{Wed 9 May 2007} Love as yardstick of truth

Well, this started out as a comment on another blog, but rapidly grew long enough to be a post in its own right, so I decided to open it for further comment here. If you want a bit more background, go to the previous discussion on What Theology Looks Like at Father Stephen’s blog.

In response to Father Stephen’s gentle suggestion that my original conversion experience might have been emotional rather than content-based, I responded as follows:

I don’t think anyone would be able to continue living with the consequences of their conversion if it contained no content, unless they really had a pathological need for rejection by and isolation from family, former friends and mainstream society. Although my conversion experience was emotional and therefore highly motivating, it was strongly founded on a clear intellectual understanding of the Christian gospel and much bible reading.

I experienced many further “proofs” of the reality and effectiveness of my faith over my years as a Christian, being a witness to and facilitator of many other conversions and physical and emotional healings, and was very involved in leadership and church-building in different communities, including one of the first truly multiracial churches in South Africa, based in Soweto before apartheid fell.

All my experiences further convinced me of the truth I espoused, because my framework was adequate to contain and explain them as long as my exposure to other worldviews was limited. When I began to read and travel more widely, this was no longer possible as some aspects of reality simply could not be forced to fit any more. Do not assume that acknowledging this was easy or quick for me. Finding a stance from which I could live positively thereafter was an extremely painful and lonely process over 10 long years. I’ve only recently begun to name that stance “negative capability” after Keats, and I know that name may turn out to be inadequate. The key factor for me (at present) is personal responsibility.

I think the issue is not to do with content or the lack of it, but with the names we give to the content. Our naming systems are impossibly inadequate for the task of codifying suprarational realities, and our attempts to do so, while inevitable as part of our efforts to make sense of our world, usually amount to no more than Babel-building, because we don’t have sufficient humility to acknowledge our limitations.

This is not the same thing as saying that everyone is “right”. I’m not sure whether that is a “quintessentially American idea” – it may be, but I doubt whether it originated in America. In any case, I’m not an American, so my current position is not due to the undue influence over me of what you might perceive as negative forces in American thought!

In my opinion, the state of the world offers clearer evidence that everyone is wrong, than that anyone is right! I do believe that everyone may (although many choose not to) draw some enlightenment and some sharpening of conscience from their traditions, but I do not believe that all traditions are equally right (or wrong). They (and sub-traditions within them) may be closer to or further away from the kind of love that respects all persons equally and facilitates each person’s becoming all that she can be. This love-in-action is the yardstick I choose to use for measuring truth.

Tia Azulay 09May07
Copyright © 2007 Tia Azulay

{Wed 2 May 2007} Fine energies and fine (if erroneous) thoughts

Well, I’ve just given in to an impulse to update the grammar in the essay on “The Priesthood of the Soul“, although I admit that it’s 99.999% likely that I’m the only one who would notice the difference (as it’s just about as likely that I’m the only one who’s actually read it). Anyway, it’s infinitesimally less poncey and slightly more readable due to some shortened sentences, use of the active rather than the passive voice, etc. I couldn’t do more without really settling in to rewrite the thing, but it was a good way of revisiting these thoughts.

Today, I was struck by this quote from Keats that I used in the essay:

Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine… (In the same way) our reasoning though erroneous…may be fine. This is the very thing in which consists poetry. (317)

I think this stood out to me because I’ve been re-engaging with theology and the Bible a bit in my new comments today on “The Nakedly Evil Origins of Ritual Oppression of Women“. It’s not a new thought that the Bible is poetic in nature and thus contains poetic rather than rational truth. The one is no less true than the other, but they are of a different order and arrived at via different processes. It is also not news that some very intelligent and highly trained thinkers believe that the Bible is rationally and empirically true. I think one reason for this may be that the “fine energies” in the Bible are so seductive that they attract thinkers capable of fine reasoning who sense its power but misinterpret its mode. Because these fine minds have a rational approach (and are not accustomed to seeing the poetry in everything), they insist on a form of biblical exegesis that requires reality to be modified in order to remain internally consistent.

