceive or expect, that the impoverishment of our five senses can be enriched, and the very definition of ourselves can be amplified, and that we can increase our own significance by increasing the significance of the world.
Art in all of its forms has the ability to bring us back into focus, to open possibilities, provide ground to stand upon, and behold beingness, that most sacred of treasures. This is exactly what good poetry can accomplish. It can show you the aliveness of things, which we usually don't see, or see very superficially. Whether the poem is positive or negative is only secondary, what matters is that the poem is rendered with as much complete openness as possible. The poem doesn't have to be a "feel good" experience for it to have a spiritual dimension, for it to open the psyche to new realities. Pollyanna is not the patron saint of the arts. Poets needn't be moralists, or pillars of virtue, but rather instigators of new emotional patterns with which to approach the undeveloped faculties that lock us into time and culture. The cosmogenic push of the poem's instinct can see past the infantile ego of both the poet and the reader, if only momentarily, to show the potential that lies all around them. The poem is an ancient mediator in the long dispute between the cherished self and the deeper knowledge of the plenitude, which exists outside its narrow definition of reality.
We are taught to accept the view of the world we've inherited, the indicated circle of "reason" handed down generation after generation. For many, anything outside that protected boundary is unknown and therefore dangerous: "there be dragons" and a frenzy of likely horrors awaiting the traveller. Art has acted as both arbitrator and translator in that struggle with chaos, regardless of whether it's internal or external. At times, the more conservative among us are right, there are dragons out there. Sometimes the poem itself is a dragon, its green and regenerative fire burning away the petty notions we've accumulated about phenomenality. The motif of terra incognita is rich with possibilities, both positive and negative, but richer still is the chance for rebirth.
The poet must perform some degree of self-annihilation to experience the full fluidity of the poem rising out of the ground of being. The sanctum sanctorum cannot be reached with your name intact. The poem as it is written down must precede you, not the other way around. If the poem doesn't lead the way, you're left with dross, with your opinions and beliefs formed during a lifetime of culturally acceptable ideas. To go your own way, you must be reborn to some degree each time you sit down to write a poem. Death and rebirth are a common theme in the traditions of all people. For the poet it is a necessary practice in order to cross over to the far-reaching space outside his or her personal views.
The sacred does not give itself readily to people whose heads are clogged with preconceptions and personal judgements on what a poem should be. Rather, the poet needs to be receptive to a long series of potential influences that can alter his or her basic percepts regarding what defines a poem. In part, the function and value of poetry is to cheat reason, to break away from its hold and censor. Reason is the serpent in the garden, it whispers in our ear that there is no larger panorama beyond its scope to behold. The pride of reason damages our ability to see the multi-dimensional possibilities inherent in our spirit. "Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason," to quote Novalis. To write, to really write, one must die to reason for a while in order to give birth to the ambiguous self, ready to explore all the unreasonable possibilities. The mystery lies in those redemptive words that come forth when we break free of our prejudices, allowing language to sharpen our sensibilities to a point of entry beyond mere reason.
Bounded by certain aspects of our daily consciousness, we become numb to much of the world; so much of it becomes dull and gives back no light. Art and poetry are not a panacea for all our ills, but they can help us to focus in on what's important, what calls to us around every corner, under every stone. Deepening our lives essentially means to be aware, to answer the call from life itself, to practise the veneration of its numerous forms. This has nothing to do with religion, per se; rather, religion and art grow out of this veneration, this deep need to bow our heads before wonder and being. Without art or religion, human beings still have this irresistible urge to acknowledge the awe they feel in the presence of creation.
An atheist can feel that as deeply as a believer, the magnitude of the experience can be exactly the same in either case. No amount of negation can push aside this longing for reverence, it wells up, regardless, in every human being. This yearning for the sacred is the driving force behind all true art, even if it isn't recognized as such. If we listen quietly we can hear that sigh of creation, world sustaining, spinning galaxies, balancing itself on the tip of a rabbit's hair, drifting to the ground on a birch leaf. The whole round of existence and every piece of it is revelation; every square inch is the totality of time and space nestled into form. Every atom is the ultimate expression of mystery, the mystery that things exist, that we have the ability to be conscious of them. The universe unfolds like the meaning of a single poem and that meaning is simply to be. The greatest mystery, held in every grain of cosmic dust, in every blade of grass, is existence itself. This is the first and last wonder, beyond words to describe; only the wordless poem can accomplish this. Only the poem we are always trying to write, but can only point to, that singularity immersed in the continuum of itself, without any possibility of secondary interpretations. Wordless, it comes to us without an attendant personality; without a meaning we can grasp with language. Yet we all know of it, feel it in times of intuition beyond the nature of names and forms, it is the connective tissue between heart and mind, stone and star. It is this living moment, alive now in the presence of all beings, in the isness of all objects.
