TO RECEIVE THE LOVE OF THE SUN
In the spring of 1689, the Japanese poet Bashō set forth from his home near Edo (Tokyo) on a nearly 1500-mile journey by foot and horseback to the northernmost prefectures of his country. Bashō's journey took over two years and resulted in his best known haibun, a combination of prose and haiku, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Already firmly established as Japan's foremost literary figure, Bashō eschewed the comforts and trappings of his fame and remained what he had been throughout his career: a devoted wanderer. "The gods seemed to have possessed my soul and turned it inside out, and roadside images seemed to invite me from every corner, so that it was impossible for me to stay idle at home." (1966, p. 97)
The poet and essayist Jane Hirshfield zeroes in on the connection between Bashō's propensity for travel and his art, "A wanderer all his life, both in body and spirit, Bashō concerned himself less with destination than with the quality of the traveler's attention." (2015, p. 52) The "quality of attention" referred to by Hirschfield is not simple observation; it is in a very real sense transformative way of seeing. It enables the observer to perceive beyond and through the apparent, literal world and into what depth psychologists might call the archetypal realm. At a time in which a rational orientation towards the world is increasingly predominant, the capacity to see through literalisms is underdeveloped and therefore of immense countervailing importance for the health of the individual and the society at large. We recognize this quality of attention in verses such as this:
How could anyone believe
that anything in this world
is only what it appears to be—
that anything is ever final
Mary Oliver
and this:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
William Blake
Inspired by Bashō and poets such as Mary Oliver, William Blake, Robinson Jeffers, and others and intrigued by the link between the nature poet's particular type of attention and James Hillman's depth psychological concept of "seeing through", I composed my own haibun derived from a decidedly less arduous journey, a 90-minute stroll through my garden. Aside from being thoroughly enjoyable, the experience did shed light upon the connection between a "poetic" quality of attention and making soul in a Hillmanian sense as well as ensouling, or reanimating, the world. In this paper, I will reflect upon my creative process for the project and suggest that the wandering and "seeing through" of the poet have an important, even redemptive role to play in our historical moment.
Of Wandering and Attention
While the haibun form is a new discovery for me, the act of wandering through nature with no particular aim other than to see things differently and feel connected with the other than human world is an old habit. Ten years ago I wrote in the following in a personal essay:
"Years ago, I started taking slow walks in the hills to decompress after work. I stop to watch ants going about their business, or to examine the delicate patterns of wildflowers. On occasion I become so absorbed in observation that I simply forget myself, forget time, forget place. These moments bring with them a deep sense of peace and connection, awareness that all life is inextricably linked. In these moments, I am reverent." (2009, p.12)
Jennifer Davis Michael, writing on the inspiration the contemporary poet Mary Oliver drew from the 18th and 19th century poet and artist William Blake, speaks to the state I would occasionally and quite by accident stumble into in the California hills during my young adulthood. A reverent attitude, Davis Michael suggests, is not just a hallmark of this capacity to "look through", but a prerequisite for arrival.
"Oliver's adoption of Blake as a mentor suggests a desire to look through, not merely at, the things of this world. Looking through, however, comes only after looking at them with reverence, and resisting what Douglas Burton-Christie calls 'the impulse to domesticate.'" (2011)
This brief reference to "the impulse to domesticate" hints at a reason for the nature poet's propensity to wander. The origins of the word domestic are "of the house". The house represents our realm, our locus of comfort, safety, and control, our sense of order and value. The writer who domesticates his subject removes it from its native habitat, takes it out of context, and inevitably misunderstands it (or comes to an incomplete understanding). The wandering poet leaves her domicile precisely because it is known and safe and comfortable. Hillman's concept of psychologizing, which he uses interchangeably with "seeing through", has a similar goal. "Rather than increase of certainty there is a spread of mystery, which is both the precondition and the consequence of revelation." (1977, p. 142)
Not every nature poet goes to such geographical lengths as Bashō, but in general we find a restlessness in poets like Oliver and Blake, William Stafford and Annie Dillard, Walt Whitman and Gary Snyder. In their line of work, one does not "choose" the subject of one's attention, one is chosen by it. Oliver did not set out to write about a grasshopper in The Summer Day or an otter in Almost a Conversation. In my project, I was chosen by alder, robin, ant, daffodil, and fern; I had no forethought nor specific intention to observe and write about these particular beings. To wander is to carry the desire and openness to meet subjects in their own environs, on their own terms. To wander is to work with what arises and to do so with humility and reverence.
The "soft", open attentiveness of the wander can quickly transition to the focused, intensely relational absorption that is the true wellspring of the nature poet's art. This is where looking at transforms into looking through.