This applies especially to the axioms on which the reasoning is built. Despite their intelligence, these thinkers simply cannot allow for any causes or conditions that do not support the extraordinarily finely structured house of cards that they have built upon their chosen foundations and on which they continue to labour lovingly day after day. Its very fineness, though erroneous, in its own way pays homage to the “fine energies” to which the thinkers are responding. Quite simply, it is too fine a thing to lose. And so mankind blunders on.

Tia Azulay 02May07
Copyright © 2007 Tia Azulay

{Fri 6 April 2007} The nakedly evil origins of ritual oppression of women

I’ve read three articles today on the oppression of women by patriarchal religions. It’s not news to me, of course, but the intensity of these outraged lists of the sins of human against human on the basis of genital differences forces me to face the fury and the fear that always lurk within.

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=303929&area=/insight/insight__comment_and_analysis/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2051503,00.html

http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2005/02/institutionalized-misogyny.html

Here are some examples of what in my view are blatantly evil and incredibly destructive religious precepts:

What a disgusting “God” these quotes reveal! Who would want to worship, who could trust, such an insecure bully?

What on earth possessed the men who could institute a daily prayer thanking God that they’re not born female? How about not born stupid, or poor, or apelike, or with three legs, or something? Of course, any of these could cause offense to any being that happens to have these characteristics, so we’d not think of creating a new prayer like that now (at least, we wouldn’t do it in the UK), but because we’re so politically correct, we also wouldn’t challenge any religion that continues to promulgate this oppressive crap. Here’s a novel idea: how about thanking God for what you are, instead of for what you are not?

When one reads these, it is hard to understand how anyone can insist that religion is a good thing. The only people who benefit from it are men, and even this benefit is short-term and deceiving, because how can men truly be served by systems that encourage them to be less-than-human and that rob them of the possibility of living a truly fulfilled life that is enriched and balanced by the female principle, by honest, equal relationships with women?

The huge need to oppress women reveals an enormous fear of women. This cripples both sexes and ties us into continual battles with each other, when there are so many other issues on the planet that would benefit from our pouring all our energy jointly into their resolution instead.

Maybe there’s a poem here somewhere, but at the moment I just feel sick!

Tia Azulay 07Apr07
Copyright © 2007 Tia Azulay

{Sun 25 March 2007} The Priesthood of the Soul

The priesthood of the soul

Old essays written in flow

I have just found in an old backup file some essays of mine on subjects close to my heart, which I had feared were lost. They were created in WordPerfect in 1992 and 1993 on my first computer — a 7.5kg whopper of a laptop which I abandoned in about 1997, I think. I have no idea whether these thoughts and approaches would be considered to have any validity now in any current education programme, but part of me doesn’t care. I just want to affirm and reconnect with my experience of “flow” at the time and also to reconsider now these influences which I know have formed and informed my approach to poetry.

A belated shout-out to my teachers

As I read through them, and read the markers’ comments again, I am amazed both at the intensity with which my mind was working at the time, and at my concurrent inability then to absorb either the praise or the criticism that the markers gave. My relative maturity now enables me to see how much care was taken by the markers in their thoughtful comments and I am embarrassed to realise how little I valued them then. My driving need for approbation and reinforcement prevented me from realising that people were offering me exactly these simply by taking my writing seriously enough to offer me thoughtful feedback.

I have no record of the mark I received for this one, but the lecturer actually wrote a five-page response to this twelve-page essay. (I’ve inserted subheadings for readability on the blog; the original essay had none, as was common then.)

The Priesthood of the Soul:
The relationship between Imagination and Reason in Keats.

