How Poesis

Last edited Mon Aug 3, 2015, 12:01 PM - Edit history (7)

Rich food on a never-ending plate, while savory and palatable, can ultimately have an undesired effect if it is not tempered with wholesome garden fare. There is a Mexican saying: after so much delicacy, black beans in the street look good. Maybe this is what we are getting with Guy Davenport's “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,” a venture into more garden-variety prose stanzas interspersed with very rich delicacy and art.

Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), French philosopher of science and literary critic, in his book Poetics of Reverie, said that “poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.” Further, according to Bachelard, in Water and Dreams, poetry can also be thought of as “a function of awakening, coming out of dreams. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.” And, he asserted, we must listen to poets.

In Fragments of a Poetic Fire, Bachelard wrote: “One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.” He also invoked the Freudian idea of the subconscious, which for him “is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.” And “The words of the world want to make sentences.”

Also discoursing on poetry in this vein, Jacques Maritain, Bachelard’s Jesuit contemporary, in his book Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, said that poetry has its source in the pre-conceptual life of the intellect; but for Maritain this creative intellection derives from a very un-Freudian preconscious intuition. And, according to Maritain, the poet “knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.” (In Enlarging the Change: The Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism 1949-51, ed. Robert Fitzgerald, Northeastern University, 1985.) Were Maritain and Bachelard channeling each other? This is quite good stuff, and I believe it shines more of a light on the creative process and language than more traditional approaches do. As Maritain wrote:

Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.

So the question arises: is there a supernatural, precognitive element in the creative process? Is that why writers of the past first invoked the muses for inspiration? Is there also a way that willful intention can become reality just because one intends it in thought first? In Heaven and Hell, Swedenborg wrote: "cogitatio non aliud est quam voluntatis forma." Thought is nothing but the form of our intention.

The photon does not exist until it is observed. Does anything, by analogy, exist before it is observed?

It seems equally possible for a mental or psychic state not to exist until it’s diagnosed and verbalized. Poetry obliges us to consider the intellect both in its secret wellsprings inside the human soul and as functioning in a non-rational (I do not say anti-rational) or non-logical way. That is why John Ciardi wrote that it is much more important to look at how a poem means than to try to discover what it means.

Whether what the psyche manifests already exists a priori, in my opinion, is the only matter to be debated. That it is non-rational, arising from the way the subconscious or the preconscious mind visualizes or organizes the cosmos, is perfectly consistent with the thinking of Carl Jung. That we see correllative images and symbols the world over is consistent with the findings of Joseph Campbell.

How you make it your own is your path; but the way the avenues of the learning maze route into original thinking cannot be denied.

A rose by any other name....

Second, the idea of universal archetypes ala Jung and Campbell is interesting. There are certain journeys and energies of the psyche, stages and transformations in life, that are well and aptly represented in the images, symbols, and stories we have been given to engage us in the process. Jung even called it an alchemical process, due to his origins and interest in deriving analogous metaphors to show the kinds of energy and transformations at work... both in words and pictures. Emma Jung and Marie von Franz also did marvelous work and thinking around fairy tales, which stories have also undergone the various permutations and recreations we often see in human oral traditions... and some of these, most archetypally, have derived from and through Greek myth, along with the Mespot and the Egyptian.

Last, to end with the beginning -- in the early days, poetry was thought of as divination, mousike arising out of tekhnê. The word music comes from the Greek mousikê (tekhnê) by way of the Latin musica. It is ultimately derived from mousa, the Greek word for muse. In ancient Greece, the word mousike was used to mean any of the arts or sciences governed by the Muses. Later, in Rome, ars musica embraced poetry as well as instrument-oriented music. In the European Middle Ages, musica was part of the mathematical quadrivium: arithmetics, geometry, astronomy and music. The concept of musica was split into three major kinds by the fifth century philosopher, Boethius: musica universalis, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis. Of those, only the last, musica instrumentalis, referred to music as performed sound.

So here's to Poesy:

Alight fair spirit of delight
Dream the shore and land with light,
And show the world the silver might
Of double lenses and oracular sight.