Chinese Poem

I find this poem to be especially moving.  It was written by T'ao Ch'ien, a Chinese poet who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries AD.

Moving House

My old desire to live in the Southern Village

Was not because I had taken a fancy to the house.

But I heard it was a place of simple-minded men

With whom it were a joy to spend the mornings and evenings.

Many years I had longed to settle here:

Now at last I have managed to move house.

I do not mind if my cottage is rather small

So long as there's room enough for bed and mat.

Often and often the neighbors come to see me

And with brave words discuss the things of old.

Rare writings we read together and praise:

Doubtful meanings we examine together and settle.


I think this poem gets at the goal of this blog: a place to meditate on "writings" and "doubtful meanings."

The Mystery of Poetry

A poem is not a riddle, it is a mystery about a mystery.  A mystery is a reality that is beyond one’s understanding.  In a riddle, the answer is mysterious only in its relation to the clues, the answer is not itself considered mysterious.  And once one has the answer, the clues are no longer mysterious in their relation to one another.  So a riddle is demystified by its answer, whereas the poem is made mysterious by its subject.  A poem should be about something mysterious.  In other words, it should be about something real.  The poet does not demystify his subject; he is meant to make one aware of the mystery that is already there.  Wonder is his poetic inspiration.

Reality is constantly flowing: from one person to another through words and gestures; from a flower to a bee; from a cricket to a person; from the sun to a towel to a cat.  There is a constant giving and receiving among beings.  Aside from these beings, there is the reality of what is given and received.  Words and light are special, because they are physical instantiations of the regular flow between beings(1).    

The poem is a capturing of what is given and received between the poet and another being(2).  This capturing itself becomes a being, a poem, which is a testament to the relationality of existence.  It is no surprise that poets deal in analogies, allegories, metaphors and similes, because they are the tools with which to discover existing relationships.  So the poem as poem is relational, and the content of the poem deals in relations(3).  This relation of nature and content allows a poem to stand on its own as a viable being.

(1) In the first chapter of his Gospel, John uses the “Word” and “light” as two of three themes for understanding God, which is not surprising, given the fact that God is pure relationality. The third theme is "life," which is a standard for good literature.

(2) A poem is, among other things, instantiated awe.

(3) This is similar to when Jesus reads from Isaiah at the synagogue, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” (Lk 4:18)  He is doing what he is reading by reading what he is doing.  His purpose and action are one.

What is Meaning?

To determine a word’s meaning, we use a dictionary.  The dictionary often gives us several definitions, and we pick one out according to the context of the word we’ve read.  So the meaning of a word is based on context and identity (definition).

When we say a gesture means a lot to us, it is because it has importance and applies to us in a specific way, at a specific time, in a specific context.

When we have a meaningful relationship with a person, it is because we share many meaningful things with him or her.  We are within one another’s context.  A husband and wife share children, who, as persons, have a great capacity to provide meaning.

It is unjust when a thing has the identity and context to mean a great deal to us, but doesn’t.  Ignoring one’s children is an injustice of this kind.  

There is a network of things that ought to mean a great deal to us, and a network of things that actually mean a great deal to us.  The more these two networks are in sync, the more true meaning we have in our lives.

Our network of valid meaning is both determined for us and by us.  We may choose to have children, but we don’t choose who our children are.  It is a matter of responsibility (justice) to accept the aspect of our choice that we did not determine.

For Christians, the Word of God is the "meaning of life."  He is the Creator of the network of meaning, “without him was made nothing that was made,”  and he is the cornerstone of meaning itself, “in Him all things hold together.” (Jn 1:3; Col 1:17).  

For something to be meaningful, it must point beyond itself:  A word is always spoken about something; a person discovers meaning when he dedicates himself to some cause; the Word of God points to the One who spoke Him, the Father.  Our “meaning of life” is the thing toward which our whole being points.  

According to the word of God, a person is in the image of God.  His very existence, then, points to God, and all his meaning comes from God.  This is a part of the network of meaning he has not chosen.  It is up to him to choose God as the meaning of his life.  

The Power of Poetry and Symbolism

A symbol is a true representation of a thing, and stands in the thing’s place.  Just as a one can be tempted to take out bad news on the messenger, so too do we often react to symbols as we would toward what they represent. The emotions and associations that a person has when he hears, say, the word “sunset,” can be the same as he has when he sees an actual sunset, though often the emotions are, understandably, not as powerful.

