Words Can Be Quite a Help
When the attempt to express something feels like taking a photo of a sunset and missing half the colors.
They can be quite a help—words. They can become the spirit’s hands and lift and caress you. —Meister Eckhart (1260-1328; trans. Daniel Ladinsky)
Last week, I heard the poet Melanie Green speak of her life-long affair with the numinous. Appearing in the Milwaukie Poetry Series, she described the numinous as being “that which you cannot find words for.” Ah, words—my frenemies.
So often, the attempt to express something feels like taking a photo of a sunset and missing half the colors. (As my brother, who sees jaw-dropping sunsets almost every evening, lamented the day before Melanie’s reading. Thank you, synchronicity. Thank you, Mark.)
What is captured is like music that’s missing the soaring melody; you got just the accompaniment. Or a dance without rhythm. Poetry allows that rhythm, that melody, those colors to inhabit words and take them—take the reader—to new realms.
I remember as a kid, combing shelves at the local library for the next book that would keep me reading under the covers. Later, seeing the book on my bedroom floor in the bald light of day, I’d wonder: All that adventure that was happening inside the silent, unmoving object—was it still going on?
Opening to a page at random, there it all would be. As if waiting for me. Imagine a carnival scene: Music and rides. Hawkers, and little children tottering under huge stuffed bears—panda, polar, teddy. Wind-blown dust sticking to cotton candy-stained fingers…
Shut the book: Nothing.
Open it up again and hear the calliope. Every time.
All of that held, ready for the conjuring. If a book isn’t opened, its contents might as well be entombed. (A paradox lurks here that I’ve never been able to frame. I should ask a librarian.)
When you open your spirit to a poem, something similar happens. It forms a multidimensional container ready to release its truth, its beauty to the reader. Truth and beauty because, “that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” (The immortal John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”)
Poetry—incorporating music and the rhythms of breath—excels at the sport of wrapping language around the numinous, around that which mere words are inadequate to express.
Melanie excels at poetry. For example, her poem “Spacious” (from A Long Wide Stretch of Calm), is simple and straightforward. But linger with it, breathe with it, and you feel it open up in you.
So yes, poetry can provide the means to express, to share something that had felt inexpressible. But that isn’t all poetry is up to. Sometimes, a poem will confront you with the numinous when that is the furthest thing from your mind. (And just maybe, the foremost thing needed.)
Like when tackling a sink full of dirty dishes. There are many descriptions of holy people turning the most humble chores into acts of devotion through prayer, mindfulness, meditative presence. I always chalked that up to Olympic-level spirituality. Not on the radar for this Earthling.
Then I read a poem by Al Zolynas, in a book that the great Czeslaw Milosz compiled: A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry.
Zolynas, in “Zen of Housework,” describes watching himself wash dishes (mindfulness signpost: self watching self). He sees his arms “disappear under water / into hands inside pink rubber gloves.”
You bet I’m going to pay attention to a man who washes dishes in pink rubber gloves! And notices his arms disappearing into hands—what a cool way of seeing. He watches his hands lift a wine glass. “It breaks the surface / like a chalice / rising from a medieval lake.”
Wait, what? At the line break after “chalice” I was ready for a turn toward the sacred, but the medieval lake took me straight into fantasy-land instead.
“Full of the grey wine / of domesticity, the glass floats / to the level of my eyes.” And one of those eyes is probably winking, reminding me to forget about the pink gloves.
His eyes catch the sun setting beyond the window, “among / a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches.”
I can see thousands of droplets of steam—each a tiny spectrum—rising from my goblet of grey wine. They sway, changing directions constantly—like a school of playful fish, or like the sheer curtain on the window to another world. Ah, grey sacrament of the mundane!
(For the full experience, you can read the whole poem at the Poetry Foundation.) Rainbows, playful fish—a window showing me another world! If I recall that world, or better yet, dwell in it, when I wash dishes (in my yellow rubber gloves), the moment can expand, overflowing with the numinous. Not through my devotion, but thanks to the gift of words that Al Zolynas took the time to arrange. And Czeslaw Milosz, to collect. And my various bookshelves, to patiently and securely hold for the past couple of decades until the time was right.
Some words do their work and leave.
Others call me back again and again.
What words do you go back to? What words name something you thought unnamable? Are there any that take you to new worlds?
Holy crap! Al Zolynas was my teacher in college in San Diego! He was fantastic. Thank you for reintroducing me to him as a poet!