BETWEEN WHAT I SEE AND WHAT I SAY

for Roman Jakobson

1

Between what I see and what I say,

Between what I say and what I keep silent, Between what I keep silent and what I dream, Between what I dream and what I forget:

poetry.

It slips

between yes and no,

says

what I keep silent,

keeps silent

what I say,

dreams

what I forget.

It is not speech:

it is an act.

It is an act

of speech.

Poetry

speaks and listens:

it is real.

And as soon as I say

it is real, it vanishes.

Is it then more real?

2

Tangible idea,

intangible

word:

poetry

comes and goes

between what is

and what is not.

It weaves

and unweaves reflections.

Poetry

scatters eyes on a page,

scatters words on our eyes.

Eyes speak,

words look,

looks think.

To hear thoughts,

see

what we say,

touch

the body of an idea.

Eyes close,

the words open.

— Octavio Paz

Following C.G. Jung and James Hillman, not to mention the long line of those greats that preceded us, such as Marsilio Ficino, Giambattista Vico, Plotinus, Plato, and so many others, the psyche is poetic, imaginal, partaking of all dualities yet always in between such categories like: thought and feeling, spirit and body, mind and matter, subject and object, within and without, me and you, the personal and the archetypal, myth and reality, ego and the world, there are so, so many! Psyche is non-dual and fundamentally poetic! Our dreams don'ts speak in concepts, but in felt and embodied poetic metaphors.

The brilliant and Nobel Prize-winning poet, Octavio Paz so beautifully speaks to poetic soul-making and poetic consciousness here. To enter and cultivate poetic consciousness is to open your third eye and third belly, poetically speaking, and learn how to enrich your life and living imagination. You stop merely seeing things literally, and begin to discover and co-make images and ideas that are making and constituting you!

The ideas and images, the experiences and memories, are shaping you and informing your heart's imagination and feeling life. With few ideas and images, with few metaphors and few paints, we see and experience life bluntly, basically, and most likely, concretely and too-rationally.

So lets us enter the paradox, the mystery, the liminal, the in-between where we can follow the great Persian poet Rumi who said:

“Work in the invisible world at least as hard as you do in the visible.”

Painting: Florine Stettheimer, Self-Portrait with Palette (Painter and Faun), undated

LISTENING TO THE RAIN

Wang Gai (1677–1705), a scholar-amateur artist, was a native of Xiushui, Zhejiang province, but lived in Nanjing for most of his life. He became well known as the author of Jieziyuan huajuan (Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting), the most influential of all Chinese instructional manuals on painting. In Wang Gai’s “Listening to the rain,” a poem is inscribed by the artist, in the regular style of calligraphy, in the left-hand corner of the landscape’s sky:

Trees full of blossoming wisteria cover thatched huts

Waterbirds stand in a lake of spring water

Fishing boats, facing my window, take shelter for the night At dawn, misty lamps resemble a string of stars.

Beyond my boat, lake clouds are like flowing water,

Ten miles of beaded curtains bring back memories of Yangzhou.

This solitary sail only allows me to keep a long flute, fully loaded with wanderings through rain and mist in Jiangnan.

In a secluded corner of the lake, enclosed by mountains, a solitary figure (the artist) takes shelter in a boat and listens to the spring rain. The misty trees and movement of the reeds in the water create the sensation of drizzling rain. Painting and poetry are so subtly interwoven that one wonders whether the poem inspired the painting or vice versa. The work crystallises the literati’s theory that painting is silent poetry, and that poetry is painting with sound. It also follows that poetry is painting without form, and painting is poetry with form.

-Mae Anna Pang

I post this painting/poem and accompanying comments to offer a path of cultivating one’s poetic eye and imagination. If you are so inclined, find a quiet moment to pause and attune to what Wang Gai is revealing here through his being-perceiving-and-making-visible of, from, out of, and in the subtle, sublime, and invisible which all at once and as one wonderfully blooms as an exquisite expression-flower of poetry, calligraphy, and painting!

And just look at all the words that came to labor with me to give birth to the visionary conditions which can bring forth eyes of imagination (what the alchemists called the vera imaginatio, or True Imagination) to truly see such flowers and flowering in our day-to-day so easily narrowing down to the humdrum and the merely-getting-through.

