Honour

I've been listening to poetry on the Internet lately, read by the poets themselves. Robert Creeley reads from the Introduction to his Selected Poems:

It was Ezra Pound who first impressed me with his emphasis, “Only emotion endures.” Just a few nights ago I heard a friend from college days, talking about artificial intelligence, his authority. He noted the banality, in some respects, of emotions, that is, how, neurologically, they are a familiar spectrum and shift almost crudely from one to another – whereas the intellectual acts which are so sponsored, what we think thus funded, are of extreme human interest and consequence. Again Williams: “The poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity.” No doubt it is all a dream, humanly speaking, but how language thinks to say it, what it thus makes of its own mind and feeling, is to me ever provocative. “A new world is only a new mind, and the poem and the mind are all apiece.”

To write a poem there needs to be a general movement from the poet's deepest recesses where they are naturally connected to all, through their energy, feelings, emotions, mind, thoughts, words and into the written poem. At the deepest level there is only commonality – a moist togetherness – and with each rising level there is a retraction and a focusing in on the activity and the activator until finally we have the unique product – the poem. Creeley is suggesting that each rising level is more interesting and of more “consequence” than the preceding one. In a sense this is true but only because each rising level has more observable detail and texture – is more specific and more of the realm of language – more describable. In fact it seems pretty obvious that the direction we need to be going, as individual, race and species, is deeper. You can have immensely detailed and involved conversations with work colleagues about the work you have in common, but the unspoken communication you have with your loved one is far deeper and more of your humanity. The reason my teacher feels more connected to his cat than with any other living being is because it's the creature with whom he can communicate on the deepest levels. Whether each is consciously aware of these levels I don't know, but each is honourable enough to live a life which puts these levels first, and so each is moving gradually deeper with and through the other. This is the key really. In a sense it is a matter of relaxation – relax the body, quieten the mind, ignore your feelings, slip through your energy and reside and dwell in those deepest recesses where there is no distinction or separation. However, relaxation is just the technique and needs to come from the right place otherwise it wont be successful – it wont necessarily open you out and reconnect you. That place is the place of honour – of putting something far beyond yourself first and foremost. Sacrifice. The image of the man bidding his young family goodbye to lay down his life in battle for his country (“I could not love thee, dear, so much, / Loved I not honour more”). There is always something beyond, and to get there the heart must in some sense already be there. If this is the case then the general thrust of your life and energy will be to go deeper. Every so often this will engender creative acts which will express themselves as insights – sparks of understanding from those deep levels expressing themselves in the light of day. If you have the intelligence and heart to work with these insights – incorporate them into your practice – then eventually they will help you breakthrough whatever is holding you back from the next (deeper) level. This is the way of it. Each insight is like a stepping-stone across a vast river. If you don't work correctly the next wont appear, and if you don't work hard enough you wont be able to leap to it. A teaching is just the first few stones given to you for free. It is always possible to fail. This is the fear that keeps you working.