Often times, a word turns into a cliche, and ceases to have the power to stand in for the reality it represents.  A person can hear the word “sunset” and not think of an actual sunset.  This can be because he has heard the word so many times that it has lost meaning for him, or it can be because the word is used by the speaker in an uninspiring context, or it can simply be a lack of effort in the listener.

It is the poet’s job to revivify words, to bring them back to their original meaning for the reader and listener.  He must use words within a new and beautiful context, so that the reader once more encounters reality through the symbol that is the word, and encounters the word itself. 

Poetry, and this can be said about fine art in general, is the use of symbol to encounter reality and then symbol.  For poetry to remain poetry, however, emphasis must be placed on the encounter with reality first, then on symbol.  The more reality is ignored for symbol, as happens in modern art, the less symbol remains itself, because symbol is the true representation of a thing.  The less symbol represents something outside itself, the less it is a symbol, and the less it is poetry or fine art.

Poetry shapes the way people interact, because it shapes their understanding of the words they use.  Love comes about through word and deed.  Poetry shapes the words used for love, and shapes the way a person receives and gives love through words.  Without poetry, the person can be stuck in a world of cliches, of dead words, and no word given to him by another can make him aware that he is loved.  Nor will any word he uses be a sincere expression of his own love.  When poetry is doing its job, it is furrowing the soil of the heart to make it ready for love.

An Attempt at the Ordered Life

It can be difficult to figure out what is important in life and what isn’t.  There is always a disconnect between what is important in reality, and what is important to us.  When the two match up, however, we are able to place our spiritual and physical power in the right area, and the result can be magnificently beautiful.

The reason why it is often so difficult to get our priorities in order is because we have inordinate desires that drive us in mistaken directions.  An easy example of this is the greedy person who betrays his friend to make money.  His greed leads him to prioritize money over friendship, and so he makes a costly mistake, not realizing that in the end friends are actually more valuable than money.

But wealth has a certain sheen that friendship does not necessarily have.  The value of friendship is discovered incrementally, often in imperceptible ways that one can’t control or hold in his hands.  Money, however, is easy to see and use.  It has a sort of immediate value that is more glamorous than the value of a friend.

Disordered desires are in the will and emotions, so they need an outside source to regulate them.  The intellect is this source.  With the intellect, we are able to reach past our own disordered desires and discover what exactly is the proper order of things.

Where does the intellect find the knowledge to prioritize the goods in our lives?  There are a few sources.  First, we can think about morality, and draw our own conclusions.  This process is invigorating, and can be fruitful, but can also lead us in false directions, because our intellects are limited.  Another way is to speak with people whom we identify as being wise.  The third way is by reading moral philosophers, who have thought a great deal about these issues.  This too, though, can often be based on the musings of men with limited intellects and their own disorders to mix up their thinking. 

The final way to learn to prioritize our lives is by turning to God with an intellectual assent to what he has revealed to us.  This can manifest itself in many ways, depending on the person’s current state in life.  It can mean turning to the Word of God, in which God sets out moral principles to guide us.  God knows that we have limited intellects, and He has given us His Word to help us see things as they are.  We can also turn to the Church, which bears God’s message through time and continually applies eternal principles to the here and now.

The Creative Synthesis

Say we are presented with several images, that are seemingly unrelated.  There are three methods of engaging them intellectually.  First, we can, without thought, say they are unrelated.  Second, we can pretend that we see relations in them that aren’t actually there.  Third, we can discover a deeper unity that wasn’t initially seen.  This last act is what modernist poets like T.S. Eliot ask us to do in poems like “The Wasteland," where the sections of the poem are seemingly unconnected, but are actually connected in a more obscure way.
 

The common principle serves as the light that shines on the images that it gathers together.  Darkness remains in the unthoughtful, unconnected mind.  The intellect is the principle of the person, which finds principles in things and thereby draws them together.  The intellect is the principle of principles.  It is the metaprinciple.  In mathematics there are functions, and these functions produce numbers.  The spirit is on the face of the deep when we encounter the numbers, and come up with the function.  This is a process of induction.  It is, along with deduction, the process by which we come to understand reality.


There are also received ideas, when one takes another's word for it that one thing is the principle of the other.  There is no spirit in this case, but merely acceptance of the movement of another spirit.  We must all move our spirits, and in doing so become human.  We are all meant to be creative, and to discover meaning ourselves.  We can accept principles from others, but must always try to see the truth of them for ourselves.