To contemplate the way of Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting as One is to cultivate one’s Psyche-Retina. And to do this in one’s being and imaginative-discerning-feeling-sensing is to awaken one’s compassionate ability to see any other, be it a person, place, thing, or moment, by way of epiphany, or epiphanic heart-revelation! To suddenly experience life, another’s display, a place as lit up and radiating its soul, its uniqueness, its essence as Sacred Presence, this makes our lives soulful, fills them and us with beauty, and evokes our compassionate reverence!

This, this love-full poetic cultivation, redeems us from mass-mindedness run through with impersonal and single-minded focus on casualness, ego-takeaway, practicality, efficiency, productivity, and the bottom line, and makes our lives worth living. And this because we can witness and through such soul-witnessing, bless and be blessed, blessed by the divine within, the divine uniquenesses hiding and permeating and ever-creating everything.

This holy world is just joyfully waiting to be discovered, recognized, truly seen, and then give itself wholly away, a gift uniquely and freely and lovingly given to those who can see like this, with this sacred regarding...

Painting: WANG Gai In Listening to the Rain/Landscape (17th century) album: ink and pigment on paper, 12 leaves, silk and cardboard, glued concertina binding

The engraver and visionary artist William Blake gives imagination to these lines from Macbeth: "And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,/Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin hors'd/Upon the sightless couriers of the air"...

Pity: to feel sorrow and compassion in the face of sufferings...There are moments where poetic discernment and vision see the soul of another and meet it with great heart and companionship.

Kathleen Raine has this poem which ends with the feeling of pity:

The Dead Not because they are far; but because so near

The dead seem strange to us;

Stripped of those unprized familiar forms they wore,

Defending from our power to wound

That poignant naked thing they were,

The holy souls

Speak, essence to essence, heart to heart, Scarcely can we dare

To know such intimacy

Those whom courtesy, or reticence, or fear Hid, when, covered in skins of beasts, Evading and evaded,

We turned the faces of our souls away.

Only the youngest child is as near as they, Or those who share the marriage-bed

When pity and tenderness dwell there.

—//—

May we know while we move through our days such intimacy with those we are with, those literally present and those whom we will forever deeply love who are not...Pity and tenderness softly invite enduring Love into view as the place where we truly dwell and deeply meet. Remembering the over 500,000 beloved individuals who passed away from COVID-19 and all deeply affected, mourning, and celebrating their lives...

Image: William Blake, "Pity,” c. 1795

Psyche's beauty is often confused with Venus' beauty. There is a mystery in this to be entered, discovered, contemplated, and lived. She was abandoned on a mountaintop because of this confusion. Yet it was the beginning of her sacred calling and true purpose!

And her presence in the world irritated the hell out of Venus. So she sent her son, Amor, to teach Psyche, actually all of us, a lesson about love, give a hard-knock lecture to Psyche before all is said and...Donne: "Stand still, and I will read to thee. A lecture, love, in love's philosophy." Lessons and lectures sometimes go astray (Hermes sees to it!), so that the lesson can become a terrifying and yet also an ecstatically joyful initiation, also a profound soul-speech we become, changing gods and humans, myth and reality, the world within and without, and the above and below, alike!

Psyche's beauty has everything to do with her longing, awakening, and persevering in her journey towards her beloved Amor! He, too, undergoes a transformation on the way to the wedding. And their wedding is just the start. Indeed, their journey is ever and further unfolding within and without, in our souls, in the world soul, in everything!

And that brings us back to this initiatory mystery. About this, we must remain silent. There, though, on that threshold, Winged-Words pause and remain ready, vigilant, protective, attuned to Love's inspiration, to Psyche's stamina, standing right at the entrance, right at the sacred and secret gate of our feeling, imagining, imaginal heart! They know who to usher over, who to stop...They discern and know the Soul's selected society...They let in Emily Dickinson because they knew her, knew what she was being asked to live, and loved her, even gingerly placing a thorny crown interwoven with laurel leaves by Psyche herself on Emily's assenting spirit to honor her...Love remembers, forever, loved ones...

Indeed, to come near, possibly enter, this dark and veiled mystery ever-approaching our abandoned Psyche on that mountaintop where monsters and dragons are said to be, there at the very edge of our mapped knowing, we who seek love must raise our soul-anointing lamps, find the courage to approach the light and the gaze and the sting and leave all that we have known behind... become utterly, truly ourselves yet shorn of all identifications... to find, see-through, soul-know, unite with, and be Love.

