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{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

Tia @ 5:08 pm [filed under philosophy, poetry, theology, theories of everything tagged 6 Comments »


{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

Tia @ 1:40 pm [filed under art, creativity, poem, poetry, theology, theories of everything, writing tagged , 4 Comments »


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