My Mystical Turn

So I’ve taken the plunge: the last few weeks I’ve been reading mystical poetry. From Celan and Hopkins, I went to the Song of Songs and medieval women and then the Indian Gavitagavinda and then Kabir and Rumi … some of this was inspired by a class, most from conversation, most of that with my dissertation adviser. I’ve just indulged. (My Daniel Dennett-toting cognitive science friends would box my ears if they knew!) I hadn’t even realized I was refraining until I gave in! Reading Rumi is simply luxurious. I’ve held myself away from most of this for some of the translation reasons I mentioned with Celan… and also because of the fear that mysticism is just a code word for laziness or worse, sentimentality. Sentimentality is a fate worse than death for a poet, in my book (death just makes poets martyrs, anyway). And laziness… well, perhaps that’s not what one thinks.

I was reading the diaries of the young Simone de Beauvoire who, I discovered, was quite in love with Merleau-Ponty (the subject of my erstwhile dissertation). She claims– much to my surprise, informed by his lush writing on embodiment – that he is naïve, Catholic and obsessed with abstract metaphysics. (He was only twenty or twenty-five at the time, and it is my thought that he was in love with her too and stylized himself in response to her rejection) She said of speaking to him, “I say, ‘skepticism.’ He says, ‘laziness.’ My skepticism has its excuses. Yes, but one must not need to be excused.” (July, 1927)

So… I have been skeptical. But one must not need excuses. This is just such ridiculously good poetry! Kabir … “ the musk is in the deer, but it seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.” Rumi… “close the language-door and open the love window; the moon cannot come in the door, the moon must come in the window.” And “loves comes with a knife, not some shy question … The sun rises, but which way does night go? I have no more words. Let the / soul speak with the silent articulation of the face.” READ MORE

I have also been reading Hopkins. And I wrote about him. But I read him in the context of these fellows … A trope that persists through all of theses mystics is madness and intoxication by desire. This sounds so universal & vague as to be trite … but Rumi is not trite. Bertrand Russell – analytic of analytics – confessed that he had two great fears: loneliness and madness. The worse of it was, the one caused the other: the less mad he was, the more rational he was … and thus the more lonely. The less lonely he was , the more intimate he was… the more mad he was. I love this… and mostly because it’s crotchety old Russell who said it! (though, he did have 4 wives, the last when he was nearly 80 yr old!)

So, I have lots of new work this week. I don’t know if it’s all good or at all good, but I have been writing tons.

All these “I” pronouns in my work make me nervous…. I am worried that I wouldn’t like my work if I picked it up. What is the work about except me?? I wish I had the same poem(s) without an I. I worry that I’ve let this “I” slip in at certain encouragement but without my own approval… on the other hand, it’s been so freeing. Much like reading the mystics. It feels like more aural/oral poetry than poetry on the page. I’m just writing the way I think when I walk.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with Brendan Kennelly. He’s a pretty darn well known Irish poet who happens to have a chair at our strongly Irish Catholic School. He’s rather old and his only job is just to stay around campus and write. My adviser - an Irish philosopher—and I were having coffee last week and we ran into Kennelly and I was introduced. Later in the week, I was walking around campus and crossed his path and he said, “Isn’t it a lovely day?” And I said, “Yes, it ‘tis.” And then I re-introduced myself and we had a nice chat. Then he “spoke” me a poem... he insists that he only speaks poems, he doesn’t write them. The poem was about a loaf of bread he remembers watching his mother make. The poem was told from the point of view of the bread, and it began, “Someone cut my head off in a field…” And ended with the bread being torn and consumed by the mother. Wow. (wow with an explicative and raised eyebrows!) He just recited this to me sitting on a bench on campus. He asked me about my work … and my work is … on the computer? I couldn’t recite anything! (and summarizing poetry is worse than not writing it) So I changed the subject.

This past week he gave a public address... in which he spoke his own poems and the work of maybe 5 or 10 other authors from the last 50 years of Irish poetry. All from memory, not one note for an hour. He is a rhapsode in the strongest meaning of the term.

So for the past week, I’ve been trying to memorize little things. Some Rumi. Some of my own. So that, at the least, if I run into Mr. Kennelly again, I can recite something for him. The summer, before the WW retreat, I memorized the first 15 or so sections of George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous.” That was a great exercise. It’s really hard for me… I am such a visual person. When I used to play the violin, even though I supposedly learned through the Suzuki method, I actually just memorized the look of the sheet music and watched it. I worry that I don’t have enough music to be a poet … shouldn’t I think like that?

I do write often while I walk. Mr. Kennelly and I talked about that too… about Coleridge and Wordsworth and then, locally, Emerson and Thoreau. He said Coleridge and Wordsworth walked twenty or thirty miles a day. I think actually some of my better poems are one that I write that way : these peripatetic poems end up only being as long as what I can manage to memorize on my walk and write down upon return. My walks are limited by modernity and my busy schedule and the poems are thus limited by those factors plus my weak aural memory. But … maybe those are good strictures to hold to. Could Oppen himself ever have memorized all of “Of Being Numerous”? Could Shakespeare recite all of Hamlet? Maybe he could have, actually…

So.. to summarize ;) I have been, of late, concerned with the aurality/orality of poetry and poetry as unconstrained, mystical speculation. This is quite a far cry from my concerns a year ago, or even six months ago