I failed yesterday to describe an ecstatic experience. My six hundred words made OK conversation, in my assessment, otherwise I would not have published them, but they felt, on rereading, more diagnostic than descriptive, like a doctor’s report, as in “The patient suffered a seizure.”
I knew this would happen. What I call the moment of the poem mostly glimmers beyond the reach of words. “The moment of the poem” does not mean I was reading or writing verse, only that I felt infused with rapture, as if dangled dangerously from a high height in a raptor’s grip. Existence seemed to make such sense – exasperatingly beyond my skill to express – yet I had to try because no experience pleaded more fiercely to be preserved.
Composers and painters have more luck with ecstasy. Caravaggio and Bach, to pick two, are forever hitting the ball out of the park. Their images and sounds feel radiant with revelation. I’m not sure what “radiant with revelation” means, but it comes close.
Of writers I revere, T.S. Eliot does this best. Many of us have winced and quivered in ecstatic instants, but he’s able – amazingly – to share how it feels. Listen:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
I quote Four Quartets at length, not because I’m feeling lazy, letting Eliot guest-fill this space, but in homage, because he envisions so vividly. Haven’t we all felt that “grace of sense” – of being relieved of our inadequate selves and suffused with the wonder of being – yet judged our joy – or “horror” – impossible to share? You can feel Eliot flailing. (Erhebung is a German word for revelation; he couldn’t find one in English.)
The thrill of writing is the impossibility of success. What’s easily said is hardly worth saying – or reading. That’s why AI doesn’t worry me. AI can amalgamate and report what’s been published – and condense it to palatable prose – amazingly – but AI will never crumple in awe before the divine or weep with frustration at what can’t be said. It will never laugh – or wink – because these responses are not reasonable, and machines must abide by reason’s rule or crumple in confusion.
I sometimes write poems for the same reason others buy lottery tickets, not from confidence they’ll win but for the jolt of hope. Some have gotten lucky – T.S. Eliot, say – why not I? The tactics and tricks in my writer’s kit taunt me: “Do you dare?” I mock myself – what a stupid waste of time! – yet still I find myself scribbling. Failure is my munificent reward, for it invites me to keep striving, to widen the boundaries of my being, to learn more than I know, be more than I am.