Breathing space

Looking back over the week, I began on Monday morning looking at Williams’ ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’; Thursday there was a school conference on the role of religion in the 21st Century; this morning (as on Wednesday and Friday afternoons and yesterday morning) I went swimming. And right now I’m writing this in preparation for the Blog. And I’m beginning to see how everything might relate.

i) ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ I read in terms of the tension between a referential ‘pull’ in the language (red – white – wheel – barrow – rain – chickens – upon – beside), adjectives plus nouns plus prepositions suggestive of a concrete world ‘out there’, poem as depiction …

and

... the poem as poem, a construction of language, (WCW’s ‘machine’ of words) whereby enjambment (notice on the very “wheel/barrow” itself) refuses to let the reading eye let go and the inner eye conjure up a picture. You are tethered to the page: the lines (the poem’s idiosyncratic patterning), the eye:ear axis (sensing delicate little modulations of long and short vowels), the way prepositions (‘upon’, ‘beside’) even definite articles acquire as much value as nouns and adjectives; the gradual development (pedantically slow) … to get – where? To what conclusion? Well, that’s the point.

ii) During the conference I was becoming more and more dissatisfied with the terms – religion, Christianity, spirituality … Isn’t this the issue: what do we mean by ‘spirit’ or ‘spirituality’? The terms have become clotted, muddled, diluted, appropriated?

iii) Swimming. The pool at 8am on a Sunday morning – the body plunges through a blue mirror. Doing lengths, the first three are an effort – it feels cold, you wonder why you didn’t just stay in bed, your muscles are stiff and reluctant. Then, as you start into the eighth length, the breathing is in rhythm with your arm strokes, the body and the water share a temperature, a different part of the brain seems to be directing your movements, you-are-you-are-not the one swimming, thoughts come and go and seem to take shape with the swimming, sunlight floats on the surface of the water and dances like writing on the floor … Leaving the pool, you hear the bird song and smell the morning air, your senses are sharpened. You could be walking on air. The idea of breakfast seems fabulous …

iv) Pierre Hadot identifies key categories of spiritual exercises or – as he puts it – Stoico-Platonic philosophical therapeutics: research (zetesis), investigation (skepsis), reading (anagnosis), listening (akroasis), attention (prosoche), self-mastery (enkrateia), meditations (meletai), in particular.

“Attention (prosoche) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit. … We could also define this attitude as “concentration on the present moment”.

v) Hadot explains the significance of physics as part of the spiritual exercises:

“the walls of the world open out, I see action going on throughout the whole void …” (Lucretius)

“Those who practice wisdom … are excellent contemplators of nature and everything she contains. They examine the earth, the sea, the sky, the heavens and all their inhabitants; they are joined in thought to the sun, the moon, and all the other stars, both fixed and wandering … and although they are attached to the earth by their bodies, they provide their souls with wings, so they may walk the ether and contemplate the powers that live there, as is fitting for true citizens of the world … it goes without saying that such men …make of their whole lives a festival …” (Philo Judaeus)

(I'm thinking of Wenders' angels in 'Wings of Desire')

“Don’t limit yourself to breathing along with the air that surrounds you; from now on, think along with the Thought which embraces all things. For the intellective power is no less universally diffused, and does not penetrate any the less into each being capable of receiving it, than the air in the case of one capable of breathing it … you will make a large room at once for yourself by embracing in your thought the whole Universe, and grasping ever-continuing Time …” (Marcus Aurelius)

(What did Wittgenstein say? "I manufacture my own oxygen" - was that it?)

vi) Learning to die – Hadot cites Brice Parain “language develops only upon the death of individuals” before developing a section on philosophy as a ‘training for death’. Inevitably, I’m thinking of Blanchot and his ideas of the encounter with language as an existential encounter with the Other.

vii) Learning to read – first, in the sense of understanding how philosophical texts should be read. Not as set in stone theories or immutable laws. Instead, as a work in progress – “thoughts cannot be expressed according to the pure, absolute necessity of a systematic order. Rather, it must take into account the level of the interlocutor, and the concrete tempo of the logos in which it is expressed.” This is philosophy as a dynamics, a gymnastics even. Thought in motion and evolution.

Learning to read, second, in terms of spending our lives “reading”. As Hadot writes: “Old truths … there are some truths whose meaning will never be exhausted by the generations of man. It is not that they are difficult; on the contrary, they are often extremely simple … Yet for their meaning to be understood, these truths must be lived, and constantly re-experienced.”

He closes his essay ‘Spiritual Exercises’ with the following – it’s a terrific final flourish:

“And yet we have forgotten how to read: how to pause, liberate ourselves from our worries, return into ourselves, and leave aside our search for subtlety and originality, in order to meditate calmly, ruminate, and let the texts speak to us. This, too, is a spiritual exercise, and one of the most difficult. As Goethe said: “Ordinary people don’t know how much time and effort it takes to learn how to read. I’ve spent eighty years at it, and I still can’t say that I’ve reached my goal.”

viii) Of course – and you’ll have made this leap, I’m sure – where Hadot speaks of philosophy I’m thinking of POETRY. The Williams poem – to take what is at hand (the phrase is apt, too) – embodies the main thrust of Hadot’s essay. To abstract the ‘thought’ is to miss the meaning which is embodied in the poem, its language, the ‘situation’ of reader : page : the time and act of reading. What, in any case, is 'The Red Wheelbarrow' saying? Paraphrasable meaning seems limp, beside the point, beside the white chickens, so much depends upon ... language.

Poetry – the poetry that matters – it seems to me is always such: a reminder of the 'moment' (and the utter simplicity of this inevitably opens out into such complexity).

ix) Returning to a thread from earlier posts – the US/UK poetry ‘divide’ - is this, perhaps, another aspect of the issue? Poets such as Pound, Olson, Duncan, Spicer who see the poem as inextricable from a poetics of living, of thought embodied in the ongoing writing : living – against those who see the poem as a separable entity, ‘perfected’ (and thus amputated?).

x) And finally – if it’s not too pretentious a claim – why this Blog might be justified? As a daily (daily? – if only!) practice – imperfect, responding to different promptings (reading, writing, eating, sleeping, thinking, swimming, teaching, driving …), not knowing where it’s going only following its nose. And why it needs – itself – to listen to voices and words coming in from other directions.

Hadot, again:

“ “Spiritual exercises”. The expression is a bit disconcerting for the contemporary reader. In the first place, it is no longer quite fashionable these days to use the word “spiritual”. It is nevertheless necessary to use this term, I believe, because none of the other adjectives we could use – “psychic”, “moral”, “ethical”, “intellectual”, “of thought”, “of the soul” – covers all aspects of the reality we want to describe.”

I see his problem but offer my solution: surely “poetic” is the adjective he’s after?

*

Today Belgianwaffle renounces the wristwatch in a gesture of defiance against Time (or, rather, the timekeeping mind).

I take off my watch. There!

My mind feels lighter already.

*

Poem

(for Max Eastley)


to

be

able

to

spend

all

after

noon

.

with

a

match

and

the

colour

blue

.

that's

one

of

the

problems

I

have

.

finding

endless

variations

of

things

to

do

.

*

Deep breaths, now -