Comments on Poems 4: "A Word Made Flesh"

From Emily Dickinson:

A Word made Flesh is seldom

And tremblingly partook

Nor then perhaps reported

But have I not mistook

Each one of us has tasted

With ecstasies of stealth

The very food debated

To our specific strength —

A Word that breathes distinctly

Has not the power to die

Cohesive as the Spirit

It may expire if He —

“Made Flesh and dwelt among us”

Could condescension be

Like this consent of Language

This loved Philology.

In this poem, we receive the Gospel According to Emily. As Matthew and Luke’s gospels are said to be derivative of Mark’s, so Emily’s is derivative of John’s, whose gospel starts,

In the beginning there was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. […] And the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us. […]

In the remainder of John’s gospel, a few additional lines stand out as pertaining to this poem:

John 3:6—That which is born of flesh is flesh; and that which is born of Spirit is spirit.

John 4:24—God is a Spirit.

John 6:4—Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life…

***

The more I recite this poem to myself, the more it feels like an internal dialogue wherein each line extends, responds to, or turns the line previous, with an air that is unplanned and spontaneous. It’s as if Dickinson is in her study reading the gospel of John, comes across the statement, “And the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us,” and then looks up thoughtfully and speaks aloud—an accidental monologue wherein she reforms John’s notions in her own image.

Already in her first two words, she has transcended the gospel of John. For John, the Word made flesh had been from the beginning, had been with God, and even was God. But Emily’s is only a Word made flesh—one of an implied multiplicity. And what are the parts of this multiple? For John, logos signifies something beyond symbols—Word is his figuration of the Divine— a metaphor. The switch of article from the to a shifts the referent from something outside of language to the parts of language, so I can only assume the dictionary to be her multiple. Her new article exchanges the metaphorical “Word” for literal words.

“The Word made Flesh” is John’s figuration of God’s condescension—the enfleshment of a Divine Principle in the person of Jesus Christ. By shifting one element of that metaphor, “Word,” towards the literal, Emily constructs an entirely new metaphor. How can parts of speech be made flesh? I take it to symbolize that moment when a morsel of speech succeeds in meaning-making—the moment when a word’s contents seem tangible to the mind.

And this, says Emily, is seldom. Of course, in the second line it is discovered (surprisingly) that “seldom” refers to “partook” and not to the “Word made Flesh,” but the first line on its own is too arresting not to take it as a full, complete thought in its own right before reshaping its meaning in the second line. It is so arresting that upon each internal recitation, I take it as aphorism.

 (And this is what I mean by the spontaneous, turning, unplanned feeling of the poem. This poem, more I think than any other I’ve sat with, transcends itself over and again by turning the thread of thought with each line.) (One more side-note on taking the first line as an aphorism: “seldom” is both adverb and adjective, enhancing the initial ambiguity of what it modifies. Were it instead “seldomly,” the entire cadence of the first stanza would differ, and this to the detriment of a poem so beautiful for ambiguity)

So what could “A Word made Flesh is seldom” mean as aphorism? There is a great irony in this first line that I find difficult to express. Christianity maintains that the Word was only made flesh once. Nothing is more seldom than once, and so Orthodoxy might turn its head at this line in surprise and ask, “well, what were you expecting?” Although the article shift distinguishes Emily’s “Word” irrevocably from John’s, the starkly religious context can only indicate that she is also saying something about religion in this aphorism. And what she seems to be saying contextually is the apparent opposite of what she is actually saying. If we take “Word made Flesh” (articles unconsidered) to represent some sort of Divine manifestation, then Emily troubles Orthodoxy by assuming most would find such revelation to be more commonplace than it is and then responding to this unvoiced assumption by saying not that it is actually more rare than supposed. Her aphorism responds to a question Christianity cannot ask.

