Table of Contents

POETRY AND POLITICS

POETRY AND POLITICS

Todo es poesia. Todo puede hacerse poesia.

(Everything is poetry. Everything can become poetry.)
Ernesto Cardenal

THE CONNECTION WITH HEALTH

I will preface my thoughts about the political nature of poetry (and art in general) with a brief philosophical reflection. The subject of this reflection has to do with our most basic manner of experiencing our existence in the world. Whatever interpretation we retroactively bring to it, the most fundamental fact of our existence is our experience of ourselves as fluid, shifting patterns of experience – patterns that are organized in an irreducibly dual manner. On the one hand we find ourselves existing as modes of experience – sensory, perceptual, emotional, cognitive and behavioral. On the other hand these modes of experience are always directed toward a world of things, events, and other people that we apprehend. In other words, we are an embodied pattern of experience. Our actual lived worlds are always organized and interpreted by our perceptual modes, but at the same time the reality that our perceptual modes organize into inhabitable worlds always transcends our constructs – there is always more to it than we can see.

We are an embodied pattern of experiential modes – thinking, feeling and doing. These modes are “intentional” in the philosophical sense of the term: they are directed toward something other than what they are, and find their essence in this directedness.

A change at one point in the subject/object pattern of experience that is our world will generally have effects on other aspects of the pattern, and will at times also alter the pattern of the whole. We are thus experiential gestalts. When we turn our consciousness on ourselves to understand more fully the nature of these gestalts, we find that we are always already embedded in an irreducible duality. We cannot see the world as “it really is” independently of the specific nature of our experiential modes – our manner of thinking, feeling, sensing, and behaving. On the other hand we cannot know our experiential modes except through the world they apprehend and in some sense create. We find ourselves always in the process of creating a world which begins before we can remember and extends into the future in outcomes we can never fully anticipate.

By stressing our inability to transcend the nature of our experiential modes I do not mean to suggest that real knowledge is unattainable. This inability simply implies that our knowing is always finite; it is always embedded in a situation and it derives from a particular point of view.

Science attempts to suppress the subjective pole of the irreducible duality in which we live. It also slices out a small portion of our total experience – sense impression – and systematically excludes the rest. When a sunset is observed, for example, how the event is apprehended by our emotions or our “spiritual” sense of things is considered irrelevant. These aspects of our experience are “only subjective.” It is assumed that only by limiting the data to sense impression and, if possible, reducing it to mathematical formulas can we attain “real” knowledge. Most would agree that the approach that has been pursued by natural science has yielded remarkable and fascinating results. Undoubtedly the natural sciences have provided us with a valid and reliable form of knowledge. What is at stake is whether it is a complete knowledge that is adequate to all our needs. Are there truths that are inherently inaccessible to natural science – truths that may be essential for our well-being and for the survival of our species? The fact that we appear to be on the verge of destroying the earth as a hospitable environment for the human species with the products of our technology suggests that there may be some validity – urgency even – in addressing this question.

So here is a poem that is perhaps a starting point:

The poet sleeps with reality. The knowledge that the poet brings to us is based on a wholisitc and intimate relationship with the Real that includes the full range of his or her perceptual sensibilities and which accepts as its data the full range of human experience. A “poet” as the term is used here, is anyone who attempts to attune him or her self to reality in a personal and wholistic manner through the use of the full range of cognitive, perceptual and behavioral faculties.

The poet is a “seer.”

Typically, the “seer” or visionary must withdraw from his or her social group and journey beyond the established and customary boundaries that delineate the experience of his or her people. Simon in the Lord of the Flies is such a figure. He strikes out on his own in search of the truth of the specter that is terrifying his group. He sees, and when he returns to tell what he found he meets the fate of so many who return from the as-of-yet-uninhabited territories of experience: he is killed. Far from being lost in idle fantasies, Simon sees what is real much more accurately than do his compatriots. They need the information with which he returns, but are not able to receive it from him.

By saying poetry is political I intend to suggest that the works that derive from the poetic encounter with reality alter the nature of our social relationships – and especially those relationships that deal with authority and power. The poet, at his or her best, facilitates a profound transformation of our manner of being together in the worlds that we mutually create. Pragmatic arrangements, love relationships, and power structures are all affected by the transforming power of poetic speech. In this sense poetry is political even when it is not addressing what would generally be called “political issues.” Poetry in the broad sense of the term impacts the health of our natural environment, our social arrangements, and our bodies.

Poetic knowledge is not the enemy of science – but is its complement. We desperately need both kinds of knowledge if we are to survive. That is the theme of the this section of the POH page. We need a binocular form of vision if we are to see the depth of things and apprehend their true relationships. This is not likely to happen if we subscribe to a scientistic philosophy that affirms science and technology to be the only lights by which we should guide our steps, and relegates all other forms of knowledge – poetic knowledge in the broadest meaning of the term – to the realm of the “merely subjective.”

KEY ISSUES

What are the primary elements of artistic or “poetic” approach to life?

