When Soul Wakes, Poetry is Born

Dear Friends and Family,

I’ve just come from a walk, and my mood is the green of spring because first came the rain and the rain and the rain, and every time I stepped outside, more rain, for three days straight. Then came the wind and the wind and the wind, and it all left me quivering to get out like a horse at the gate. Maybe it was worth it to fret. I’m so drunk now on wow.

In today’s reflections, we come to the second part of an April series on poetry and human becoming. In last week’s letter, we read Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica.”¹ I invited you to note reference to sound and its twofold complement, silence and word, and hence, wordlessness; also to time; and that he says a poem should not mean but be. Today, we read “Ars Poetica” again. Only, we first explore human becoming as context. Let’s see what you experience this time. . . .

May the green of spring shower you this day, wherever you are.

With love,

Renée

In the beginning of the beginning of the human, all is.² We-human is world, world is amnion. These two are not two but one, no center.

In the beginning, we-human, entranced, wanders dreamlike absent dreaming.

Sensing senses. What is not immediate is no less perceived.

In the beginning, human being, upright and walking, is.

Latent is soul in the still womb of heart. Thought is not. Words are not. Sound is—

bare feet on mossy ground, the moss a sound

urgrrrrrghh, a warning or cry (heeded no less either way)

two bodies in the night

In the early human, which we shall call Archaic, from archē, meaning first, all that is is everywhere being.

We unfold as humans, and what was before is covered over.

We come to first awareness of sound received, awareness not as thought; awareness as perceiving an aliveness that everywhere is.

Awareness of being a single node inside everywhere abounding flickering aliveness. Awareness of labyrinthine folds within.

Hunt, hunter, hunted is one seamless move; an arrow a ray of sun.

Every happening is now.

Now wonder wakes in we-human. Now tremendum, the quivering quaking inside that comes when struck with awe that world is —

as when sun sets and flames sky

as when water tumbles over stone, bodies forth again, one stream

as when morning breaks and rain is gone

This unfolding we-human, we shall call the Animist mode, from anima, meaning life; its vital force: elan vital. In this mode, awareness of aliveness is born, and so, too, the sacred sense evoked with awe and terror.³

We unfold as humans, again, and what was before is covered over.

In this great turning, the human begins setting apart from we-human as latent soul begins to wake. Soul is reflector and reflection.⁴ Soul as reflector is soul as inner within inside an infinite within.

Soul as reflector is Ocean holding a mirror for Moon.

Soul as reflection is world-soul in/as human-soul in/as world-soul. The inner is the outer and the outer, inner; round and round an axis of soul: human, Gaia, Heavenly Firmament.

Soul as reflection is Sun waking Moon.

And so, soul wakes the rhythms of day and night, flower and harvest, Earth and Cosmos, love and loss.

When soul wakes, uttering is no longer sound alone but now, too, comes word—word is meaning pointing to Moon.

In this mode, which we shall call the Mythic, the human soul is given to word what wonders and feels the experience of being human in a Cosmos so, too, ensouled.

In the unfolding Mythic, poetry is born.

We unfold as humans, still more, and what was before is covered over.

In this next great turning, thought transcends wonder as seeking. In the word seeking is the word see. As thought unfolds, it seeks what it cannot see. In seeking, thought divides what is seen from what is not seen. In dividing, thought brings cause and effect. Thought that divides is rational thought, from ratio: divide.

As thought unfolds more, it brings something new: perspective the eye can see. Now here and there are distant. That there is means that what is here must be something not there.

To suddenly see this way is to think this way.

To think this way births I, which is here, and a world that is not I, which is there. To think this way is to divide self from the world—self in here, the world out there. The world out there now this and that, ever more divided and detailed; atomized.

In this unfolding, which we shall call the Mental mode, space is born. Where there is space, there must be time traveled the distance from here to there; and so, the world becomes space and time: a line, measured.

Now comes difference. Seeing as thought sees is to now see what is different and what is the same. Now the human soul, the animal soul, and the vegetal soul cannot be of the same essence because what we see, meaning, what is visible of these domains, is not the same.

The Mental mode, the mode of intellect, is primary today.

We unfold as humans; this time, because we think, we must choose . . . and recall what has been covered over.⁵

Recalling what is covered is making Sun with Moon. It is said that the art of poetry has something to offer this great turning.⁶ If this is so, what may we gather from “Ars Poetica,” this time en/unfolding the human modes of being into the experience of reading?

If you wish to evoke the Mythic mode, i.e., hearing word, Listen to MacLeish read. Seeing word evokes the Mental mode. You might try both.

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as a sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown –

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

                 *

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind –

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs. 

                 *

A poem should be equal to: 
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea –

A poem should not mean
But be. 

---

photo credit: Kimberly Warner (thank you!)

Read the story of CURAlive here. If you would like to know more or order a bottle, please email me: reneeeliphd@substack.com.

1. Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica,” Collected Poems, 1917–1982 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985). Retrieved from Poetry Magazine online, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17168/ars-poetica

MacLeish took his lead from Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, “Horace,” who wrote the first Ars Poetica as an epistle in the year 15 CE.

2. I have adapted segments of these reflections from first segments of a paper I presented in 2023, entitled, “Vertex is Everywhere: Immune System as Perceptual Verition.” Here is a link to the video of the conference presentation. The quality of video improves after minute #2.

3. For you Gebserians: for our purposes, I have changed the term Magic structure to Animist mode for several reasons. I wish to avoid any pejorative connotations that may arise, i.e., ‘magical thinking’, given a not fully fleshed-out exploration here of this structure or “mode,” as we are calling each unfolding. Moreover, Gebser, in such phrases as “structure of consciousness,” albeit best approximating what he means by consciousness and its unfolding in the human, can keep us in the firm grip of the Mental structure, which, he seems to insist, we are, at this time, being pulled from toward Integrality. For this reason, I adapt Gebser’s “structures of consciousness,” among other phrases, in favor of those that seem more evocative, such as “mode of being,” which I borrow from Thomas Berry, especially, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bellwether, 1999) and The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker (Columbia University Press, 2009). Other insights informing these reflections are those put forth by twentieth-century French philosopher, Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1911/1944); Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor into the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford University Press, 1958); Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion—The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture, trans. Willard R. Trask (Harper & Row, 1959). Otto referred to awe as the mysterium fascinans and terror as mysterium tremendum, both of which together would, in human becoming through Animist to Mythic to Mental modes, give rise to the perception of spirits, then gods, then God, respectively.

4. Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1949/1985), p. 70.

5. You may recall that several weeks ago when we explored instinct and intelligence, we discerned that an attribute of intelligence is the capacity to choose: Intelligence Is Relation

6. Gebser, EPO.