The Religion of Poetry

Lewis Connolly September 4, 2017

Last week, we touched upon the idea that Mary Oliver found her freedom, her way of being in this world, through an interplay between nature and poetry, as she recovered from the hurtful and broken family she was from. I find this idea of finding healing through poetry quite compelling. I think it’s quite a similar process to what happens within religious community. In both religious communities and poetry (I have given you a list if you want to follow along), you focus upon the interior world, you think about things in an associative way, drawing out tacit connections between one thing and another, you speak together a language which is not the language of our everyday lives, you are very attentive to the present moment, and not simply swept along by the rhythms of the mundane, you are not self or ego orientated, you place a value on things which goes beyond financial matters, and finally both religious communities and poetry are both incapable of realising, or fulfilling, the impulse from which they arise. I’m going to unpack what I mean by each of these similarities. First, in religious community and poetry, we focus upon the interior world. Focusing upon our interior selves is not a thing valued much in the West. Through introspection, we very slowly and meaningfully consider all the dimensions of things. Say for example, you have an emotional response to something, and you consider where that emotional response comes from within you. Does it resonate with something about which you have strong feelings, does it hook up with memories from your past, will the consequence of ‘it’ (whatever ‘it’ is), be contrary to what you want? In this introspective process, we delve into the implications of what is happening in the world, and how we might act in this world. An introspective person is a conscious person, a person who thinks first and acts second, a person more rooted into this world - they’re not just skimming over it. They feel the world’s pain and her joys.

There is a pop song that came out a few years ago which is the antithesis of this introspective process. It’s a song I really hate, but it captures in many ways a prevalent spirit of our age, a nihilistic, nothing matters, flippant, don’t think about it type attitude. It’s a song by Natalia Kills called ‘Controversy’. It’s a Pop song so it has a lot of repetition in it as you would expect – ‘controversy, controversy, controversy’, followed by ‘controversies’ being listed: drug dealers, porn addicts, under age, politicians, teen brides, headlines, STDs, high school shootings, peer pressure, working late, society, online is the new reality, prostitution, hate crime, and on and on it goes… And then we get to the chorus – ‘Drink the Kool Aid, don’t drink the Kool Aid’, ‘Drink the Kool Aid, don’t drink the Kool Aid’. In other words, take it seriously, don’t take seriously, care, don’t care, take up the cause or don’t, either way it ultimately matters not. This nihilistic mentality I personally find quite troubling. I value, as I think all of us gathered here do, taking weighty issues seriously, being reflective, and thoughtful. Of course, it goes without saying that being a conscious person does not mean being a religious person, one can obviously be a thoughtful, spiritually attuned person without going to a place of worship on a Sunday, though I would imagine it helps. Poetry, in this way, often shows up as a way of doing spirituality in a secular way. Again, Mary Oliver’s poetry strikes me as a very good example of this, of being spiritual without being religious. I think Unitarianism often functions in that way also; a place for people who feel spiritual, without necessary feeling religious.

Okay, returning to similarities between religious communities and poetry, the second on my list is thinking about things in an associative way. In poetry, you often take an idea or image, which at a surface level, or in literal terms, is unrelated to the subject matter, but through associating them you draw out a particular feeling or sense. This of course happens all the time in poetry. Like in the poem we heard of a man on a walk under the trees in the evening, reminiscing about a past with bare feet and silk dresses. The leaves on the trees rustle gently, and this is likened to voices – muffled voices, locked in a past he can no longer access. He reaches for images and senses in his present, to articulate a sense, a longing… This reaching after inadequate words to express something which is ultimately beyond words is a recurring theme of poetry, and also religious language. Take the passages we heard from 1 Kings, the Lord passing by Elijah who was in his cave. In those verses, you have words which are basically prose poetry, “There was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” We can only speculate about what is happening to Elijah. He is having a transcendent experience of the divine, and he is reaching for words to try and express it. I would imagine there is not really any splitting of mountains, earthquakes, or fires. He reaches for ideas he can take hold of, to express something he cannot. The journey of faith is really a journey of wrestling with metaphor, of groping after language that we can share in common which expresses something luminous, something essential, that speaks to our most essential selves.

Elijah on Mount Horeb, a Greek Orthodox icon.

