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.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
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. 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.
(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.
Generative Tension between “God” and “Earth” in Mary Oliver’s Thirst
Love for the earth and love for [God] are having such a long conversation in my heart. —Mary Oliver, “Thirst”The contemporary American poet Mary Oliver has been long recognized as one of those spiritually minded people who, because of her profound interest in nature, has found it necessary to reject formal religious concepts of God, even equating God unproblematically with the earth. Since her Pulitzer Prize winning book American Primitive in 1983, she has been noted as an “earth saint.” However, her recent book Thirst introduces into her poetry for the first time orthodox Christian themes. Though remaining consistent with her earlier work in proclaiming that “My work is loving the world” and that the earth is “God’s body,” she now also expresses a longing for God’s missing self: “Where, do you suppose, is [God’s] / pale and wonderful mind?” The title poem of Thirst speaks of the book’s central theme as a “long conversation” between “love for the earth and love for [God].” Through sustaining and living out this conversation, she hopes to become more kind, patient, and joyful—in short, to love both God and the earth more fully. Skillfully composed, insightful, humble, and timely, Thirst is an important contribution to contemporary Christian ecological spirituality. Using a two-faceted approach which parallels Francis McAloon’s recent proposal for “reading for transformation,” I suggest (1) that the spiritual meanings to be found in Oliver’s new poems can inform us about the spiritual practices of spiritual-ecological generative tension and (2) that the act of reading these poems slowly, attentively, and prayerfully can in fact be such a practice.
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