Meditation on Mind and Poesis

We live in a fast-paced world. The pressures we face come from a life on the run—from meetings to emails and phone calls to soccer practices, we work long and hard at our jobs, at parenting, and at figuring out what we are and what we hope to become. The job is not made any easier by our cultural habits. Fast food and fast sex, drive-through restaurants and drive-through relationships, hurry-up educations and hurried career changes. We scurry ahead toward some narrowly-defined destination, climbing the corporate ladder, fueled by coffee, cigarettes and alcohol. Slowing down is not an option, because to slow down is to be less competitive, less successful, less likely to get rich and famous. No one wants to be “slow.”

But something important is lost along the way. Quality engagement. Attention. Depth perception. We skate across the surface of our lives, coolly avoiding both the water under us and the land around us. We interact without engaging and hear without listening. We measure success dollar by dollar and award by award, rather than by personal fulfillment and meaningful, life-enriching results. Our hurry blinds us to our blundering force, which destroys the earth, disrupts our relationships with one another, and impoverishes our collective and individual spirits. We are ill, and need to regain our health—our wholeness and harmony and balance.
And so we seek meaning in New Age ideas, in a return to religious fundamentalism, in “healthy living” and diet and all sorts of quick fixes. But our need is not met. Something vital is missing from our experience of the world, and we don’t know how to recover it.
The problem, oddly enough, is the world that reason has built. Reason and Rationality have been the guiding lights of Western Culture for the past 400 years, and we have come to worship them. The light that led us out of the dark ages! But as Kenneth Burke observed, computers are not only the product of our reason, but the caricature of it. And as Robert Pirsig observed in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,

The whole university he was attending smelled of the same
ugliness. It was everywhere, in the classroom, in the textbooks.
It was in himself and he didn’t know how or why. It was reason
itself that was ugly and there seemed no way to get free.

Reason, in the particular form that has come to rule our culture, is indeed ugly. It oversimplifies and falsely formulates; it encourages hubris rather than humility; it de-sensitizes us to the local, the individual, and the personal. It encourages us to ignore the irrational, the intuitive, the imaginative, the emotional. In short, it encourages us to ignore the wellsprings of our own lives and relationships. It has become the figurehead of standardized testing, encouraging the multiple-choicing of reality. It has driven technological innovation beyond the bounds of sensitivity to the earth and the life it bears. It has encouraged us to operate within a calculus of large scale building and monetary manipulation, in the domain in which formulas can guide us, rather than in the complex domain of local decision-making and action.

How did Reason become such an ugly and perverse thing? And what can we, as people anxious for a more meaningful life, do about it (without discarding all that it GOOD about rationality)? These questions were first addressed with serious attention in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and we can learn much from the answers that poets, philosophers, and scientists of that era came up with.
One of the answers was simple. Reason is not enough, in and of itself. The manipulation of symbols and formulas, the predictive success of the hard sciences, the logic that we use to make large-scale decisions. All of these are limited in important ways. Negotiation, relationship, interaction, integration are not accommodated well by rational deliberation only. Reason can easily become a tyrannical force that ignores alternatives, rides roughshod over diverse opinions, and destroys difference. It needs to be kept in check.

In addition, we know that reason all-too-easily becomes rationalization. Ideally, we reason without personal interests in mind. Realistically, that does not happen. Reasoning depends on focus, selection, and prioritization. All of these depend on the individual mind—with its interests, prejudices, and pre-existing codes of decision. Thus we must counterbalance reason with an awareness of personal interests and habits of mind.

Reason does not cultivate attention, or wonder, or reflection, or revision. It encourages an instrumental view of materials, creatures, objects, and other people. It narrows our appreciation for uniqueness, reduces our respect for non-human creatures (they aren’t “rational”), and encourages us to dismiss intuition, imagination, and the unknown.

We need a broader understanding of mind, and a better way of looking at the biological and linguistic processes by which meaning is made. Oddly enough, poetry is a vital avenue by which to pursue such understandings.

What can poetry teach us? Well at the peak of the Enlightenment, a shift took place in the world of writing and thinking that placed poetry at the center of the stage. Why? I think it was the assimilation of empirical philosophy and the French Revolution among other things, but the moment was pregnant with possibilities. Apparently the world of brain science was engaging the “embodied mind” with an interest and seriousness that was unprecedented. At the same time, the poets were exploring poetry as a medium of interaction with extended audiences of real people—not just a handful of literati. That medium was ideal for its ability to work on the embodied mind—to create powerful experiences and to alter pre-existing codes of decision. It was, in effect, a technology for moving and uniting people.
In chemical experiments with nitrous oxide, firelit evenings reciting poetry, lecture halls filled with eager listeners and participants, there was an excitement about the possibilities of human experience and the dynamic range of the embodied mind. But there was also fear. What if that is all that mind is? What if we are temporary? Wordsworth did not deal well with this. Coleridge did not either. Somehow there was a swerving away from engagement into denial. And as a result, poetry and science both became more attenuated and less “embodied.” We need to recapture that moment now.

Somehow we were allied with nature in ways that no one was prepared to understand. Darwin’s conclusions were in the air already, but the ways in which his ideas could be interpreted were many.

Wordsworth sensed that our union with the natural world was the site of new and important understanding, and he made it very clear that the development of urban life was an obstacle to that kind of understanding. But why? Because it was fast, and frantic, and mechanical, and impersonal. Small is beautiful, according to E.F. Shumacher, and Wordsworth would have agreed.

The crux of the matter was a view of life which was in harmony with the natural world, small scale interaction, and slow, deliberate cultivation of relationship and meaning over time. Reason and rationality were not dismissed, but they were deemed inadequate in and of themselves. Intuition, feeling, spontaneous connection with all that lived and breathed—a “fellowship of sense with all that breathes” in Barbauld’s terms—were vital too.

So how does poetry fit in? By providing a matrix for experiential learning and relationship that brought the unknown, the possible, and the improbable into the hearts and minds of readers without “overstimulating” their imagination (unlike the “frantic German novels” that Wordsworth disparages).

Rhythmically structured, image-centered, abductive, exploratory language events. Feel it on the pulses, think about it and reflect on its possibilities. Poetry reminds us of the ever-vital, shifting domain of MEANING. It calls attention to the maps we live by and encourages us to re-examine and re-make them when necessary. Poetry is, in a real sense, meditative practice.

Poesis is really what I’m talking about—composition. The making of order out of chaos. The crafting of a life out of possibility. The shaping of meaning out of potential meaninglessness. To learn the right approach to life, one must grow close to poesis. To the patience that comes with faulty beginnings and premature endings, to the persistence that leads to a made thing, to the engagement that recognizes and adapts to changes in the material of life as they approach, to the wonder that recognizes and explores everything beautiful and joyful, to the laughter that never erases seriousness but only leavens it with love and relationship.