September 5, 2022

“Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen…” — John Keats

[Read slowly, three times through...]

I have spoken words of power.

To speak these lines aloud, in New York City, is to speak a foreign language. Not just a foreign language, but a forgotten language. Not just a forgotten language, but a scorned language. Not just a scorned language, but scorned values - a scorned way of seeing the world, a scorned way of being, a scorned past... A scorned part of ourselves. A part of ourselves we are embarrassed of.

To hear these lines spoken aloud, is to hear the most intimate whisper of a lover, the most vulnerable nudity, exposed to a whole room full of people. Now we are all embarrassed, but will we, like fear-striken Peter, deny our love? For the higher things, the realms of gold, exist - all around us - even if we can't see or hear them; or, seeing and hearing them, do not dare to speak of them.

In The Common Tongue, which we are all used to speaking, at parties, where pleasantries and gossip are traded, what makes a person "cool," that is, high status, is to speak fluently the language of popular culture. And what is that, but petty humor and amusement, or mere utility? Or, in the company of more polite society, of worldly things - of possessions and experiences, of people and places, of pleasure, but not of pain, of wealth and power... But never the language of the soul.

When polite society gathers to see art, to speak of art, it adopts an academic tone. From a recent museum exhibition, I quote: "Through an experimental and transcriplinary methodology... including... critical pedagogy..." Do you hear it... the above-it-all attitude, the know-it-all tone, the smugness? The person who goes to that exhibit leaves feeling not Wonder, but haughty Pride. But the smugness is just a mask for terrible boredom and numbness. Our art also devolves into the absurd - again, from a recent museum exhibition, "In the film, two animated anthropomorphized lizards serve as protagonists, moving through a city gripped by a pandemic, extended isolation, and cries for social justice reform." Is that a Geico ad or art?

Ironically, when people believed the world was flat, at least they still perceived it as mysterious; whereas now, although we have seen the world-sphere, although we live in The New World, its mystery has left our eyes, as has that of the Old World. When people believed the world was two-dimensional, they still perceived its three-dimensionality; whereas now, although we know it is three-dimensional, we only understand it two-dimensionally. Modern society has made everything small, petty, bourgeois. We take a cynical attitude towards the sublime and sublimity - and anyone who would speak of the mysterious and the beautiful, in earnestness, in awe...

***“The earth has become small, and upon it hops The Last Man, who makes everything small...

‘We have discovered happiness,’ say The Last Men... and they blink.”***

This is the language of the soul.

*Like Keats (John Keats), Nietzsche (Friedrich Nietzsche) is also fluent - they are speaking the same language. Isn't it sort of cringey, loud, embarrassing? Our first reaction is to dismiss or disown it. Doesn't it sound foreign to our ears? Even though this has been rendered from German into English, and its grammar is not complicated - it still sounds... strange, not from around here. Not from around... anywhere. Certainly this is not what you would hear in the streets of New York. But you also wouldn't hear this in Berlin. Or in the 21st century, or even in the 19th century. Its voice comes to us, as if from far away... But it isn't from a place or a time - this would have sounded strange in any time, or in any place. It is from another culture... another civilization... another state of being, entirely. ***This is romantic mysticism.

Romance, like this,

*“La vie est une fleur, l'amour en est le miel.

Life is a flower, of which Love is the honey.

C'est la colombe unie à l'aigle dans le ciel,

It is the dove and the eagle United in the sky.

C'est la grâce tremblante à la force appuyée,

It is Grace trembling at Insistent Force.

C'est ta main dans ma main doucement oubliée.

It is your hand, in my hand, sweetly forgotten.*

The language of love - although something is lost from the French, for every old language suggests the mystery in its own way, the English translation conveys enough. But the language of love is also the language of enlightenment:

“Yet, though it is like this, simply, Flowers fall amid our Longing and Weeds spring up amid our Antipathy.”

That is the Genjōkōan by Dōgen - it was written in 13th century Japan. Do you hear it? The same language... as the language of nature…

I caught this morning morning's minion, king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

Science, for all its explanatory power, cannot explain the majesty of a falcon so well as Hopkins. To describe nature’s beauty without poetry is nigh impossible, the exercise will always verge on, like a rising tide, and then break forth, like a dam, into poetry. Speaking of falcons…