Poetry as Spiritual Exercise

Abstract

In early 1942 the French Algerian writer Max-Pol Fouchet devoted a special double number of his review, Fontaine, to an unusual theme: De la poésie comme exercice spirituel.1 His readers would certainly have recalled Ignatius Loyola's Exercitia spiritualia (1522–1524), a detailed set of meditations designed to lead Catholics on retreat to discern the will of God in their lives and thereby to attend to him first and foremost.2 Holding a copy of the review in their hands, potential readers in Algiers or Paris might well have wondered how poetry could in any way resemble the meditations and prayers that Ignatius had composed and the effects that they could have on them. In some respects, Ignatius bypasses the tradition of contemplatio and consolidates meditatio, in part by absorbing the medieval tradition of consideratio: His pages are profoundly and densely committed to images of the life of Christ and to the practice of finding God everywhere. But could one expect poetry to do anything remotely similar to meditations on hell, the passion, or the resurrection, events that bear on one's eternal soul? Over the thirty days of the “long retreat,” excercitants seek spiritual integration under the guidance of an experienced retreat leader. Yet most poetry, it will be said, does not require non-natural beliefs of any sort in order to be appreciated and, while it may broaden one's consciousness or sympathy, usually does not aim to change the writer's or the reader's life decisively in any particular respect.3When De la poésie comme exercice spirituel was reprinted in 1978 a new literary generation might not have been quite as puzzled. Like those who came before them, these later readers may well have thought of Rimbaud, especially the voyant of Les Illuminations (1886); and they would have also remembered the surrealists, especially André Breton, who sought contact through writing, including automatic writing, with whatever might be beyond the mundane realm.4 Yet some of the new readers may also have recalled books that could not have been known in 1942, among them Georges Bataille's L'Expérience intérieur (1943; translated Inner Experience [1988]) with its longing to breach the line between life and death, and Maurice Blanchot's La part du feu (1949) with its commendation of “literature as experience, which makes fun of art and is ready to ruin itself to attain the inaccessible” (1995, 224–25). They might even have thought of Blanchot's more recent claim, made in the aftermath of les événements de mai 1968, that the very act of writing could dissolve the “I,” regarded as a center of power, opening it to a new way in which human beings could be in relation with one another: deferred, mobile, plural, and dispersed (1969, xii).To think of poetry as a spiritual exercise, for the contributors to Fontaine, was to recognize that some of those we call “mystics” have had recourse to poetry in order to express their ecstatic states and, equally, that some poets, including atheists, have used poetry to press beyond conventional or even natural limits.5 Each literary act differs from that of poets writing poems that are also religious meditations, as was practiced in the seventeenth century (by John Donne and Georges de Brébeuf, for example). Instead, the modern insight was to prompt experiences that could be undergone either by way of transcendence or by way of transgression. Just three years after the reprint of the special double number of Fontaine, a book whose title chimed with that of the special number appeared: Pierre Hadot's Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (1981). Yet there is a gulf between the journal and the book. Hadot does not affirm transcendence in any Christian sense and he eschews transgression; rather, he places a welcome emphasis on ancient philosophy, φιλοσοφία, not only as discourse about logic, ethics, physics, and metaphysics but also as a call to bring one's life into conformity with what is being learned in those areas. One might well see that Platonists, Epicureans, and Stoics, among others, sought a transformation of the self by practicing highly coded methods of attending to it—by way of dialogue, overflight, physical definition, premeditation, attention to the present moment, and so on—instead of merely intellectually mastering a doctrine, and that monastic Christians would seek to do the same in their own ways.6 Here, it might be thought, is something that does not fit into the theme of poetry as a spiritual exercise. After all, the pagan exercises, like the Christian ones that were adaptations of them, adhere to strict models, while poetry in the modern age craves originality.Poetry as seeking transcendence or performing acts of transgression in one or another sense of those two fecund nouns has long been a theme of Romanticism and much that has come in its wake (Surrealism, for example). Instead