Bees of the Invisible

Dear Friends and Family,

Welcome! to you who are new and you who are long on this journey of Sunday letters with me.

We come today to our final letter in this April series exploring poetry and human becoming.

In these letters, my hope has been to intimate and evoke the unfolding modes of being in the human insofar as the written word and my own capacities as a writer allow. Perhaps these letters have set a tone. At every turn, they have surely come upon a gap. And at every cul de sac circling words around a gap, there has been the danger of losing you.

I have resisted the impulse to fill the absence. And I have resisted more the impulse to not lose you, trusting something unsayable between us, something within to meet the absence from a deeper presence. I hope today to fill the outer edges of some of what’s inside. And still, there will be cul de sacs around what is wordless. Perhaps we come close to the meaning of poetry all the same.

The next two weeks will be a transition before a new series to dovetail this one. I leave you with a survey end of letter to gather where you might like to go next on our journey. If you receive this letter by email alone and prefer not to click, feel free to email me: reneeelihpd@substack.com.

Ever in gratitude and with love,

Renée

Today’s images are from my daily walks in the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains

We are the bees of the invisible.¹

In “Ars Poetica,” the twentieth-century poet, Archibald MacLeish, spirals into the marrow of poetry telling us, a poem should not mean, but be. These are the final words of the poem. And for these past few weeks, they have been our echo. It would not do for these words to be the first. It takes a bit of undoing to let loose the grip of the rational mind so that poetry itself can be.

What MacLeish manages in this short poem is not unlike Persephone taking the hand of Parmenides, pulling him into the underworld and saying:²

I will do the talking, and it's up to you
to carry away my words once you have heard them.

But there’s a twist.³

this, I can tell you, is a path from which no news
returns. For there is no way you can recognize
what is not – there is no travelling that path –
or tell anything about it. 

Macleish delivers a similar fate to the poet, and so to us, when he ushers us, line by line, into the marrow of our own existence; into being itself. In so descending the depths of being, he shows us what poetry seeks: to touch again the essence of being . . . from which no news returns.

We could stop here. We could say we’ve concluded that poetry is about being, and there’s nothing more to say because we’ve reached the unsayable. Fair enough. We could close the book and walk out into the day. Or we could stay.

. . . and sidestep the very real possibility of cheating ourselves.

. . . and open the very real promise of seeing through the expression of poetry as, like being itself, the bodying forth of the creative energies of the universe.

. . . and in this way, tend the soul anew through and beyond these uncertain times.

The poetic impulse matters that much and is as much about you and me today and tomorrow as it was when the first songs of the soul were sung.

It is said that the first poem was a song not unlike that of the songs of the winged ones today and the ancient cry of the whale at sea. Only this human song morphed beyond the undulations of intonations. Each intonation took on ever more meaning. Each meaning, a mirror of soul stirred to outward expression of an inner feeling. Each meaning, a word.

Poetry, as first word on living Earth, was inner feeling layering the world anew with the tissue of voice. What was this feeling? We can only suppose. You would need to sit very still in a great silence to come to it.

But of what we know of what we believe we know of the first song, the inner feeling was of a present absence of an absent presence.⁴

Verse, we might say, arose then and arises still out of yearning. This yearning comes all at once with a touch of the numinous in all that is; this touch, a sense of the sacred presence that, moment-by-moment, gives being to being. And so, we could say poetry is an inner urge to give word to the awe and absence waking in the waking soul.

It gave to being the soul-reflective expression of making meaning of the very fact of being.

Which can seem like another twist. MacLeish said, after all, that a poem should not mean but be. But what we come to in this winding hermeneutic is that poetry pulls up meaning out of being like a rope pulling a bucket from a deep well. First, it must descend, blind, into the depths of being. The same is true of making meaning of our lives today.

For meaning to come, the human must transverse memory and encounter the origins of what we are. We must slip whole-bodied into the experience of being itself, however fleeting the moment.

In an earlier letter, we said that poiesis—the root of poetry—is the coming into being of something that before was not there. It is said—in purely biological terms—that the first coming into being of life here on Earth was autopoietic, that life itself is autopoietic. What this word means (again, in purely biological terms) is that by some force altogether mysterious, a closed system became an open system whose activities became self-creating.

Science, you see, circles the mysterious to cross over it, much as poetry circles the absence of the ever presence, ceaselessly yearning to sit inside noetic (Gr. nœin = perception) remembrance.

We say that life came to be across eons of becoming of the Earth’s biosphere. Becoming is evolution (opening out). But of this, we must bear in mind that evolution is always at once involution (opening within), sympoi/lution (opening with), and onto/lution (opening meaning).

Across more eons of the becoming of life, the human appeared. And in the human, across still more eons, modes of being unfolded through human becoming. We explored this in an earlier letter. That this has been so tells us that becoming is so, even today.

Behind every whisper of creativity is a force pulling itself ever toward—as with a seed toward a stem, a stem toward a flower, a flower toward fruit . . . as with the human being

yesterday

today

tomorrow

revealing in this unfolding that not only forms of life but modes of being that before were not there come into being through a creative pull toward.

What we are really saying is that while the creative force of life is ever pulling toward, the pull toward poetry and its birth gave not only word to the world and not only meaning to the human. The birth of poetry gave word and meaning to the creative energies of the universe, to Being itself.

You may say we’ve flowered the art of poetry with too many petals of emphasis in the unfolding of the human, of life, and of consciousness itself. We tend to emphasize science and technology as uniquely human, unique to the intellect, and the cream of the crop of consciousness. Poetry, we should be sure, is not absent intellect. Nor is it without significance to consciousness itself.

Poetry arises from the sensitivities of soul, soul as reflector and reflection of the creative energies of the universe.⁵ We are shedding light on poetry as a vital way of being and knowing. Words that circle what we cannot say are mirrors of soul mirroring the everywhere mysterious. Poetry—whether written, spoken, read, or heard—assures that we are the bees of the invisible.

In the bread and wine of our day to day, we come to this:

Poetry is an expression of soul as an expression of the deep in us that recognizes and yearns for the deep that gives us. Yearning to make meaning of the present absence of the absent presence—the deep in us—pulled the human toward verse, toward song first, calling out from the depths of soul waking up. It was as if to say, I long for you. Deep calls unto deep and re/verses.⁶

My sense, and this is only my sense, is that our way into the future is a ­re/vers/all, which is not a nostalgic return to something before. Returning won’t do in an ever pull toward. Re/vers/all is a re/calling, which is to say, a calling forth from within the all of us, including not only our powerful intellect but vitally, our ensouled poietic originary being; for it is from the seed of originary being within us that the creative energies of the universe have access through us to pull forth the becoming of life here on Earth, our home, our place of belonging.

Earlier Letters in the Series

Ars Poetica and Human Becoming

When Soul Wakes, Poetry is Born

Every Word Heard Is a Corpuscle

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1. Maria Ranier Rilke in a letter to his translator, Witold Hulewicz, in November 1925.

2. Peter Kingsley, Reality (Point Reyes, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 2003) p. 60.

3. Ibid.

4. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious (New York: Schocken, 2009), p. xix.

5. Jean Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas (Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 70.

6. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg offers a brilliantly lucid hermeneutic on the biblical unconscious reflected in the song of Psalms 42:8, “Deep calls unto deep,” in her work, The Murmuring Deep.