Mark S. Burrows Soul in Sight - BLOG: soul/in/sight

Maine Is One of The Only Places To See Stars This Side of the Country

Starlight, Black Holes, and Generosity

Each time we gaze into the night sky, we imagine we are seeing what is “there.” In most cases, that might well be the case: the light that we see has raced across the years—and in some cases, across billions of years—to reach our eyes. But what we are seeing is not those stars as they exist. We see them as they once existed when that light began its journey across the universe. And it does this not simply for our benefit. That light traveled in every conceivable direction from that fiery sun—as if bathing the entire universe in the same light.

In those cases where a star has burned out or imploded into a “black hole,” the light still exists. It is still racing “beyond” us—toward other infinities of space. And, in the case of a star’s implosion, scientists tell us that the light still exists, but the gravitational pull is so strong that it cannot “escape” beyond itself. Which is why it appears dark—to us. Actually, though, this is a state of an intensifying density of matter by which light finds itself imprisoned—in light.

Mindboggling.

Thinking about the nature of such immense mysteries as starlight might remind us that each of us, in the ways others have experienced us and the ways we have experienced them, is a kind of microcosmic version of this. We experience others (and they experience us) not in terms of who we are in some absolute sense. No, we have glimpses of them, and they of us, given the light—or darknesses—we or they create. Not unlike those “moments” when we gaze at the stars in the vast canvas of the night sky, imagining that what we are seeing is the way things are. Which is not true. Just so, we often presume about others—and, presumably, they about us—that the glimpses we have of others, or the glimpses they have of us, is who "we" are. When it might simply be who they were, or who we were, at some given moment, in a specific situation. Beyond such glimpses, the I or you or they has continued to live, change, advance, or regress, as it were. And, in the process, we give off new (and often different) “light” for others to see or take into themselves, and they do the same toward us, in ways not unlike the inner journey of perception by which our optic nerve translates the particle-waves of light into a visual image deciphered in the cerebral cortex of our (or their) brain.

The philosopher Kant mused about the impossibility of our ever “knowing” or “experiencing” the Ding an sich, the “thing in itself.” Recognizing this might caution us from presuming that what we “see” or experience of others captures something essential about them. It might, but it might just as easily be something occasional. Accidental. Provisional. It might even say more about the way our optic nervous system and brain function, with all its specificities, all of which might have little or nothing to do with that other “self” in their essential “selfness.” Of course, the same is true of their perceptions of us.

Meister Eckhart, that daring genius who lived at the height of the European Middle Ages, insisted that God was like that, too: none of us ever knows anything, really, about who God is in God’s “godness” (Gottheit), he insisted. And for that reason he instructed us to “take leave of God for the sake of God.” What he meant with this was that we should abandon every presumption that we “know” something immediately or absolutely about the divine being—who is uncontainable in ideas or forms or assumptions. The true “God”—whatever that is—is beyond all this. Just as the true “self” is beyond all our glimpsing, imagining, presuming, declaring. Utterly.

What’s the lesson in such musings? Be gentle with what you presume about what others have shown you of themselves. Which is a way of saying be gentle with others. After all, they, like you, are in some process of light-emission (and, at least sometimes, of light-implosion). It might gentle you, at least a little, toward them. But remember that this is true for their perceptions of you: whatever they are sure to know about you might only suggest what they once knew of you. Recalling this might help you take the certainties of others about you, particularly when they sting or seem wildly wrong, with a bit more generosity—not only toward them but also toward your self. After all, as with the unavailability of that Ding an sich, you don’t have any idea who you are in an ultimate sense. What you know is the “you” that is still becoming. Still evolving. Still transforming. Try showing generosity as a way of practicing this insight—toward yourself and others. The call to love that becoming-life within your own self might open you to imagine the same for others. And that might offer them the freedom to do what we all do—which is to change.

TO SETTLE ALONGSIDE AMAZEMENT

„Die Heiligen” (“The Saints”)

Denn wir essen Brot,

aber wir leben von Glanz.

For we eat bread,

but we live from radiance.