The vale of Soul-making

The Romantic obsession with the apparent dichotomy between Passion and Reason is given a new twist in Keats’s unique theology:

Call the world … “The vale of Soul-making”…. There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions — but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself…. Spirit-creation … is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years — These three Materials are the Intelligence — the human Heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul… As various as the Lives of Men are — so various become their souls.
Letter 123, 335-6, The Letters of John Keats ⁱ

A chemical metaphor for the poetic process

That Keats favours a chemical metaphor for the processes of both poetry and human experience indicates how much his rational and his imaginative faculties complement each other. In The Chemistry of the Poetic Process, Stuart M. Sperry minutely demonstrates how much Keats borrows from his scientific reading to develop his poetic philosophy.ⁱⁱ

He shows that Keats sees poetry as a process whereby the material world’s beauties and travails are absorbed via the senses and distilled, through an inner contemplative-experiential mechanism called ‘intensity’, into an essence of thought. Such thought, however, cannot be equated with rational conclusions arrived at through logic. Sensation acted upon by the imagination (the agent of intensity) produces a fresh complex of sense-stimulating beauties which open up new avenues for exploration.

For the reader, the poem then forms an acutely tuned part of his material world and invites him to a similar experience of intensification and distillation of thought. In consequence, the reader’s appreciation may differ from the poet’s. Keats’s own capacity for existing in uncertainty allows his readers to fashion their own souls as they choose. In one letter he asserts that poetry can lead man into contemplation and through it to an active awareness (by which he means sensitivity to potential pathways rather than any single, absolute conviction) which could transform humanity (48, 103-4). This is how the poet functions as priest of the soul in ‘the vale of Soulmaking’.

Read the rest of this entry »

{Sat 24 March 2007} Green thoughts in green shades

Today, I was thinking of changing my presentation theme; then I remembered this stanza from Andrew Marvell’s poem The Garden that was a favourite of mine at varsity:

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

In many ways, this is what I’m doing on this blog, I guess, so I think I’ll stick with the green shades! A friend last night suggested that I was possibly being a little over-enthusiastic in my intention to post something on my blog every day (a not-yet-achieved goal), and I do confess that the blogging I’ve done so far has possibly taken up a tad more of each day than I originally intended, but I hope that the annihilation of all that’s previously been made will make space for green thoughts that are fertile and bursting with life and potential! Meanwhile, in the other room, my hubby is creating far other worlds and other seas in Second Life… sigh… is that where all cyber roads eventually lead? An alternate reality?

For the whole poem, go to this lovely site: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/garden.htm

Tia Azulay 24Mar07
Copyright © 2007 Tia Azulay

{Mon 19 March 2007} Poetry and creativity in the press and in the Bible

Oh happy days! Not one, but two poetry-relevant articles amongst all the bad news in the past few days.

First, I was interested to see this ancient debate revived: John Walsh asks “Is there a link between madness and creativity?” in The Independent. See http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article2361028.ece for the full article. The sentence “The idea of creativity as divine afflatus, the breath of God, turns easily into the divine fire, that ignites the imagination but consumes the thinker” particularly caught my eye, because it refers to the mad wonder of creativity and creation that I tried to express in my poem Primeval Watercolour, which is about my surprised discovery in my first watercolour painting lesson of how unpredictable and how intense the colours could be (I had previously thought that watercolour painting was all about delicate, faded, impressionistic landscapes!).

As my poem reflects, the experience made me think of the Judaeo-Christian myth of creation out of formlessness, in particular Genesis 1:1-2: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

By the way, while thinking about this again today, I found this beautifully written exegesis, “Making sense of Genesis 1” by Rikki E. Watts ( http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/Bible-Science/6-02Watts.html), which urges the reader to be conscious not only of the worldview brought to the text by its original, Hebrew-speaking, hearers and readers, but also of the writer-reader “contract” that requires the reader to recognise the conventions of genre in determining what kind of truth is being conveyed. The writer asserts that Genesis 1 is poetic and refers to Blake’s burning tiger to suggest a possible approach for interpretation. There is also a good brief overview of other creation myths to support the general argument. One to bookmark, I’d say.

Secondly, I was excited to read “The lost joy of ‘difficult’ poetry” by Roy Hattersley in the Mail&Guardian here:
http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2007/2007mar/070316-poetry.html which contains thoughts related to those expressed in my post Poetry’s Potential and my Comment on my poem On deciding not to marry a priest. Unfortunately, I don’t have time today to summarise any more, but I’m noting the link here for future reference.

