Wordsworth and Whitehead - ​Spots of Time and Occasions of Experience

​Spots of Time and

Occasions of Experience

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Wordsworth and Whitehead

by Jay McDaniel

​"The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience." - Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

"He would read The Prelude as if it were a Bible, pouring over the meanings of various passages." - Jessie Whitehead about her father*

*as cited by Mary Wyman, "Whitehead's Philosophy of Science in Light of Wordsworth's Poetry," Philosophy of Science (1956) 

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Wordsworth's Spots of Time

"There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating virtue, whence--depressed

By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse--our minds

Are nourished and invisibly repaired."

- William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Twelve

From the earliest iterations of The Prelude, Wordsworth built his poem around various ‘Spots of Time’: each one a remembered moment, vividly recreated in Wordsworthian blank verse, of intense experience or apperception he had had in his life. These spots possess not just in-the-moment intensity, transcendent acuteness and borderline-inexpressible concentration of affect — they also have the capacity to stay with the individual, to be recalled later in life. Examples include: walking the streets of London and noticing a blind beggar, or young Wordsworth waiting, in blustery weather, for the horses to take him home for Christmas at the end of the school term — or in one of the most famous examples, even younger Wordsworth riding a pony through the lake district on a windy day and seeing a girl carrying a pitcher of water.

- Adam Roberts, Nov. 24, 2022, Medium

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Occasions of Experience

Why did Whitehead like Wordsworth so much? And why, perhaps especially, did he pour over The Prelude, which is an autobiographical poem of more than 8000 lines.

The poem contains many themes that are important to Whitehead's philosophy.

• The aliveness and spiritual significance of the natural world
• The role that memory plays in providing sustenance for life
• The primacy of experience (feeling) in revealing the concrete facts of nature
• The importance of imagination in meaning making
• The sense of divinity interfused with actuality
• The limits of a merely scientific account of things

​But I suggest that Whitehead turned to Wordsworth, not simply as inspiration for ideas such as these, but for deepening of his perception of lived experience. He knew that Wordsworth's poetry better illuminates the concrete fact of experience than does, say, a scientific theorem or mathematical axiom or, for that matter a philosophical principle. What, then, were the meanings of various passages that Whitehead poured over? They were not simply ideas to be affirmed but also, and more deeply, feelings to be recognized.

I say recognized but I might better say re-cognized, with a dash in the middle. The Prelude is an autobiographical account of Wordsworth's life from childhood to adulthood. The poet remembers past experiences, with special emphasis on relationships, the natural world, and, as he puts it, spots of time. Adam Roberts puts it well: "These spots possess not just in-the-moment intensity, transcendent acuteness and borderline-inexpressible concentration of affect — they also have the capacity to stay with the individual, to be recalled later in life." In the process of recalling them Wordsworth re-cognizes them, understanding them in a new way. The past experiences become, for Wordsworth, sources of nourishment and renewal: affective sacraments of a kind.

This, I believe, is why Whitehead turned to Wordsworth's The Prelude. The various passages were, for Whitehead, a way of dipping into the river of human feeling, human intuition, and a reclaiming the affective side of life. Later he came to speak of the entire universe as consisting of drops of experience or actual occasions of experience. He suggested that each drop is itself a momentary event, an act of prehending past drops of experience in an affective and emotional way. Wordsworth took Whitehead into the drops. Whitehead cosmologized Wordsworth; Wordsworth humanized Whitehead.

To be sure, some spots of time, some drops of experience, are more intense and important than others. Wordsworth's The Prelude highlights the intense and important ones. But all spots of time, all drops of experience, are part of what makes us human. Even the boring ones, the painful ones, the forgotten ones. The drops are the very building blocks of reality. For Whitehead we don't stand outside the drops of experience; we are the drops of experience, unfolding through time. And so are are quantum events in the depths of an atom and living cells. Even God is a vast ongoing drop of experience. Everywhere we look, within and beyond ourselves, we find spots of time.

- Jay McDaniel

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​Whitehead on Wordsworth​

Wordsworth expresses "the concrete facts of our apprehension."

Of course, Wordsworth is a poet writing a poem, and is not concerned with dry philosophical statements. But it would hardly be possible to express more clearly a feeling for nature, as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others:

‘Ye Presences of Nature in the sky

And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!

And Souls of lonely places! can I think

A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed

Such ministry, when ye through many a year

Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,

On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,

Impressed upon all forms the characters

Of danger or desire; and thus did make

The surface of the universal earth,

With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,

Work like a sea? . . .’

In thus citing Wordsworth, the point which I wish to make is that we forget how strained and paradoxical is the view of nature which modern science imposes on our thoughts. Wordsworth, to the height of genius, expresses the concrete facts of our apprehension, facts which are distorted in the scientific analysis. Is it not possible that the standardised concepts of science are only valid within narrow limitations, perhaps too narrow for science itself?

​- Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

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​About The Prelude

Wordsworth's "The Prelude" is an autobiographical long poem that describes his personal and spiritual growth from childhood to adulthood. It is often considered a seminal work of English Romanticism and is one of the most famous poems in the English language.