—Hilde Domin (1909 – 2006)

„Dichter sein” (“To Be a Poet”)

Entlang dem staunen

siedelt das gedicht, da

gehn wir hin

Von niemandem gezwungen sein, im brot

anderes zu loben

als das brot

The poem settles

alongside amazement, that’s

where we’re headed

To be coerced by no one, and with bread

to praise something other

than bread

—Reiner Kunz (b. 1933)

Several of the questions you might pose at a cocktail party that are sure to cause others to flee for the nearest door—or politely excuse themselves as they head to the bar:

“Have you ever thought about becoming a professional clown?”

“When was the last time you cleaned the lint in your belly button?”

“Could you try right now to make a ridiculous face?”

“Have you ever imagined becoming a cactus?”

“What do elephants do when they wake from a dream at 2 am?”

Or: “When’s the last time you read a poem that changed your life?”

Perhaps you’ve never wondered about such questions. They might seem too indelicate for you. Or simply too absurd to consider, much less ask publicly. And you’ll probably agree that they have little or nothing to do with what we understand with that old-fashioned word “amazement.” Or “wonderment.” Or “enchantment.” Take your pick. Or do they? What about belly-button lint and elephant dreams? Surely ridiculous.

Except when they’re not. Or when ridiculous is part of what just might pry you loose from those smug self-satisfactions we all become so used to.

Germans—like the poet Reiner Kunze—gesture toward such things with the word “staunen,” which may—or may not—have anything to do with the shorter word for traffic jam, which is “Stau.” Though that, too, can be a source of amazement when you stop and ask yourself why we find ourselves so important that spend so much energy hurrying all about when what matters most has little or nothing to do with anything other than “here.”

“And why this preoccupation with motion?” you might find yourself asking. And what, if anything, does this have to do with emotion—which, let me remind you, is not an electronic form of movement but something closer to those sudden bolts of energy that shoots through us like lightning, igniting sensations that have nothing to do with lint in our belly button. Except when they do—now that you’re imagining it.

And imagining things is what poems are about. The kind of things that might, just might, change your life—at least a little—by giving you some glimpse of what matters amid the ordinary flux of your life. When you suddenly see something that shifts your perspective. Perhaps even your worldview. Or your sense of your own proper place in this life.

And now that I’m on this topic: When is the last time a poem changed your life—the way they sometimes do, like discovering that vintage clump of lint tucked in that tummy pocket you always carry around with you—and rarely bring out for public view.

When was the last time? When was that moment that a particular line of a poem caused your pulse to quicken? When was the time when you looked up and suddenly saw something that had been present to you all along—though you were not present to it? A little brown wren pecking away at seeds under your feeder, letting go occasional bursts of ridiculously lovely song? Or a cloud shape-shifting as it drifts across the midwinter sky? Or a sense of that unknowable place, far off and yet somehow close at hand, where the ocean and the sky mingle and meet? Or hearing a snatch of music in your mind that you’d carried with you from your youth? Or feeling the soft plush of satin touching the back of your neck?

Most of the time, we settle for “bread” in our lives, or—perhaps—“bread and circuses” (panem et circenses), as that poet of ancient Rome, Juvenal, famously put it, describing as he was the way politicians placate the masses not with truth or public service but with distraction, lies, or violent entertainment. We might update this to add “conspiracy theories” to the list.

The poet Hilde Domin was right, after all: we do eat bread. And we need this to survive. But what of radiance, which we can’t eat? Try posing that question in that awkward moment when you’ve just met a woman you’re deeply attracted to, but don’t how to engage in conversation: “Do you live from radiance?” Or, perhaps less ambitiously, “Do you know how the poem goes that has settled alongside amazement?”

Such questions are awkward, of course. But not ridiculous. They might even be the sort that remind us of the courage it takes to be fully human. Or at least a little bit more human. And to “be coerced by no one” and, “with bread / to praise something / other than bread.” Because when all is said and done, our survival depends, yes, on bread that fills that hungry cavern behind our belly button. While thriving calls for radiance.

But then, survival might as well. As when a poem suddenly reminds you what it means to be a word-bearing creature who does not live by bread alone. Who knows what it means to be rescued by an unsuspecting metaphor; to be saved through the startlement of a delightful phrase. And you find yourself coming home to parts of yourself you’d never known, or forgotten existed. And you discover that your life, on the neighborhood of poetry, is not the same as it was. And that perhaps, just perhaps, you suddenly begin to sense what it means to settle, as poems sometimes call you to do, “alongside amazement.”

WHO LIKES POETRY, ANYWAY?