Tia Azulay 19Mar07
Copyright © 2007 Tia Azulay

{Wed 14 March 2007} “Meter, rhyme, and stanza: they are too beautiful to disappear.”

This essay by Timothy Steele has been around awhile, but it’s so well-written and its defense of the value of “meter, rhyme and stanza” is so well-supported with resonant examples that it still bears reading.

The Forms of Poetry by Timothy Steele, from The Brandeis Review, 12 (Summer 1992), 28-33

Today, I am particularly taken with these two passages:

“The original revolutionaries perceived more acutely what they wished to challenge or undermine—meter and rhyme in poetry, representation in painting and sculpture, conventional melodic arrangement in music—than what they wished to establish. As a result, the revolution had considerable destructive vitality, but it did not have comparable constructive powers to create alternatives to replace the conventions it swept away.”

“Meters reflect patterns of speech that occur naturally in language. Poets do not invent them out of thin air. To construct a new metrical system, one would first have to construct a new language, or the pronunciation or accentuation of the existing language would have to change radically. So once the battle the modernists fought had been won, their followers tended simply to maintain a somewhat meaningless spirit of rebellion, meaningless because the styles and attitudes against which the rebellion had been directed had ceased to exist.”

It seems an inevitable part of human experience that “the revolution”, after a heady period of free-spirited innovation, always acquires its own orthodoxy and becomes a vicious enforcer of “rules” of freedom. The insistence on the new way of seeing things as the only way of seeing things invalidates the experience, wisdom and creative productions of whole generations, and robs current generations of access to beauties and insights that have empowered and developed human consciousness for thousands of years.

This has always been the pattern with “renewals” in church history. At first they ride on a tide of openness, soul-searching, risk-taking and energetic action as people strive to “live out” their refreshed understanding of the meaning of their faith, sometimes taking great steps of love and courage and martyrdom which change lives and invigorate communities. But after a while, the actions become forms in themselves, nothing more than repeated, futile attempts to recreate the mysterious energy of spirit (Spirit?) that impulsed them so naturally before. The challenge to the status quo becomes the status quo, and the s/Spirit flees.

Why, oh why, is it so difficult for us to maintain “negative capability” (Keats) and realise that any form may contain or even generate mystery, that form does not preclude mystery and that neither form nor lack of form guarantee mystery?

{Wed 7 March 2007} Roses of Life (or, how not to write a poem)

Well, there’s been some discussion on this blog about whether my poetry is “accessible” or not… the jury’s still out on many related issues, such as which poems we’re talking about, to which audience/s one should aim to be accessible, and whether “accessible” is always good, for instance. I think most people would agree that the following is an example of an accessible poem that is puke-inducingly ghastly. I wrote this at the age of thirteen, obviously during one of my weaker moments…

(Warning: this might make you feel that you’re covered in icky stuff that just won’t come off for the rest of the day…)

Roses of Life

My heart is full of roses,
Of soft petals and cruel thorns.
Life and living it makes these posies:
Happiness the petals and sadness the thorns.

Light pink are the mem’ries of loved ones,
Deep red the embraces of lovers.
Soft yellow are my childhood companions,
Sweet orange are all the others.

Sharp, short, are innocent childhood hurts;
Long and curved the unfaithful friend.
Cruel, hooked, are the many “light-hearted” flirts;
Sword-sharp is youthful contempt for old men.

But through joy and grief has been growing
The flower of experience and wisdom:
She now her pure white petals is showing,
And her thorns are mere decoration.

{Sat 3 March 2007} Poetry and specialised vocab

Today I came across an interesting article called Mathematics in Poetry by JoAnne Growney. It’s aimed at people interested in maths, of course. I’m one who protests an interest in maths, but in whom maths is not interested, having given up on me a long time ago. Therefore, although I’m drawn to it, I lack some of the necessary vocabulary to make the best sense of some of the quoted poems. However, I remember enough from high school to recognise the cleverness and humour of some of them.

