crone
wraps the shawl around her
in a way of sayingi’m enough –
sits in front of our block
her old bones chilled –warming now, us seeing her
knowing we want her,
the wise crone in our lives
From the category archives:
Text
bird
i read that the body is a depression
and wanted you more.and walking to the car
weary from the waitingthinking of the day to come
a single bird
voiced what i’d yearned to graspwanted to have
translated into form.
Scything Device (detail)
the scything
there were high meadows
and a wooded passthere was a clearing
where people gathered
[continue reading]
it’s like this at the fish market -
standing around
when all I want is
pink glistening salmon flesh -there’s a problem with knives
and by the time I get one
you’ve offered me
your breast to cut -I go for the cheek
incising thin red
around the jaw lineand throw away the knife
shocked by the pain I’ve inflictedhiding the act
from the rest of my life
It feels time to publish this little book of poems, The Rains That Fall Around Here on Issuu. All 24 poems, written over the period 2003 to 2009, have a devotional theme.
My poetry output is fairly low, and these poems are for me a distillation of an ongoing understanding and occasional encountering of the devotional, the noumenal.
One of the poems, something in a drawer, appeared in Australia’s Blue Dog; the rest are unpublished elsewhere.
white clouds scroll
across the sixth-floor windowdo not open window
to prevent a dewdrop
or harmful insect enteringthe book of buddha’s
at the bedside tablebe always thinking
of the transiency of your lifeleaving, turns back to the
white sheet crumpledto the cast of a body
spent the night in transit
bound for rome
Here’s the first of four short posts on the field, a topic dear to my heart.
This post’s a personal reflection on Robert Duncan’s exquisite poem Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow, which appeared in his 1960 book The Opening of the Field:
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall thereinthat is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going downwhose secret we see in a children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
The phrase “an eternal pasture folded in all thought” has me thinking of David Bohm’s implicate order, unfolding in time to form the explicate order of which we are usually only aware. And “eternal pasture” is a lovely poetic form for what I usually refer to as the noumenal field, “so near to the heart”.
“Wherefrom fall all architectures I am” has the sense of that place from which the constructions of selfhood occur, the developments of self-representations, those patternings with which we then subsequently live, mistakenly taking them to be our real selves. As A.H. Almaas says:
The experience of the self is actually determined by the self-representation. The phenomenology of the self’s experience presents itself through this representation, and hence, what the self perceives and experiences as itself, in its present experience, is greatly determined by it. The self-representation actually sculpts the forms that arise as the phenomenological particulars of the self’s experience of itself. (A.H. Almaas, The Point of Existence, p59)
“as if it were a given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos” speaks to me of that noumenal place – we can see it in Unica Zürn’s work and I mentioned it in my previous post – that place which for many of us is a creative centre – which holds the psyche against dissolution. Duncan puts it so beautifully, “a place of first permission.” And this is a “made place”, a place we make for ourselves by giving it (finally!) the importance it deserves.
This is merely a series of notes – the poem stays alive and available to me as a source of inspiration, always more rich than any attempt I might make to analyse.
(There’s a more literary reading of the poem at the Poetry Foundation.)
Ron Dowd
Field with Horses’ Manes, 2009
Acrylic, ink and coloured pencil on paper, 66 x 50 cm
From David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous (page 237):
…mind as Wind is a property of the encompassing world, in which humans – like all other beings – participate. One’s individual awareness, the sense of a relatively personal self or psyche, is simply part of the enveloping Air that circulates within, through, and around one’s particular body; hence one’s own intelligence is assumed, from the start, to be entirely participant with the swirling psyche of the land.
In this recent Counselor Magazine article – Spirituality Around the World, Culturally Diverse Approaches to 12-Step, are thoughtful cross-denominational views of approaches to 12-Step recovery for addictions – the approaches being Islamic, Christian, Jewish and Buddhist. Here are gems from the Buddhist Rev. Koyo S. Kubose:
There is no sin in Buddhism, only ignorance. The greatest ignorance is ignorance of oneself; namely, thinking that one exists as an independent entity in the world and that everything revolves around oneself.
Liberation comes from loosening the grip of one’s self-centered and self-created existence.
Which evoke for me a poem I wrote in 2004:
wicca
perhaps one night they will take you
from your home
to a place out of doors
and in the darkness
on bare ground
before a pitch painted shed
begin to tell you who you are –and realise something
for which even they were not ready –that its only
that in the black shed
(its closed door hiding a mystery
terrifying even to them)
of which you are worthy
Polanyi’s book Meaning has continued to play on my mind since recently making a little book of drawings and my recent post The Lost Power of an Explicated Metaphor. Specifically, it’s his examples of skills that require a number of levels that have stayed with me (these he presents as indicators of how the mind-body problem is resolved), particularly his example of the hierarchical levels involved in the production of an oral communication.
In this example, Polanyi describes how such a communication requires a complex hierarchy that begins, at the lowest level, with phonetics (or it could be even lower than that, with phones). Words, in turn, are constructs of these phonemes. At the next level, combining the words into sentences requires use of a grammar. The sentences are subsequently fitted into a style (the next level) that best communicates the ideas. And then, the style of presentation serves the ideas, the content, that the speaker wants to communicate. As Polanyi says:
…the operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing the particulars, which form the next-lower level. You cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics; you cannot derive a grammar from a vocabulary; a correct use of grammar does not account for good style; and a good style does not supply the content of an oral communication. (Polanyi’s italics)
Polanyi’s view is that any level controls the boundary conditions that are left undefined by the next lower level. “The mind relies for its working on the continued operation of physiological principles, but it controls the boundary conditions left undefined by physiology”.
The necessity that the boundary conditions limiting the operation of a set of lower-level principles must be different from these principles means that the mind can readily be understood to serve as a set of such boundary conditions for the laws of neurophysiology. Though rooted in the body, the mind is therefore free in its actions from bodily determination – exactly as our common sense knows it to be free.
Although the content of the chapter from which these quotes were taken (“Reconstruction”) is based on lectures given in 1969, the topic is for me high relevant today, as psychotherapy grapples with both neurophysiology and neuropsychology.
Let’s just not fall into the trap that there’s some causal relationship between the functions and behaviours of the lower level (neurophysiology) and those of the higher (mind) – “the operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing the particulars, which form the next-lower level”.
Here’s a drawing (Hierarchical Levels of an Oral Communication after Polanyi, pen and coloured pencil on paper, 18 x 30 cm) of the levels in Polanyi’s example. I’ve tried to depict something about the mysteries that take place, moment by moment, as we articulate, particularly when this articulation is part of a conversation with another. The energies within these repeated movements between levels I see as connected, as well, to a deeper level, a noumenal field from which the dyad in conversation arises.
