Onion

I'm having trouble writing this paper (or these papers), flapping back and forth on things. Perhaps I'm trying to write this thing too linearly. I need to let it grow like an onion.

I'm not in a rush yet, so I have time to go layer by layer, around and around. "Ogres are like onions . . ."

Two Papers

I'm starting to think that the two papers I have here actually have less to do with each other than I originally thought. My initial plan was to make the conference paper a section of my thesis paper. I equated "Generative tension . . ." with "Mary Oliver and Christian Spirituality." And I imagined that the second of those would be a longer version of the first which would remain essentially intact as the core of the essay. But now I'm thinking that the two purposes/audiences I'm aiming for are different enough to warrant two more separate papers, dealing even with some different poems. There will be some overlap, I'm sure, but I don't see that one organization for the two papers will work. So here's how they might look different:

Generative Tension between “God” and “Earth” in Mary Oliver’s Thirst

• Introduction--her recent book Thirst introduces into her poetry for the first time orthodox Christian themes which introduces also a generative spiritual tension . . .
  
• Generative Tension--using temporary binaries?
  
• Loving "Earth"--Nature, the body, neighbors | being gentle and joyous and kind | grieving
  
• Loving "God"--kataphatic spiritual practices such as church and scripture and kindness | sense of gratitude and obedience | desire for the apophatic side of God
  
• Sustaining Tension as a Spiritual Practice--she works up a tension through reflection and writing | she hopes that this will make her better
  

Mary Oliver and Christian Spirituality

• Introduction--her recent book Thirst introduces into her poetry for the first time orthodox Christian themes
• Earlier Poetry / Criticism to Date
• The Christian Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers
• Orthodox Spiritual Practices and Values
  
• Jesus and the Apophatic God

I'd still probably argue that "Mary Oliver and Christian Spirituality" does in effect boil down to "Generative Tension between 'God' and 'Earth' in Mary Oliver’s Thirst," but for the sake of writing things out into essays, I think that two different pieces with two different angles might be the best way to go. The first of these two essays would be a specific exploration of a particular dynamic of the Christian spirituality in her work written for an audience with particular agreed on understandings of spirituality. That essay would have an important methodological emphasis. The second essay would be a broader essay about Christian spirituality in her work written for a broader audience with a less specific methdological focus. The first one would say "here is what she is doing"; and the second "here are some themes." Something like that.

Notes on Messenger

The opening poem of Thirst demonstrates strong continuities with Oliver's earlier work. The first line of "Messenger" reads: "My work is loving the world." Even in this line, though, she also introduces the religious themes of this book. In this line, it is her "work" to love the world. This is a good job in this poem (in later poems, it is much harder and sadder). But in noting that it is her "work" (and not something like her purpose in life or the completion of her being) she demonstrates the kind of open-handed engagement with that which is not ultimate characteristic of an orthodox contemplative Christian spirituality.

Oliver brings up a her imperfect condition (and I have to assume that some version of Oliver is the speaker in these poems) asking

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect?

Putting her aging and imperfect self in parallel with her boots and a coat (an theme that is reinforced later in the same poem when she refers to "these body-clothes"), Oliver begins to delineate what belongs in the category of "earth." She goes on, letting go of questions about perfection, to say

. . . Let me keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all of the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude . . .

If this poem can represent Oliver's position relative to the earth, these are the things which mark this poem:

1. An emphasis on awe of physical being (and implicitly awareness) accompanied by concrete images (in about 20 lines, she almost catalogs them: sunflowers, hummingbirds, quickening yeast, blue plums, the clam deep in the speckled sand, my boots, my coat, phoebe, delphinium, sheep in the pasture and the pasture, moth, wren, the sleepy dug-up clam)
2. An awareness of her own earthly imperfection (bodily and moral)
3. A sense that there is important important work to do, termed as "loving the world" and explained as appreciating and being aware of it. It is not just important that "we all live forever" or that nature is beautiful, but it is also important to take note of these things, to talk about these things (which, stepping back, is what the poem itself is doing.
4. An awareness of "work" as non-ultimate and of guilt (or pride, egocentrism seems to be the point) as even less important than the work
5. Interconnectedness with earth ("telling them all, over and over, how it is / that we live forever")
6. A spiritual something underpinning both the sense of wonder and the task at hand, this spiritual something taking precedence over other things. The most important thing now is to be aware and awed and to keep in mind that the most important thing (now or later) is that we "live forever."

What "live forever" means needs some discussion since certainly flowers do not live forever. From another poem when Oliver suggests that "heaven" is not her goal, we can take a hint that she might mean something about "eternal life" being eternally present. Certainly she doesn't mean anything that systematic, I think, or directly paraphrase-able. She means something about the spirit, though.

I'm having some trouble identifying exactly what the main things here are than need to be pointed out. In this poem, there are hardly any visible tensions. There is the tension inherent in having an worn body. And there is a tension in calling "loving the world" work. One of the things that makes this poem powerful is the fact that the speaker is certainly not naive to what she is saying.