April is National Poetry Month. But poetry has to share this designation with a host of other “National X Months,” including: “Distracted Driving Awareness Month,” “Fresh Florida Tomato Month,” “National Canine Fitness Month,” “National Soft Pretzel Month,” and fifty-one others. Among them, perhaps appropriately, “National Humor Month.” So, we poets have a lot of collaborating to do to keep our heads above water.

That’s the way it is with poetry. It’s not exactly everyone’s cup of tea. Or piece of celery—and, yes, it’s also “National Celery Month.” But I digress. But what is poetry anyway? And why should we care about it? Well, if the “we” is poets, this seems an act of self-preservation. We poets don’t mind sharing our month with others, as long as we’re not lost in the crowd. But then, poetry is often if not lost then surely neglected given the press of more flashy entertainments.

The Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Wisława Szymborska, put it this way in a poem entitled “Some People Like Poetry”:

Some people—

that means not everyone.

Not even most of them, only a few.

Not counting school, where you have to,

and poets themselves,

you might end up with something like two per thousand. . .

So, if you’ve read this far, congratulations: you’re one of those rare species who actually reads poetry. Perhaps you also like celery or fresh tomatoes. And concern yourself with the dangers posed by distracted drivers. All of which might come to figure in my next poem; who knows?

Szymboska ends her poem with what sounds like an evasion, but it is a kind of disclaimer that reveals something essential about poems:

Poetry—

but what is poetry anyway?

                             More than one rickety answer

                             has tumbled since that question first was raised.

                             But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that

                             like a redemptive handrail.

You see, poems—unlike celery or tomatoes—are ways of communicating. They tease us into seeing something we’ve looked at but never noticed. They hold us, like “a redemptive handrail,” opening us to startlements when we find ourselves rattled free of our premature certainties. They heed Emily Dickinson’s admonition to “tell all the truth but tell it slant,” because “direct-telling” rarely moves us in our depths. As we know from the theater of politics.

Robert Frost suggested that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Sometimes, anyway. And in this, poems are unlike celery or soft pretzels which generally begin with the hard work of gardening before they find themselves wedged between our teeth and then passed on down the hidden path of digestion. Which is also, if one allows metaphor its magic, an apt description of a poem’s quiet work within us: planting seeds. . .bearing fruit. . .offering nutrition.

What poems can’t do, as Frost noted, is to pronounce “a great clarification, as sects and cults are founded on.” Rather, they offer us something he described as “a momentary stay against confusion.” Such “moments” are more needed in our day than ever, against the bullhorns of derision and the megaphones of division.

We need poems to slow us down against the frantic pace of 24/7 communication and remind us that we are creatures whose best instincts are shaped by imagination and compassion.

What does poetry do? The German-Jewish poet Hilde Domin put it, memorably, this way: “Poetry is alike a great pealing of bells: so that everyone takes notice. So that each one who does so listens for that which serves no purpose and would be falsified through compromise. . .In truth, there is no poem that is ‘against’ that is not also at the same time and to a greater extent ‘for’: as an appeal for helpers in order to overcome, together, something unlivable. And therein lies the catharsis: in an ultimate faith in humanity, without which there cold be no poetry.”

We need poems as much as dogs need “canine fitness.” And perhaps more than we need soft pretzels or tomatoes. Of course, we also need humor, especially in times like ours. But without that pathway that “begins in delight and ends in wisdom,” we easily fall into trouble, whether or not we heed the importance of “distracted driving awareness.” And while many of us are allergic to “great clarifications,” particularly those inflicted on us by others, we do well to pause to take in “a momentary stay against confusion,” perhaps one that comes to us, like a poem, when it whispers hints of wisdom in our direction.

[first published on March 31, 2023 in The Camden Herald and The Free Press and The Village Soup]

POETRY AND THE REASONS OF THE HEART

We are made for poems. As children, we come to them naturally, delighting in how words play on our tongues, whether in nursery rhymes and lullabies or the songs we make up in the delicious hours of daydreaming. In their early presence in our lives, poems are companions to us in the ways they lure us into the dance of speech. They are for us tools of discovery and expression, inviting us to delight in the newness of language, initially for their sounds but just as surely for their manifold senses—and the playful hesitations that come between.