A Ralph Gustafson lecture, 2005
My talk this evening is about poetry and the sacred. It's a theme I've kept going back to for over thirty years now. For me, there's an intimate connection between the two, so intimate in fact that I can't really separate them out, one from the other. It's been the reason why I have continued to write; otherwise, I don't honestly think I would.
There's an umbilical point somewhere that nurtures both, like twins fed from the same source. By sacred, I don't necessarily mean religious, or spiritual in the New Age sense of that word. I mean the fundamental experience one has with time and space, with the seemingly endless corporeality that flows into our consciousness. I mean how each thing holds a mystery, simply because it exists, because existence itself is sacred. The fact that something exists at all has continued to amaze me, and the forms, as well, have amazed me. I don't mean this in a sentimental way; true amazement asks far more from us than the recognition of beauty and form. Amazement also demands that we see the darkness inherent in everything, that we see the destructiveness implicit in creation and its attending grief. Poetry helps to enhance and deepen our experience of existence, not just by the use of words, but by the fact that despite their use something else is carried along with them.
At the heart of poetry is a pre-verbal reality, a calling forth from a core within our being. There is something in poetry that pushes us beyond language. It's as if the language used negated itself and opened up well beyond linguistic meaning, into a realm that has far more to do with communion than communication. Poetry derives its energies and interests, to a great degree, from an extralinguistic view of itself and its meaning. It transcends what is written on the page. Poetry carries us, not just on the backs of words, but also on the spaces between the words.
This is why some teachers have a difficult time teaching poetry; they are always looking for meaning, while sometimes driving their students to distraction with the search. It becomes a game of Where's Waldo, but poor old Waldo isn't there. There is no objective meaning. Meaning is what you bring to the poem, not just what the poet has written. Meaning is very arbitrary. In the end, the poem is the integrity of a moment lost in the enormity of that moment and found again on the far side of any linear meaning. The words themselves point to where no words can go, where the textual intent becomes secondary to where the poem is directing us.
As Buddhists say, you shouldn't confuse the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. In other words, you shouldn't think that believing in the teachings of the Buddha means you're a Buddhist, but rather you should look to where the teachings are pointing. Believe in the moon, not the finger. Poets, the politics of poetry, the prizes, etcetera, are meaningless in the face of the moon itself. Often, the moonlight is lost and we forget why the poems are there, why we're standing outside, looking up at the night sky.
The poem, as Archibald Macleish said, shouldn't mean but be. Creating being is the Great Mystery re-enacted on the page and in the psyche. Once it was considered stealing fire from the gods; in our society, it's keeping a sacred fire alive amid the destructiveness and greed that is an ever-present darkness we must navigate daily. Donald Hall once said that poetry in this culture is a revolutionary act. Not just the writing of it but the reading of poetry as well, an act of rebellion in a world so bent on hiding the experience of the sacred.
Mindfulness, one of the main components of poetry, has become a subversive act in a civilization so fixated on the self. It's a sad commentary on our society when opening up our hearts and eyes has become seditious behaviour. Without mindfulness, there is no poetry, no art, no spiritual development, only the barrenness of a self separated from the rest of existence.
It takes a great deal of effort to see what's in front of you, whether that's a stone, a mountain, or another person. After much watching, after much witnessing of the metamorphoses from object to presence, you find that everything is self-luminous. If you observe something long enough, its being comes forth, the isness of the thing is made manifest. You end up feeling the sacredness of its presence in time and space. In Ulysses, James Joyce says it well: "Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods." What you're experiencing is the being of what has been attended by your sight and patience. What you're feeling is a connective pulse, the conjunction of seer and seen, the prime ritual of the sacred. This is what the great Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart meant when he said, "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." The watcher and the watched are one and the same, as the poet and the reader are one when their spiritual centre of gravity has been altered by the poem. The poem can allow us a perspective beyond the culture and iconography used to create it. The poem has no culture or language to steadfastly support its framework; it is more an act of nature, operating outside the constructs of a given society.
