{"id":6911,"date":"2024-03-22T13:39:56","date_gmt":"2024-03-22T17:39:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/poetry-as-spiritual-practice-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T13:39:56","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T17:39:56","slug":"poetry-as-spiritual-practice-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/poetry-as-spiritual-practice-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry as Spiritual Practice \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"Awakened<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cEvery atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,\u201d wrote<\/a> Whitman, who called himself a kosmos<\/em><\/a> and believed of \u201cthe true poems\u201d that \u201cwhom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars.\u201d <\/p>\n

Shortly after Whitman returned his borrowed stardust to the universe, when quantum mechanics made it impossible to take seriously the image of the atom as a miniature solar system of electrons orbiting a nucleus but no one yet knew what image to replace it with, quantum pioneer Niels Bohr told<\/a> quantum pioneer Werner Heisenberg: <\/p>\n

\n

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Another half century later, after we had split the atom and split the world, James Baldwin insisted that poets are \u201cthe only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don\u2019t. Statesmen don\u2019t. Priests don\u2019t. Union leaders don\u2019t. Only poets.\u201d<\/a> And if the truth, the elemental truth, is that we are matter yearning for meaning \u2014 \u201catoms with consciousness,\u201d<\/a> in the poetic words of the physicist Richard Feynman \u2014 then poetry, this supreme instrument of self-knowledge, is the mirror consciousness holds to the cosmos.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe<\/em><\/a> by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That is what poet, translator, and Chinese literature scholar David Hinton explores in Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 an inquiry into poetry as spiritual practice, lensed through the life of Tu Fu: a man of uncommon depth and breadth of spirit, who lived as an impoverished wanderer through a civil war in the eight century to become China\u2019s greatest poet.<\/p>\n

With an eye to poetry as the language of silence<\/a> and a portal to unselfing<\/a>, Hinton writes:<\/p>\n

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Poetry is the cosmos awakened to itself. Narrative, reportage, explanation, idea: language is the medium of self-identity, and we normally live within that clutch of identity, identity that seems to look out at and think about the Cosmos as if from some outside space. But poetry pares language down to a bare minimum, thereby opening it to silence. And it is there in the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest possibilities \u2014 for there it can render dimensions of consciousness that are much more expansive than that identity-center, primal dimensions of consciousness as the Cosmos awakened to itself. At least this is true for classical Chinese poetry, shaped as it is by Taoist and Ch\u2019an (Zen) Buddhist thought into a form of spiritual practice. In its deepest possibilities, its inner wilds, poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself \u2014 and the history of that awakening begins where the Cosmos begins.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Epochs before the poet John Milton introduced the word space<\/em> into the English lexicon<\/a> to connote the cosmic expanse, ancient Chinese poets were reckoning with the relationship between the cosmos and the ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrow that Taoists placed at the heart of human experience. Hinton writes:<\/p>\n

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Although ancient Chinese poets and philosophers didn\u2019t describe it in these scientific terms, this same sense of consciousness as the Cosmos open to itself was an operating assumption for them \u2014 though perhaps here existence<\/em> is a better word than Cosmos<\/em>, as it suggests the sense of all reality as a single tissue. This existence-tissue is the central concern of Lao Tzu\u2019s Tao Te Ching<\/em> (sixth century B.C.E.) \u2014 the seminal work in Taoism, the spiritual branch of Chinese philosophy that eventually evolved into Ch\u2019an Buddhism. Lao Tzu called that existence-tissue Tao<\/em>, which originally meant \u201cWay,\u201d as in a road or pathway. But Lao Tzu used it to describe the empirical Cosmos as a single living tissue that is inexplicably generative\u2026 an ontological pathway by which things emerge from the existence-tissue as distinct forms, evolve through their lives, and then vanish back into that tissue, only to be transformed and reemerge in new forms. It is a majestic and nurturing Cosmos, but also a refugee Cosmos: all change and transformation, each of the ten thousand things in perpetual flight, always on its way somewhere else.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Dorothy Lathrop<\/a>, 1922. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is precisely because we are pilgrims of mortality that we so long for refuge and belonging, for something to balance the presence that we are with the void out of which we came and into which we will return. Hinton writes:<\/p>\n