Often a mark of spiritual maturity is a recognition that an idea or assertion within a religious text can be understood in a multitude of ways. In the same way that we each experience poems uniquely, filtered as they are through our own unique perception, so it is likewise that biblical texts are going to be coloured by our individual reading of them. The spiritually awakened person is someone who is able to think associatively. We reach for associative language because it helps us be more experimental. This way we can try to express originality, attempt to find new structures of intelligibility, new ways of thinking in this world, which at least optimistically, should help us discover new ways of being in this world. When you read a poem you enter into an unspoken agreement with the poet. You recognise together that associative language is being used. You’re not using the language of our everyday lives. You expect a poet to string concepts together in an unconventional way, to communicate the subject matter uniquely. As you read poetry, and think poetically, you become better at reading poetry, and thinking poetically. There is a process, a growing taking place. This is also the case within religious communities. We, by virtue of being a religious community, think and unfold ideas in way which is unique to this community. We have our own, Ipswich Unitarian Meeting, ‘language’. A language which has taken shape here for decades, centuries, which we all have a stake in. I think it’s very easy for religious communities to forget how odd what we’re currently doing is. When new people come into this community, they’re not going to just get it. There is a process of enculturation that has to take place. You could almost say there is special knowledge; as I said a couple of weeks ago, there are key ideas we as Unitarians move in concentric circles around. Each service builds on the previous, each conversation builds on the previous. To be a Unitarian is to learn the language of Unitarianism.

Number four is focused on the present. In a poem, one is intensively focusing upon the particularities of a present moment, making oneself aware of every sensation, feeling, sight, sound, smell, of that moment. And by capturing it in words, trying to make that present moment universally accessible. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” In other words, God has sent Jesus to show us the way, and if we follow Jesus’ way, we will not perish but have eternal life. Now what is that? The traditional conception of eternal life is the literal definition – that somehow, our bodies, or our souls, or our essences, will be eternally preserved in some way. But what if we read Jesus words and assume that as he often does he is not talking literally, but rather, talking associatively. What if he’s not talking about a future reality, but rather possibilities within our present reality. What does Elijah say - “There was a great wind, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” Being utterly present, infinitely present, eternally present to sheer silence. In silent meditation, we endeavour to silence the mind, a silence which goes deep, a deep silence of our unconscious mind. Here we gather in the Meeting House each week, to be wholly present to ourselves, to one another, to our world. We’re not trying to kill time. In our everyday lives we may naturally slip into just coasting through, numbed by just how repetitively mundane everything is. Here we are awake, to the present. We practice being present in this space, to these people, we practice what Jesus was inviting us into, being eternally alive people now. Full of life, love, and compassion. Both religious community (at its best) and poetry (at its best) are about being wholly alive to the present.

Number five is probably the most self-evident. In both poetry and in religious community, we expand our circle of compassion. By imaging what it’s like to be in someone else’s subjective space, we learn to not just view this world through the lens of our own wants and desires. Being in religious community, being in any community to an extent, helps us practice putting others before ourselves. To quote Albert Einstein, “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty”.

Number six is value beyond money. In the West, we are in the throes of a self-esteem epidemic. Suicide rates are high, clinical depression is prevalent. As far as we know, it’s worse now than it’s ever been in human history. Now why is that? One likely explanation is the extent to which value is determined today by something’s economic worth alone. A human being is worth the sum of his skills, skills by which he or she earns money. Each of us is under pressure to prove his or her own worth, by maximising their own value. The more we earn, money, recognition, likes on Facebook, hits on our blog, the more value we perceive ourselves to have. Through poetry, through religious community, we measure value by a far different criteria, a more humanising criteria, by which we recognise innate value. Poetry is a particularly good example of this in the arts, because a poem has essentially no economic value at all. The greatest poems ever written can be owned by anyone, easily accessed on the internet, downloaded, and printed. If you have the words, you own the poem. It’s not like a painting, in which you have the original, and the limited prints of that piece. Paintings are subject to market forces in a way poetry is not. Both poetry and religious community turn the criteria of value our world operates under on its head. ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did to me.’

And finally, number seven. The poet comes to a white piece of paper, white space. She seeks to create a timeless moment, to express an individual experience with universal appeal, to create a sense of communal identity. There is an ideal, a transcendent impulse which poetry attempts to capture, but by virtue of being reduced to finite words on a page, the poem fails. All poetry fails to live up to the possibility of poetry. Religious community is the same - we long to inhabit some pure crystallised transcendental moment, to feel wholly at one in some primordial sense with reality. Every poem and every religious service is a record of failure, another example of an unrealised possibility. What’s interesting though, is that by virtue of being inadequate, and us recognising that inadequacy, it proves in a way that we instinctively have a criterion by which to know we fail. To know this is to make the journey worthwhile. Religion does not give us what we want, it gives us what we need.

