In a Hazelnut part 2
leading on directly from yesterday's post.
Levertov’s sequence is more than metaphor and biographical speculation – she is also well aware of the ‘vast gaps’ and ‘dizzying multiplication’ of our existence which she also relates to Julian’s mysterious hazelnut vision, but I would like to look at Kathleen Jamie’s poem ‘Julian of Norwich’, from her Bloodaxe collection The Way We Live, also 1987. Jamie’s is a strong lyrical poem which has been much anthologised. While Levertov’s sequence either speaks of or occasionally (at start and finish) addresses Julian directly (‘Julian, Julian, I turn to you’), Jamie’s employs direct first person voice throughout. The implication is that this poem is in fact not merely lyric but more of a dramatic monologue, in which the speaking voice assumes a fictional or historical identity and directs their speech to a silent interlocutor – in this case, we might assume that the speaker is Julian, the unspoken other is God. Although certainly not exclusive to contemporary women poets, the dramatic monologue has been identified (by Deryn Rees-Jones among others) as a way of giving voice to those women characters who in the past had been either voiceless or ventriloquised by male writers. However the project of giving such a voice to Julian of Norwich is rather different in that Julian has given herself a voice, regarding her spiritual experiences, very well indeed, and in addition critic Christopher Abbot has shown with what dramatic skill she has depicted herself in dialogue with God; questioning, experiencing, explained to and explaining to her readers; never despairing. Jamie’s poem is predominantly one of personal agony and absence – hinting, at its start, (though redeemed at the close) of over-solicitous female and neglectful, absent male (or its spiritual equivalent; there is a long tradition of equating the human soul with female and God as male in mystical language). But is Jamie’s speaking voice really intended to be Julian? Does it refer to the intensely graphic, yet ultimately hopeful visions of the Revelation and Julian’s anchoritic life, or is this apparently specific historical voice in fact much more a personal meditation, perhaps owing something to the ‘slightly acid soil’ of a Presbyterian upbringing? In this poem God (we suppose) is a ‘Brute’ and the abandoned speaker ineffective and infantilised: a ‘canary/ caged and hung/ from the eaves of the world/ to trill your praise’; a disturbing metaphor evoking spiritual inconsequentiality; perhaps a fear of poetic triviality also. This imagery though is distinctly Jamie’s own: there are no caged canaries in Julian’s text –The individualism of Jamie’s poem, the documenting of physical discomfort (‘bloodless hands…stiffened, stone-cold knees’) is also unlike the voice in the Revelation which depicts (after documenting Julian’s illness at the time of her visions) only the suffering Christ, not the suffering self, difficult though conditions must have been in a fourteenth-century East Anglian anchorhold.
But what does echo back to Julian’s own writing is the sudden switch, logically inexplicable but metaphorically wonderful, from agony to bliss: Julian’s vision of a suffering, dying Christ changes incomprehensively to one of Christ complete, whole and smiling, so Jamie’s lyrical I is suddenly shown ‘suspended’ in ‘joy’, ‘as huge and helpless/ as the harvest moon in the summer sky’. Another metaphor of roundness – and the moon a feminine symbol – this ‘harvest moon’ suggests completion rather than the microcosmic potential-to-be-fulfilled of hazelnut or egg. There is just a hint too of maternity, the September, ninth-month moon as a huge, helpless woman at the point of giving birth: something which does echo back, indirectly, to the exploration of Christ’s maternity Julian included in her own ‘Long Text’. To conclude though: Jamie’s ‘Julian of Norwich’ is, although mostly tangential to Julian’s own text, yet an example of the use of Julian as a touchstone, a site from which to explore spirituality in poetic language. Interestingly too where Julian, and Levertov quoting Julian, concludes that ‘Love was his meaning’, Jamie echoes but switches the emphasis: ‘Love is the attitude’, [my italics in both cases] that subtle shift from ‘meaning’ to ‘attitude’ signalling a personal responsibility, a perspective to take, rather than a definitive answer to proclaim. Jamie has used voice and original metaphor both to invoke Julian – or at least, an anchoress’s solitary commitment to God – and to explore the personal ‘dark night’ of a lyrical I who comes to find herself fully illumined in a state of grace. At this point the poem too is complete, as though the longing to write a poem is fulfilled at the very point of creative surrender.
But metaphor is not the only resource of poetry. Language itself is explored, set in surprising harmony and counterpoint, and especially in more experimental contemporary poetries, stretched and split until semantic moorings are deliberately loosened in order to allow for a full spectrum of readerly reflections. So I’d like to look briefly at Lisa Samuel’s poem ‘Revelations of Divine Love: for Julian of Norwich’ which first appeared in the 1997 Sound and Language anthology ‘Public Works: New Sequence Length Writing by Women’. Samuels, who has since published four collections, has not in fact written this particular poem as part of a sequence although her interest in mysticism and the religious life appear elsewhere in her oeuvre, particularly in the exhilarating ‘Nun walking naked out of the ahead of time, and what she is thinking’ (from ‘Paradise for Everyone’). But her ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ is a long poem, and although structured in tercets throughout as is Jamie’s, it is far from being a comparable lyric text. Instead there is a constant flux of language and meaning, first and second pronoun use, with the poem appearing to question the purpose and very possibility of fixity in semantic intention – and indeed in spiritual intention: ‘coindurance of pleasure with surety/ emasculates many raptures’. Surety - certainty of one’s path – might lead to nothing more than the ‘pain of malfunctioning witness’ and questing for the ‘meant’ (what is intended semantically; perhaps also what is predestined to be) results in paradoxical ‘everlasting finitudes’: paradoxes are traditional poetic devices also used in mystical writing, and can prompt a destabilizing of language, which reminds us that our belief in linguistic clarity, just as our belief in supernatural revelation, can never be entirely justified or proven. God or the Divine is a concept which is difficult to approach in language and one theological concept – that of apophasis – acknowledges this by accepting that the Divine can only be spoken of by what it is not: a linguistic via negativa. Medievalist Denys Turner identifies another manifestation of the apophatic: ‘showing by means of language that which lies beyond language’; in Julian’s case sometimes by what Turner identifies as ‘a superfluity of affirmation’. Julian is, for example, illogical over her use of gender positions and pronouns in phrases such as ‘And so I saw that God rejoices that he is our father, and God rejoices that he is our mother, and God rejoices that he is our true spouse, and our soul is his much-loved bride’. Julian also struggles to reconcile her declared loyalty to judgemental church doctrine with her own vision of what has sometimes been construed as universal salvation: ‘all shall be well’. This well known quotation is complex in its context, prefaced by the phrase ‘sin is behovely [necessary]’ spoken to a Julian who attempts to hold the ‘puzzle-fit’ in faith rather than comprehension. In Samuels’ poem of course there is a ‘harder’ use of paradox and complexity. There is some fractal wordplay too: ‘the scree and scree of screaming off distance’ and woven through also, religious vocabulary – the dreams of nuns; the ‘walling-in’ effect of chance circumstances as much as willed commitment; and a final image which reminds me of Jamie’s poem’s close of surprise and uplift through resonant image: ‘the softest screen of release/ pressed out from the window of surprise’. Somehow and sometimes there is insight and uplift freed through the gaps in our walled-up lives, like an anchoress’s personal window onto the church, or her veiled opening out onto the world. This is my personal reading of a puzzling poem, of course: but I’m pleased to contemplate paradox and linguistic ‘solubility’/ un-solvability as this is an echo of Julian’s own text which is often politely ignored by more comfortable commentaries, and makes little appearance in the untroubled ‘quotable’ Julian of popular spirituality. This poem echoes the subversion, mimicry and illogicality of the Irigarayan mysterique: another way of approaching the Divine through the veiled figure of Julian.
Levertov’s sequence is more than metaphor and biographical speculation – she is also well aware of the ‘vast gaps’ and ‘dizzying multiplication’ of our existence which she also relates to Julian’s mysterious hazelnut vision, but I would like to look at Kathleen Jamie’s poem ‘Julian of Norwich’, from her Bloodaxe collection The Way We Live, also 1987. Jamie’s is a strong lyrical poem which has been much anthologised. While Levertov’s sequence either speaks of or occasionally (at start and finish) addresses Julian directly (‘Julian, Julian, I turn to you’), Jamie’s employs direct first person voice throughout. The implication is that this poem is in fact not merely lyric but more of a dramatic monologue, in which the speaking voice assumes a fictional or historical identity and directs their speech to a silent interlocutor – in this case, we might assume that the speaker is Julian, the unspoken other is God. Although certainly not exclusive to contemporary women poets, the dramatic monologue has been identified (by Deryn Rees-Jones among others) as a way of giving voice to those women characters who in the past had been either voiceless or ventriloquised by male writers. However the project of giving such a voice to Julian of Norwich is rather different in that Julian has given herself a voice, regarding her spiritual experiences, very well indeed, and in addition critic Christopher Abbot has shown with what dramatic skill she has depicted herself in dialogue with God; questioning, experiencing, explained to and explaining to her readers; never despairing. Jamie’s poem is predominantly one of personal agony and absence – hinting, at its start, (though redeemed at the close) of over-solicitous female and neglectful, absent male (or its spiritual equivalent; there is a long tradition of equating the human soul with female and God as male in mystical language). But is Jamie’s speaking voice really intended to be Julian? Does it refer to the intensely graphic, yet ultimately hopeful visions of the Revelation and Julian’s anchoritic life, or is this apparently specific historical voice in fact much more a personal meditation, perhaps owing something to the ‘slightly acid soil’ of a Presbyterian upbringing? In this poem God (we suppose) is a ‘Brute’ and the abandoned speaker ineffective and infantilised: a ‘canary/ caged and hung/ from the eaves of the world/ to trill your praise’; a disturbing metaphor evoking spiritual inconsequentiality; perhaps a fear of poetic triviality also. This imagery though is distinctly Jamie’s own: there are no caged canaries in Julian’s text –The individualism of Jamie’s poem, the documenting of physical discomfort (‘bloodless hands…stiffened, stone-cold knees’) is also unlike the voice in the Revelation which depicts (after documenting Julian’s illness at the time of her visions) only the suffering Christ, not the suffering self, difficult though conditions must have been in a fourteenth-century East Anglian anchorhold.
But what does echo back to Julian’s own writing is the sudden switch, logically inexplicable but metaphorically wonderful, from agony to bliss: Julian’s vision of a suffering, dying Christ changes incomprehensively to one of Christ complete, whole and smiling, so Jamie’s lyrical I is suddenly shown ‘suspended’ in ‘joy’, ‘as huge and helpless/ as the harvest moon in the summer sky’. Another metaphor of roundness – and the moon a feminine symbol – this ‘harvest moon’ suggests completion rather than the microcosmic potential-to-be-fulfilled of hazelnut or egg. There is just a hint too of maternity, the September, ninth-month moon as a huge, helpless woman at the point of giving birth: something which does echo back, indirectly, to the exploration of Christ’s maternity Julian included in her own ‘Long Text’. To conclude though: Jamie’s ‘Julian of Norwich’ is, although mostly tangential to Julian’s own text, yet an example of the use of Julian as a touchstone, a site from which to explore spirituality in poetic language. Interestingly too where Julian, and Levertov quoting Julian, concludes that ‘Love was his meaning’, Jamie echoes but switches the emphasis: ‘Love is the attitude’, [my italics in both cases] that subtle shift from ‘meaning’ to ‘attitude’ signalling a personal responsibility, a perspective to take, rather than a definitive answer to proclaim. Jamie has used voice and original metaphor both to invoke Julian – or at least, an anchoress’s solitary commitment to God – and to explore the personal ‘dark night’ of a lyrical I who comes to find herself fully illumined in a state of grace. At this point the poem too is complete, as though the longing to write a poem is fulfilled at the very point of creative surrender.