I always considered the best
poem would be the lived
poem not the written poem
so I set out to live my life
in a poem

Cliff Fyman

From Life, Advise & Eccentricities
Life growing up in a small town
of A Hundred Fires, Cuba as told by
Luis Comabella in the Tenth Street Lounge

It is probably best to think of poems not as a collection of things but as a process – a way of living. The pictures that we hang in museums or the poems that we print in books are the by-products of this process. To live poetically is to live with a high level of atunement to the images and narratives one encounters in the world around us. Through this attunement we become aware of the various meanings of the events that constitute our lives. When we subject this process to analysis we become aware that the artistic process consists of three elements:

1. A text composed of images and a narrative

2. An event that we observe or in which we participate

3. An interpretation that illuminates the meaning of the events in terms of the text

These three elements come into play whether we are remembering a dream we had the night before, reading a story, or searching for a metaphor to bring some light to a confusing experience. We all live poetically all the time. A person we call an artist (a poet, a religious visionary, a painter, a novelist or whatever) is simply a person who attempts to do this more consciously, and whose creations may have some relevance for other people as well as him or her self. The three elements of the artistic process, and their relationship to each other, is illustrated in the article “Mean Gene” below. “Mean Gene” is the description of the poetic process as it unfolded in a bit of art therapy with a boy who was having some problems with his school.

What is Art's relationship to the world?

It is possible to create “pure” art, which is to say art that does not have any clear or obvious reference to a world beyond itself. This might be compared to pure mathematics or to a grammar that is abstracted out of a language. There is a limited usefulness in the exploration of these “language” structures when they are extracted from their usual contexts, and studied in their own right. Also one can find a kind of joy in the perception of the complex, interesting, and sometimes surprising relationships that obtain between the formal elements in any language system. But mathematics becomes powerful only as it is applied to the world beyond itself, and grammar becomes powerful only when it is used to say something about a non-grammatical world. Likewise, art becomes powerful when it interprets the world in which we find ourselves thrown.

To live poetically and to then attempt to record some of what we discover on a piece of paper, or whatever medium is appropriate to the means of expression we have chosen, is always a political process. It clarifies the meaning of an event we are living and conveys that meaning to another person. In this way it serves to transform both the one producing the work, and the ones who enters into it through reading or observing it. If the event that is clarified is a typical event for a large number of people, an artistic or poetic creation can be transformative for a whole society. In short, authentic art interprets and transforms the world we share. When it fails to do so, the one who is capable of artistic expression is fails to meet the challenge of his or her gifts. This is the message of the poem about apolitical intellectuals by Castillo, below.

What does "complementary" mean?

Up until quite recently it was common to preform major surgery on young babies without the use of any anesthesia at all. All the signs – both behavioral and physiological – pointed to the fact that the baby was in excruciating pain. It screamed and writhed and had to be taped to the operating table. It was in effect, being tortured. How was it possible for ordinary “normal” human beings to participate in such procedures? The surgeons who preformed these operations certainly knew more than most of us about the physiology of infants, and it was their claim that the infants nervous system was not sufficiently developed to feel intense pain. The complementarity principle may give us a clue as to how this atrocity could have occurred.

The modern complementarity principle grew out of quantum physics, as interpreted by Niels Bohr. It was observed that for some purposes light had to be thought of as a “wave” and for other purposes a “particle.” This was something of a conundrum as these are contradictory concepts. Yet both had to be affirmed for a complete description of the behavior of light.

Extrapolating from the dual nature of light as both wave and particle to a more general level of theory, complementarity theory applies to any situation in which a complete description of some aspect of reality requires that we simultaneously affirm two descriptions of reality that are not only polar, but that are actually contradictory. If one is to grasp how radical this principle is, it is essential to the understand that the two descriptions are not just different – they are intuitively or logically mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the principle of complementarity affirms that the more was enter into one description of reality, the less we know about what might be disclosed to us through the other perspective.

It is in this sense that I suggest that the poetic and the scientific approaches to reality are complementary.

And here, perhaps, we have an answer to the question we asked earlier. How was an intelligent person of presumed normal human sensibilities able to perform operations on babies without the aid of anesthesia? Is is possible that the more the doctor learned about the baby as an “organism” (a construct of natural science) the less s/he was able to see the baby as a person? I am certain that nobody who lived his or her life poetically would have made this mistake.

This is not to discredit natural science, which would be as serious a mistake as it would be to discredit the poetic approach to life. What we would wish to affirm, rather, is the need for a binocular vision that encounters reality simultaneously from both perspective, despite the tension between them.

What is the nature of our "embodiment."

We suggested above that in our essence each of us is an embodied pattern of experience. The nature of this “embodiment” is worth thinking about. Living forms are always embodied in complex systems that have semi-semipermeable boundaries, that engage in a variety of transactions with a surrounding environment, that appear to be purposeful in their activities, and that strive to replicated themselves. These systems tend to incorporate other systems lower down on the scale of things, and in turn be incorporated by larger systems. We are embodied in our cells, our organs, and our whole bodies, but also within out social groups, our nations, the global society, and in the total ecology of the earth. The Earth is my body as much as this body sitting here in this chair typing these words. When I realize this, all illusions that I can attain real health in a world that is unhealthy in any of its parts will evaporate.