Now let us reconsider the article. If I’m correct that she’s speaking metaphorically of the ability of words to convey meaning, then her aphorism is saying that words seldom work—the sense (as indicated by her allusion) being not for pragmatic, day-to-day tasks, but for the transcendent. And so her Orthodoxy-troubling aphorism troubles Orthodoxy yet again by maintaining that the sublime resists words: that which is meant to be signified by John’s “Word” itself resists signifiers.

And then, as though this were not puzzle enough, the sentence extends into the second line that reveals the true verb of the sentence—not “is” but “partook.” A Word made Flesh is partook: this is the skeleton of the first clause we are given, stripped of modifiers. Notably, she writes it in the passive voice. Who is partaking? Is it her? Is it someone else? Is it a crowd of people? Is it all people? “Partake” holds communal connotations. To partake is to take your part in a collective experience. It also evokes communion—of which John’s Jesus says, “whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life…”

And so Emily revises her statement about language. The aphorism is undone (and is, grammatically, a part of its own undoing). It’s not that words seldom touch transcendence, but that we seldom partake—and tremblingly when we do. (I love the constriction of the mouth in the repetitive “leeenglee”—a vocal reverence that evokes, to me, the constricted repetitions of ritual). It’s as though Words ready and willing to be made Flesh surround us on all sides, but we seldom think to take our part in them. If the first line already transcended John, in the second, we have transcended that transcendence and entered a new realm entirely.

But what can we say of this new place the poem has taken us? As if the first two lines had been some negation (they weren’t), Emily begins her third line with a mystifying “nor.” The following “then” indicates that the trembling part we have taken in a Word made Flesh has constituted such an event that whatever comes next is separate. And now a “perhaps,” which I sense modifies “nor,” making that befuddling negation befuddle us further by the speaker’s uncertainty. I think it best to extend the grammar skeleton thus: A Word made Flesh is partook then reported. So what is it that we can say of this new place the poem has taken us? We would like to report it, but we are befuddled by strange and tentative negations that stand in our way.

And this is, once more, a clever attack on conventional Christianity, whose Christ commands his disciples to go into all the world and report what has happened. “The Word made Flesh was partook then reported” could be a brief, slightly poetic, and entirely accurate account of the disciples of Jesus in the gospel of John.

But maybe we’re missing something. Emily herself wonders as much in the last line of the first stanza. Have I not mistook? The parallel takings in “partook” and “mistook” amplify the tension of her double-take. Even when we feel to have tremblingly partaken in the communication of something sublime, how do we know we have not mistaken, instead? By this point in the poem, so many possible meanings have floated through the mind that I cannot tell to which her question points. Or perhaps she does not question the potential meanings at all, but the entire project. Have I not mistook in trying to compose a poem about words becoming flesh? Have I not mistook in trying to use words to get at my meaning? Like the aphorism of the first line, this question arrests. And as the second line of the first stanza turns in a surprising direction that clarifies the direction of her thought, so the next line clarifies her question.

...

I’m very interested in the relationship and contrast between “condescension” and “consent.” She uses “consent of language” as a way to reframe the notion of “condescension.” In a way, these two words are synonyms. But in another way, they are antonyms. Importantly, both carry connotations with right, rank, power, and kingship (thus the religious use to refer to the descent of the “king of kings” into mortality).

Both words mean “to yield,” but it’s the directionality that differs. “Condescension” generally implies voluntarily waiving a superior position—to yield one’s rights of status. “Consent,” meanwhile, generally implies yielding when one has power to oppose; hence the phrase, “consent of the governed.” The directionality of “condescension” is from high status to low, of “consent,” from low status to high.

The implication of the statement “Could condescension be this like consent of language?” would be that language is both above us and beneath us. We yield to it; it yields to us. And this parallelism is itself paralleled in the final line which renames “this consent of language” as “this loved philology.” “Loved,” a quotidian word (and missing a definition of the “lover,” who I imagine as all of us), carries the directionality of “consent,” while “philo” carries the weight of Greek, implying love with the directionality of “condescension.” Could “philo” here indicate the love that language has for us? Understanding “Logos” as “the Word,” could “philology” be a stand in for the love of God?