She gives a bit of attention here to her own body, more than she usually does in a poem, mentioning her self as "no longer young" (age is quickly associated with the physical affects of aging), and she mentions her heart, mind, these body-clothes, and her mouth.

Love, astonishment, joy, rejoicing, gratitude.

I'm not sure what it is that I want to say about this poem. And I'm not sure what this poem says about the rest of the book. Certainly that it introduces important themes that can be best understood within the religious context in which Oliver situates herself.

What are all of the ingredients for love? since she mentions that they are all there. There are the mind, heart, body-clothes, mouth and, presumably, all the things to be astonished at, as well, perhaps, as the spiritual context in which love is possible.

It is probably not best to read this poem in isolation from the other poems in the book, including or especially the sadder ones. Still, it seems that this joyful poem, embracing earth in loving work, is good poem to read as representative of one of the poles of the themes in the book.

How am I to read this book? Do I read the poems as simultaneous statements. Certainly not. I also can't read them as disconnected. And it doesn't seem well advised to read the book from fron to back as the log of some sort of spiritual journey or progression. There certainly does seem to be some progression. But I don't know from what to what. This poem in particular takes one tone when read first and another when read again after the darker poems.

Poem Lists

I set out to write a list in this entry of six poems or so from Thirst to write about closely in my essay but I nearly ended up simply copying out the table of contents. It would be simpler to list the ones that are that interesting to me or relevant to my topic--probably just the poem, "The Poet Thinks about the Donkey."

I can't write about it all, though. As Ruth Salvaggio told me, "Everything is partial." Here is a list, then, of a little more than a dozen poems that I feel I want to include:

Messenger
When I Am Among the Trees
Musical Notation: 1
After Her Death
Cormorants
What I Said at Her Service
Coming to God: First Days
The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church: The Eucharist
More Beautiful Than the Honey Locust Tree Are the Words of the Lord
Praying
Six Recognitions of the Lord
The First
The Uses of Sorrow
On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate (Psalm 145)
Thirst

Since I have two projects I'm working on here, a conference paper and a longer thesis essay, I'll be able to build a shorter and longer list. If, allowing for references to other poems, I had to limit my discussion to three close readings (which I may have to do for my conference paper), I would have to write about these ones:

Messenger
After Her Death
Thirst

Generative Tension

When we speak of generative tension between "God" and "Earth," we need to ask several things about what we even mean in the terms of the statement.

Do we mean God and Earth or do we mean our conceptions of God and Earth, or both? For example, we might, through cultural norms and childhood training, conceive of God as an angry father figure. Then, we can address that conception with thoughts like: "I don't really believe that God is an angry father figure--at least, I don't want to really believe that--but the tendency to feel that way and think that way is deeply ingrained in my consciousness and subconsciousness." In such a case, we hold two separate conceptions of God. One is how we "naturally" conceive of God; and the other is how we would like to believe God is if, to allude to a gospel story, someone would help us with our doubt. This second conception, we could suggest, is what we think is "really" the case. Likewise, in speaking of the tension between God and Earth, we may have multiple conceptions of the relationship between them: We might conceive of God as having created earth and abandoned, of God having created it and then handed over to the devil, of God having created it and actively sustaining it with omnipresent spirit. And we can understand one conception to be "ingrained" in us and another to be "more accurate to reality." So not only do we have tension between God and Earth--for real and in our conceptions--but we have tension between conceptions of the tension.

I am influenced in my thinking about the term "generative tension"--which is actually a mode of thinking--by Joseph Harris. "Intellectual writers usually work not with simple antithesis (either x or not-x) but with positive opposing terms--that is, with words and values that don't contradict each other yet still exist in some real and ongoing tension" (Rewriting 25).

To arrive at a point of identifying a generative tension is to arrive halfway in terms of the intellectual and artistic process. Poets, perhaps, have an advantage in this as they are trained to look for puns and paradoxes, contradictions and connections. For someone with a conservative upbringing like myself (and I am being slightly hyperbolic here), to arrive at this tension means going from an understanding, in a sense, that "God" and "Earth" do contradict each other--whether a philosophical denial of the body in favor of the mind or a theological sense that "this place is fallen and is going to burn! we just got hang on until the rapture and the new earth!"--to a sense that they don't contradict each other and that the earth is indeed sacred. For someone like Oliver who begins with the sacredness of the earth, this may mean going from unproblematically identifying God with the earth to a realization that there is "some real and ongoing tension." Thirst wonderfully and beautifully described the tension and, perhaps, hints at the process Oliver took to arrive at it.

If identifying the generative tension is half of the intellectual (artistic, spiritual) process, the other half is maintaining the tension. We ask questions like: What are the positions each item in the tension have vis-a-vis each other? What does the tension mean? What can we make of it? What can be generated? And we explore answers to these, settling at times on tentative working answers, settling at times on resolutions to the tensions. This work is not ever done in this life. We don't need to work at it frantically but seriously and steadily: this doesn't mean without fun, for the work often proceeds in a certain kind of word play. The point is that the work has to do with living in the point of the tension: both exploring answers and letting questions remain. Thirst can be conceived as such work in that it articulates a sustained statement of the tension between God and Earth--and exploring some resolutions--but not dissolving the tension completely or permanently at any point in the present tense.