But metaphor is not the only resource of poetry. Language itself is explored, set in surprising harmony and counterpoint, and especially in more experimental contemporary poetries, stretched and split until semantic moorings are deliberately loosened in order to allow for a full spectrum of readerly reflections. So I’d like to look briefly at Lisa Samuel’s poem ‘Revelations of Divine Love: for Julian of Norwich’ which first appeared in the 1997 Sound and Language anthology ‘Public Works: New Sequence Length Writing by Women’. Samuels, who has since published four collections, has not in fact written this particular poem as part of a sequence although her interest in mysticism and the religious life appear elsewhere in her oeuvre, particularly in the exhilarating ‘Nun walking naked out of the ahead of time, and what she is thinking’ (from ‘Paradise for Everyone’). But her ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ is a long poem, and although structured in tercets throughout as is Jamie’s, it is far from being a comparable lyric text. Instead there is a constant flux of language and meaning, first and second pronoun use, with the poem appearing to question the purpose and very possibility of fixity in semantic intention – and indeed in spiritual intention: ‘coindurance of pleasure with surety/ emasculates many raptures’. Surety - certainty of one’s path – might lead to nothing more than the ‘pain of malfunctioning witness’ and questing for the ‘meant’ (what is intended semantically; perhaps also what is predestined to be) results in paradoxical ‘everlasting finitudes’: paradoxes are traditional poetic devices also used in mystical writing, and can prompt a destabilizing of language, which reminds us that our belief in linguistic clarity, just as our belief in supernatural revelation, can never be entirely justified or proven. God or the Divine is a concept which is difficult to approach in language and one theological concept – that of apophasis – acknowledges this by accepting that the Divine can only be spoken of by what it is not: a linguistic via negativa. Medievalist Denys Turner identifies another manifestation of the apophatic: ‘showing by means of language that which lies beyond language’; in Julian’s case sometimes by what Turner identifies as ‘a superfluity of affirmation’. Julian is, for example, illogical over her use of gender positions and pronouns in phrases such as ‘And so I saw that God rejoices that he is our father, and God rejoices that he is our mother, and God rejoices that he is our true spouse, and our soul is his much-loved bride’. Julian also struggles to reconcile her declared loyalty to judgemental church doctrine with her own vision of what has sometimes been construed as universal salvation: ‘all shall be well’. This well known quotation is complex in its context, prefaced by the phrase ‘sin is behovely [necessary]’ spoken to a Julian who attempts to hold the ‘puzzle-fit’ in faith rather than comprehension. In Samuels’ poem of course there is a ‘harder’ use of paradox and complexity. There is some fractal wordplay too: ‘the scree and scree of screaming off distance’ and woven through also, religious vocabulary – the dreams of nuns; the ‘walling-in’ effect of chance circumstances as much as willed commitment; and a final image which reminds me of Jamie’s poem’s close of surprise and uplift through resonant image: ‘the softest screen of release/ pressed out from the window of surprise’. Somehow and sometimes there is insight and uplift freed through the gaps in our walled-up lives, like an anchoress’s personal window onto the church, or her veiled opening out onto the world. This is my personal reading of a puzzling poem, of course: but I’m pleased to contemplate paradox and linguistic ‘solubility’/ un-solvability as this is an echo of Julian’s own text which is often politely ignored by more comfortable commentaries, and makes little appearance in the untroubled ‘quotable’ Julian of popular spirituality. This poem echoes the subversion, mimicry and illogicality of the Irigarayan mysterique: another way of approaching the Divine through the veiled figure of Julian.
Comments
Post a Comment