And not just any “consent of language” but this consent. Where does the demonstrative point? Most immediately to the biblical passage.. But the quote is borrowed to complete the conditional “if” statement of the previous four lines, which is itself an extension of the simile “Cohesive as the spirit…” This simile only reframes her (aphoristic) comment, “A word that breathes distinctly/ Has not the power to die.” And this aphorism seems to follow from the logic of the eight lines that precede it, which are all the consequences of her own first thought, “A Word made Flesh is seldom.”

Could condescension be that language comes down to us from the past and yet consents to our creative (mis)uses of it? Could condescension be that language allows for our partaking yet consents to our mistaking, as well?

Comments on Poems 3: "I wandered lonely as a cloud"

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud 

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

I was very interested in this poem from the outset because John Stuart Mill credited Wordsworth's poetry for almost instantly catalyzing his recovery from an intense depression upon reading another of Wordsworth’s poems, “My heart leaps up.” For some time after his episode of melancholy, Mill said that he understood his calling in life as being the persuasion of those of an intellectual disposition that poetry has merit. In an essay on poetry, Mill said that Wordsworth was a writer who came to poetry himself from an intellectual disposition (as opposed to Coleridge, whom Mill described as more “poetical” by nature, and so more difficult for the intellect to grasp). Back when I was reading Mill, I'd never ventured into Wordsworth's poetry, so this was an exciting opportunity to me.

And what figures the disembodiment and loneliness made possible by intellect better than a cloud? The ruminating thinker floats above, over, on top of all that rambles through the mind, disconnected from the world of perception, alienated from subjective experience—lonely. But Wordsworth—almost intimating Mill’s satori—reports that a transformation can occur “all at once” upon perceiving something beautiful. Whereas the cloud is figured as all one (i.e., alone), the daffodils are not only a “crowd” and a “host,” but they’re also situated in a broader company “beside” and “beneath” other features of the landscape. And in a relationship perhaps more poetical than intellectual, the “golden” color of the daffodils seems to me the very antithesis of loneliness. What I love most about this first stanza is how the daffodils’ golden influence is so profound that it alters the very meter of the poem in the final two lines of the first stanza, when the words themselves begin to flutter and dance in a sudden turn from iambic to dactylic feet.

The emergence of the stars in the second stanza has puzzled me. Yes, stars do seem continuous, but to me, at least, they continue in a very different way than daffodils along a bay. The stars don’t merely continue in a line—they also continue across time with such stability as to provide orientation across many dimensions of human life (from sailing to astrology). Daffodils may dance with glee, but they’re seasonal ephemera, not continuous anchors. The only way I can redeem this simile is to judge it a prefiguration of the way daffodils serve to orient the mind of the poet in the final stanza, though it feels a stretch.

I love the third stanza. Again, we see the daffodils joined by other forces, emphasizing their togetherness with all that surrounds them. The enjambment in the first two lines strikes me as particularly important, given that it’s the only instance of enjambment in the poem. For me, it serves to emphasize the other “they”—the daffodils—and the verb at the start of the second line—“out-did.” My favorite thing about this stanza is the meta-commentary on what it means to be a poet. A poet can’t help but be affected by his company. A poet lets features of the world enter him and change his mood, thus overcoming cloudy loneliness. He builds up wealth for himself by implanting images within his mind that he can later use to repicture the world.

The final stanza was so relatable to me. Losing myself to spirals of thought or catching myself staring off vacantly have been features of my most poignant episodes of melancholy, and I love imagining Wordsworth caught away in such an episode when suddenly the flash of daffodils in his inward eye returns his heart to dancing. I imagine this precise experience also characterizes the effect of Wordsworth’s poetry on Mill after his melancholy. Much can also be said about the “bliss of solitude” and the way it contrasts with the loneliness of the first stanza. What comes to me now is the way this last stanza juxtaposes two varieties of inwardness—that of vacant pensiveness opposed to inward image-making—imagination. Loneliness, pensiveness, and vacancy all cloud our sight—but the inward eye sees what is not there now, blissfully.