There is a nuptial banquet, a great feast, all these divine and worldly guests, waiting for her, now with him, on that once-frightening mountaintop but now intimating, now revealing, now re-veiling, through the cloudy mists, as the very Mt. Olympus itself! Come on! Let's go our solitary way together into the vales and also onto this Olympian peak! James Hillman, the founder of Archetypal Psychology, is already there waiting for us! He brought all this food!

The gods brought the heavenly nectar! The muses, laughing and singing, are gathering rice and starting to spray all this healing holy water from that glorious springing font! And now look: everything is Radiant Imagination! Let us make our way to that edge where the frightening Unknown appears and sweeps us up on wings to wake us up in the glorious Palace of Amor where such stories unfurl, attended to by invisible ones, to make us ready! We are all invited to the Wedding! And, can you hear, can you...here? The music has started and this poem is singing!

Welcome!

Painting above: Peter Paul Rubens, Cupid and Psyche, circa 1636

SONG FOR THE LAST ACT

Now that I have your face by heart, I look

Less at its features than its darkening frame Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame, Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook. Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease

The lead and marble figures watch the show

Of yet another summer loath to go

Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read

In the black chords upon a dulling page

Music that is not meant for music’s cage,

Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.

The staves are shuttled over with a stark Unprinted silence. In a double dream

I must spell out the storm, the running stream. The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see

The wharves with their great ships and architraves;

The rigging and the cargo and the staves

On a strange beach under a broken sky.

O not departure, but a voyage done!

The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

-Louise Bogan, “Song for the Last Act” from The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968

Painting: Odilón Redon, La Voile jaune (The Yellow Sail), 1905

PICK A CARD

Perhaps this calling,

this life’s wand-erring,

these fateful detours, wrong turnings,

this donning of magician’s nature,

is a way behind the seens,

a theatrical vision, an actor’s experience,

a twofold awareness steeped in emotion,

a sacred action, a sacrificial enactment,

the ego’s offering in a surrendering flourish,

the eyes and the heart seeing, feeling, indirectly, what we, the audience of this life, often do not.

Plato’s intuition: the soul chooses its life.

This epiphany of magical awareness:

I see the given and I see the unseen.

Every crossroads, birth, choice, death,

occasion to love another, to serve,

is a vent, a portal, where the God invents, orchestrates, brings together,

creates destiny, friendships,

our happenings, our losses,

our finds, our joys…

As above, so below, and circulating,

the snake-dragon moves through us,

climbs up our spines, slithers down,

in between we rise and fall,

dip into the source, the hidden, the silence,

the mystery, and we meet the dead,

those now purified in love revealed

after smallness is discarded

along with hate, fear, anger, and hurt,

and we meet the unborn, watching us closely

as we descend

past the planet-Gods, receiving gifts

uniquely combined, radiating

what beloved Beatrice offered that magus Dante who would leave us entering afterwards

that Beatific vision, the glorious knowing

that must be earned, is encountered as grace,

of His Love, fountain-source, circling angelology, which appears, when a magician gives

himself, herself, away, disappears

within, eyes closed, cloak wrapping

what was once so solid, and loves,

and loves, and loves, incense-burning gestures draw one in…

The fist unfurls, hand opens, extends,

knows, offers the hidden imaginings

weaving between your soul and God’s plans

of what is to come unexpectedly, full of surprise, to the unlived you,

knowingly, chosen, expected, arranged,

by the You who never dies,

who never lived, who ever-loves,

who abides and accompanies you

as pure Presence.

You are witnessed, the magician smiles,

eyes twinkling starlight, now turning

inward, closing, for the real magic

happens out of site, within, beyond,

and love holds a deck of constellating life,

fanned out into momentary view:

your approaching choice, this decision,

what wonders you may discover,

what life you may marvelously live,

what amazing moments you may have!

Yes, pick a card, this moment’s card,

this life’s card, this destiny’s card.

The animals around the manger gather, look,

offer their warmth, know what is happening

while the world, casual and causal, knows it not.

And if you and your soul’s choice

get lost in the shuffle, don’t worry,

I, your soul-friend, will find it for you

so you can remember who you are,

recognize why you are here,

and we can celebrate this happening together!

We are all each other’s magicians,

and yet we all watch in amazement

as all this healing love

and all these revelations of beauty,

in spite of, together with, all this darkness

and incomprehensible mystery,

ever-jump into view!

Joy, laughter, a gasp, tears:

all join this moment, become

winged-spirit, dove-descending,

letting us know

we are alive,

that all this is real,

but this is not the whole of it,

yet all of this,

all of it,

is Holy.

-G.V. 10 January, 2016