of pursuing it here, I wish to dwell with the spiritual exercises identified by Hadot and place them within the frame of the title of the special double issue of Fontaine.7 One might think, first of all, of specific poems that could be spiritual exercises, lyrics by St. John of the Cross, Hafez, and Ephrem the Syrian, for example.8 They are deeply spiritual, but it is less than clear that the writing of them would close any gap between what each man believes and how he lives. A better example might be George Herbert's The Temple (1633), if only because we have Herbert's last note to Nicholas Ferrar in which he says that his friend will find there “a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master” (Herbert 1941, xxxvii).9 With the final line of the concluding poem of the collection, “Love” (III), we presumably see complete accord between Herbert and Christ. Yet Herbert's word “picture” might give us pause. Perhaps any spiritual exercises that Herbert practiced occurred outside the realm of writing poetry, and the poetry represents what happened. In that case, The Temple would not register spiritual experience as much as report it, even if the writing of a poem added or took away from the original experience. What, though, if we exclude devotional poetry, and even poetry that is openly religious, in order to see what “spiritual exercise” might mean more broadly with respect to poetry? In doing so, we would remain closer to the French spirituel than the English “spiritual.”Several caveats must be registered right at the start, beginning with the expression “spiritual exercise” when it has been detached from Ignatius Loyola and loosened from the Græco-Roman practices that were taken into Christianity and reset there. We must be careful to put out of play any affinities that “spiritual” has with cultural or emotional refinement, yet to preserve reference to thought, even the intellect, though not to the exclusion of the imagination, memory, and will.10 “Exercise” also needs preliminary attention. I am not interested here in a poet trying out a set form, such as a pantoum or a triolet, or submitting to a series of severe artificial constraints, as one finds promoted by Oulipo, in order to catch the Muse off guard, as it were. I wish to preserve, for the sake of my investigation, the sense of “exercise” as enabling an improvement or modification of the self in one way or another. That said, I keep this word as open as possible for the time being, if only because it may well be that there are elements of some spiritual exercises—perhaps “ghosts” would be a better word than “elements”—at work in poetry that have no strong or overt relation with philosophy or religion in a robust sense of either word.In order to be able to return from my exploration in a timely manner, I will attend only to one poet, although there may be others who would repay a reading with the lens of “spiritual exercise” placed an inch or two over their books.11 I have chosen A. R. Ammons (1926–2001) for a variety of reasons. First, his religiosity is neither institutional nor heavily marked; indeed, one would not be wrong to label him, perhaps a little crudely, as an agnostic or even an atheist, not least of all because of the ways in which the study of the natural sciences has marked him.12 He is our most Aristotelian of poets.13 Second, many of his most memorable lyrics, as well as many more that are not, seem to be partly characterized by some of what the ancients practiced as “spiritual exercises.” It is doubtful that he knew directly of their use in Græco-Roman culture, though who can say for sure; more likely, he gathered something of them by way of his study of Taoism, or perhaps he absorbed them passively from Western culture at large.14 And third, Ammons speaks himself of writing poetry as a process of self-transformation. One might amplify this point by indicating the poet's almost obsessive self-presentation in terms of an “I” that is far more empirical and psychological than it is rationalist and metaphysical. He evokes the word “transcendental” from time to time but shows no sign of writing from the space of a transcendental subject.15 Ammons's freedom shows itself in several ways, one of which is his willingness to bend himself to inexorable forces he recognizes outside himself, but not in a dissemination of pure subjectivity by means of a dizzying variety of pronouns, tenses, and shifts of focus, even in a single poem, as one so often finds in the medium-length and longer poems of John Ashbery.16Ammons's work is far too copious and too diverse in its genres (dialogue, essay, hymn, invective, journal, lyric . . . ) and modes (didactic, meditative, pastoral, satiric . . . ) to be adequately covered in a single essay, especially one with a highly restricted aim.17 It is also very uneven in quality, although that is not a pressing problem here. My motive in entertaining the idea of