Imaginative practices, I take Wordsworth as saying, are what make us truly wealthy. I completely agree, and I feel wealthier for having absorbed this poem.

Comments on Poems 2: "God's Grandeur"

God's Grandeur 

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

My chief interest in this poem is Hopkin’s movement from irony to earnestness—or at least, what I read as such. I’ve played around with reading the entire thing as earnest and the entire thing as ironic, but for me the text sustains neither reading in its whole and instead communicates a sudden movement from one to the other.

There is a duplicity to the word “charged” in the first line. For my first many readings of the poem, this word meant for me the same thing it means for a battery to be charged: filled with pulsating energy. But the more I sat with the following lines, the more I realized the possibility of an ironic reading—that the world has been charged with God’s grandeur the same way a thief may be charged with robbery in a court of law. Whatever meaning you ascribe to that first word completely changes the mood and tenor of the poem: the electric charge of the world fills the reader with awe, but legal charges fill me with bitterness and ire.

I see no possibility beyond irony in the second two lines. “It will flame out” and “It gathers to a greatness” invoke the seriousness of scripture, but the appended similes are surprising. When I hear “the shining of shook foil,” I see in my mind the image of my uncle and his sons carrying metal sheets back behind the barn, and I wonder what other possible connotations “shook foil” could have beyond the glimmer of light reflecting on construction materials. When I read “like the ooze of oil,” something in me recoils, and I see gross barrels oozing at their seams. How could the charge be electric when the similes themselves are seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil?

And then the timpani beat at the broken line: Crushed. Grammatically, this is describing the oil, isn’t it? As if something is crushing barrels causing the oil to leak? Its place at the beginning of the line, though, brings it to the fore as a meta-comment on the poem thus far, and to my ear it does the same when I read it aloud. My own hopes that the world be charged with the electricity of God’s grandeur stand crushed when I try to understand the supernatural by means of such mundane and mucky metaphors. When I reach this word, I reread the first few lines of the poem and see “charged” as a legal term and “crushed” as what happens to promises like “it will flame out” and “gather to a greatness” when viewed in terms of the similes provided.

Upon reflection on lessons learned in my churchy youth, the oil metaphor, though initially material, does seem to point to something more divine. Oil is crushed from the olive in the press, and prior to his crucifixion, Christ bled from every pore in the olive garden of Gethsemane (a name that means “olive press.”) Though it may be ironic to say that God’s grandeur gather’s to a greatness in the ooze of man-made oil, and though all our hopes may be crushed by our toiling world, and though God himself may stand on trial for the world he has created, yet redemption oozes at the olive press through the torment of Christ’s atonement and intimations of the final earnestness of Hopkins theology withstand the battering winds of his doubts and live there, embedded beneath the irony in a turn that feels transcendent.

But I hold that to be a mere suggestion, food for thought, not overtly present in the voice I hear when I chant the text to myself in my mind, because the intensity of Crushed speaks far more to the pain of doubt than to an epiphany of transcendence, and it’s followed by what must be the ironic highlight of the poem, a question to which both the preceding and following lines stand as answer. Why do men then now not reck his rod?  I read this as seven concatenated drum beats of stress before the release of the final iamb, his rod. The tension is incredible. It makes this line one that you can keep in your mouth for hours, like a potent lozenge that refuses to finish its flavor. This question can be read in two ways: “Why, then, do men, after knowing this, not reck his rod?” And, the slightly more tenuous but still inescapable, “Why do men, then as well as now, not reck his rod?”

