QUESTING ...
Strange. I’m watching myself prepare to sit
down and write this. A cup of tea placed, carefully, to one side, putting on my
warm black waistcoat as it’s a little cooler today and this awareness of self
makes me realise the need, our need, my need, for ritual; a preparation that’s
needed (why?) for me to address this question.
So, as a starting point I’m aware that
we’re physical beings as well as animals with a capacity to wonder. Why did our
relations, so many years ago, feel impelled to paint animals on cave walls in
Lascaux? I don’t know who first spoke the word sacred, but I feel there’s a
strong sense of it embedded in our psyches and a need not only to express it in a
sound, an Aw, but to share this awe, this O, this gasp, this sigh with others.
But, how to convey a sense of wonder that
moves me, makes me tremble as I would have done before language was born and to
wonder about this with others? Yes, I feel it’s possible to write a religious
poem in the 21st. century, because at our very simplest the sense of
the sacred is, I feel, coiled within our dna.
To be bewildered, in a maze, lost, whether
in wonder or contemplation and to experience a moment of blinding awareness is
to make us hunger for it again and again. It’s an ache for the sense of the
miraculous; a longing to see whose presence flickers as a shadow, thrown on
cave walls by fire.
And is form content? To try and answer this
question I had to interpret the word form into meaning a structure or container
and to interpret the word content into what the container might contain. For
George Herbert and John Donne, in their respective poems ‘The Wreath’ and ‘Holy
Sonnets,' certainty in their faith allowed them to create poems whose outer form
harmonized with their inner meaning. But even then there was uncertainty as
they wrote at the time of the English Civil Wars.
Hafiz, who found in the Ghazal “the
ideal instrument to express the great tension between the opposites that exist
in the world”, also wrote at a time of uncertainty. (fr. Hafiz, Tongue of the Hidden Poems from the Divan, version by Paul
Smith, New Humanity Books 1998). What appeals to me about the Ghazal is the
harmony that is yearned for between heart and mind, feeling and thinking, and
which is brought into unity by love.
Perhaps times of upheaval, religious
struggles, ecological disasters, wars, poverty and fear provide a crucible
whereby deeper levels of understanding are forced on our attention?
Perhaps these words are just another
pattern of black marks on white paper? Perhaps if this paper was folded into an
aeroplane and floated round shops and offices, buses and trains, it would make
more sense?
Back to the question, and is form content?
As I typed the word ‘form’ I thought of a hare, whose presence remains even
when its form is empty. We can imagine a hare because we’ve seen its form, but
how would we know what shape the hare was?
I feel an urge to make poems partly to
remind myself of wonder and use the image-magic of words to conjure the
presence of the hare. I’ve struggled with this question and feel, not envious,
but a sigh that the hare has its form and that it fits the shape of its body.
Dr. Geraldine Green, fr. Is a religious poem possible in the early 21st century? Edited
by David Hart, pub. by Flarestack 2004.
“The question, though, was something else:
What does poetry itself offer us? Not to write about something else – ‘religion’ – but to find in ourselves and in
response to being in the world a language of religious – what? news? sensibility? experience? – by means of poetry.
-
David Hart April 2004
Other contributors:
Gillian Allnutt Anne Cluysenaar
Maura Dooley Predencia Gibbons
David Healey David Head
Michael Hulse Geoffrey Herbert
Michael Laskey Basir Sultan Kazmi
Maggie Sawkins Brenda Lealman
Albert Radcliffe Henry Shukman
Hugo Williams
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