poetry as spiritual exercise is not intended to be a covert means of commendation. It may be that thinking of some of Ammons's poems in terms of spiritual exercises—and I will be mentioning only a few of them, ones chiefly used in the classical and late antique periods—brings facets of the poems to light that might otherwise not be noticed. So, I will be cutting only a thin line through a broad and multifarious work, not mentioning many of his most engaging poems.Finally, I must draw attention to an ambiguity in what I propose, for we may think of writing poetry as a spiritual exercise, and just as cogently we may think of reading poetry in that manner. The former might be legible in some poems, although there is no special reason why it should be unless it is marked by a specific lexical form (inner dialogue, for instance) or dilates on a particular motif (overflight, say). Even then, these things can be imitated without any desire for self-transformation. There is another concern. To use poetry in the service of something else, even if it is taken to be a good, is always to render it secondary; and this is a danger implicit in a writer's choice to figure his or her writing as a spiritual exercise, one that might well prompt all traces of the service to be erased in revision. Only a poem remains once an exercise is complete, regardless of whether or not the writing of it has had a desired effect on the poet. One might be left with a weak poem or a strong poem, a finished poem or something far rougher, after having completed an exercise, and that exercise itself might have been successful, partly successful, or utterly disappointing. I will attend only to specific forms and motifs of spiritual exercises in Ammons and to the poet's remarks about writing poetry, many of which lead one to think of some of his poetry at least by way of spiritual exercise.With regard to poems as spiritual exercises undertaken by the reader, it needs to be kept in mind that people read poems for a wide range of reasons—amusement, consolation, enjoyment, distraction, instruction, the gaining of wisdom, and so on—but that the central ground in play here would be the quest for insight into how to live one's life. People have been changed, sometimes permanently, by encountering this or that poem.18 I will keep the ambiguity between reading and writing alive throughout, although my accent will fall more heavily for longer on the writer than the reader.• • •Ammons begins what would become a prolific writing life with Ommateum with Doxology (1955), one striking feature of which is apparent exchanges with the natural world, if “exchanges” is not too strong a noun, since sometimes they are no more than separate ejaculations. There is the poet, adopting and adapting the mask of Ezra (a hunchback boy recalled from childhood), and elements of a desert landscape about him that give the name a biblical resonance. The first lyric, “So I said I am Ezra,” narrates a failed communication: Neither the wind nor the sea answers the poet's proclamation of bardic or prophetic power. His name, Ezra, “falls out of being” by dint of mere repetition, and he is left to wander in a landscape that evades memory (CP 1, 2). Thereafter, his attempts at interchange are somewhat more successful. In the second lyric, “The Sap Is Gone Out of the Trees,” an oat field calls out “Oh” in acknowledgment of the barrenness of the landscape and is seconded by the wheat fields, but it is only when the wind adds its voice to theirs, saying “How shall I / coming from these fields / water the fields of earth,” that the poet answers. He does so by exclaiming “Oh” and falling into the dust (CP 1, 3), much as the oats and wheat have done. Soon the poet separates himself from “every natural heart,” and only with the sixth poem does dialogue appear as a structural feature: He addresses the sun and then the moon, and each responds to him. He begins to chastise the sun, source of life, for its anger at the moon, which prettifies the world at night, “since all at last must be lost / to the great vacuity” (CP 1, 7). Thereafter, one finds more ejaculations but no more dialogue; an exercise, however, seems to have been completed. Inner dialogue, along with the adoption of a long perspective, has led to the recognition of a natural law that is at odds with human desire.By the time Ammons writes “Hymn” (1956) he is concerned less with evoking a law of nature than with determining its ground, which he addresses as though it were a person, something that no Stoic would do and that no Epicurean would regard as more than a convention. “I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth” (CP 1, 37), he writes, imagining a steady ascent until he reaches “the unseasonable undifferentiated empty stark.” No sooner has he passed as far as he can in this direction, though, than he realizes that “if I find you I will have to stay with the earth,” for the