Although we need look no further than shining of foil and oozing of oil to answer this question (that life is suffering and makes no sense and so it seems useless to reck the rod of a heartless God), the following lines further highlight the irony of the question, ringing with clear intonations of the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author tells us that “Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.” It may remain forever, but all our toil and our trade have shorn it of life, and our own feet are separated from contact with the earth by our shoes (that very same raiment that we must remove if we are to stand in God’s presence, as Moses before the bush).

 After the flurry of irony and percussive anger in the first two quatrains, I read a movement in the speaker’s mind that begins after the space. And for all this—“for” meaning “because of” or “on behalf of?” I prefer the latter—And for the sake of that whole nasty process, nature is never spent / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. No matter how I read these lines, I can intone no irony into their pure song, but doubt returns so quickly as even as the speaker must acknowledge that the very morning he celebrates comes at a brown brink (which I read as a comment on the smudge of pollution that dirtied Victorian skies with hazy coal smog).

After paying brief homage to his doubts, the speaker moves further towards earnestness, acknowledging the brooding hen of the Holy Ghost over the world, a strikingly natural metaphor in a poem that has hitherto insisted on employing figures of trade and toil. The world is bent, yes, but ah! the wings of God are bright despite it all. And how like this interjection comes God’s earnest grace amid the selfyeast of so much doubt! 

Comments on Poems 1: "What Can I Tell My Bones?"

What Can I Tell My Bones?

(Section 1 of 3)

Theodore Roethke

1

Beginner,

Perpetual beginner,

The soul knows not what to believe,

In its small folds, stirring sluggishly,

In the least place of its life,

A pulse beyond nothingness,

A fearful ignorance.

      Before the moon draws back,

      Dare I blaze like a tree?

In a world always late afternoon,

In the circular smells of a slow wind,

I listen to the weeds' vesperal whine,

Longing for absolutes that never come.

And shapes make me afraid:

The dance of natural objects in the mind,

The immediate sheen, the reality of straw,

The shadows, crawling down a sunny wall.

      A bird sings out in solitariness

      A thin harsh song. The day dies in a child.

      How close we are to the sad animals!

      I need a pool; I need a puddle's calm.

O my bones,

Beware those perpetual beginnings,

Thinning the soul's substance;

The swan's dread of the darkening shore,

Of these insects pulsing near my skin,

The songs from a spiral tree.

      Fury of wind, and no apparent wind,

      A gust blowing the leaves suddenly upward,

      A vine lashing in dry fury,

      A man chasing a cat,

      With a broken umbrella,

      Crying softly.

This poem reads to me like a stranger’s messy room. I hold up a sentence here, a couplet there, look at it a moment, wonder at its proper place, and then end up setting it back on the ground while I examine another. It's a floor littered with sentiment and meaning, strange objects that must be profound to the lodger, all arrayed in patterns suggestive of connections I cannot see.

Is it truly a mess, or did the tenant lay them out this way? What sort of a person lays out such an assortment of oddities? Who sets swan fathers and straw and dead insects all in spiral around a withered branch of pine? What meaning could the missing occupant have ascribed to this jumble?

Beginner. I set a feather back in its place but can’t turn away from the floor and so pick up a dried hornet and just hold it in my hand, wondering softly—perpetual beginner. I don’t know what to believe about this room, about its dweller. I’ve never met him, but I somehow see a balding, portly man in my mind, crescent of bare skin crowned by white, wispy hair, tears running down the crow-footed wrinkles round his eyes.

A cat meows, and I turn my head to see an orange tabby walking nervously, back arched, hair standing up on the end, and then it scampers away beneath a bed that holds a broken umbrella on its surface, arched backwards like an empty cup.

This room stirs something inside me, something sluggish, something small—a pulse beyond nothing, a fearful ignorance. I’ve lost myself for hours here, I realize, and not a thing has been done. My head a-daze, my tongue dry, my body inflamed, my mind comes suddenly to a sharp point around the sad, harsh song of a solitary bird, and I peer outside the window to discover its source, but the bird hides from my view. It cries again and feels closer, closer.