The poetics of religion.
The religion of poetry.

Amen.

Sitting with Emerson by the Fire

Lewis Connolly July 10, 2017

In 1832, the architect of American intellectual culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was going through a dark patch in his life. He had just lost his first wife to tuberculosis, and he was only 29 – same age as me; he was, at the time, the Unitarian minister of a prominent Boston church, and his ministry was suffering as a result. Full of grief, and feeling lost for purpose, he took to his pulpit each Sunday to berate his congregation. His sermons were becoming increasingly gloomy and stern. He was burning bridges fast, falling out with parishioners left, right, and centre. Ralph Waldo Emerson may well be the most important Unitarian to ever have lived, and yet here we find him in a very destructive mode of being, embittered at the world. It’s always interesting I think to read about great people of history at their darkest moments. From our historical omniscient vantage point, we know that things get a lot better for Emerson; we know he has about fifty years ahead of him being a very successful writer and speaker, but in this moment he does not know that. For Emerson, in the light of his pain and uncertainty, the world seems to be closing in. He felt unrooted, lonely, and his job seemed uncertain, and so he threw in the towel, packed his bags, and on Christmas day 1832 embarked for England. In the early 1800s getting from Boston to England would have meant six gruelling weeks at sea. When he eventually arrived in England in 1833 he visited both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. I don’t think we can underestimate the significance this voyage has had upon Unitarianism, and even upon the world. Without this journey, the world is unimaginably different. That may seem like an over exaggerated assertion, but given the shift this pilgrimage prompted in Emerson, and the subsequent impact he had upon religious philosophy, literature, national identity, politics, and the Unitarian movement itself, it is not an unreasonable claim. Without this voyage, what worship looks like each Sunday here in the meeting house would be very different; indeed we may not even be here at all.

By the time Emerson did arrive in England, Coleridge and Wordsworth were both in their 60s, and well established on the literary scene. The poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, or ‘Daffodils’ as it is more popularly known, was already a celebrated English poem. Coleridge and Wordsworth were both leading lights of British Romanticism. Romanticism was an artistic and literary movement of this period, the early 1800s. It was basically a reaction against the industrial revolution, and the hard-headed rationalism of people like John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. In other words, it was resisting the kind of cold rationalism that reduced us to being merely cogs in a machine, or numbers on a screen to be manipulated. Romanticism wanted to elevate the value of our subjective sense of things. It’s a conflict society and organisations repeatedly knock up against when making decisions - should we be basing them solely on what makes most economic or business sense, or should we be allowing our intuitive sense, or other more metaphysical claims like the inherent value of humanity, or the inherent value of sentient life, to have a bearing on our decision-making process also? Since the industrial revolution these kinds of questions have never not been pertinent, but in recent months, in light of the Grenfell tower fire for instance, societal consciousness in this area seems to have risen.

Following the enlightenment, the notion of gods sitting on other planes of existence, rewarding the good, and punishing the bad, became intellectually unsatisfying. The danger was, many intellectuals extrapolated that to mean that the world was therefore a soulless place, red in tooth and claw, an ever-unfolding Darwinian battle, a cold machine suited to some cold hard logic. The trouble is, people cannot live in a world like that. Romanticism was an attempt to redress that imbalance, an attempt to hold rationalism in one hand, while at the same time recognising the great value of love and beauty: the value of poetry and words, the value of ‘how it sits with you’, and ‘what your gut sense tells you’, the value of spiritual language, the value of feelings, and hopes, and dreams, and in so doing, elevating the significance of ‘Nature’. Communing with our primordial self through nature, or communing with God through nature; ‘God’ for Wordsworth being a metaphor for mystery, or like Spinoza, a word to be equated with Nature or everything. But again, the line between a ‘belief in God’, and Atheism, is incredibly thin. Coleridge called Wordsworth a ‘Semi-Atheist’. For Wordsworth then, a belief in God was essentially when individual people turn their hearts towards love and the good for no logical reason. That is God.

