“Each atom belonging to me pretty much as good belongs to you,” wrote Whitman, who called himself a kosmos and believed of “the true poems” that “whom they take they take into area to behold the delivery of stars.”
Shortly after Whitman returned his borrowed stardust to the universe, when quantum mechanics made it inconceivable to take severely the picture of the atom as a miniature photo voltaic system of electrons orbiting a nucleus however nobody but knew what picture to exchange it with, quantum pioneer Niels Bohr told quantum pioneer Werner Heisenberg:
On the subject of atoms, language can be utilized solely as in poetry. The poet, too, is just not practically so involved with describing information as with creating photographs and establishing psychological connections.
One other half century later, after we had cut up the atom and cut up the world, James Baldwin insisted that poets are “the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” And if the reality, the basic reality, is that we’re matter craving for which means — “atoms with consciousness,” within the poetic phrases of the physicist Richard Feynman — then poetry, this supreme instrument of self-knowledge, is the mirror consciousness holds to the cosmos.
That’s what poet, translator, and Chinese language literature scholar David Hinton explores in Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry (public library) — an inquiry into poetry as religious apply, lensed by means of the lifetime of Tu Fu: a person of unusual depth and breadth of spirit, who lived as an impoverished wanderer by means of a civil struggle within the eight century to turn out to be China’s biggest poet.
With a watch to poetry as the language of silence and a portal to unselfing, Hinton writes:
Poetry is the cosmos woke up to itself. Narrative, reportage, clarification, thought: language is the medium of self-identity, and we usually dwell inside that clutch of identification, identification that appears to look out at and take into consideration the Cosmos as if from some outdoors area. However poetry pares language right down to a naked minimal, thereby opening it to silence. And it’s there within the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest potentialities — for there it may possibly render dimensions of consciousness which are far more expansive than that identity-center, primal dimensions of consciousness because the Cosmos woke up to itself. A minimum of that is true for classical Chinese language poetry, formed as it’s by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist thought right into a type of religious apply. In its deepest potentialities, its inside wilds, poetry is the Cosmos woke up to itself — and the historical past of that awakening begins the place the Cosmos begins.
Epochs earlier than the poet John Milton introduced the word space into the English lexicon to connote the cosmic expanse, historic Chinese language poets had been reckoning with the connection between the cosmos and the ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrow that Taoists positioned on the coronary heart of human expertise. Hinton writes:
Though historic Chinese language poets and philosophers didn’t describe it in these scientific phrases, this identical sense of consciousness because the Cosmos open to itself was an working assumption for them — although maybe right here existence is a greater phrase than Cosmos, because it suggests the sense of all actuality as a single tissue. This existence-tissue is the central concern of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (sixth century B.C.E.) — the seminal work in Taoism, the religious department of Chinese language philosophy that finally developed into Ch’an Buddhism. Lao Tzu referred to as that existence-tissue Tao, which initially meant “Means,” as in a highway or pathway. However Lao Tzu used it to explain the empirical Cosmos as a single residing tissue that’s inexplicably generative… an ontological pathway by which issues emerge from the existence-tissue as distinct types, evolve by means of their lives, after which vanish again into that tissue, solely to be reworked and reemerge in new types. It’s a majestic and nurturing Cosmos, but additionally a refugee Cosmos: all change and transformation, every of the ten thousand issues in perpetual flight, all the time on its manner some other place.
It’s exactly as a result of we’re pilgrims of mortality that we so lengthy for refuge and belonging, for one thing to stability the presence that we’re with the void out of which we got here and into which we are going to return. Hinton writes:
The abiding aspiration of religious and inventive apply in historic China was to domesticate consciousness as that existence-tissue Cosmos open to itself, woke up to itself: itself, listening to and touching itself, tasting and smelling itself, and likewise pondering itself, feeling itself — all within the singular methods made doable by the individuality of every explicit individual. That is consciousness within the open, wild and woven into the generative Cosmos: wholesale belonging.
[…]
At its deepest stage, the tissue of Tao is described by that cosmology when it comes to two basic parts: Absence (無) and Presence (有). Presence is just the empirical universe, the ten thousand issues in fixed transformation, and Absence is the generative void from which this ever-changing realm of Presence perpetually emerges. And so, Tao is the generative course of by means of which all issues come up and move away — Absence burgeoning forth into the good transformation of Presence… The ideas of Absence and Presence are merely an method to the elemental nature of issues. Ultimately, after all, they’re the identical: Presence grows out of and returns to Absence and is due to this fact all the time a manifestation of it. Or to state it extra exactly, Absence and Presence are merely other ways of seeing Tao: both as a single formless tissue that’s someway all the time generative, or as that tissue in its ten thousand distinct and all the time altering types.
We now know this to be not solely a religious reality however a scientific reality — an equation written into the physics and chemistry of what happens when we die. Poetry, too, performs with this equivalence of absence and presence. As a result of it “articulates the vacancy surrounding the phrases,” Hinton observes, it “infuses on a regular basis expertise with that generative tissue of vacancy” and, in doing so, reveals enlightenment as the essential cloth of our existence in “an unlimited and detached Cosmos, a Cosmos that’s in the long run impervious to our makes an attempt at knowledge.” He displays:
A poem is just not merely about its obvious content material — the actual life-experience described within the poem — because it appears from the angle of our personal cultural assumptions, which is the view we see in a translation of such a poem. It’s, as a substitute, concerning the vacancy surrounding it, every poem revealing that vacancy in a singular manner. And what’s that vacancy? It’s, lastly, the wild existence-tissue Cosmos open to itself, woke up to itself within the type of human consciousness.
Practically a century after the titanic poet Muriel Rukeyser noticed that “however confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole,” Hinton provides:
Nonetheless confused and unenlightened our lives could seem, nonetheless blind to that on a regular basis enlightenment we could also be — we’re all the time already wild consciousness within the open, all the time already the Cosmos conscious of itself, woke up to itself.
[…]
This awakening is the character of on a regular basis expertise, the very cloth of our lives, for within the precise second of pure notion, there is no such thing as a self concerned. If we glance intently at what occurs in consciousness, we discover nothing greater than the perceptual expertise itself. It is just upon reflection afterward that we describe it as an “I” listening to — an outline dictated not by expertise itself, however by a physique of philosophical assumptions.
Lao Tzu himself captured this as one of many many paradoxes the Tao Te Ching invitations into consciousness:
When you aren’t freed from your self
how will you ever turn out to be your self?Surrender self-reflection
and also you’re quickly enlightened.
Surrender self-definition
and also you’re quickly obvious.Realizing not-knowing is lofty.
Not figuring out not-knowing is affliction.The Tao of heaven…
by no means speaks
and so solutions completely.
Within the the rest of Awakened Cosmos, Hinton leans on Tu Fu’s most interesting poems to look at the fundaments of reminiscence and identification, the position of generative vacancy in creativity, the best way language each limits and liberates our consciousness, and the way we make which means in a meaningless universe. Complement it with a poem about our cosmic destiny and non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson’s “Center of the Universe,” then revisit Ursula Ok. Le Guin’s magnificent more-than-translation of the Tao Te Ching.