I regard the world outside, a world windy though I see no wind at all—only windy shadows winding their way in slow circles of the late afternoon. And shapes make me afraid. In my eye's corners I think I see lashing vines and gusts of leaves but when I look, all jumps back to stillness. All I can see is the the immediate sheen of an ambient world all twisted by the day’s dying light.

Even sunset cannot save me from the dizzy of disobedient light. The full moon rises, casting darker shadows with its ebullience than daylight can muster and sets a single tree on the hillside ablaze and I suddenly yearn, I yearn, I yearn, but for what? 

To dare to somehow be a tree again.

I want so badly for this room—this poem—to make sense to me, to mean something. But absolutes never arrive. In place of meaning, I find only mood.

In Praise of Good Conversation

We sometimes say that a person is good at conversation, but what can we say of what that means? When someone is good at chess, it’s because of how often they win. We don’t often say people win at conversation, but the contrast between chess and conversation could have something important to reveal.

Both chess and conversation have rules. There are, of course, variations on these rules—when I was young, my dad decided that in our house, “en passant” was against our “house rules” because it was too obscure. The house rules of conversation likewise change from place to place. They can be a bit different between families, workplaces, and friend groups, but the biggest differences are between cultures and languages. House rules can only be so different, though. If I came across a house where they decided that the shape of chess pieces didn’t actually matter, that all the pieces could only move diagonally and that you took an opponent’s piece by hopping over it, I might say “This isn’t even chess anymore. It’s checkers.” Likewise, when I see one person talking at length and the other only listening, I might say, “this isn’t even conversation anymore. It’s a lecture.”

Both chess and conversation have goals. In chess, the player’s goals are part of the rules. We all know that both players want to yell out “checkmate!” once they put their opponent’s king in a position where it cannot move without getting killed. In this respect, conversation shows its dissimilarity: it’s a game that lets its players bring their own goals to the table, sometimes clear, sometimes obscure. Stranger still, you or I can feel the pull of a conversation, sense there’s something critical to be obtained, but remain completely, willfully or unwillfully, oblivious to our own goals.

Both chess and conversation are made up of turns and moves. Each turn, the players make the move they think will best get them to closer to their goal. When we watch a game of chess, we can assess what each player’s moves do for their progress towards the goal of victory by saying, “this was a bad move” or “that was a good move” accordingly. In conversation, we take turns talking, and our moves are the comments we make, each taking us closer to our goals or moving us further away. When we watch people talking, though, it’s harder to say what’s good and what’s bad because we can’t be sure of everyone’s goals. I might say a comment was bad only to later learn that I’d misjudged the person’s goals.

So when we converse, it is critical that we understand what our goals are and that we have a picture of the way we’ll know we’ve attained them. Competitive games set up mutually exclusive goals. You and I cannot both win our game of chess: only one of us can cry “checkmate” at the end. Conversation’s flow is so flexible that not only can all players attain their goals, but new goals can emerge in a flash that change the meaning of each move. When a conversationalist’s shifting goals are out far beyond the horizon of his partner’s vision or sunk deep down below his own awareness, the radical change in the moves he makes can be alarming. To prevent this, he may need a higher goal, an anchor, a partner to the other goals that arise and fall in his heart.

People who study games call the study of moves “tactics” and the study of how they fit together “strategy.” If a chess player is a marvelous tactician and an excellent strategist, we might say she is a “good chess player.” But if someone told me they had a friend who has great conversational tactics and is very strategic in the way she talks with people, I wouldn’t say she sounds like a good conversationalist. I’d say she sounds like a politician.