We are made for words and seem destined for poems, giving ourselves over to their allure long before we can read. With them, we learn to new-name the world: in our “first speech” we discover the world—our world—with words. Some are real, many imagined. They are tools that help us negotiate our lives from day to day. Indeed, words seem to discover us in childhood, finding out what they are capable of through the unexpected ways we play with them. A word on children’s lips can be an epiphany—for themselves, for those around them, perhaps even for language itself. This is one of the ways poems live.

Sadly, we seem to drift apart from such enjoyments as we grow older. Poems can come to seem a luxury at best and an irrelevance at worst, driven as we are by the duties of work and ensnared in what Wordsworth more than two centuries ago memorably described as “the world” that is “. . . too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” The problem is clearly not a new one. It is part and parcel of a form of life Wordsworth sensed, even if he could not have imagined how it might develop over the centuries of industrialization and the recent emergence of the “information age.” Yet he already knew the feeling we also experience in having “given our heart away, a sordid boon!”

A hundred years later, long before anyone could imagine the velocities of jet travel or the Internet’s conveyance of information at the speed of light, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke gave us a way of naming our plight: “My life is not this steep hour/ in which you see me hurrying so. . .” (R. M. Rilke, in Prayers of a Young Poet, trans. by Mark S. Burrows [Paraclete, 2016]). Speed has come to measure the outward shape of our experience, but Rilke knew that it had little to do with our inner core where we come to know ourselves as “the stillness between two sounds,” as he went on to put it. Even if the relentless tempo of our lives seems far removed from the temperament of our heart, our yearning for this sense of stillness suggests what philosophers and theologians have long named the soul.

How do we find our way back to “soul” in our lives? How do we ground our deepest and truest self in those “reasons of the heart, which reason knows not,” as the French philosopher Blaise Pascal once put it? What inner paths are always present deeply within us, even in the darkest hours of our lives?

THE POET WHO RESIDES IN EACH OF US

In the memoir written about Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salome reminds us that "every one of us leads an imaginative existence, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated levels of our experience, from our most waking thoughts to our deepest nightly dreams. And the more removed we are from controlling consciousness, the more immersed we become in the wellsprings of psychic darkness: the more convinced we become of the poet who resides within us and within everyone."

What wisdom in this insight! Our work is not to organize our imaginative life; that would defeat it from the start. No, our task is to release ourselves from the pressure of that "controlling consciousness" and open ourselves to the wellsprings of what she calls "psychic darkness." What is this? It is the life of the "deep brain," as neuroscientists understand it, that most ancient part of the mind where the emotions take shape, where memories are lodged, where the imaginative energies lie in wait. To live into this "imaginative existence" is not a duty. It is our birthright. If we turn from it and refuse its lure, we will manage--and may find some level of contentment. But we will never touch that deepest source of our joy, which is entering into the creative life that is ours to discover.

What Lou knew is that "psychic darkness" is not a crisis to be avoided, but the dimension of our inner life that is both a difficult burden and the origin of our renewal. Of course, she knew the dangers of entering this terrain: "This part of [our] creative potential belongs not merely to the internal estate of the healthy [person]; it reaches down into the most humiliating strata, where emotional fragility and neediness threaten to drive us to distraction, ensnare us in misguided impulses, from which only the most conscious elucidation of perspective can deliver us. Precisely in such states, it can happen that, as a result of hainv been drawn into an abyss, we near those deep pathways upon which the artist erects his work into consciousness." Finding these "deep pathways" is not a source of salvation, but it is an inner lever that can open the floodgates of experience and unleash the energies of insight. Will this make poets or artists of us? Not necessarily. But it will open us to the storehouse of our imaginative life without which no poet can prosper in her work.

“WE ARE CONVENTS OF DREAMED THINGS”:

IN PRAISE OF AWE AND OTHER WONDERS

As children, we did not have to be taught what awe was. We simply experienced it. Recall the first time you found yourself stretched out in a field, on a balmy, late-summer day, watching those soft, billowy clouds drifting across the sky, changing forms with a restless abandon. Revealing stories to your mind. Luring you into what you only later came to understand as “reverie.” Or recall the time you were alone, perhaps on a crisp, cold winter’s night, somewhere far from city lights, and began to see the immensity of the heavens open above you as the Milky Way revealed itself stretched across the skies like a soft, wide, glowing belt. Awe, in its first, unconscious form.