The poem spans over 8000 lines. It begins with Wordsworth's childhood experiences in the Lake District of England and his encounters with nature, which he sees as a source of spiritual renewal and inspiration. He then reflects on his experiences at school and his travels in Europe, which help shape his artistic and philosophical ideas.

In the later books, Wordsworth reflects on his struggles with doubt, despair, and political disillusionment, and his eventual return to nature as a source of solace and renewal. Throughout the poem, Wordsworth celebrates the power of imagination, memory, and language, and the transformative power of personal experience.

​

Overall, "The Prelude" is a complex and multi-layered work that explores themes of nature, spirituality, memory, and personal growth. It is a deeply reflective and introspective work that reveals the inner thoughts and feelings of one of the greatest poets of the English language.

​- chatGPT

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The Prelude read Aloud

by the Faculty of English

University of Cambridge

​

The readers include thirteen members of the Faculty of English in Cambridge, including several authorities on Wordsworth such as Prof. Heather Glen and Dr Philip Connell, and on the Romantic poets more generally, such as Dr Mina Gorji and Dr Paul Chirico.

• Book First - Introduction: Childhood and School-time Dr Daniel Wakelin

• Book Second - School-time Continued Prof. Adrian Poole

• Book Third - Residence at Cambridge Prof. Heather Glen

• Book Fourth - Summer VacationProf. Angela Leighton

• Book Sixth - Cambridge and the Alps Prof. Helen Cooper

• Book Seventh - Residence in LondonDr Paul Chirico

• Book Eighth - Retrospect: Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind Dr Mina orji (and the students of Pembroke College)

• Book Ninth - Residence in France Dr Sophie Read

• Book Tenth - Residence in France and French Revolution Dr Eric Griffiths

• Book Eleventh - Imagination, How Impaired and Restored Dr Clive Wilmer

• Book Twelfth - Same Subject (Continued) Dr Christopher Tilmouth

• Book Thirteenth - Conclusion Dr Philip Connell

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​A Scholarly Discussion of

Wordsworth's The Prelude

offered by BBC's In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss

William Wordsworth’s poem, The Prelude

BBC "Sounds" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b00899w0

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest long poems in the English language – The Prelude. Begun in Northern Germany during the terrible winter of 1798 by a young and dreadfully homesick William Wordsworth, The Prelude was to be his masterpiece - an epic retelling of his own life and the foundation stone of English Romanticism. In language of aching beauty Wordsworth expressed thoughts about memory, identity, nature and experience familiar to anybody who has walked alone among the hills. With Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London; Stephen Gill, University Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford; Emma Mason, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Warwick.

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​Some Passages from The Prelude

• ​"Oh, many a time have I, a five years' child, / In a small mill-race severed from his stream, / Made one long bathing of a summer's day; / Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again / Alternate all a summer's day."​

• What though the radiance which was once so bright / Be now forever taken from my sight, / Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; / We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind."

• "For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity."

• "I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils."

• "The child is father of the man."

• "The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love."

• "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!"

• "And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused."

• "A simple child / That lightly draws its breath, / And feels its life in every limb, / What should it know of death?"

• "The earth is all before me. With a heart / Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, / I look about; and should the chosen guide / Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, / I cannot miss my way."

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​The Influence of Wordsworth

​on Whitehead

by Antoon Braeckman

​

In the "Autobiographical Notes," Whitehead asserts that he was acquainted with Wordsworth before he arrived at the university in 1880. In secondary school he read Wordsworth and Shelley during spare time. This acquaintance with Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge becomes apparent through a consideration of the different passages in which they are mentioned. In Principles of Natural Knowledge he cites some lines from Wordsworth (PNK 200); in Process and Reality he quotes Wordsworth’s well-known phrase: "We murder to dissect" (PR 140/212). In Modes of Thought he suggests that he read Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. But the most important rendering of the romantic poetry we find in Science and the Modern World. Let us therefore confine our investigation to the latter text, in order to see clearly Whitehead’s view on romantic poetry.

At the end of Chapter V, "The Romantic Reaction," Whitehead summarizes the significance of Romantic poetry: "I have endeavored to make clear . . . that the nature-poetry of the romantic revival was a protest on behalf of the organic view of nature, and also a protest against the exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact." Here, Whitehead stresses the importance of the romantic concept of nature. That concept entails, according to the above quotation, two characteristics: (a) the organic view on nature and (b) the understanding of nature as exhibiting an intrinsic value-character.

Whitehead elucidates the former aspect as a (romantic) reaction against the mechanical, 18th-century scientific view on nature, whereby nature is reduced to mere abstract matter, devoid of any form of subjectivity. As to the latter aspect, Whitehead argues that the English romantic poetry "bears witness that nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values." This means to Whitehead that nature, in the first place, has to do with experience, but above all with the experience of value. Both aspects of the concept of nature in romantic poetry exhibit two dimensions of one and the same intuition namely, that of the fundamentally subjective character of nature. This subjective character has to be understood as the ever-acting ground, involved in any particular instance of nature:

Whitehead’s comment on English poetry in general, and his evaluation of the Wordsworthian poetry more specifically, shows that the most valuable contribution of that poetry consists exactly in this articulation of the concept of nature. This statement can be sustained through a closer study of the similarity in concept, principles, and elaboration of Wordsworth’s and Whitehead’s view on nature.