Okay, back to Emerson’s visit to England. He first visited Samuel Taylor Coleridge in London, and was very disappointed. 60-year-old Coleridge was a large, bombastic man, and Emerson said “the visit was more spectacle rather than a conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity”. Coleridge merely spouted nonsense for about an hour, before Emerson was able to escape back onto London’s streets. His encounter with Wordsworth was far more satisfying. Finding his way to the lake district, he moved along the picturesque tracks. Feeling inspired and uplifted by the countryside, he walked to Dove Cottage resting in a thickly wooded hillside, where William Wordsworth lived. He knocked unannounced at the door. Wordsworth was a plainly dressed, elderly man with white hair. He was kindly and serene, warm, and generous with his time. Emerson was invited in, and they sat talking by the fire. Their conversations meandered where you would imagine, they talked about Coleridge, and the fact that his poetry was unnecessarily complicated, they talked about politics of course - Wordsworth lamented that America seemed obsessed with money in a very unhealthy way. Wordsworth recited some of his poetry to Emerson, poetry Emerson was very familiar with, and some new poetry, never yet recited. When it was time for Emerson to leave, Wordsworth walked along with him, accompanying him for a mile before turning back ‘with great kindness’.

The Emerson who returned to America later that year was a changed man. Within three years, he had begun giving his lectures, married his second wife, and written his most significant book, ‘Nature’. He was doing the important work of the poet, which Emerson described as ‘that insightful [person], who can pierce this rotten diction, and fasten words again to visible things.’ Weaving new meanings, and new narratives. He formed the Transcendental club, to discuss, in an open and free manner, issues of spirituality and philosophy. Transcendentalism empowered individuals to do no less than weigh religion for themselves, to form their own faith as their conscience led. Ralph Waldo Emerson directly inspired many artists, writers, visionaries, and poets, none more so than Henry David Thoreau. If Emerson was the architect of American intellectual culture, setting forth the theoretical framework, Henry David Thoreau was the man who lived it, and embodied it. But for that chapter, you’ll need to wait till next week…

Amen.

The Biographer’s Eye

Lewis Connolly May 15, 2017

When someone reads a biography, they are not accessing the truth of a person directly. There is always an argument being made. There is always the attempt by the author to have the reader regard the subject in one way or another. This week I have been reading around the interesting figure of Ted Hughes - poet laureate, environmentalist, winner of the most coveted T. S. Eliot poetry prize in 1998, shortly before his death. But he’s probably most famous for the fact that his first wife was Sylvia Plath.

You are probably familiar with the story: a whirlwind romance, married in four months, Plath in the shadow of her husband, poetry, anger, the cheating husband, the all-consuming depression, a life cut short in a flat in London. Sylvia Plath’s most notable work, ‘Ariel’, was published posthumously a couple of years after her death. ‘Ariel’ is a collection of poems which explores the dark spectres of her psyche; it was a very personal and confessional work, and this made it a very new kind of poetry. Prior to the 50s and 60s, very personal poetry about emotional experiences were regarded as taboo. The zenith point in ‘Ariel’ is to be found in a few stanzas in the poem ‘Daddy’.

‘Daddy’ – this poem was written only a few months prior to Sylvia Plath taking her own life.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Now, a great deal has made of these passages. There is a huge amount of academic literature surrounding them. To what extent are we to understand this poem impersonally, as just simply being about a seven-year-old girl losing her father, or should we assume there is a personal angle here? Perhaps it’s about her own relationship to her own father, or perhaps we should have a more psychoanalytical reading, and assume the poem is about the most prominent patriarchal figure in her life, Ted Hughes.

So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

The telephone ripped out the wall, an expression of totally rejecting the world. Is it not easy to read her suicide into this poem? As she collapses into complete isolation, rejecting the modern world and society.

The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.

Seven years… Sylvia Plath knew her own father for seven years before he died - a good reason to think the poem is about her own father. But seven years was also the amount of time she knew Ted Hughes before she died. Ultimately, we are left with no other option but to speculate. But my own sense is that it is her hatred towards Ted Hughes that is ultimately driving the poem. During this period, Ted Hughes was writing very animalistic apocalyptic poetry, very bloody visceral poetry. A few years after Plath’s death Hughes wrote the poem we had read out - ‘Two Legends’, which is from his book ‘Crow: From the Life and Song of the Crow’. ‘Crow’ is a very interesting collection of poems, drawing a great deal upon Christian mythology, all from the perspective of the Crow. It plays on this idea of perspective; the Biblical narrative, is as it were, offering one vantage point on life, the universe, and everything, and here we are getting the mythological Crow’s perspective, a perspective which is both grotesque and beautiful. Ted Hughes, through the Crow, is moving the conversation around Christianity within literature onwards, framing the Christian myth as simply one provisional myth about humanity and its relationship to the world of spirit. As such, ‘Crow’ could be viewed, and has been viewed, as piece of anti-Christian literature, because it dares us to play with sacrosanct imagery. The Crow invites the possibility of entering a more fertile space, in which we are able to take liberties with the mythical imagery we have inherited. In a later poem that Hughes wrote he sums up his Crow phase in one simple stanza:

Who’ll be their parson?
Me, says the crow, for it is well known
I study the Bible right down to the bone…

The Crow is the trickster figure, and as such is able to get away with more, ask questions that shouldn’t really be asked, and in so doing uncover ideas which will elude most. He is the in-between figure, living in between the sacred and the profane, living in between the world of the gods and the world of humanity. So, in the spirit of the Trickster, in the Spirit of the Crow, let’s look at today’s Bible reading - John’s account of the crucifixion of Jesus. The normative reading of the Gospels synchronizes the four accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, into a single narrative. But of course, we know this is a deeply flawed way of reading the Bible, because each of the four Gospels has its own author, its own biographer of Jesus, and as such each account is attempting to convince its readers of a particular perspective. You simple have to play the Gospels off one another to see the extent to which this happens.

So, let us contrast the crucifixion of Jesus in the Gospel of John with the crucifixion of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. As we had read from the Gospel of John, Jesus knew that all was now finished, and then he said ‘I am thirsty’ and John tells us that he said this is in order to fulfil the scriptures. So, he’s not asking for liquid because he’s actually thirsty, no no, just so he can fulfil scriptures. What we have in John is a comic book Jesus, is a superhero Jesus, a Jesus who doesn’t get thirsty. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. Note: he does not drink the wine, he receives the wine, and when all is done he looks out and declares triumphantly ‘It is finished’, bows his head and gives up his spirit. Note also he is not even killed; he is in full control in the Gospel of John, everything is going according to his pre-ordained plan. He chooses when his spirit is to depart from this mortal life. In Mark, on the other hand, Jesus’ final words are not ‘It is finished’, but rather he cries out in anguish, shouting ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In Mark’s Gospel, a passer-by is compelled to carry Jesus’ cross, because he cannot manage on his own. In John, he needs no help. In Mark, Jesus is human, all too human. In John, Jesus is superhuman, god-like. These two accounts are completely unrecognisable. Indeed, to even attempt to reconcile the two accounts does an injustice to the integrity of the original authors’ literary work. Now, the temptation as liberals is to say something like: Mark is the ‘truer’ account of the events in Jesus life, and John is a later development that tries to integrate into the narrative some of the evolving theological traditions, and therefore, Mark is more accurate, and a better account. The problem with this move is that it assumes Mark to be a less biased biographer. I would much rather conclude in this way; Mark and John are both pieces of biographical literature responding to the Jesus event as they experienced it, first or second hand. By making this assertion, we break the illusion that there is a consistent or mono-narrative. We problematize the very notion of ‘orthodoxy’. We problematise the persistent question: ‘Yes, but what’s the actual reality?’...

The Crow, by looking at the Christian narrative from another vantage point, helps us to recognise something we already knew, that just as in the first century there were a multiplicity of responses to the Jesus event, so there is today a multiplicity. Indeed, that multiplicity is within us. The sacred and the profane, the desire to build and the desire to destroy. The trickster, or the Crow, advocator of uncertainty, at once the creator and destroyer, bringer of help and harm, the shadow that shapes the light. And with that, I’m going to segue back to Ted Hughes - the shadow that shapes the light. Ted Hughes was a formidable character. A poet who inhabited and wrote from a place of sheer intensity, almost a shamanic type figure, communing with dark forces from beyond. Ultimately it was these dark spectres which Hughes summoned in his work that suffocated Sylvia Plath. ‘Ariel’ in the years that followed became hugely significant. The cult of Sylvia Plath grew. The narrative construct of ‘Ariel’, the woman driven to her own demise by the overbearing masculinity of Ted Hughes, became the defining myth that coloured Hughes. He was cast into the role of patriarchal villain, destroyer of femininity. By the late 1960s the feminist movement was taking off, and Sylvia Plath was adopted as their perfectly suited martyr for the struggle. Hughes became increasingly a character trapped in the Plath cult. The fantasia, the myth, became more significant, more important than the reality. And yet is that not always the way of it? The mono-narrative became the lens, the truth through which Hughes and Plath were to be understood. The victim and the villain. But the Crow jeers from the sidelines. The Crow ridicules our simple narratives through which we frame such complexity. The Crow makes mockery of our sacred cows.

God bless the Crow.
Amen.