Jung's Nothing-But and Hillman's Soul Making
The emphasis on rationality ushered in by the scientific revolution represented a seismic shift in the way in which human beings perceived the world around them. In the 17th and 18th centuries, sense perception that could be measured and quantified began to be valued over and increasingly at the exclusion of any perception that was deemed subjective. The development and honing of the rational mind has led to giant leaps of scientific understanding and the technological explosion that gathers steam by the minute, yet it has also led to what C. G. Jung called lives of "nothing-but". Speaking to English clergy in 1939, Jung stated,
"Life is too rational, there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life... And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill—this awful, grinding, banal life in which they are “nothing but." (1977, p. 274)
Jung suggested that our overly literal, rationalistic worldview has led to a flattening, an inability to "see through" appearances, beyond the quantifiable, the measureable, the apparent. The end result is a world dangerously lacking in meaning, depth, mystery, and genuine relationship (because relationship, too, is nourished and revealed by poetic attention). We might say that it is the role of the artist in general to act as a counterbalance to a society reduced by its very reductionism, but I believe creatives who wander the physical and psychological wilds and edge zones carry a particularly strong medicine for our times.
Perceiving the Archetypal
We might ask, what is it that the nature poet is seeing through to? From a depth psychological perspective, the poet is glimpsing past appearances to the archetypal substructure of reality. The poet is viewing the world not just literally but also symbolically. This is the antithesis of "nothing but". To view the world symbolically is to see that a circle is a circle, and to see that a circle may be an image of wholeness, of seasonality, of the journey and return, etc. Jung theorized that the psyche contains innumerable archetypes, or psychic forms or patterns that are universal yet that manifest uniquely in each individual (i.e. the shadow, the anima, the great mother). Jungian analyst and scholar Michael Conforti draws a parallel between the archetypes of the psyche and the patterns so apparent in the natural world. "The relationships among instincts, archetypes, and patterns are important to any investigation involving the emergence of form. Patterns can be viewed as material representations of archetypal, informational fields expressed in space and time." (2013, p. 1)
Many of the patterns we observe in nature have analogous archetypal forms within the psyche, and for this reason closely observing nature is one of the primary ways in which humans have gained insight into their own inner world. For example, we observe in nature that in the fall, deciduous leaves gradually lose their color and fall off. This process is known as abscission, and it occurs by the plant growing a callous between the main plant and the leaf. Psychologically, we can all relate to the process of abscission when we have to say goodbye to a loved one or a stage of life. We may naturally callous over to a certain extent, removing our psychic energy, to protect ourselves from psychological pain. The natural world provides a mirror for our psyches; it is an inexhaustible universe of pattern that reflects our own inner universe.
Re-animating the World
As valuable as the psychological insights drawn from being attentive to the natural world can be, there is potentially a more profound consequence. For the majority of human history, it was simply taken for granted that the world itself and all of her creatures had souls. It was not until the agricultural revolution and the attendant complexification of human civilization that a more reflective consciousness and new religious ideas took root that gradually expelled the soul from all non-humans. Without speculating here on the exact nature of the soul, it is evident that this de-souling of the world has had a profound effect on our attitudes and behavior toward non-human life and has contributed to a widespread sense of alienation, of not-belonging to the world that is our only home.
The process of seeing through is a two-way street; we see in the other-than-human world a reflection of our psyche (derived from the Greek word for soul), but we also and simultaneously project our psyche into the world. We, in a sense, en-soul, or re-animate the world. Jung observed this phenomenon in his exhaustive studies of the medieval alchemists. He saw that in their careful, reverent work with their materials, the alchemists unconsciously projected their own psyche into the material and "redeemed" it. The alchemists believed that divinity was "trapped" within matter, and their opus was in effect to liberate it.
"Alchemy is interested in the fate and manifest redemption of the substances, for in them the divine soul lies captive and awaits the redemption that is granted to it at the moment of release. . . For the alchemist, the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. "(1952, p. 312)
The cultural ecologist David Abram points to another key point: without an animate world, there is no reciprocity, no dialog, no communion.
"To define another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to actively engage us and to provoke our senses; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being... Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world." (2017, p. 56).
This is, perhaps, where all of our wandering wants to take us: into conversation and into relationship.
References
Abrams, D. (2017) The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more than human world. New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1996).
Bashō, M. (1966) The narrow road to the deep north and other travel sketches. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Conforti, M. (2013) Field, form, and fate: patterns in mind, nature, & psyche. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books.
Hirshfield, J. (2015) Ten windows: how great poems transform the world. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Jung, C. G. (1954). Religious Ideas in Alchemy. In R. F. C. Hull (Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 3). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1977). The Symbolic Life. In R. F. C. Hull (Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 18.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Michael, J. D. (2011). Eternity in the moment: William Blake and Mary Oliver. Blake 45(2).
Morse, C. (2009) Cracks in the pavement. Lulu Press.