WHY NOT BE TOTALLY CHANGED INTO FIRE?
Describing the symbolic saturation he experienced while writing some of his early poems, William Butler Yeats remarked,
I had sometimes when awake, but more often in sleep, moments of vision, a state very unlike dreaming, when these images [from Irish folklore] took upon themselves what seemed an independent life and became a part of a mystic language, which seemed always as if it would bring me some strange revelation.1
Much as the religious poet has Moses backing into the great dazzle of God’s darkness as a model for retrieving and revealing a religious language, the poet also has Orpheus to guide the project of encountering mysteries. For Yeats, the visionary drowse of falling sleep (or waking up) enables revelation, eventually prophetic, in a Mosaic sense, but initially Orphic in the sense of descending into and returning from an underworld inhabited by mysterious forms and even stranger language. Though Yeats could make it seem easy, this is hard work, and not always effective. Writing about a stay in a monastery, Fanny Howe remarks:
On Ascension Day in the middle of May 1999, I went on a retreat hoping for a revelation. I hoped that I would find better words for spiritual phenomena than I was finding in the Catholic Church during the Eucharistic prayer and the homilies. I prayed the doors of heaven would fly open and I would see at last; I prayed because I did not believe any of it would happen.2
Sometimes it doesn’t happen. In truth, most of the time it doesn’t. In this regard, the religious poet is more like Moses wandering in the desert for forty years than the prophet of God speaking to a burning bush on an upslope of the holy mountain.
Yet sometimes it does happen. The burning bush is real. Ronald Johnson believed the burning bush to be the preeminent symbol of the imagination, authorizing the entire poetic and visionary process. The scene in Exodus with the burning bush stands for what F. C. Happold describes as “the sudden moments of intuitive perception, elusive, fading quickly, but of deep significance, illuminations which … reveal … new facets of reality.”3 This is a vision of light and darkness at once, arising out of long, often dull struggle and sudden, revivifying flashes of insight. My work in Thick and Dazzling Darkness arises from that scene in chapter 20 of Exodus in which Moses, having received the Ten Commandments, begins to bring the Law down from the mountain to the people, who have been watching in fear and trembling. “And all the people saw the voices and the flames and the sound of the trumpet and the mount smoking and, being terrified and struck with fear, they stood afar off.… But Moses went to the dark cloud wherein God was” (Exod. 20:19, 21).4 Elliot R. Wolfson, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, lucidly expands on this passage from Exodus by way of an argument put forth by Saint Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth-century Cappadocian bishop and theologian. Gregory, Wolfson explains, describes three levels on which the invisible God might be envisioned: the cosmological, the anthropological, and the theophanic. The cosmological level is, for all practical purposes, the Orphic level, in which things seen—hidden things and revealed things—make manifest divine powers. The anthropological level shows that the image of God lies at the center of the person, to be awakened in the mind and bodied forth in the world. The theophanic level is exemplified by the unconsuming fire of the burning bush, its “ineffable and mysterious illumination.” Gregory, according to Wolfson, reads the “dark cloud” Moses enters
as an expression of the view that contemplation is a progression to what cannot be contemplated: the pinnacle of the mind’s ascent consists of beholding the “luminous darkness,” an oxymoron that resolves the exegetical problem with which Gregory began his exposition; the ostensible conflict between the theophany at the bush where God appears in the light and the later statement that Moses enters the cloud of darkness to encounter God is no clash at all, as the mystic vision is a seeing of luminous darkness, a vision of unseeing through the mirror of the infinite, the image of God mysteriously embodied in the person of Christ and to some degree in each human being, that is, a seeing through which one comes to see that one cannot see, the blindness that is true insight.5
There is seeing, and there is not seeing. In the religious imagination, both are forms of vision, of insight.
This puts me in mind of one of my favorite passages in Thomas Merton’s The Wisdom of the Desert, which consists of his versions of the sayings of the desert fathers:
Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?6
Something about the work of the religious poet aligns with Merton’s early Christian anecdote: Long and typically thankless labor done in obscurity inflected by grace into sudden, epiphanic illumination. Both burning bush and dark cloud. Both desert wandering and alpine ascent. Both enduring confusion and ecstatic confidence. Early in The Flowering of the Rod, the third part of Trilogy, H.D. writes:
I am so happy,
I am the first or the last
of a flock or a swarm;
I am full of new wine;
I am branded with a word,
I am burnt with wood,
drawn from glowing ember,
not cut, not marked with steel;
I am the first or the last to renounce
iron, steel, metal;
I have gone forward,
I have gone backward,
I have gone onward from bronze and iron,
into the Golden Age.7
The religious poet is full of new wine, totally changed to fire, moving onward into the golden age. As long as there are readers of poetry, there will be religious poets performing this work. Why?
In the “Conclusions” to The Varieties of Religious Experience, having presented extensive case studies that validate the pathological and mystical aspects of his subject, but in a moment of exultant resignation, William James confesses,
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.8
Religious poetry filters the higher energies in. As readers, we seek these energies, drawing power from what this poetry releases into us. No matter what the age declares of itself, no matter how absent of spiritual truth and tendency you operate, there is beneath the loquacious level that your rationalism inhabits a deeper level to your nature where intuitions and occult convolutions gather and where, even deeper, a darkness emanates the material of creation. It’s poetry that narrates and demonstrates that dark energy, an unconsuming fire in which our imaginations come most intensely to life.