Games don’t come to mind when I think of a good conversationalist. Instead, I think of dancing. Some dances have set rules, yes, but in the case of dancing, the goal isn’t set out by the rules: the goal is the rules. If you and I set out to tango, our goal is to perform the tango perfectly, with elegance and grace. Like conversation, the rules of dancing exist even when they can’t be expressed in words. Whether it’s the tango, or break dancing, or an informal night at the club, each dance is governed by the higher law of the beat.

When a dancer has spent years studying beats with her body’s motion, she develops ways of moving that are all her own. We call this her style. When two people have danced long enough together, they find a style that belongs to both of them and to neither of them, some strange admixture of the moves they make within a ruled constraint, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The master duet is lost to self in a flow that follows the beat.

When I meet a good conversationalist, it’s like this. No matter the rules of conversation that govern our interaction, whether he’s mastered them or not, he listens first to discern a rhythm. Once found, he moves to it in a way that’s all his own. When I take his hand, we dance in turn, move by move, building the very beat we follow but losing ourselves so completely that it feels beyond us.

Everyone comes to conversation with goals, but we don’t always contemplate them. That’s not to say that no one is ever aware of their goals, but situations and needs tend to rule the day. I need money, so I have conversations with my colleagues at work that are governed by the goals of my role. I’ve offended someone close, so I seek to make amends. I want to persuade someone, so I put my voice behind a cause. Few people contemplate between all possible goals of conversation and discipline themselves to the ways of the very best one.

But is it possible to say anything that might apply to every single conversation? Can I find a higher goal to anchor myself to while I go about these lesser tasks so that whether I win or lose the small games, I can be sure to win the highest game I give myself to play?

Here we have a microcosm of the ultimate question: is there anything I can say about the whole of life that would apply to every situation or circumstance? Is life merely a series of moves we make for a game we can never win? What is the best the goal for a human life?

A good conversationalist, of course, would address these questions by holding out his hand and inviting me to dance. “What do you think?” he would ask. In my answer, he would hear the beginnings of a beat, and he’d follow it, then listen closely to my next move to watch where the beat would go. He would stay strictly to the beat of the talk but in a voice unmistakably his own. Before I could even pause to think of how it happened, we’d lose ourselves in the motions of a dance that would also be an answer, a high goal, an anchor and a partner to the flux of human life.

Of God's Realness

Life can feel enliveningly real or witheringly fake. Dreams can seem more real than waking life, but most we sense correctly as fabrications of the sleeping mind. I say there is an unseen organ of the soul that senses the realness of things and that communicates it's findings to the heart through the glow of meaningfulness. In the drift of depression, this organ goes blind, and our only touchstone to meaning becomes the void of meaning's absence. In that full-filling feeling some call enlightenment, the organ is sharpened so finely that all phenomena feel fully real, fully meaningful. 

I've puzzled long over what belief is. I decided it's the name we give to realness when its attached to ideas. Notice when someone says they "can't believe what is happening," they don't mean to say they deny the facts but that they have no sense that the idea of the thing is real. Our sense of reality or unreality does not hinge on facts.

Sensations of realness are unreliable narrators to the true events of the world. In fact, I don't believe them to be a function of reality at all, but a function of attention. The more we attend to an idea as real, the more our sense of its realness grows, nourishing our sense that life is meaningful. The more we attend to an idea as unreal, the more our sense of its unreality grows, and at times this can threaten our sense that life itself is meaningful. If one focuses on fantasies long enough, one can sense the reality of any number of gods.

What then could be said of God to assuage my skeptic soul? 

Nothing, if not for beauty. 

Ideas are portraits that we can sort by raw aesthetic appeal as much as by any other quality. What I call God is whatever idea stands atop my pantheon of beauties, beckoning my gaze. As I attend to the most beautiful idea, the realness I sense in its (and all) beauty grows. So seek beauty to fill life full with life!

And I pray for a shapeshifting God. May my attention to beauty wander so wide that an equanimous realness compresses my pantheon of beauties until all hierarchy succumbs to its warmth, until the focus of my worship widens to embrace the Godliness of life.