In Wordsworth we can find the stress on the organic pattern of nature. Moreover, while interpreting its value character, we are impelled to look at nature as an agent to be qualified as subjective. Finally, the concept of an ever-acting ground which is involved in and finds expression through all particular instances of nature allows us to envisage here in nuce Whitehead’s own principle of creativity. Hence, we can conclude that if there has been an influence of Wordsworth on Whitehead at all, it will have to do with his concept of nature. I would even claim -- but this has to be investigated later on -- that the particular synthesis of the concept of nature with aesthetics in Whitehead is almost completely Wordsworthian.

* from Whitehead and German Idealism: A Poetic Heritage by Antoon Braeckman. Braeckman is a Research Assistant at the Catholic University of Leuven, Kortrijk Campus, Sahbelaan, Kortrijk, Belgium. The article appeared in Process Studies, pp. 265-286, Vol. 14, Number 4, Winter, 1985. Process Studies is published quarterly by the Center for Process Studies, 1325 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Used by permission. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

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​The Poetry of Philosophy:

Wordsworth’s Poetic Vision

of Nature in Light of Whitehead’s

Cosmological Scheme

Sept. 28, 2012

by ​Matthew David Segall

reposted from Footnotes2Plato

​

The aim of this essay is to read the nature poetry of William Wordsworth in light of the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, such that the epistemological and cosmological implications of the former are brought more fully into philosophical view. According to Victor Lowe, it is probable that no other man, save Plato, shaped the imaginative background of Whitehead’s outlook quite as profoundly as Wordsworth.1 This influence makes the task of this short essay far easier, since so much of what Whitehead labored to give clear conceptual expression to in his own work was originally awakened in him by the feeling for the universe that vibrates off the pages of Wordsworth’s poetry. In this sense, the task of this essay is the opposite of Whitehead’s: to translate the basic outlines of his philosophical scheme back into the cosmic visions and archetypal visitations expressed in Wordsworth’s verse.

One of the defining characteristics of Romantic literature is its exaltation of the figure of the philosopher-poet, the one who unveils the way in which, as Keats put it, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”2 The famous friendship and intimate artistic collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth provides an example of two minds who, while considered alone are great in their own right, considered together as a single mutually formed and imaginatively alloyed soul surely surpass the genius of any claimant of the title philosopher-poet to come before or after. According to Owen Barfield, the friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth both “exemplified the contrast” and “deepened the affinity” between the poles of imagination, namely, self )–( world, or again, spirit )–( nature.3 Reconciling these two imaginative forces in one person is all but impossible, since “the finite activity of poetry, like every other motion, still requires a predominance, however slight, of the one pole over the other.”4 Coleridge had a more philosophical bent, tending toward reverential reflection upon the high station of spirit, while Wordsworth was easily charmed by the every day and more sensitive to the living depths of the natural world.Though Coleridge proved himself on occasion capable of penning the sublimest poetry, it could be said that, as a result of his philosophical tutelage, Wordsworth became the greatest of his poetic achievements. Indeed, Whitehead writes of Coleridge that, despite being influential in his own day, when considering “those elements of the thought of the past which stand for all time…[he] is only important by his influence on Wordsworth.”5

Wordsworth is perhaps the most esteemed nature poet in the history of the English language. For Whitehead, he is the chief exemplar of the Romantic reaction against the abstract mechanistic picture of nature fostered by the scientific materialism of the 17th and 18th centuries. He cites the famous line, “We murder to dissect” with qualified approval, agreeing with Wordsworth that “the important facts of nature elude the scientific method” even while he, a mathematical physicist as well as a philosopher, believes the specialized abstractions of natural science need not necessarily leave nature lifeless.6 Science can and should be reformed. Mechanistic science of the sort championed by the likes of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Laplace commits the fatal sin of bifurcating nature, isolating its objective mathematizable aspects by pealing away its sensual and moral layers, layers which found their home in a soul now entirely sealed off from the outside world. Concerning the ethereal hues of a sunset, the sweet fragrance of a primrose, or the melodies of a thrush the poets are all mistaken: from the point of view of scientific materialism, nature is “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.”7 Contrary to the general thrust of natural science since its birth in the 17th century, Whitehead’s cosmological scheme is an attempt to systematize Wordsworth’s emphatic witness to the fact that “nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values, and that these values arise from the culmination…of the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts.”8 In the jargon of his metaphysics, Whitehead saw in Wordsworth’s poetry “a feeling for nature as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others.”9 Hidden within this one short cryptic sentence are the major categories animating Whitehead’s entire cosmological system, including “actual occasions,” “eternal objects,” “internal relations,” and “concrescence.”

