"What Deepens the Deep for Us": Poetry, Contemplation, and the Art of Reading

Abstract

"What Deepens the Deep for Us":Poetry, Contemplation, and the Art of Reading Mark S. Burrows (bio) The sole archives of the divine are poems, and an address to the god, more than any other kind, requires a conversion in language or an entirely different attitude within it. —Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe This essay undertakes the task of unfolding Lacoue-Labarthe's bold claim,1 exploring poetry as a literary genre and examining how it relates to "an address to the god," here understood as contemplative practice.2 As Lacoue-Labarthe suggests, such an approach identifies poetry with prayer since each depends upon nothing less than "a conversion in language" and nothing other than "an entirely different attitude within it." It is important to say that both have more to do with practice than theory, steering us toward the question of reading as contemplative engagement and inviting us to consider contemplation as a poetics of experience. What unites the two is that each gestures toward, and indeed depends upon, such a conversion—in terms of language, first of all, but just as importantly a broader view of life itself. At the outset, it must be said that the matter of what constitutes contemplation—and poetry itself—is not uncomplicated, particularly in a culture shaped by pressures that ignore the call to "address the god" and dismiss the poetic as an irrelevant luxury in "a world come of age."3 Nietzsche anticipated the challenge when he conceded that Down below—everything speaks, everything is missed. One might ring out one's wisdom with bells, but the merchants in the marketplace will out-ring it with pennies. Everything down there speaks, but no one knows how to understand. Everything falls into the water, but nothing falls into the deep wells. Everything down there speaks, but nothing comes to completion. Everything cackles, but who knows to sit quietly on a nest and hatch eggs?4 This essay explores how poetry might be engaged as a means of orienting ourselves to a contemplative practice of reading, examining the ways that such a practice expands our capacity to listen for the voice of the "other," so that our words—and we with them—might fall into "deep wells." [End Page 269] "A RAID ON THE INARTICULATE" In a short prose-poem entitled "Lecture on Mystery," the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski approached the challenge of speaking about poetry with a wryness characteristic of his thought: We do not know what poetry is. We do not know what suffering is. We do not know what death is. We do know what mystery is.5 Or do we? Zagajewski avoids going further in attempting to define "mystery"—for good reason, one might add, leaving us wondering how, if at all, we might "know" what mystery is, to say nothing of daring to speak or write about it. The point he is making is not that of explaining this but rather of pointing to mystery as an essential dimension not only of suffering and death but of poetry as well. One might even go so far as to say that a poetic gesturing toward such "knowing" is a contemplative task, since whatever else we might understand it to be, contemplation suggests a posture that looks both within and beyond our experience, longing for something that transcends us but also somehow offers itself to be "known" within our experience. In a lecture on "Exactitude," Italo Calvino addressed the same dynamic, putting it this way: I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since the times of our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss. For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate...