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.)