principle of nature is to be found here equally, “right on down where the eye sees only traces.” Although this sounds like a hymn to God seen solely through the aperture of natural theology, there is not the slightest sense of transcendence in play, let alone any personal attributes ascribed to the addressee. (If anything, Ammons goes a step too far in making the point, which comes across as more than a little awkward: “praying for a nerve cell / with all the soul of my chemical reactions.”) Rather, “Hymn” is about the poet finding his place in the great scheme of things, somewhere between the two extremes of nature, at the level of a “sweetgum” that has “begun to ooze sap at the cut”; it is a poem about accommodating oneself to the immanence of the natural world, a secular hymn of awe and of setting aside all hubris.Another early poem that figures nature as law is “Gravelly Run” (1958), one of Ammons's lyric triumphs in his first maturity. The poem's theme is the sufficient, as is announced right at the start and, as it happens, at the very beginning of the Collected Poems where Ammons speaks of being about to embark on “the track of the sufficient” (CP 1, 1), which henceforth asterisks in advance the poem under consideration: I don't know somehow it seems sufficientto see and hear whatever coming and going is,losing the self to the victory of stones and trees,of bending sandpit lakes, crescentround groves of dwarf pine:for it is not so much to know the selfas to know it as it is known by galaxy and cedar cone,as if birth had never found itand death could never end it. (CP 1, 139–40)In a colloquial, offhand manner, the speaker says that he has learned to accept the primacy of the objective world over against his subjectivity, the effort in doing so lightly suggested by the “as if.” All that he brings under his gaze resists him: “the air's glass / jail seals each thing in its entity.” If he says that it's “no use to make any philosophies here,” it will assuredly not be any theory that diminishes the claim of nature or suborns it to a supposedly higher mode of being: “Hegel is not the winter / yellow in the pines.” All that can be said is that the self is “surrendered” to “unwelcoming forms.” (So perhaps Epictetus or Lao-tsu is there, at least “in the air” or in the back of the mind, even if Hegel is not.19) There is nothing for you or me to do here, or anywhere, in terms of enhancing or deepening our subjective overture to the world. The lyric ends, “stranger, / hoist your burdens, get on down the road,” and as we hear those words, we understand ourselves to be less strangers in Ammons's world than strangers in a world that makes no attempt to make us feel welcome in it. Our experience of life will be no different down the road.This theme of the recalcitrance of nature, as so many instances of phenomena subject to an unalterable law, continues throughout Ammons's work. If we look ahead to “Staking Claim” (1970), we find dialogue once more. This time he is talking to a line of willows without getting any salute at all: the trees “never would waken / never could feel the rushing days.” Yet their lack of awareness of his presence underlines his consciousness of time and perhaps helps to reconcile him to “the long changes” (CP 1, 595) to which he and everyone else is subject. Later, in “Ballad” (1973), he develops a fuller dialogue with the willows, finding them self-absorbed to the point of selfishness, eager to “get rid of the wateroak” that takes some of their resources. The poem ends with the possibility, by no means assured, that the willows can settle their differences with the water oak by presenting it with “our powerful / concept that all things are in all” (CP 1, 745–46). In truth, it is the poet's concept—something like “the web of nature”—and not one shared by the willows. But what is important is the way in which dialogue has the potential to overcome selfishness and pointless dissent and to bring the various natural beings into harmony with an evident law of natural life.The role that a dialogue plays in a spiritual exercise is most clearly seen, though, in the poet's encounters with mountains, which seem impervious to change only because from a human perspective they are transformed so very slowly. We remember Mark 11: 23 and Matt. 21: 21 where Jesus imagines someone with faith telling a mountain to throw itself into the sea. And we remember St. John of the Cross (2010) when he evokes Mount Carmel as the spiritual peak that Christians must climb in the darkness of unknowing (2010). Ammons cuts a quite different figure against the same ground; there is no room for faith in his view of things, and no wish to dispose of any mountain. Perhaps Emerson's “Fable,” his poem about a squirrel and a mountain having a quarrel, is in the background, but, if so, it is no distraction (1994a, 61). More, though, for him mountains are beings of another time or, better, are