{"id":8117,"date":"2024-07-10T16:45:59","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T20:45:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-great-russian-poet-marina-tsvetaeva-on-reclaiming-the-divine-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-07-10T16:45:59","modified_gmt":"2024-07-10T20:45:59","slug":"the-great-russian-poet-marina-tsvetaeva-on-reclaiming-the-divine-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-great-russian-poet-marina-tsvetaeva-on-reclaiming-the-divine-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva on Reclaiming the Divine \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\n

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

\u201cAttention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,\u201d Simone Weil wrote in her exquisite reckoning with attention and grace<\/a>. Because poetry is the art of attention, anchored in a total receptivity that judges nothing and rejects nothing, every poem is a kind of prayer, kneeling before the wild wonder of the world with faith and love.<\/p>\n

The great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva<\/strong> (October 8, 1892\u2013August 31, 1941) articulates this dialogue between the poetic and the divine in Art in the Light of Conscience<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the wonderful essay collection that gave us Tsvetaeva on the paradoxical psychology of our resistance to ideas<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Marina<\/a>
Marina Tsvetaeva<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Living in a political atmosphere that banished the divine from human life \u2014 the same state-mandated atheism I too grew up with in communist Bulgaria \u2014 Tsvetaeva writes with an eye to the prayerful poems<\/a> of her beloved Rilke<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

What can we say about God? Nothing. What can we say to God? Everything. Poems to God are prayer. And if there are no prayers nowadays (except Rilke\u2019s\u2026 I know of none), it is not because we don\u2019t have anything to say to God, nor because we have no one to say this anything to \u2014 there is something and there is someone \u2014 but because we haven\u2019t the conscience to praise and pray God in the same language we\u2019ve used for centuries to praise and pray absolutely everything. In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A century later, in the atmosphere of Western consumer capitalism with its cult of the self, it is even more countercultural to speak about the soul<\/a> \u2014 perhaps the last human holdout against commodification, too private and furtive to be turned into a marketable data point. And yet if art is what we make to save ourselves<\/a>, to cotton the shock of living<\/a>, then the soul is the only studio we have. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Altarpiece<\/em> by Hilma af Klint, 1907. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tsvetaeva, who considered art a physical manifestation of the spiritual and a spiritual manifestation of the physical, knew this and articulated it beautifully:<\/p>\n

\n

Poetry \u2014 which I never take my eyes off when I say \u201cart,\u201d the whole event of poetry, from the poet\u2019s visitation to the reader\u2019s reception \u2014 takes place entirely within the soul.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being<\/a>, Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem<\/a>, and this soulful read on how poetry saves lives<\/a>, then revisit Richard Jefferies on nature as a prayer for presence<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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

\u201cAttention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,\u201d Simone Weil wrote in her exquisite reckoning with attention and grace. Because poetry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}