Later, as you grew older, you began to realize that these stars were not simply “up there” doing their twinkling magic, but were many billions of lightyears away—and gradually, you began to understand, however dimly, what “far away” could possibly mean. 32 billion lightyears might be somehow imaginable, but hardly conceivable. As with such magnitudes, such a notion bends far beyond the widest reach of our minds. And the notion that it is constantly expanding, that it is in a sort of outward migration, exceeds the limits of our minds. What is left, in such moments, but a growing sense of awe, if—as we grow older—one shaped by a self-awareness we did not have as children.

In such moments, we begin to wonder: Who am I and who are you, breathing for a span of years in the midst of such immensities? We are but one infinitesimally small speck—by comparison, at least—in this unimaginably vast and expanding canopy of space. And yet, and yet. . .we are a “center,” somehow, of a consciousness that allows us to imagine ourselves, however distantly, as a being among what begins to appear to us as an infinity of other creatures and things. How else can we take this in other than with a sense of amazement, perhaps edging toward bewilderment? The ancient Hebrew psalmist captured this sense of awe, writing: “As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more” (Ps. 103. 15 – 16).

And yet, and yet: these days, each one of them, can be as treasured as a precious gift, as we approach it with awe. Yet we also know that if this sense is something we come by naturally, almost instinctively, as children, it is something we gradually lose sight of as we grow older. The presence of children in our lives can help, of course: a walk along a shell-strewn beach with a grandchild in hand, or a lazy bedtime hour reading some treasured book with them that we recall from our own childhood, as once again the whimsical characters of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, Christopher Robin and Eeyore come to life—such moments remind us of a delight we once knew without thinking about it. In their presence, we find ourselves touched again and again by awe as we watch them discovering their world, our experience as adults now seasoned with memory and the long arc of experience.

Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet, one might say, who felt himself caught up over and over again by the capacities of awe. It seemed to be the state of mind out of which his poems emerged, and he occasionally wrote memorably about it. In a French letter written near the end of his life to the talented young Swiss painter Sophy Giauque, he put it this way:

How all things are in migration! How they seek refuge in us. How each of them desires to be relieved of externality and to live again in the Beyond which we enclose and deepen within ourselves. We are convents of lived things, dreamed things, impossible things; all that is in awe of this century saves itself within us and there, on its knees, pays its debt to eternity.

Rilke went on to wonder “how to speak this language that remains mute unless we sing it with abandon and without any insistence on being understood.”

Our work, as humans, is—in part, at least—to find our way back to this original posture of awe. To learn to respect, with a sense of wonder but also with “fear and trembling,” that we are part of a “whole” whose center is everywhere, and whose bounds we cannot even imagine. Ours is the work, as we grow older, of recovering this posture, of learning in an adult form the cadences of this strange and marvelous language, and finding a way to embody the rhythms of its vocabulary and the energies of its grammar in our life. Ours is the work of wandering in what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard described as the “intimate immensities” of our minds. Ours is the gift of learning to recall, as Rilke put it, that our lives are “convents of lived things, dreamed things, impossible things”—which is yet somehow necessary for the expansive collectivity that holds our wellbeing.

The poets we turn to in our desire to recover this sense of awe invite us to delve into this alluring sense of wonderment and linger in it, seeking those unexpected yet somehow familiar ways by which we remember to open ourselves to awe. Theirs are the voices and gestures that remind us of the boundlessness of our imagination, that elastic portal of our consciousness mind that opens us into what we have long gestured toward as the “heart.” Ours is the work of following their lead, and allowing ourselves to be “re-minded” that “all things” including ourselves, are in migration.

Wednesday

Jan252012

ordinary wonders

Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:20PM

We don't often slow down long enough to notice. Anything, really. We look, but don't see; listen, but don't hear. Or perhaps we have lost the art of looking--I mean the intent kind of looking that doesn't begin with an ambition, an expectation, a demand, but simply opens the eyes to what is at hand. A sparrow darting from branch to branch in the ash tree, shivering in her winter nakedness; several crimson leaves clinging tenaciously to the maple outside my kitchen window; the slice of sunlight carving a hole in the blanket of January clouds. We don't really know what it is to look. To take an unhurried view of things, just as they are.

Ah, but when we do, when we open ourselves to the world as it is, the wonders begin. . .

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