It took me a while to figure out what I could say on this topic.. was I going to define "mystery" or "wonder" or try to figure out what "renewal of the spirit" means,.

Those were not the approaches I wanted… I went back to a set of poems that I have loved for years.. the Naylor Sonnets written by Kenneth Boulding… sonnets that are inspired by the writings of James Naylor, a 17^th C Quaker martyr.

I always encourage my students to use titles because titles focus the reader or the listener, or we hope that they do.. and lead the audience to begin thinking about the subject..

So.. the title of this talk is..

Seven Paradoxes and a definition  

I believe that poets are almost always trying to say the inexpressible, trying to make meaningful connections among and between ideas, events, relationships, experiences. We are always trying to make connections between the image and the idea, trying to make metaphors that create connections. Metaphors that help listeners and readers say "I see"… "I understand".. ( and there is a metaphor because "to Understand" is not literally to see, but we use language that connects vision and cognition) I also believe that faith ( however we want to interpret that very loaded word) is both necessary and inevitable in this process.

Here’s the fourth paradox, it is at those moments when we most "lose" ourselves in "that quick thaw of soul that liquefies the ancient bars" we become most in touch with the larger Mystery… "the burning oneness" We can never will this moment, we cannot consciously create it, but we can through certain practices open ourselves to those moments. I love the word practice here.. with all it’s connotations of "drill" and "exercises" and "repetition" because it often is the actual roteness of these practices that frees the creative parts of our minds to connect with the larger mystery. It is only when we can play a piece of music from memory that our conscious minds are free to let the Art happen. It is only when we have memorize the lines of a play that we can actually begin to inhabit the character who says those lines, and it is only when we memorize the sonnet form that we can write sonnets that are poetry. We use the form to allow the Mystery to move through us.

Here’s the fifth paradox… learning a form and a structure, frees the creative mind enough to embrace the wonder and the mystery

Both Mystery and Wonder incorporate the notion of unanswered questions. We say "It’s a Mystery." or "I wonder" when we do not understand something, or are puzzled by something. Mysteries and wonders are things we ponder on, think about. Once we solve a Mystery, it is no longer mysterious. Once something is understood, it is not longer a "wonder."

Here is the seventh paradox: this source instructs us to have an openness to the forces that create and uphold life, but as one of my students pointed out recently nature contains as many forces of destruction and death as those that create. Animals die in storms, fires destroy forests, and regardless of how much we would like to blame some of that destruction on human intervention, we cannot really deny that the forces are there. Does this source tell us to ignore those destructive forces? Perhaps, and I would say we do so at our peril because we can learn much from those forces.. As John Greenleaf Whittier says "Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire the still small voice of calm " Whittier’s reference is the Old Testament Prophet Elijah in the first book of Kings

I would propose that those destructive forces are inevitable, and that our task as creative people is to acknowledge those forces, but to move through those forces to find the sound of silence at the end. That sound of silence might be the void left by death, it might be the silence an abandoned and destroyed village, it might be the silence left after the forest fire has moved on.. But those forces of destruction can become, paradoxically, the forces that "uphold life" if we as creative people are willing to wait for the silence. I think of Dylan Thomas’ great poem, "The Refusal to Mourn the death of a Child by Fire in London" in which he says, "After the first death, there is no other" or Anne Bradstreet, the American Puritan Poet who wrote in the early 17^th Century about the loss of her house in a fire.

While she acknowledes later in the poem that as a good Puritan, she must be thinking of her Heavenly home and not her earthly one, she mourns that no one will sit at her table in that house again, no one will sleep in that bed. We feel both Thomas’ great grief and anger, and Bradstreet’s pain through their words, just as we feel the agonies and bitterness of war through Wilfred Owen’s work. This paradox is that in allowing readers, years and centuries later to feel the forces of destruction through the words of the poets, the forces that "uphold life" grow out of those forces of destruction. These poets break our hearts while they value and engage in the forces of creativity.

which brings me to the meaning of the word "paradox" itself.. the word’s origin is Greek.. the prefix ‘para’ means beyond.. ( as in parapsychology or paranormal) and dox from the Greek "dokein" meaning opinion or belief..

So.. the literal meaning of "paradox" is "beyond belief"..

The best word for something beyond belief, it seems to me, is "faith"..

In our quest to be part of the greater, unseen, unliteral world of creative Power and Mystery, we must take a great deal on faith.

Poets are always operating in the world of faith because if we did not we would never write anything. If we waited until we were sure, until we had evidence that what we were going to do would work, we would never write. We must have faith in our own abilities, faith in our ideas, faith that what we are supposed to write will become clear as we practice the craft.

So, the world of paradox is the world of faith ….faith in something larger than ourselves..

A writer friend of mine used to tell me whenever she began a new writing project that it felt like stepping off a cliff…she would say the only way she could begin was that she had faith that the Universe would catch her before she crashed on the metaphorical ( tho’ very real) rocks below.

 I’d like to come back to the poem I opened with

A logical positivist might respond to Boulding’s poem with a discussion of brain functions, or a discussion of sensory perception, or the presentation of evidence that shows that a belief in god (or as Boulding puts it "some Thing that moves among the stars) is an outmoded survival tool, like a vestigial tail. All of those ideas really beg the questions, which are what is that connects us to the rest of the world, and what it that leads humans to be creative? The short answers to these questions is "we don’t know." We don’t know what that connection we feel really is… the traditional religious explanations are all metaphors for the un-nameable..

And yet, in one way or another at one time or another, outside in the mountains, holding a child on our laps, or in the experience of great pain, mourning and sadness many of us have experienced "the burning oneness binding everything."

And so finally, I’d like to end with one of my own poems that seems, at least in my mind, to address some of these questions…