This is a limbo of desolation and despair, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s phrase: ‘With what I most enjoy contented least.’ Endurance is all; now there is nothing else. A time of bleakness can also be a time of pruning. Sometimes when our minds are dispersed and scattered, this pruning cuts away all the false branching where our passion and energy were leaking out. While it is painful to experience and endure this, a new focus and clarity emerge. The light that is hard won offers the greatest illumination. A gift wrestled from bleakness will often confer a sense of sureness and grounding of the self, a strengthening proportionate to the travail of its birth. The severity of Nothingness can lead to beauty. Where life had gone stale, transfiguration occurs. The ruthless winter clearance of spirit quietly leads to springtime of new possibility. Perhaps Nothingness is the secret source from which all beginning springs.
There are also times of malaise, when life moves into the stillness of quiet death. Though you function externally, something is silently dying inside you, something you can no longer save. You are not yet able to name what you are losing, but you sense that its departure cannot be halted. Those who know you well can hear behind your words the deadened voice, the monotone of unremedied sadness. Your lost voice cannot be quieted. It becomes audible despite your best efforts to mask it. Sometimes even from a stranger one overhears the pathos of the lost voice: it may speak with passion on a fascinating topic, yet its mournful music seeps out, suggesting the no man’s land where the speaker is now marooned. Put flippantly, no-one ever really knows what they are saying. The adventure of voice into silence and silence into voice: this is the privilege and burden of the poet.
T
HE
V
OICE OF THE
P
OET
Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find
Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing.
LUCRETIUS,
POETRY IS WHERE LANGUAGE ATTAINS ITS GREATEST PRECISION and richest suggestion. The poem is a shape of words cut to evoke a world the reader can complete. The poem is shaped to enter and inhabit forgotten or not yet discovered alcoves in the reader’s heart. The vocational quest of the poet is the discovery of her own voice. The poet never imitates or repeats poems already in the archive of the tradition. The poet wants to drink from the well of origin: to write the poem that has not yet been written. In order to enter this level of originality, the poet must reach beyond the chorus of chattering voices that people the surface of a culture. Furthermore, the poet must reach deeper inward; go deeper than the private hoard of voices down to the root-voice. It is here that individuality has the taste of danger, vitality and vulnerability. Here the creative is not forced or appropriated from elsewhere. Here creativity has the necessity of inevitability; this is the threshold where imagination engages raw, unformed experience. This is the sense you have when you read a true poem. You know it could not be other than it is. Its self and its form are one. There is nothing predictable here. For the poet there is a sense of frightening vulnerability, for anything can come, anything can happen. The unknown outside and the unknown interior can conceive anything. The poet becomes the passing womb for something that wants to be born, wants to become visible and live independently in the world. A true poem has a fully formed, autonomous individuality. Keats says: ‘Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but with its subject’ (Letter, 3 Feb. 1818).
It is interesting that true poetic beauty emerges when the poet is absolutely faithful to the uniqueness of her own voice. Beauty holds faith with the deepest signature of individuality; it graces the passion of individuality when it risks itself beyond its own frontiers, out to where the depth of the abyss calls. The danger of that exposure seems to call beauty. Here the gaze of familiarity falls away and repetition arrests. Something original and new wants to come through. Beauty is individual and original, a presence from the source. She responds to the cry of the original voice. Keats also said: ‘Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity . . . if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’ (Letter, 27 Feb. 1818).
Silence is not just the space or medium through which sound comes. Rather silence comes to voice in sound. The primeval beauty of silence becomes audible in the elemental music of the earth and in our music of instrument and voice. At the core of the world and at the core of the soul is silence that ripples with the music of beauty and the whisperings of the eternal.