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The abiding aspiration of spiritual and artistic practice in ancient China was to cultivate consciousness as that existence-tissue Cosmos open to itself, awakened to itself: looking at itself, hearing and touching itself, tasting and smelling itself, and also thinking itself, feeling itself \u2014 all in the singular ways made possible by the individuality of each particular person. This is consciousness in the open, wild and woven into the generative Cosmos: wholesale belonging.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

At its deepest level, the tissue of Tao is described by that cosmology in terms of two fundamental elements: Absence (\u7121) and Presence (\u6709). Presence is simply the empirical universe, the ten thousand things in constant transformation, and Absence is the generative void from which this ever-changing realm of Presence perpetually emerges. And so, Tao is the generative process through which all things arise and pass away \u2014 Absence burgeoning forth into the great transformation of Presence\u2026 The concepts of Absence and Presence are simply an approach to the fundamental nature of things. In the end, of course, they are the same: Presence grows out of and returns to Absence and is therefore always a manifestation of it. Or to state it more precisely, Absence and Presence are simply different ways of seeing Tao: either as a single formless tissue that is somehow always generative, or as that tissue in its ten thousand distinct and always changing forms.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We now know this to be not only a spiritual truth but a scientific fact \u2014 an equation written into the physics and chemistry of what happens when we die<\/a>. Poetry, too, plays with this equivalence of absence and presence. Because it \u201carticulates the emptiness surrounding the words,\u201d Hinton observes, it \u201cinfuses everyday experience with that generative tissue of emptiness\u201d and, in doing so, reveals enlightenment as the basic fabric of our existence in \u201ca vast and indifferent Cosmos, a Cosmos that is in the end impervious to our attempts at wisdom.\u201d He reflects:<\/p>\n

\n

A poem is not simply about its apparent content \u2014 the particular life-experience described in the poem \u2014 as it seems from the perspective of our own cultural assumptions, which is the view we see in a translation of such a poem. It is, instead, about the emptiness surrounding it, each poem revealing that emptiness in a singular way. And what is that emptiness? It is, finally, the wild existence-tissue Cosmos open to itself, awakened to itself in the form of human consciousness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Olivier Tallec from This Is a Poem that Heals Fish<\/em><\/a> \u2014 a tender French picture-book about how poetry works its magic on us<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nearly a century after the titanic poet Muriel Rukeyser observed that \u201chowever confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole,\u201d<\/a> Hinton adds:<\/p>\n

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However confused and unenlightened our lives may seem, however blind to that everyday enlightenment we may be \u2014 we are always already wild consciousness in the open, always already the Cosmos aware of itself, awakened to itself.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

This awakening is the nature of everyday experience, the very fabric of our lives, for in the actual moment of pure perception, there is no self involved. If we look closely at what happens in consciousness, we find nothing more than the perceptual experience itself. It is only upon reflection afterward that we describe it as an \u201cI\u201d hearing \u2014 a description dictated not by experience itself, but by a body of philosophical assumptions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Lao Tzu himself captured this as one of the many paradoxes the Tao Te Ching<\/em> invites into consciousness:<\/p>\n

\n

If you aren\u2019t free of yourself
how will you ever become yourself? <\/p>\n

Give up self-reflection
and you\u2019re soon enlightened.
Give up self-definition
and you\u2019re soon apparent. <\/p>\n

Knowing not-knowing is lofty.
Not knowing not-knowing is affliction. <\/p>\n

The Tao of heaven\u2026
never speaks
and so answers perfectly.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the remainder of Awakened Cosmos<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, Hinton leans on Tu Fu\u2019s finest poems to examine the fundaments of memory and identity, the role of generative emptiness in creativity, the way language both limits and liberates our consciousness, and how we make meaning in a meaningless universe. Complement it with a poem about our cosmic destiny<\/a> and non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson\u2019s \u201cCenter of the Universe,\u201d<\/a> then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s magnificent more-than-translation of the Tao Te Ching<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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