Musings on Poetic Language

If the question, what is poetry? has never been answered, everyone will agree at least thus far: that it is not merely so many waves in the air or ink-marks on a piece of paper - that it exists primarily in the world of consciousness." - Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction.

Poetic language expresses information. It does not just express emotion, although it might. This information can be true or false. Regarding super-sensible objects, it arouses in us the same emotion we would feel if we encountered that thing we've never experienced. Poetry gives us the quality of experiences we've never had, or perhaps never will have, or even can have. It does this by using things we have experienced to point to things outside our experience. We learn more about the super-sensible things by using sensible things to arouse the same emotion the poet thinks we'll feel if we were to ever encounter the super-sensible things.

Asia, in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, says, "My soul is an enchanted boat." An enchanted boat moves along the ocean at night to an unknown destination without sail, a map, or paddles. Asia isn't just saying, "My soul is pretty neat." Something more is implied here. Asia is being transfigured, is turning into a god. We don't know what that feels like. But Shelley thinks the emotion aroused by the image of an enchanted boat is the same emotion that might accompany the gradual transformation into a god.

We have to go half-way to receive what Poetic Language has to offer us. We can't force the Poet to cough it up by force. We can't put him on a witness stand and cross-examine the poet about how a river could have a hair, or how thoughts could be green, or how a woman could be a red, red rose, or a violet half-hidden by a mossy stone.

Poetic language is harder to falsify than scientific language or ordinary language. You can say that this particular woman is a red, red rose. But then that woman might arouse a different emotion in me, an emotion that isn't aroused when I observe a red rose. So, the observation of the woman might be falsified for me, but not for you. Whereas, the falsifiablity of scientific language is more easy to grasp and to prove. But when poetic language is successful, it captures oceans of meaning, as opposed to the puddles of scientific language.

The same applies to Religious Language that borders on being poetic. In non-Religious language, we had scientific and poetic; in Religious language, we have theological and poetic. Each type has an ordinary-language counterpart. For example, 'I believe in God.' is an ordinary-language statement. Now, we can go in two directions if you were to ask me what I mean. Theologically, I can say, 'I believe in a triune unity of persons, exemplified by one substance, personal, supernatural, immaterial, creator of the heavens and the earth, relational, and on which we are all dependent for our individual and collective existence.' This is scientific, in the religious sense; that is, theological. This could all be true, but the point is that this isn't Religion's natural language. And, if it were, we'd have puddles when we could have oceans.

Theological language is abstract. But God is the most concrete, personal Being there is. Theology arises out of debate, argument, and controversy; in such, clarity of concepts is key, along with the validity of logic and the soundness of arguments. Religio-poetic language is meant to point to the concrete. But only if you meet it half-way. It would be like putting a witness on the stand and demanding the witness to convey to the court the character of a close friend, or the love he had for his wife. The court is not in the right frame of mind to listen to the witness even if he was a poet, and the poet isn't in the right frame of mind to convey such information while a dialectical pistol is being held to his head.

Religio-poetic language is concrete. It compares God to bright lights, consuming fires, a shepard, a gate, a husband, a warrior, a hunter, a lamb, a lion, love. Jesus is called the Son of God, a familial metaphor. Theologically, we can analyze the metaphor - Jesus doesn't stand to the Father in all respects as a son stands to his father: there are temporal/physical differences. We might then call - as did Aquinas - 'Son of God' analogical language, of which metaphor is a species. But this route is bound to fail to capture as much meaning is the divinely inspired 'Jesus is the Son of God'. If we keep to the theological road, we end up with something like: "Between the Son and the Father, we have a relation of asymetry, harmony, and equilibrium, and yet involving homogeneity." The meaning of 'Son of God' has been changed from concrete language to the abstract language of theology. In a religio-poetic context, we again understand 'Son of God' if we go half-way. We experience first-hand what it's like to be a good son or a good father, and we strive to be a better son or father by praying and meditating on the relation of Sonship Christ has to the Father, and the relation of Fatherhood the Father has with the Son - and trusts the Divine relation is the rule, and our clumsy imitations the exceptions. If we get at 'Son of God' like this, we become a perfect conduit for an ocean of meaning contained therein.

The next step is to recognize that though poetry - or pros verging on the poetic - arouses emotion, and though it doesn't have to: that when it does arouse emotion, we can always follow that emotion to the object which evoked it. In other words, emotions are always about a Something that is responsible for arousing it. When I first heard 'Release' by Pearl Jam, I felt the emotions of transcedence; but if I could duplicate that feeling by taking a magic pill, I wouldn't do it. The significance of the first emotion came from what the emotion was about, that Something - whatever the song hinted at in my aesthetic imagination, the result being a felt change of consciousness - which aroused it. It's the same with any metaphor given in any medium. They are designed to arouse in you a certain emotion in relation to a certain object so that you can have some idea of another object of which you might not have had experience - the poet tells you what it might feel like to have this other experience of which you have no experience.

And now we come to those people who are obsessed with only Scientific Language, to the exclusion of the religio-poetic, and even ordinary, since scientific language is that language denuded of metaphor, only revealing those common elements in experience that can be measured by scientific instruments. Such a frame of mind seems to be overtaking the West. So much is it taking over, that there might come a time when poets and religious people are no longer even understood, a time when our language will be labled meaningless, as the verficationists already tried to do: they thought that if something couldn't be verified by science, then that something was meaningless. You see where this will lead? The huge store-houses of meaning saturating the texture of the universe and language shall be stopped up: the funnel will only let through those droplets of meaning that are allowed to pass through science's truncated faucet.