Before moving on to unpack Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme, it is important to note that his allegiance to Wordsworth and the Romantic reaction is not at all to say that he has sided with subjectivism or idealism over the objectivity of science. The danger in aligning oneself against the mathematical abstractions of mechanistic science is that one rushes too quickly to adopt the opposite extreme, elevating personal emotion and individual will to such unwarranted heights that the entirety of the visible universe is made to seem a private projection, a mere appearance dependent upon the constructive activity of my mind. Wordsworth’s absorption in living nature–“an inmate of this active universe,”10 as he put it–all but inoculated him against this subjectivist over-reaction; but there are a few occasions when Wordsworth seems almost to become infected by other strains of the Romantic bloodstream, especially those emerging in the orbit of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Whitehead strongly positioned himself in opposition to Kantian, Fichtean, and Hegelian forms of idealism which can be read as attempting to derive the concrete and contingent existence of the universe from the abstract universal categories of thought.11 Not incidentally (considering the influence of Schelling on Wordsworth through the intermediary of Coleridge), the relationship of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is far more congenial, since unlike for Kant and Hegel, for Schelling “Nature is a priori.”12 Whitehead pithily suggests that his approach “aspires to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason.”13 In Kant’s first critique, experience is either translatable into conscious rational knowledge (Descartes’ “clear and distinct ideas/representations” of geometrical space and time), or it is no experience at all. The vague but overriding feelings of nature’s creative rhythms and physical purposes always scintillating along the fractal horizons of consciousness are ignored in order to secure the certain knowledge of the rational, waking ego.14 The abyssal complexities of our aesthetic encounter with the sublime are left for the 3rd critique, the Critique of Judgment, but even here, where Kant’s powers reach their highest pitch, he pulls up short of the erotic receptivity that may have reconnected him with the animate intelligence of the cosmos. In book XI of The Prelude, as if speaking directly to Kant, Wordsworth pays homage to the “animation and…deeper sway” of nature’s soul while warning against the “narrow estimates of things” resulting from rational critique: “suffice it here/To hint that danger cannot but attend/Upon a Function rather proud to be/The enemy of falsehood, than the friend/Of truth, to sit in judgment than to feel.”15

While for Kant, “the world emerges from the subject,” for Whitehead, “the subject emerges from the world.”16 Whitehead’s conception of subjectivity is such that the order and meaning of our experience is originally given to us by the order and meaning of the surrounding actual universe. “[The subject] is not productive of the ordered world, but derivative from it.”17 Whitehead’s object-to-subject account of the formation of experience may seem too strict a rule for Wordsworth’s imaginative epistemology to obey, since for the latter the senses must be free to half-create and half perceive the world, as he suggests in Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (1798). This reversal of the vector of experience may at times prove to be a true tension in the two men’s outlooks, a tension worth untangling if only to discover a deeper commonality.

It would be an unfair reading of Whitehead, based on his reaction to much of German idealism, to neglect the extent to which his epistemology is fully awake to the creative and participatory role of the imagination in evaluating and synthesizing the facts of the actually existing world. His criticisms of idealistic accounts of perception result primarily from the mistaken prioritization of a derivative mode of perception, “presentational immediacy” over the truly primitive mode, “causal efficacy.” Presentational immediacy is a highly advanced form of experience available to conscious human beings. Dominated by the eyes (“The most despotic of our senses”18), it gives us a certain degree of reflective distance from the causal flow of cosmic vectors of inter-bodily emotion. These vectors, felt through the more original mode of perception, causal efficacy, generate the “mysterious presence of surrounding things”19: for example, the “voluntary power instinct” of the brooding Cliff that made the young Wordsworth’s hands tremble while rowing back to shore in his stolen skiff.20 Without the enlivening passion of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy becomes a fallen mode of perception, detached and cut off from intimacy with nature, her inner life reduced to the external relations of dead objects floating in outer space. Without the reflective disinterest of presentational immediacy, causal efficacy would swallow up our consciousness into the “dim and undetermin’d sense/Of unknown modes of being” that haunted Wordsworth for days after he returned the skiff to its mooring-place.21 Whitehead describes a third, hybrid mode of perception called “symbolic reference,” which plays a role akin to the synthesizing imagination, able to skillfully interweave physical prehensions with mental conceptions in order to produce heightened forms of aesthetic enjoyment and moral appetition. In Whitehead’s jargon, mental conceptions are also prehensions, or feelings, but instead of feeling concrete matters of fact, they feel eternal objects, or abstract forms of possibility. Whereas causal efficacy is “the hand of the settled past in the formation of the present,” presentational immediacy is the “[projection which] exhibits the contemporary world in its spatial relations.”22 Through the mixed perceptual mode of symbolic reference, habits of imagination are gradually acquired which bring forth the taken for granted world of every day experience.23 It is the synthesizing activity of this mode that Wordsworth refers to when he writes of how “The mind of Man is fram’d even like the breath/And harmony of music. There is a dark/Invisible workmanship that reconciles/Discordant elements, and makes them move/In one society.”24 A skillful poet is able to consciously moderate the synthetic activity of symbolic reference, “to keep/In wholesome separation the two natures,/The one that feels [causal efficacy], the other that observes [presentational immediacy].”25