How do we evaluate the truthfulness of artistic statements?

Let us imagine for a moment that the world that we daily co-create is infused at its very core with the intent of the One who exploded into duality with the Bang they say occurred some twelve billion or so years ago, and that this Intent was simple and comprehensible and holy: to maximize continuously in ever new ways values that can be realized only in duality. These values are the experiences that we all seek: love, adventure, beauty, freedom, discovery, health, pleasure, the achievement of difficult tasks, communication with otherness. Perhaps what we are imagining about the source of All-there-is is actually true. I fancy that it is. When we sense our essential kinship with All-that-is we suspect that something of our own kind of striving must have been from the beginning. But even if the Big Bang were the dull and random thing some claim it to be, devoid of any intent whatsoever, the experiences I have mentioned are the things we all strive for now. Never mind for the moment how a mindless rock of a universe could have produced all the wishing and striving and loving that you and I experience as ourselves no matter how many times it banged its head against the wall of randomness. By whatever route, this is what has come about. In our innermost heart we are a shifting pattern of experience driven by what we most love and wish for.

The truth of poetic or artistic expression has to do with the faithfulness with which the text discloses the nature of our experience as we seek fulfillment in a world that is sometimes facilitating, sometimes indifferent and sometimes deadly to what we most want. The poet or artist can commit only one sin, and that is to lie about what we most want and why the world responds in either a friendly or hostile manner to our wanting.

Poetry and art speak about the truth of our wanting – of what we value. It is “objective,” minimally in the sense that this wanting is a reality in the world about which true or false things can be said. If we are kin to the whole of creation, and not simply an inexplicable and weird anomaly, a peculiar wart on an essentially foreign body, then poetry also brings us real news of the universe. I would suggest that we live in a universe that is intrinsically concerned with the maximization and intensification of such values as beauty, love, pleasure, health, adventure, and discovery. But even should one reject this assertion as a metaphysical proposition, surely it makes sense that this aspect of the universe which we call human reality should be occupied with the maximization of such values.

Knowledge of what we most want may be the most fundamental knowledge we can have. Because natural science sees us only as a complex object, and not as a subjective pattern of wanting, it cannot provide us with this information:

CONNECTIONS WITH OTHER TOPICS

Technology

The poetic approach to reality is certainly the polar opposite to the technological one. Few would reject technology in its totality. But a technology that is unconstrained by insights that are available to us only through the poetic experience of reality is one sided and quite dangerous. It could, in fact, be fatal for the human species, and many others along with it.

Ecology

To understand the earth to be a living system in its own right is both a scientific and a poetic insight. It can, and has, been demonstrated that taken as a whole, the earth has the characteristics of a single living, self-regulating organism. The correlary of this is that we should relate to it not just as a system to be manipulated, but as a living thing with a mind and an integrity that must be respected. Because of the almost total supremacy of the scientific/technological perspective in most educated circles, this is an idea that still seems strange to most of us, despite its obvious plausibility.

Religion

The natural language of all forms of spirituality is poetry, in the broadest sense of the term. It can be reasonably argued that organized religion is the source of more suffering than it alleviates. This is probably true. Yet there are needs and aspirations within human beings that can be met only by an authentic spirituality. One of the difficulties is the frequency with which the adherents of many religions do not understand how poetic language works, and how they interpret their major texts literally rather than symbolically.

Human rights

When people behave in ways we do not like, or have opinions we disapprove of there are several advantages to the established society in labeling these people as “mentally ill.” Since almost all “mental illness” is now assumed by the dominant workers in the mental health field to be caused by organic abnormalities, we can fully discredit the speech of such people, and even appear compassionate while we do so. What would be seen as a political and/or an interpersonal conflict from a poetic perspective, is then reduced to a matter of brain chemistry. This allows the disruptive person to be locked up without any serious discussion of his or her perspective of reality. This “medicalization” of political issues is a major means of social control in all technological societies.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

First and foremost we can begin to live more poetically despite the fact that this is not the favored manner of being in the world in modern society. This means being open to the meaning of the signs and symbols that come to us in our dreams, our visions and our encounters with the outside world. It means listening to the authentic poetic statements of others, and seeing in such statements a doorway into their innermost hopes and desires. It may mean meditating on the artistic and spiritual texts that have come to us through the ages – and to allow these texts to speak to us today.

Perhaps to live poetically means that we should attempt to express ourselves through images and narratives that reflect what we most want, and to do so honestly. Virtually all such efforts are of interest, regardless of the skill level of the creator, if they are truthful expressions of our deepest selves and not just facile imitations of what has already been done by many others, or efforts to produce something “pretty” or popular.

We can attempt to tolerate the tension between the scientific and the poetic ways of encountering reality without seeking an easy resolution of the apparent contradictions.

We can insist on the importance of the political dimension of life, and its relationship to all forms of art.

Finally, in this day when no one person can know everything, we must accept our limitations. We cannot present the world with an absolute or final answer with regard to anything, but should not lose courage because of this. We can speak truthfully to the situations in which we find ourselves. And we can open our minds and hearts to what others have to say.