as close to eternity as can be in this world; they serve as sages whose steady contemplations over the ages merit deep respect and that invite a contemplative stance in those who ponder them.20 It is not always prized by the mountain itself. In “Mountain Talk” (1964) the mountain laments its “changeless prospect” and the speaker continues “counting my numberless fingers” (CP 1, 419).Consider, for instance, “Continuing” (1975), which begins with the poet inspecting the soil for “the accumulation of / fifty seasons,” fallen leaves in progressive states of decay. On reaching the lowest perceptible level, of “sand or rocksoil already mixed / with the meal or grist,” the poet initiates a conversation with a nearby mountain: is this, I said to the mountain,what becomes of things:well, the mountain said, onemourns the dead but whocan mourn those the dead mourned:back a waythey sift in a tearlessplace: but, I said,it's so quick, don't you think,quick: most time, the mountain said, liesin the thinnest layer: whocould bear to hear of it:I scooped up the sand which flowedaway, all but a cone in the palm:the mountain said, itwill do for another year. (CP 2, 5–6)Such is the voice of Ammons once he is in stride—modern, American and, in his low style, folksy—yet the motivating thought behind the dialogue is ancient and ultimately Stoic: the daily exercise of reducing one's anxiety over death and decay by bringing oneself into harmony with nature (that is, law), which is achieved by attending to changes in the landscape. I think of Lao-tsu advising us to “realize that all things change” (1988, 74) or Marcus Aurelius telling himself “The universe is change” and, more plangently, “How all things quickly vanish, our bodies themselves lost in the physical world, the memories of them lost in time” (2006, 4.4 and 2.12). The Bible is even more insistent on this wisdom: “All flesh is grass, and all the goodness thereof is as the flower of the field . . . the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing” (Is. 40: 6, 15, The Holy Bible, KJV 2021, hereafter KJV). But Ammons has less and less recourse to the Scriptures by way of motif and cadence as the years go by.In the same year, 1975, Ammons talks with another mountain, this time passing from his own apparent inconsequence in the cosmos to a consequence that he believes he truly embodies. “Apologetics” begins with the speaker telling a mountain that he doesn't “amount to a thing,” that he comes from “nothing” and will return there, and that he has no summit from which to view the world. The mountain replies to him, addressing him as “sir,” and says, “what you don't have you nearly / acquire in the telling, there is a weaving / winding around in you lifting you buzzardlike up into // high-windings.” To which Ammons responds, amusingly, “just a minute . . . exaggeration is not your prerogative: / you have to settle for size: eminence is mine” (CP 2, 75). No poet, the mountain cannot outlast the ages except by virtue of its sheer bulk. Its wisdom is punctured; and so, what begins as a spiritual exercise swerves away from being one, and the poet wryly defends his supposed status as standing on the peak of Mount Parnassus by way of the word “exaggeration,” which suggests comic self-regard, on the one hand, and self-deprecation, on the other.A similar self-mocking can be found in another dialogue, this time with a river. Earlier, in “Classic” (1969) a mountain had concerned itself with the poet sitting by a stream: “if you're not careful / you'll be / arriving at ways / water survives its motions” (CP 1, 399). The poem I have in mind, though, is slighter than those discussed so far but exhibits a charm not always noticed when reading Ammons. It is entitled “Dominion” (1979), a word that immediately recalls Gen. 1: 26 where God says that men will have “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (KJV): Glittery river, I said,rise, butit didn't:stop, then, damnit, but itdidn't:O river, I said,ruffleblurringwindknots up(andthat was nicelike perch striking roilsat surfaceflies):river, I said, don'tturn back,and it eased onby,majestic in the sweetestcommand. (CP 2, 157–58)One might associate spiritual exercises as practiced by the ancients or even a modern such as Wittgenstein with self-therapy but not with humor: To affirm how to live and what to believe was no joking matter for the ancients or for any philosopher in their wake. “Dominion” lightly deflects this tradition as well as that spawned by Gen. 1: 26; the poem relaunches Henry of Huntington's story in the Historia Anglorum (1154) of King Canute demonstrating the power of God to his courtiers. “I command you, then, not to flow over my land, nor presume to wet the feet and the robe of your lord,” Canute tells the sea, and when the tide continues to come in, he says, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws” (Forester 1853, 199).The powerlessness of the human