It would be a superficial reading of Wordsworth to ignore the degree to which he wavers in his assigning of precedence to either the mental or physical poles of experiential reality. Just a line below his statement in Tintern Abbey about the creative element in perception, he writes of being “well pleased to recognize/In nature and the language of the sense,/The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse/The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/Of all my moral being.” He finds that his mind is not only necessarily tied to his sensual encounters with nature (as it is for Kant), but that the language of sense has birthed and raised to maturity even the purest of his ideas from out of the womb of nature herself. Elsewhere, Wordsworth writes of the way a mountain range “By influence habitual to the mind/…shapes/The measure and the prospect of the soul.”26 Further conforming to Whitehead’s object-to-subject reading of the vector of experience, he writes: “From nature doth emotion come, and moods/…are nature’s gift.”27 But it could still be asked: is Wordsworth speaking here in a psychological or in an ontological register?

Whitehead’s characterization of Wordsworth’s poetry as exhibiting a sensitivity to the interpenetrating “prehensive unities” of nature, “each suffused with modal presences of others,” is meant to classify him as an ontologically committed panpsychist. His poetry is overflowing with hymns to the Anima Mundi, with references to the “the Life/ of the great whole,” and to the way “every natural form, rock, fruit or flower/…Lay bedded in a quickening soul.”28 Even here, however, just as Wordsworth appears to fully confirm his cosmological orientation, the tension of the poles of spirit and nature begin vibrating, as if hovering in superposition. Does Wordsworth mean that all these natural forms lay bedded in his quickening soul? In the same lines from The Prelude cited above, he could be read as congratulating himself for rousing nature from her sleep: “To every natural form…/I gave a moral life, I saw them feel,/Or linked them to some feeling…/…all/That I beheld respired with inward meaning.”29 But just a few lines later, Wordsworth again reverses the vector of his experience back from the idealistic to the cosmological pole, finding his mind “as wakeful” to the changing face of nature “as waters are/To the sky’s motion,” becoming to her activity as “obedient as a lute/That waits upon the touches of the wind.”30 Perhaps Wordsworth’s tendency to waver on this issue betrays one of the key differences between a visionary poet, focused on capturing the vividness of each fading moment, and a systematic philosopher, focused on characterizing the ultimate generalities characterizing all experience.

Though it is beyond the scope of the present essay, many parallels could also be drawn between Whitehead’s conception of a dipolar divinity and Wordsworth’s visions of the World Soul, “the Imagination of the whole.” Briefly, like all other actual occasions, Whitehead’s God has two poles, an intellectual/mental and an emotional/physical. Unlike all other actual occasions, God’s primordial pole is intellectual rather than physical, consisting in an evaluative ordering of all eternal objects. This ordering serves to condition the unfolding of the universe by making relevant novelties available to the concrescence of each finite occasion of experience. These finite occasions are free to make their own decisions and evaluations, but these decisions are made amidst the set of possibilities provided by the wisdom of God. Through God’s consequent pole, the creative becoming of the physical world is taken back up into divine experience as through a loving embrace to be harmonized with God’s primordial nature. To quote Whitehead at length: “God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it; or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”31 The everlasting pulsations of divine concrescence are the macrocosmic analogy of Wordsworth’s autobiographical journey from childhood paradise, through the impairment and on to the final restoration of Imagination. “From love, for here/Do we begin and end, all grandeur comes,/All truth and beauty, from pervading love,/That gone, we are as dust.”32

Footnotes

1 Understanding Whitehead (1962), 257.

2 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819).

3 What Coleridge Thought (1971), 90.

4 WCT, 90.

5 Science and the Modern World (1925), 79.

6 SMW, 79-80.

7 SMW, 55.

8 SMW, 84.

9 SMW, 80.

10 The Prelude (1805/1970), 27.

11 Process and Reality (1929/1979), 89.

12 First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799/2004), 198. Nature here is natura naturans, the generative abyss from which all finite form arises and into which it dies; this is akin to Whitehead’s category of ultimate generality at the base of all actuality, Creativity.

13 PR, 172.

14 Modes of Thought (1938/1966), p. 74-75.

15 The Prelude, 209.

16 PR, 172.

17 PR, 113.

18 The Prelude, 210.

19 SMW, 80.

20 The Prelude, 12.

21 The Prelude, 12.

22 Symbolism (1927/1955), 50.

23 UW, 184.

24 The Prelude, 10.

25 The Prelude, 238.

26 The Prelude, 125.

27 The Prelude, 218.

28 The Prelude, 37.

29 The Prelude, 37. Italics are mine.

30 The Prelude, 37-38.

31 PR, 525.

32 The Prelude, 233.

Process Quotes & Sayings

Philosophy in the Spotlight:

Dr. Matthew Segall: Whitehead and Process

1:21:55

Premiered Sep 11, 2022

Aired on Twitter Spaces 9/10

Co-hosts Christopher Satoor + Elisabeth Schilling

Guest: Dr. Matthew Segall

Matthew D. Segall, PhD, received his doctoral degree in 2016 from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. His dissertation was titled Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead. It grapples with the limits to knowledge of reality imposed by Kant's transcendental form of philosophy and argues that Schelling and Whitehead's process-oriented approach (described in his dissertation as a "descendental" form of philosophy) shows the way across the Kantian threshold to renewed experiential contact with reality. He teaches courses on German Idealism and process philosophy for the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.