I recall being enthralled at school by Donne’s compass conceit in “A Valediction: forbidding mourning”. On reading it, I picked up the coldly functional and somewhat dangerous geometry instrument that lay inert in my pencil box and suddenly felt connected to this poet of another era. I imagined him sitting at his own desk, picking up his compass to create a circle as part of some practical or conceptual investigation and then becoming momentarily fascinated and distracted by the smooth ease with which he created a perfect circle. Perhaps he repeated the movement several times, warming the compass with his hands as he did so. Perhaps he entered a slightly altered state as he contemplated the startling perfection of its creation on the page, suddenly aware of the supernatural certainty that it gave the human hand. Did he also think about how the best circle comes with the lightest touch, and how hard it is to draw anything other than a circle with a compass—how one must bear down on the pencil tip and tear the page in order to vary the line? How this is so contrary to the nature of the thing that one desists in shame after the first attempt to break free? I’m not a mathematician, but there were aspects of this conceit that I could relate to, and which were enough to make me look up implications or inferences that I didn’t know as I sought a richer experience of the poem.

These musings took me back to my discussion of the use of vocabulary in my poem “On deciding not to marry a priest“. In response to a frustrated question about its perceived difficulty, I defended my use of a style, register, vocabulary, etc. that seemed appropriate to the content and the context of this poem. Admittedly, the context is only available to the reader by inference from clues in the title and the content, and these will be more easily read by people familiar with that context (and there are, believe it or not, many such), but I think there’s enough there for comprehension by anyone prepared to spend more than five minutes reading it.

The point is that I think it’s quite legitimate to write poetry that requires specialised knowledge for a full understanding of it. I’m quite irritated by the constant demand for accessibility requiring the exclusive use of an ill-defined “contemporary” vocabulary and forms. It seems to be driven by a requirement to communicate with a, by necessity, lowest common denominator-type audience who are not expected to put any effort into their part of the writer-reader contract. I believe that a writer has a responsibility to put an internally consistent piece before her readers. However, as a reader, I must recognise that each poem has its own language (in the broadest sense of that term). I need to be open to the potential beauty of any poem I encounter. Then, without resentment, I can seek to fill any gaps in my fluency in the poem’s language in order to plumb its depths. Of course, I won’t bother if there’s nothing in it to attract me initially, but if I scent beauty in it, I won’t petulantly demand to be spoonfed every puréed morsel so that I can make my date with the TV on time.

{Tue 27 February 2007} Song and Dance

Song and Dance

Oh, grey stone steps! My steps are grey;
They heave like schoolboys from their play
When duty, duty, duty, calls
To “brighten lives” in Hades’ halls.

Their lino path invades my shoes;
Its disinfectants now suffuse
My squeamish toes, but measured pace
Seeks out the chair. The audience waits.

A faded circle: knitting, shawls
And blankets shuffle—time now crawls
And settles into atrophy
As, shallow-breathed, I sound a key.

This note-struck hour now adds itself
To sighing streams of time which swell
Past bleary eyes that bloat with tears
And shout at slowly shutting ears.

Stripped to the lip-read sound of noise,
This young and strong and destined voice
Must gentle now to songs of yore
That echo down love’s corridor.

Must stroke and soothe and smile—but, Stop!
What floating muse impels her up?
Urgent, she battles Wheelchair’s clutch:
Rises, surprises me with touch!

Recalling love, her arms wrap round
This startled beau. Thumbs tap: she sounds
The years on me, lifts chin and heart
And cocks her arms for Charleston start!

The priesthood of the soul

Old essays written in flow

A belated shout-out to my teachers

The Priesthood of the Soul:
The relationship between Imagination and Reason in Keats.

The vale of Soul-making

A chemical metaphor for the poetic process

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The priesthood of the soul

Old essays written in flow

A belated shout-out to my teachers

The Priesthood of the Soul: The relationship between Imagination and Reason in Keats.

The vale of Soul-making

A chemical metaphor for the poetic process

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The Priesthood of the Soul:
The relationship between Imagination and Reason in Keats.