before the inexorable forces of nature in “Dominion” is rendered comic precisely by the flattery (“Glittery river”) and mock apostrophe (“O river”) with which the poem starts and the risible lack of connection between the final injunction and the river's apparent response. Only when one respects the law of nature does the order “work,” precisely by not working at all. Being brought back to the claim of nature upon us is achieved in another dialogue with a stream, “Away” (1975). Here the poet confesses his fantasies to a stream, of “wind that / unwinds freely and of late snow / on warm rocks” only to have those reveries deflated by the stream that, bending around a rock as it goes along, calls out by way of rebuke to the poet “dream of rock, rock!” (CP 2, 796). It is a lesson that Ammons had already learned; we can trace its lineaments in “Corsons Inlet” (1962), among other fine poems of the period. Here the exercise is the most basic kind: a walk by the shore to clear one's mind, which involves tuning mind to its reasonable possibilities and excluding those that are beyond its powers: “but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events / I cannot draw: the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting / beyond the account” (CP 1, 92). In seeing the variety of life along the shore, and the many ways in which nature organizes itself, the speaker accepts what is given precisely as it is given: “I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries, / shutting out and shutting in, separating inside / from outside” (CP 1, 92). To align oneself with the evident laws of nature, its patterns of order and “wider forces,” to attend closely to the present moment, is finally liberating: I will try to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, wideningscope, but enjoying the freedom thatScope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,that I have perceived nothing completely, that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk. (CP 1, 93)Yet we should not think that Ammons affirms the plethora of many things over and above a transcendent One. For we are told in “Saliences” (1962), another haunting poem about a coastal walk, that “where not a single thing endures, / the overall reassures” and one is temporarily placed “beyond concern for the separate reach” (CP 1, 362). One can be transformed by using exercises that make one find value in contrary thoughts.• • •A quite different spiritual exercise occurs in one of Ammons's most memorable lyrics, “Cascadilla Falls” (1966), another poem in which a stream is central, and which I quote in full: I went down by CascadillaFalls thisevening, thestream below the falls,and picked up ahandsized stonekidney-shaped, testicular, andthought all its motions into it,the 800 mph earth spin,the 190-million mile yearlydisplacement around the sun,the overridinggrandhaulof the galaxy with the 30, 000mph of wherethe sun's going:thought all the interweavingmotionsinto myself: droppedthe stone to dead rest:the stream from other motionsbrokerushing over it:shelterless,I turnedto the sky and stood still:OhI donot know where I am goingthat I can live my lifeby this single creek. (CP 1, 425–26)Here we have a modern version of the Stoic exercise of placing a person or an event in a cosmic perspective in order to reveal the inconsequence of human problems and to generate a sense of wonder instead. Again, consider one of Marcus Aurelius's notations to himself: “If you were suddenly lifted up to a great height and could look down on human activity and see all its variety, you would despise it, because your view would take in also the great surrounding host of spirits who populate the air and the sky; and that, however many times you were lifted up, you would see the same things—monotony and transience” (2006, 12.24). Similar observations may be found in several of Seneca's letters, Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, and Lucian's Icaromenippus.21 Yet Ammons does not merely repeat a familiar cosmic spiritual exercise, one that Hadot (1995) nicely calls “’survol’ imaginatif” [“imaginative ‘overflight’”] (98).First of all, “Cascadilla Falls” does not turn on looking down on the little patch of earth where he lives and where people swarm around in futile activities, nor does it despise anything at all. Alternately, in accord with modern physics, Ammons thinks all the movements to which the earth is subject into a single stone that he holds. Phenomenologically, as Husserl (2002) has admirably shown, human beings, even centuries after Copernicus (1473–1543), live our daily lives as though the earth were not moving at all, although we surely know that it is. So all the motions of the cosmos really need consciously to be “thought into” the stone. No sooner has the speaker perceived the stone from a cosmic perspective than he does exactly the same thing with himself, a movement that has been prepared