Art, in the end, will save us from "culture," from the rigid notions we have of the world and our place in it. The forgotten dimensions of our lives are given back to us; we are returned to our deeper selves, shown again our interconnectedness with the universe at large. That nuclear moment can happen while viewing a painting, reading a poem, listening to a piece of music, etcetera. It can also happen while seated on a hill overlooking a landscape, or staring into the night sky, or simply watching someone drink a cup of tea. All you need is mindfulness, openness to the moment offered. Poetry comes from these moments, from the longing to reanimate them, to give them new life and energy, to capture at least some of the wonder they contain. They come from our desire to cross over, to connect and interact with a larger view of reality, to break out of the confines of our small definition of the self, that claustrophobic fear of leaving the comfortable routines that define us. To these moments, language is an impediment, the weight of cliché, common usage, etcetera, pressing down heavily on each line written.
Metaphor is one way to re-establish our relationship with the textual possibilities; it sidesteps many of the pitfalls that lock language in a low, weak orbit around the individual. If the cliché that poetry allows us to see with fresh eyes is true, metaphor, to paraphrase Eckhart, is the eye that both the world and the poet use to see each other. It creates sight where there was none; it releases us to new expectations. Reality shifts and we are carried along with the movement. "Metaphor," to quote Cynthia Ozick, "is the mind's opposable thumb." It allows us to grasp meaning in one of the mind's darkest places, in that gap between the meanings themselves, in that fissure created by polarities, where light falls to blackness. To find the connection between dissimilar things is to place a flame there. In that deep chasm lies the consecrated space, the sacred ground of all spiritual traditions. The poet can bring back to our modern consciousness much of what has been lost during our journey towards mechanized existence. From the pilgrimages poets make, we are reminded of the heart's great need for wonder, its longing for a transpersonal dimension in our lives. Inside each of us is a desire for expansion outside of our ordinary self, to extend our understanding of nature, the universe and other people. Poetry is one way that this can be realized.
Our brains have evolved to exist and navigate in a narrow range of reality. For example, we see things as solid, when in fact they consist mostly of empty space. Few of us are aware that we are living on a planet travelling at 105,000 kilometres per hour through the vastness of space, and that our galaxy, the Milky Way, travels at 210 kilometres per second. We see only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum; we live within the scale and orders of magnitude that present themselves to us. We judge all of this as normal and often pride ourselves on being realists. The truth is, like any other creature, we have strict limitations on what we can perceive.
Likewise, language itself seems real, something we can depend upon. We think with it, we communicate with it, we use it to have imaginary conversations with people, even with people who are dead. We rely on the solidness of words, but like objects, they are made up mostly of empty space. They don't define, they indicate, they suggest reality. Language and reality are always in a state of becoming. Neither reaches formation, neither is ever totally realized. Actuality is always elsewhere. We move towards it, but it keeps well ahead of us. What we have as human beings are possible moments of a larger dimension. Most of us trust only to our five senses, the five reasons that hold us to a view of the self as something distinct from the rest of existence. Poetry tries to reach out and connect with more than our senses allow, attempting to discover what lies beyond the confines of our narrow perspective.
Poetry asks that we reshape ourselves, and in that reshaping discover the sacredness of what surrounds us. It lies everywhere and in everything. Christ says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, "Break a stick and I am there." A monk once asked a Zen master, "What is Buddha?" He answered, "A stick of dried dung." The divine is every place where we open our eyes. You can think of it as emanating from God or nature; it doesn't matter, because there are no words or concepts that can contain it. The poet can only point to it with what exists between the words he or she writes. That contradiction is the beating of an angel's wings; it's the presence of the lover, the ecstasy of dogs running, the readiness of your name to release you. The poem is affirmation that there is more to reality than what we are taught to perceive or expect, that the impoverishment of our five senses can be enriched, and the very definition of ourselves can be amplified, and that we can increase our own significance by increasing the significance of the world.