Matt Segall's YT: ‪@Footnotes2Plato‬

* * * * * * * *

[Process] Quotes & Sayings

article link

I.

"Philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include Heraclitus, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Nail, Alfred Korzybski, R. G. Collingwood, Alan Watts, Robert M. Pirsig, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Charles Hartshorne, Arran Gare, Nicholas Rescher, Colin Wilson, Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour, and Gilles Deleuze.

In physics, Ilya Prigogine distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming". Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences, but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science."

- Process Philosophy - Wikipedia

- Process Philosophy - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

II.

"It seems sensible to understand "process philosophy" as a doctrine committed to, or at any rate inclined toward, certain basic propositions:

1) Time and change (event) are among the principal categories of metaphysical understanding.

2) Process is a principal category of ontological description.

3) Processes (events) are more fundamental, or at any rate not less fundamental, than things (matter) for the purposes of ontological theory.

4) Several, if not all of the major elements of the ontological repertoire - God, Nature as a whole (the cosmos), persons, material substances (quantum particles and macro objects) - are best understood in process terms.

5) Contingency, emergence, novelty and creativity are among the fundamental categories of metaphysical understanding.

A process philosopher, then, is someone for whom temporality, activity, and change - of alteration, striving, passage, novelty-emergence - are the cardinal factors for our understanding of the real.

Ultimately, it is a question of priority - of viewing the time-bound aspects of the real as constituting its most characteristic and significant features.

For the process philosopher, process has priority over product - both ontologically and epistemically."

- Nicholas Rescher, Process Philosophy, 1928, p 6.

III.

"The cycles that can ground us through our busy lives are: breath, rhythms of the day, weekly rhythms like Sabbath rest, waxing and waning lunar cycles, seasons of the year, seasons of a lifetime, ancestral time, and cosmic time.

Each cycle encourages us to mindfully consider the time that passes as quickly as each breath and as slowly as the passing of generations."

- Christine Valters Paintner, Sacred Time, 2021

IV.

"Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap."

- Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1928, p. 4

"Language often stands in the way of expressing processual beingness. However, the felt experiences of passing events tumble through the barriers of psychic language bringing meaning, regeneration, thrival, and hope to the felt processual language of beingness." - RE Slater

V.

"Process philosophy, a 20th-century school of Western philosophy that emphasizes the elements of becoming, change, and novelty in experienced reality; opposes the traditional Western philosophical stress on being, permanence, and uniformity. Reality - including both the natural world and the human sphere - is essentially historical in this view, emerging from (and bearing) a past and advancing into a novel future. Hence, reality cannot be grasped by the static spatial concepts of the old views, which ignore the temporal and novel aspects of the universe given in man’s experience."

- Encyclopedia Britannica, 2021

VI.

"Mind transforms the continuance of physical spacetime into moments (the absolute Now) and blends these moments into an apparent continuity through an overlapping of unfolding capsules. The flow of psychological time is an illusion based on the rapid replacement of these capsules. Each mind computes the measure of time passing and duration from the decay of the surface present (the event) in relation to a core of past events. As each new surface (event) is generated, that surface, the rim of the immediate past, recedes in the wake of rising contents. This recession, an uncovering of phases latent in the original traversal, exposes layers in the past forming the content of the immediate past moment. The surge of the microgeny to a surface that dissolves the instant it appears, the priority of the Self in the unfolding sequence, the feeling of agency, create a Self in a state of becoming, a Self that travels in time like the crest of a wave, always in pursuit of a future just beyond the grasp of the present."

- Jason W. Brown, Psychology of Time Awareness, 1990

"Our felt experience and recognition of passing time carries forward from past eventful experiences to future eventing experiences." - RE Slater

VII.

"The Huayan developed the doctrine of "interpenetration" or "coalescence" (Wylie: zung-'jug; Sanskrit: yuganaddha),[23][24] based on the Avatamsaka Sūtra, a Mahāyāna scripture. It holds that all phenomena (Sanskrit: dharmas) are intimately connected (and mutually arising). Two images are used to convey this idea. The first is known as Indra's net. The net is set with jewels which have the extraordinary property that they reflect all of the other jewels. The second image is that of the world text. This image portrays the world as consisting of an enormous text which is as large as the universe itself. The words of the text are composed of the phenomena that make up the world. However, every atom of the world contains the whole text within it. It is the work of a Buddha to let out the text so that beings can be liberated from suffering. The doctrine of interpenetration influenced the Japanese monk Kūkai, who founded the Shingon school of Buddhism. Interpenetration and essence-function are mutually informing in the East Asian Buddhist traditions, especially the Korean Buddhist tradition."

