Turning Away from Words 3: Nothing Engaged

Having recently written about turning away from words, and about refusing to write just to fulfill expectations, I notice now that when lured into critiquing a poem or other work of art, I find myself with little to say. Only one or two poems have lured me towards giving any response, lately. One of those was by a poet whose work I have dialogued with for several years, whose work almost always pulls me into itself.

The operative factor is a sense of engagement.

If something interests me enough to want to engage with it, I respond. Frankly, a lot of recent poetry just doesn't excite me enough to want to do anything but move on to the next semi-random constellation of words and phrases. At what point do we all recognize the characteristic alkali taste of artistic self-indulgence and narcissism? At what point do we realize that most every poem is about nothing? Especially those poetries most popular in the PoetryWorld zeitgeist nowadays, which has all the elements of that most postmodern of TV programs, Seinfeld: a show about nothing. That most poetry is about nothing is indeed the triumph of the post-modern. Well done, postmodernists: you've succeeded in making poetry meaningless!

I find myself interested in talking about poetry, about poems, about poets, about what makes a poem work for me, and what doesn't. But individual poems aren't holding my attention the way they used to. I've stepped back a level, perhaps, to overview a broader landscape. This is a flip-flop in my attention, which used to be focused on the poem, and nothing else. My unchanged opinion about poetry criticism is that it's supposed to be about the poem, nothing else. But I find my attention is not held, not engaged, by so many poems. Everything feels like surface anyway; so it becomes easier to skim.

Part of this is that I won't force my attention anymore. I won't force myself to be interested in a poem, if it's not getting to me. I've given a lot of bad poetry the benefit of the doubt over the years, seeking a kernel of good writing amidst the flab. I still tend to be more open-minded than not. And I give myself permission to choose not to give my time and energy to works of art that don't merit time and attention.

I can hear some wag declaiming I must be bored. But I'm not bored. I'm never bored: there is no such thing as boredom, it doesn't exist. What I am is disengaged. Some of this disengagement comes from an attempt, after many months away from all things PoetryWorld related, especially the poetry workshop boards, to see if anything has changed in my absence, only to discover that if anything, the situation is more dire than ever. It can be defined as: ever more heated arguments about ever less significant matters.

I like reading about poetry. I like reading what poets, and translators, have to say about poets and their poems. I like reading the ideas that poets have about their art. It might be strange to say, but at the moment I'm more interested in what most poets think about their art, than I am in their art per se. Heresy, I know. As if artists could be trusted to tell the truth about their own art!

I'm interested in the big picture, perhaps: the larger context within which an individual artwork happens. I'm sensing things happening on the larger scale, on a perhaps global scale, and I'm finding it challenging to have to focus down to the particular and local. When I read larger-scale criticism, or poets writing about poetry, from the best of these I get a sense of overview and proportion that is lacking in a great many individual poems, which all still seem to be about smaller and smaller things, to the point of being about nothing. None of which is engaging, or compelling, to my attention.

Words separate, divide and categorize but there is a reality beyond words. This is an experience of underlying unity, even beyond the idea of separation, which requires there be separate things to be connected!
—Jane English, Fingers Pointing to the Moon

There's a sea-change going on, somewhere in the depths. I have no label for it, and I doubt many recognize it happening as yet, beyond a subtle frisson of doubt about their purpose, a shiver of quiet skepticism about everything we thought mattered. I note the general tone of dissatisfaction behind much critical rhetoric, coupled with a certain sense of unconscious flailing in the basement shadows: there's nothing as yet to replace what everyone is tired of.

This is the void time: the period between the ending of an old paradigm, and its replacement by another. It's the in-between time, the no-place-between time. That's both empty, and infinitely fertile with possibility. The smile on the void is that the void is the place of birthing, not the place of death.

Coming into physical form, incarnating, is an experience of falling away from union with a perfection that is beyond light, but which is often spoken of as light. In retrospect, I see that I was unconsciously reaching back for that light in much of my photography work. I was mistaking the outer world light for the inner light. Often there has been a feeling of sadness or longing in my photographing. I believed that the light was out there separate from me rather than within.
—Jane English, Fingers Pointing to the Moon

It seems to me that there is a great tribal pull towards falling back into what we know well—the old paradigm—an almost tidal gravitational pull towards the known and the same. We repeat, and we refine in ever finer detail that which we already know, and we repeat those cycles of knowing until in our expertise we know everything there is to know about nothing. That this is a tribal pull is made known by so many who do it without question: unquestioned assumptions about the nature of reality are invariably tribal in origin; or, if idiosyncratic, anti-tribal rebellions.

For myself, I have been conscious for some years now that most of my photos are about light, or the sky, or the way the natural light falls on objects, places, and people. It's been a celebration of light, rather than a longing for a missing light: I've always seen the visible light as a metaphor for, and a reflection of, the inner light. That's a mystic's way of photography. (Minor White talks about this in his various writings on photography.) I certainly reach back towards that light of unity; and I have been able to capture my feeling and vision of that light in a few photographs.

The tribal pull down the gravitational well towards the already-known and familiar is why I don't feel engaged with a given artwork: it doesn't open up and out, and it doesn't open up anything in me. It doesn't activate my energy, if you will. I cannot care about a poem that doesn't activate my energy; and I won't force myself to care.

I have been listening to a CD of Toru Takemitsu's solo piano music today. The piece I've been listening to especially is Far Away (1973), which has been described as influenced by Javanese gamelan music. Takemitsu had recently visited Indonesia in the company of fellow composer Iannis Xenakis before beginning work on this piece. The piece begins very lightly, with lots of open space; gradually, it gains in intensity until it occupies the entire keyboard like a vast musical tapestry. I hear the influence of both Messiaen and Debussy in this piece, although it remains uniquely Takemitsu.



This music engages me deeply. I find myself growing ever more silent, listening. Music like this pulls you into its own sphere of silence: vast distances, far away, pointillistically speckled with small notes. I find something in this music that speaks to me as a composer; not only for the solo piano music I feel like writing next, but in terms of the larger scale of all music.

I also recognize that my current direction is generally away from words and towards music. I freely admit that turning away from words is necessary and sufficient for me at this time—and is another reason I can't seem to care about or concentrate on poetry critique. There is no loss for anyone in this turning away; and nothing essential will be missed, now or later. What I am seeking is something I still don't know how to describe—certainly not with words, although possibly with music—and putting it into words does not seem necessary.

Like a ship changing direction, slowly, to turn towards a new course across the ocean's open waters, we follow where the wind leads. And that is enough.