Art in all of its forms has the ability to bring us back into focus, to open possibilities, provide ground to stand upon, and behold beingness, that most sacred of treasures. This is exactly what good poetry can accomplish. It can show you the aliveness of things, which we usually don't see, or see very superficially. Whether the poem is positive or negative is only secondary, what matters is that the poem is rendered with as much complete openness as possible. The poem doesn't have to be a "feel good" experience for it to have a spiritual dimension, for it to open the psyche to new realities. Pollyanna is not the patron saint of the arts. Poets needn't be moralists, or pillars of virtue, but rather instigators of new emotional patterns with which to approach the undeveloped faculties that lock us into time and culture. The cosmogenic push of the poem's instinct can see past the infantile ego of both the poet and the reader, if only momentarily, to show the potential that lies all around them. The poem is an ancient mediator in the long dispute between the cherished self and the deeper knowledge of the plenitude, which exists outside its narrow definition of reality.
We are taught to accept the view of the world we've inherited, the indicated circle of "reason" handed down generation after generation. For many, anything outside that protected boundary is unknown and therefore dangerous: "there be dragons" and a frenzy of likely horrors awaiting the traveller. Art has acted as both arbitrator and translator in that struggle with chaos, regardless of whether it's internal or external. At times, the more conservative among us are right, there are dragons out there. Sometimes the poem itself is a dragon, its green and regenerative fire burning away the petty notions we've accumulated about phenomenality. The motif of terra incognita is rich with possibilities, both positive and negative, but richer still is the chance for rebirth.
The poet must perform some degree of self-annihilation to experience the full fluidity of the poem rising out of the ground of being. The sanctum sanctorum cannot be reached with your name intact. The poem as it is written down must precede you, not the other way around. If the poem doesn't lead the way, you're left with dross, with your opinions and beliefs formed during a lifetime of culturally acceptable ideas. To go your own way, you must be reborn to some degree each time you sit down to write a poem. Death and rebirth are a common theme in the traditions of all people. For the poet it is a necessary practice in order to cross over to the far-reaching space outside his or her personal views.
The sacred does not give itself readily to people whose heads are clogged with preconceptions and personal judgements on what a poem should be. Rather, the poet needs to be receptive to a long series of potential influences that can alter his or her basic percepts regarding what defines a poem. In part, the function and value of poetry is to cheat reason, to break away from its hold and censor. Reason is the serpent in the garden, it whispers in our ear that there is no larger panorama beyond its scope to behold. The pride of reason damages our ability to see the multi-dimensional possibilities inherent in our spirit. "Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason," to quote Novalis. To write, to really write, one must die to reason for a while in order to give birth to the ambiguous self, ready to explore all the unreasonable possibilities. The mystery lies in those redemptive words that come forth when we break free of our prejudices, allowing language to sharpen our sensibilities to a point of entry beyond mere reason.
Bounded by certain aspects of our daily consciousness, we become numb to much of the world; so much of it becomes dull and gives back no light. Art and poetry are not a panacea for all our ills, but they can help us to focus in on what's important, what calls to us around every corner, under every stone. Deepening our lives essentially means to be aware, to answer the call from life itself, to practise the veneration of its numerous forms. This has nothing to do with religion, per se; rather, religion and art grow out of this veneration, this deep need to bow our heads before wonder and being. Without art or religion, human beings still have this irresistible urge to acknowledge the awe they feel in the presence of creation.
An atheist can feel that as deeply as a believer, the magnitude of the experience can be exactly the same in either case. No amount of negation can push aside this longing for reverence, it wells up, regardless, in every human being. This yearning for the sacred is the driving force behind all true art, even if it isn't recognized as such. If we listen quietly we can hear that sigh of creation, world sustaining, spinning galaxies, balancing itself on the tip of a rabbit's hair, drifting to the ground on a birch leaf. The whole round of existence and every piece of it is revelation; every square inch is the totality of time and space nestled into form. Every atom is the ultimate expression of mystery, the mystery that things exist, that we have the ability to be conscious of them. The universe unfolds like the meaning of a single poem and that meaning is simply to be. The greatest mystery, held in every grain of cosmic dust, in every blade of grass, is existence itself. This is the first and last wonder, beyond words to describe; only the wordless poem can accomplish this. Only the poem we are always trying to write, but can only point to, that singularity immersed in the continuum of itself, without any possibility of secondary interpretations. Wordless, it comes to us without an attendant personality; without a meaning we can grasp with language. Yet we all know of it, feel it in times of intuition beyond the nature of names and forms, it is the connective tissue between heart and mind, stone and star. It is this living moment, alive now in the presence of all beings, in the isness of all objects.