- Buddhist Philosophy

"Beingness both draws from and, experiences, all of the cosmos' beingness corporately, as well as some of the cosmos' beingness in uniquely creative experiences individually. Life draws from the life of the cosmos as well as it's own personal experience while continually making adjustments to it's corporate and constitutionally personalized paths." - RE Slater

VIII.

• "Reality is a process: nothing ever stays the same.

• The process of reality is creative, emergent, evolutionary, and social.

• There is a profound relationship between creativity, beauty, and life.

• All life deserves respect; nothing in nature stands alone; everything is connected.

• Thinking and feeling are connected; mind and body are not separate entities; aesthetic wisdom and rational inquiry are complementary.

• Human experience begins by feeling the presence of the world and being affected by it.

• Human happiness involves sharing experience with others and responding in harmony to these relationships."

- Jay McDaniel, 2020, Some Principles of Process Philosophy

IX.

"This sense of reality as a dynamic breath-force tissue is reflected in the Chinese language itself, and so operates as an unnoticed assumption in ancient Chinese consciousness. There is no distinction between noun and verb in classical Chinese. Virtually all words can function as either. Hence, the sense of reality as verbal: a tissue alive and in the process. This includes all individual elements of reality, such as mountains or people, and contrasts with our language's sense that reality is nominal, an assemblage of static things. A noun in fact only refers to a temporal slice through the ongoing verbal process that any thing actually is."

- David Hinton, China Root, 2020, p. 35

X.

Some Principles of Whitehead's Thinking

1. Question the assumptions of your community, your society, your religion, your science, your educational institutions, especially those that are rarely mentioned.

2. Question the dominant media, asking who controls it and what they want you to think.

3. Recognize that a serious answer to any important question brings into view lots of other questions [as well as a new language to the soul].

4. When people appeal to mystery, consider that it may be mystification. Push critical thought as far as you can.

5. Recognize that the wider range of influences on an event or person that you consider, the better you understand that event or person.

6. Recognize that the broader you consideration of the context and of the likely consequences of your actions, the better chances you will make towards the right choice.

7. Realize that all your ideas and values are influenced by your particular situation, but refuse to conclude that for this reason they can be dismissed as merely "relative."

8. Recognize that there may be no actions that are completely harmless, but do not let that prevent you from acting decisively.

9. Understand that compassion is the most basic aspect of our experience, and seek to liberate and extend your compassion to all with which you come in contact.

10. Deepen you commitments to your own immediate communities, but always remember that other communities make similar demands on their members. Let you ultimate commitment be all-inclusive."

- By John B. Cobb, Jr., What would Whitehead Think?

XI.

“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.”

- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

XII.

The Core Doctrines of Process Philosophy for Circa 2020 CE

"1. The integration of moral, aesthetic, and religious intuitions with the most general doctrines of the sciences into a self-consistent worldview as one of the central tasks of philosophy in our time.

2. Hard-core commonsense notions as the ultimate test of the adequacy of a philosophical position.

3. Whitehead's nonsensationist doctrine of perception, according to which sensory perception is a secondary mode of perception, being derivative from a more fundamental, nonsensory "prehension."

4. Panexperientalism with organizational duality, according to which all true individuals - as distinct from aggregational societies - have at least some iota of experience and spontaneity (self-determination).

5. The doctrine that all enduring individuals are serially ordered societies of momentary "occasions of experience."

6. The doctrine that all actual entities have internal as well as external relations.

7. The Whiteheadian version of naturalistic theism, according to which a Divine Actuality acts variably but never supernaturally in the world.

8. Doubly Dipolar Deism.

9. The provision of cosmological support for the ideals needed by contemporary civilization as one of the chief purposes of philosophy in our time.

10. A distinction between verbal statements (sentences) and propositions and between both of these and propositional feelings."

- David Ray Griffin, Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism, 2001, p.1-12, summary excerpts.

210 Sacred Poems - Compiled by Jay McDaniel

Photo by Jorge Salvador on Unsplash

210 Sacred Poems

for Spirituality and Practice

by Jay McDaniel

December 2020

"Reading sacred poetry is a time-honored spiritual practice. If you'd like to incorporate it into your devotions, we have many resources at Spirituality & Practice for you."

​Thus write Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat in the world's most inclusive interfaith resource center, the website Spirituality and Practice. Every April for the last seven years, during National Poetry Month in the United States, they have offered thirty poems for interfaith readers. I have compiled the poems into one list of 210 poems, with links to their site for each poem. Enjoy.

