[ad_1]
Language isn’t the content material of thought however the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our pondering, afloat on the present of feeling and time. When the vessel turns into too small to carry what we pour into it, language spills into poetry.
On this respect, poetry serves the identical perform as prayer: to provide form and voice to our unstated and infrequently unspeakable hopes, fears, and interior tremblings — the tenderest substance of our lives, to be held between the palms and handed from hand to compassionate hand. Poetry thus turns into an instrument of self-transcendence — an instrument that, in Adrienne Wealthy’s abiding phrases, “can break open locked chambers of chance, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge want.”
That perform of poetry because the language of the unsaid is what the Canadian poet and Native American tradition scholar Robert Bringhurst explores within the ultimate pages of his altogether fascinating e-book The Tree of That means: Language, Thoughts and Ecology (public library).
A century after William James positioned the ineffable atop his record of the 4 options of transcendence, Bringhurst displays on the variations between English and the native language of the Haida folks of British Columbia, and writes:
It’s not mandatory that the identical issues needs to be ineffable in all languages. It is just mandatory that in every language loads of issues needs to be so: unsayable, or, on the very least, unsaid.
It appears to me {that a} form of speechlessness — the lack to say a fairly important variety of issues — is definitely constructed into each language. However language itself is a self-transcending mechanism. It tries, and lets us strive, to say what it could’t. The survival of poetry relies on the failure of language. The rationale language exists, it appears to me, is that poetry — the resonance of being — wants it. Should you dwell in a spot that hasn’t been pillaged and ruined, the silence of language’s failure, and of poetry’s success, is current and vivid virtually all over the place you hear, virtually all over the place you look.
Complement with Muriel Rukeyser on what poetry does for us, David Whyte on the facility of poetry and silence as a portal to presence, and this glorious story of how poetry saves lives, then savor three life-giving poems: “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower” by Rainer Maria Rilke, “Singularity” by Marie Howe, and “Antidotes to Worry of Loss of life” by Rebecca Elson.
[ad_2]
Source link