The third half, I suppose, is to let the tension go as dissolve into the non-duality of life and death. But there is the important work of living and loving on earth--where the tensions do exist--to be done before we dissolve. We should know about this "third half" so that we will know that the work of exploring the generative tension is not ultimate: we work while we can; on earth, in this world of illusions and disillusionment, we need to continue creating hope. But we can believe, at the same time, in yet another generative tension, that outside of "earth"--that is from "God's" perspective everything is already created. In Thirst we can find hints of this position as well.

Notes on "Praying" (p. 37)

This poem--which is very important to me--seems to hold an important key into poetry as a spiritual practice on/at/in the tension between the physical and the spiritual (the earthly and the divine). Here, and perhaps this is too simple a definition, Oliver is telling us a similar thing to that which T. S. Eliot says: Only through time time is conquered. In a much less violent manner, Oliver is saying, through the earth we attain towards what is beyond the earth. If indeed this is what she is saying, than there are some additional important principles that she gives us:

A. The moment in the earth, the situation in which or about which we would like to engage the divine through "reflection" (poetry) on doesn't have to be anything that is particularly "special." "It doesn't have to be the blue iris." This point is not really novel--poets have long (though more nowadays than in Homer's days) been in the practice of engaging ordinary or lowly objects--but it is well put and worth being reminded of.

B. The poet's work is not about the poet's skill, particularly, not about the poet's skill in relation to other poet's. "It's not a contest." Rather it is a humble task and, can be, should be, should at least have some internal aspect of being, a simple task. This point is perhaps difficult to accept, on reading Oliver's textbooks on poetry, where the poet must be elaborately skilled. The hard work, I would like to think, is what achieves simplicity. This is so, but in addition, it is also so that even a highly skilled simplicity is not necessary for the work that Oliver is describing. Even we can write these kinds of prayer-poems because praying is different from being a well-selling poet. "Don't try to make them elaborate." Perhaps she is not talking about poetry after all--but only about praying. Is poetry not about striving, then?

C. "Patch a few words together." I'm not sure how this ties in, but it seems to affirm my preference for shorter poems. It seems also to emphasize that the point, as it is not the poet, is also not the poem either. We this is importantly in the few following lines that tell us what it is about.

D. The poem is a doorway. Poetry and prayer are for facilitating something ("attention" or "awareness" if I'm correct) that allows spirit(uality) to happen.

E. Importatly, as this process is not about the poet or pray-er, it allows the voice of someone else. The poem's task is to create silence preciely for that someone else to "speak." As gratitude is mentioned in this same line and as my mystical leanings prompt me to associate silence with God's presence, I can only think that this "other voice" is the "voice" of God. This may be God speaking to us or it may be God speaking for us.

The lines "just pay attention and patch a few words together" have become my poetics, at least in theory if not in practice. In practice, my poetics consist of "put down whatever words come." Perhaps I would benefit from "paying attention" more.

If living in the "tension" between God and Earth is a valuable spiritual practice, it is only accomplished by us doing our simple grateful work with the langauge and earthly material we have and then by God to taking up for us and with us in the silence (that, perhaps, we create). The work of praying and writing poems is the work of creating silence, creating spiritual space. The work of "paying attention" results in the creation of space in which "another voice" may speak. God speaking in the space we create--which is, perhaps, really us discovering the space and hearing God already speaking--partially resolves the tension between God and Earth for its duration and, if we believe the mystics who taught us lectio divina, it changes us some too. God's "voice," which, as it speaks in silence does not itself make a sound, exists between God's "body" and God's "mind." (Oliver's use of "mind" doesn't fit that well with apophatic langauge unless it ironically means that which is beyond the order of the mental.") It involves breath which is physical, coming from physical organs, and which is also, in its root and in its metaphorical connection to the contents of the "mind," spirit.

A Heuristic for Working Through Thirst

To avoid periods without writing and to avoid becoming distant from the poems in Thirst while I'm working through reading the secondary literature as well as other poems, I am designing a tentative framework for continually working through the poems in Thirst (as well, probably, as some of the other pertinent poems or parts of poems I come across). The three parts, which actually overlap, though I may allow them to remain artificially separated so that I don't stop writing for fear of having to show the connections, are:

(1) Narrate the poem. First, I want to write a prose "literal" interpretation of the poem, quoting, of course, key words and phrases. I want to write a re-presentation of the poem that can make sense without the poem next to it.

(2) Exposition on thematic interpretation. Next, I want to write some expository notes on my interpretation of the poem. I should aim for including multiple possible interpretations

(3) Allow the poem and interpretation to modify my frame work. Finally, I want to talk about how the poem represents the "generative" tension between "God" and "Earth" and the ways that the poem may not represent that either by representing the opposite or by representing something else altogether. This is not to abandon my framework but to develop it and fill it in with complications and particulars.