Imagine a species divided into three groups: one can see, one can see, but objects are very blurry, and the last are blind. The first group's language is uninhibited in the use of words which have meaning based upon the sense of sight: look, see, light, dark, etc . . . The second group can still see very little, a mere hazy brightness during times of day, and various shades of blackness during the night, but they can still somewhat understand the first group, although they might begin placing 'light' not 'out there', but 'in the eye itself', which many scientists do today. The third group is completely blind, and they only use 'look', 'light', 'dark', and 'see' as metaphors pointing to something super-sensible (to them), or else regard them as utterly meaningless, preferring scientific exactitude when using language: this is when they 'see' your point in an argument, or call an a difficult task 'dark', etc . . .

This is pretty much the situation of the West. How could the first group convince the third or the second that their language wasn't meaningless? That it was the language of the third group which was utterly inadequate to capture all the meaning that was plainly before the first group's eyes?

Love and Friendship

Denis de Rougement once said, "Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god." This is the foundation we must use to understand Love. There are two main kinds of love. There is the love that we Give; and there is the love that we Need. By nature, we Need love; by nature, God Gives love. It follows that we are closest to God when we are least like God. If God needed anything, He'd have to create that Need in Himself, a feat only omnipotence could acheive. In the end, however, if God does Need, then it will be satisfied according to plan; and if it isn't, then perhaps God experiences divine loss in a way we could not imagine. Hence, His willingness to send His Son, His only Son, to save us.

So, we can be near to God in 2 ways. First, we can be near Him by being like Him. Second, we can be near Him by approach. Consider an analogy. A huge chasm divides you from your destination; it's depth is unmeasurable. But the length of the division is only 15 feet. Thus, you are only 15 feet away from your destination; it's a stone's throw away! But you also know that you have to follow a path to get there; the path circumvents the chasm, even though it takes a day to complete it. So, in terms of Likeness, you are very close; but in terms of Approach, you are a day away. In terms of Approach, it may seem like you're getting further away from your destination, but - in reality - you are getting closer: even if it looks as if, in terms of Likeness, you're getting further away.

What's this have to do with Love? Each love, including Friendship, gets us near God in terms of Likeness, but not in terms of Approach. The only love that gets us near God in terms of Approach is Agape, which I'll explore more adequately in another blog. The other 3 loves - affection, friendship, and romantic love - make us like God, as a photograph resembles what is photographed: Agape makes us like God as a Son resembles his Father.

Okay, so what happens when love becomes a demon? That happens when Love becomes a god. Love becomes a god when a particular love is set up as a Sovereign, a King, without the checks and balances of Agape. This is why it is orthodox to say that God is love, but it is dangerous to say - and to mean it - that love is God.

The love that we Need shall never perish, since by nature, we Need God. We may temporarily Need another person's love - a child for his mother, a friend for another, a wife for a husband's - but this shouldn't last. Similarly, the love that we Give is by nature something we give temporarily to others; and if we give it to God, we only had it because God gave it to us first, in order that we offer it back to Him.

Along with these main Loves (Need and Gift), we have Pleasures. There is the pleasure that accompanies Appreciation of beauty. We hike along the ridge of a canyon, we happen to glance down toward the bottom below, the sun happens to be setting, it is quiet - suddenly, we are gripped by how beautiful the scene is: we appreciate it, and it is a pleasurable feeling.

So when the main loves and this pleasure are taken into account, we have a new love: the love that appreciates God - or, Worship.

What about Friendship?

This is the love that is the least Natural. We can live our lives without it, and we can go through our lives without wanting it. The species can breed without it. And yet it occurs, and when it does, it seems to make life better somehow.

The main ingredient in Friendship is 'common interest'. It occurs when one says to the other (in so many words), "You too?!" You like this too? Well, what about this? What is your opinion about that? Did you like this as much as I liked it? Do you have a passion about this aspect seen in that angle? Really? You too? We thought this passion was our own, and we thought we were strange that no one else had this liking. But then, to our surprise, we found someone else who shared that common love with us. And it was exhilarating. "You see the same thing I see?", we ask with a gasp.

In Eros, the sexes gaze into each other's eyes; in Friendship, they stand side-by-side, looking at a common point.

Friendship seems to be a shadow of that 'communion of the Saints' that shall be perfected in Heaven. Each creature has a unique vision of the divine Beauty, and can worship that particular aspect of it better than any other creature. This is because God made each person different, a unique shape meant to fit into a particular form in the Church as a whole. We shall share our private vision with the rest of the creatures; when a friendship happens, we taste the beginnings of such a fruition. But all is now hazy and blurry. One day all shall be clear and out in the open. The smoke will clear and we'll breathe fresh air. But friendship gives us a foretaste. The beauties of God, differently manifested in each creature, shall one day shine, and we'll see who they were. There will be surprises.

Where does society itself come from, civilization? Did a tight knot of people, bound together by a passion for a common vision, together build the bedrock for a country? Imagine the comoraderie of the Founding Fathers, the Spartans, the Scots, the Jews, . . . the Germans . . . All ethnicities perhaps . . .

And since our biology doesn't need friendship, it is probably Spiritual. But God never says that we are to Him what one friend is another in the Bible. He is Groom to Bridegroom, or Father to Son, or even Owner to Pet, or perhaps Artist to a work of art.

What happens when Friendship becomes a god? What if the common interest was evil? What if there is the formation of exclusive coteries, gangs, cliques? Pride, vanity, or snobbery, can emerge.

So, it seems Frienship is a love reserved for creatures.

To be continued . . .