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A HEIGHTENED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
\nJames Lawless<\/p>\n
Our thoughts are often clouded and gnarled by our environment; our concentration and feelings can be affected by whether we are at ease or not, or by the attitude of peers etc. So how does one \u201cclear\u201d the mind, as it were, for the purpose of poetic receptivity?
\nMeditative preparedness, which Wordsworth talks about in his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798) as a way of gaining poetic knowledge, could also be latched onto by the reader as a way of being in a state of readiness for reception of a text. Barthes (1967) talks of the consumer of poetry encountering the word frontally i.e., no longer guided in advance with rational intention. It achieves a condition where, like in a dictionary, it can live without its article i.e., it is reduced to a sort of zero state. The word is a category, it initiates discourse. The poem is \u201cfull of gaps, of discontinuous speech, full of lights, filled with absences\u201d (p.38).
\nAccording to Indian thought, knowledge is different when one is in different states of consciousness. It cannot be removed from the situation of the knower. Rilke represents consciousness as a pyramid, with everyday literal perceptions at the apex, and the transcendental at the base (Yarrow, 1985:2). A heightened state of consciousness enables us to create form, patterns and meaning, just as they appear on the point of happening. It is a condition where action is held in poise, like the balance of a trapeze artist. It leaves one open to total receptivity. It is what James Joyce meant, when he spoke of \u201cepiphanies\u201d.
\nHow does one achieve this state? Yarrow suggests a method which involves a progressive reduction of effort, until one is simply conscious of being conscious, alert without engaging in activity. He mentions Transcendental Meditation as one way of achieving this wholeness.1 However, he is quick to point out that the restful condition achieved is not \u201cquiescent… but rather a vital part of tuning up the mechanism by which we interact with the world\u201d (p.4).
\nHe discloses how the writer sometimes cuts the reader off from his normal assumptions of the world by shock devices.2 The reader of course must negate a priori beliefs and create a willingness to think otherwise. Thus, as Yarrow points out, a transformation takes place, where one global-view is displaced by another, and the reader is ready to make sense of the world anew. \u201cIt is the experience of the potential of consciousness which can then project itself onto the organisation of physical and verbal relationships\u201d (p.7). This attempt, to use rationality to go beyond the limitations of language, has echoes in it of surrealists or even of mystics
\nThe goal is to discover a more extensive kind of being-in-language, and the conjunction of self, language and world both as process-in-formation and as a nodal point of that ongoing creative process is what links the preoccupation of writers with that of philosophers and mystics (p.8).
\nHowever, the mystical analogy, if constricted in a Christian sense, could be interpreted by a non-religious person as \u201cpassing the buck\u201d of the unknowable, and that which cannot be expressed, to God (cf. San Juan de la Cruz).3 Nevertheless, his reference to Transcendental Meditation as a means of achieving a heightened state of consciousness appears to have some validity: while in this state \uf02d one which, as he points out (p.16), is common to many artists \uf02d EEG readings indicate that brain-wave functioning is at its most coherent. Thus, in order to achieve a gestalt, we are confronted with the paradox of withdrawing consciousness from an object so as to be more aware of its potentiality, \u201cand in the process to sharpen and hone its focus\u201d (p.9) (cf. Keats\u2019 Negative Capability, or Hopkins\u2019 Inscape). It must not be forgotten that understanding is an organic process, and that the physical and unvoiced mantra effect of TM is not unlike the rhythmic ritual of early poetic recitation, giving insights to a \u201ccommunal or archetypal nature, as also to a perception of linguistic resonances much fuller than surface levels of meaning\u201d (p.10). It is worth considering in this context, the Vedic view of pure language, as an accurately encoded system of vibratory equivalents, which physically realise the world.
\nNevertheless, if such methods fail, and one does not succeed in achieving such a transcendental state, all hope is not lost. One could lie in a darkened cell with a stone on one\u2019s belly, as was the preparatory custom of ancient Irish filidhe prior to composition. Or failing that, one could take Stephen Spender\u2019s (1962) advice in The Making of a Poem, where he cites Schiller\u2019s practical technique of placing rotten apples under the lid of his desk (Vernon, 1970:62). This had the effect of banishing all other distractions, and enabled him to channel his concentration totally into the one area of poetic composition.<\/p>\n
NOTES
\n1 Yarrow further maintains that TM works, not only because it \u201ctunes up\u201d the mechanism, but also, because it \u201csolves\u201d the problem of language itself, \u201cby passing the referential level altogether\u201d (p.15). Such a state is not dissimilar to the Zen Buddhist non-judgmental awakening, as an aid to a non-biased view of the world, a process, which, as Marilyn French points out (1985:135), never allows \u201cthe \u2018I\u2019 to fare without the \u2018non-I.\u201d\u2019 Octavio Paz (1970) cites Buddha
\nOnly the man free of his necessity and the tyranny of authority will be able to contemplate fully his own nothingness.
\n2 The subversive power of poetry could be considered in the context of Walt Whitman\u2019s use of religious language and poetic structure in Song of Myself (1855) to undermine prevailing dogma: \u201cThe scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayers.\u201d He mocks the sacred scent of incense, preferring the natural smell of human perspiration. A similar opposition to institutions is also evident in the Irish Fenian cycle of poems, where Ossian converses with St. Patrick. Ossian, like Whitman, prefers the golden rays of the sun as opposed to the metal shine of a chalice, and he berates Patrick for his subservience to the bell, summoning one to a cloistered world. Austin Clarke recaptures the mood and early Irish metres of the original poem (Agallamh na Sean\u00f3rach {The Colloquy of the Old Men}) in his rendition: The Blackbird of Derrycairn (Mahon, 1972:65)
\nStop, stop and listen for the bough top
\nIs whistling and the sun is brighter
\nThan God\u2019s own shadow in the cup now!
\nForget the hour-bell. Mournful matins
\nWill sound as well, Patric, at nightfall.
\n3 A distinction must be made between mystical (in a Christian sense) and visionary. The latter, as Levi (1990) points out, is more personal and more rooted in earthy experience. While not denying the allegorical beauty of the poetry of San Juan de la Cruz, his drawing of the way to the soul\u2019s union with God appears today in the words of Levi (p.88) \u201clike one of those Victorian games of snakes and ladders constructed for children by Bible societies\u201d. Dante is visionary, but as Levi shows, his Hell is theatrical, a literary device, not meant to be taken literally. Blake is visionary, despite his \u201cheretical\u201d reference to a \u201chook-nosed Christ,\u201d in his poem, Jerusalem. Eliot\u2019s The Waste Land is visionary, although it is interpreted by some as pessimistic. The iconoclastic Kavanagh is visionary, particularly in his early Monaghan poems, where his vision of poetry is trapped by the \u201cpeasant\u2019s prayer\u201d, just as the apparently hedonistic Larkin is visionary when he is at his loneliest as in High Windows.<\/p>\n
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From: Clearing The Tangled Wood: Poetry as a Way of Seeing the World<\/p>\n
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