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OICE OF THE
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We live in wordsheds.
NED CROSBY
THE VOICE OF COMPASSION IS NOT ABSORBED WITH ITSELF. IT IS not a voice intent on its own satisfaction or affirmation; rather it is a voice imbued with understanding, forgiveness and healing. This voice dwells somewhere in every human heart. Ultimately it is the voice of the soul. Part of the joy in developing a spiritual life is the discovery of this beautiful gift that you perhaps never even suspected you had. When you take the time to draw on your listening-imagination, you will begin to hear this gentle voice at the heart of your life. It is deeper and surer than all the other voices of disappointment, unease, self-criticism and bleakness. All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul. It is always there and the more deeply you learn to listen, the greater the surprises and discoveries that will unfold. To enter into the gentleness of your own soul changes the tone and quality of your life. Your life is no longer consumed by hunger for the next event, experience or achievement. You learn to come down from the treadmill and walk on the earth. You gain a new respect for yourself and others and you learn to see how wonderfully precious this one life is. You begin to see through the enchanting veils of illusion that you had taken for reality. You no longer squander yourself on things and situations that deplete your essence. You know now that your true source is not outside you. Your soul is your true source and a new energy and passion awakens in you. The soul dwells where beauty lives. Hermann Broch says: ‘For the soul stands forever at her source, stands true to the grandeur of her awakening, and to her the end itself possesses the dignity of the beginning; no song becomes lost that has ever plucked the strings of her lyre, and exposed in ever-renewed readiness, she preserves herself through every single tone in which she ever resounded.’
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DANTE’S EPIC BEGINS FAMOUSLY WITH THE NARRATOR SAYING:
In the middle of the journey of our life
I came to myself within a dark wood
Where the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell
Of that wood, savage and harsh and dense,
The thought of which renews my fear!
So bitter is it that death is hardly more.
In a certain sense, the whole Divine Comedy is an exploration of the inner wilderness of the lost voice. This is, however, a voice that is magnificently lost. The rich kingdoms of medieval sensibility gather here in all their fascination and terror. As in the unfurling of individual destiny, times of loss can bring discovery. This is recognized trenchantly in the mystical tradition. The Dark Night of the Soul is the night in which all images die and all belonging is severed; the abyss where Nothingness dwells. When the voice speaks from the realm of such relentless Un-doing, it is a voice in which wilderness has come alive.
This is a limbo of desolation and despair, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s phrase: ‘With what I most enjoy contented least.’ Endurance is all; now there is nothing else. A time of bleakness can also be a time of pruning. Sometimes when our minds are dispersed and scattered, this pruning cuts away all the false branching where our passion and energy were leaking out. While it is painful to experience and endure this, a new focus and clarity emerge. The light that is hard won offers the greatest illumination. A gift wrestled from bleakness will often confer a sense of sureness and grounding of the self, a strengthening proportionate to the travail of its birth. The severity of Nothingness can lead to beauty. Where life had gone stale, transfiguration occurs. The ruthless winter clearance of spirit quietly leads to springtime of new possibility. Perhaps Nothingness is the secret source from which all beginning springs.
There are also times of malaise, when life moves into the stillness of quiet death. Though you function externally, something is silently dying inside you, something you can no longer save. You are not yet able to name what you are losing, but you sense that its departure cannot be halted. Those who know you well can hear behind your words the deadened voice, the monotone of unremedied sadness. Your lost voice cannot be quieted. It becomes audible despite your best efforts to mask it. Sometimes even from a stranger one overhears the pathos of the lost voice: it may speak with passion on a fascinating topic, yet its mournful music seeps out, suggesting the no man’s land where the speaker is now marooned. Put flippantly, no-one ever really knows what they are saying. The adventure of voice into silence and silence into voice: this is the privilege and burden of the poet.
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OICE OF THE
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Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find
Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing.
LUCRETIUS, De rerum natura
POETRY IS WHERE LANGUAGE ATTAINS ITS GREATEST PRECISION and richest suggestion. The poem is a shape of words cut to evoke a world the reader can complete. The poem is shaped to enter and inhabit forgotten or not yet discovered alcoves in the reader’s heart. The vocational quest of the poet is the discovery of her own voice. The poet never imitates or repeats poems already in the archive of the tradition. The poet wants to drink from the well of origin: to write the poem that has not yet been written. In order to enter this level of originality, the poet must reach beyond the chorus of chattering voices that people the surface of a culture. Furthermore, the poet must reach deeper inward; go deeper than the private hoard of voices down to the root-voice. It is here that individuality has the taste of danger, vitality and vulnerability. Here the creative is not forced or appropriated from elsewhere. Here creativity has the necessity of inevitability; this is the threshold where imagination engages raw, unformed experience. This is the sense you have when you read a true poem. You know it could not be other than it is. Its self and its form are one. There is nothing predictable here. For the poet there is a sense of frightening vulnerability, for anything can come, anything can happen. The unknown outside and the unknown interior can conceive anything. The poet becomes the passing womb for something that wants to be born, wants to become visible and live independently in the world. A true poem has a fully formed, autonomous individuality. Keats says: ‘Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its subject’ (Letter, 3 Feb. 1818).
It is interesting that true poetic beauty emerges when the poet is absolutely faithful to the uniqueness of her own voice. Beauty holds faith with the deepest signature of individuality; it graces the passion of individuality when it risks itself beyond its own frontiers, out to where the depth of the abyss calls. The danger of that exposure seems to call beauty. Here the gaze of familiarity falls away and repetition arrests. Something original and new wants to come through. Beauty is individual and original, a presence from the source. She responds to the cry of the original voice. Keats also said: ‘Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity . . . if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’ (Letter, 27 Feb. 1818).
Silence is not just the space or medium through which sound comes. Rather silence comes to voice in sound. The primeval beauty of silence becomes audible in the elemental music of the earth and in our music of instrument and voice. At the core of the world and at the core of the soul is silence that ripples with the music of beauty and the whisperings of the eternal.