​

1. The Sun Never Says by Hafiz
2. One Song by Rumi
3. Metamorphosis by May Sarton
4. Attachment by Vasant Lad
5. Questions by Ghalib
6. Ryokan and Mary Lou Kownacki
7. Hum by Mary Oliver
8. All That Is Joy by Rabindranath Tagore
9. My Joy by Rabi'a
10. Haiku by Buson and Issa
11. Ecstatic Poems by Kabir
12. Beauty and Ugliness by Lao Tzu
13. Waging Peace by Sarah Klassan
14. The Same Inside by Anna Swir
15. Tears by Svein Myreng
16. That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection by Gerard Manley Hopkins
17. There Is No Road by Antonio Machado
18. Don't Make Lists by Dorothy Walters
19. Aware by Denise Levertov
20. 1979 by Wendell Berry
21. I Like You by Kevin Anderson
22. Roll Call by William Stafford
23. Stone by Charles Simic
24. For What Binds Us by Jane Hirshfield
25. Love after Love by Derek Walcott
26. Healing by Joseph Bruchac
27. Ars Poetica by Blaga Dimitrova
28. Earth Verse by Gary Snyder
29. The Good News by Thich Nhat Hanh
30. Hold on to April by Jesse Stuart
31. Trees Can Be Our Teachers by Satish Kumar
32. Live With the Spirit by Jessica Powers
33. Sixty-Four by Daniel Skatch-Mills
34. Open the Window by Rumi
35. Fern-Leafed Beech by Moyra Caldecott
36. Wild Things by Wendell Berry
37. Three Poems on Presence by Baisao
38. Miracles by Daniel Berrigan
39. Butterflies by Siegfried Sassoon
40. Living by Denise Levertov
41. Goodnight by Carl Sandberg
42. Two Prayers on Grace by James Vanden Bosch
43. What Is the Greatest Gift? by Mary Oliver
44. Three Poems on Hope
45. Not Enemies by Stephen Levine
46. Olive Trees by Marilyn Chandler McEntyr
47. Split the Sack by Rumi
48. The Earth Is Waiting For You by Thich Nhat Hanh
49. Surviving Has Made Me Crazy by Mark Nepo
50. On Forgiveness by Karyn Kedar
51. Morning Has Broken by Eleanor Farjeon
52. Rendition of Psalm 41 by Nan Merrill
53. Welcome Morning by Anne Sexton
54. Love Poems by Susan Landon, Ann Reisfeld Boutte, and Susan R. Norton
55. First Night by Julia Ackerman
56. An Atom of Love by Yunus Emre
57. Dear Diary by Leonard Cohen
58. Freedom to Marry by Barbara Hamilton-Holway
59. Four Sufi Poems
60. Icon by Mary Rose O'Reilley
61. Ecstasy by Hayden Carruth
62. Love Sonnet by Pablo Neruda
63. The Layers by Stanley Kunitz
64. Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
65. The Answering Machine by Linda Pastan
66. Soil by Richard H. Goodman
67. Zero Circle by Rumi
68. The True Nature of Your Beloved by Hafiz
69. Sweet Darkness by David Whyte
70. Gift by Czeslaw Milosz
71. A poem by Mirabai
72. A poem by Lalla
73. A poem by St. Catherine of Siena
74. A poem by Meister Eckhart
75. Against Certainty by Jane Hirshfield
76. Serenity Is Not by Katherine Swarts
77. Oneness by Thich Nhat Hanh
78. A poem by William Stafford
79. A poem by Mary de La Valette
80. A Place to Sit by Kabir
81. Living in Hope by Suzanne C. Cole
82. A poem by Jim Cohn
83. Who Knows What Is Going On? by Juan Ramon Jimenez
84. The Guardian Angel by Rolf Jacobsen
85. It Is That Dream by Olav H. Haug
86. Questions by Peter Dixon
87. Have You Not Heard His Silent Steps? by Rabindranath Tagore
88. God's Name by Tukaram
89. Sometimes by Hermann Hesse
90. There You Are by Rumi
91. Earth, Sister Earth by Dom Helder Camara
92. The Way They Held Each Other by Mira
93. A Cushion for Your Head by Hafiz
94. Annunciation by Marie Howe
95. Just Stop by Baba Afdal Kashani
96. That Passeth All Understanding by Denise Levertov
97. Summing Up by Claribel Alegria
98. After the Sea by John O'Donohue
99. The First Book by Rabindranath Tagore
100. The Clay Jug by Kabir
101. White Apples by Donald Hall
102. In the World by Brigid Lowry
103. A poem on Love by Kabir
104. Remember by Joy Harjo
105. Nothing Much by Allison Harris
106. A poem on silence by Baisao
107. Peonies at Dusk by Jane Kenyon
108. Reasons to Meditate by Lisa Cullen
109. The First Book by Rita Dove
110. A poem on abundance by St. Catherine of Siena
111. Soil by Richard H. Goodwin
112. Seeking Your Trace by Fakhr al-Din Iraqi
113. Vision by May Thielgaard Watts
114. A poem on devotion by Mary Lou Kownacki
115. A poem on kindness by Margaret Jain
116. A poem on transformation by Hugh Robert Orr
117. What Does Light Talk About? by St. Thomas Aquinas
118. Love Is by May Swenson
119. Leisure by W. D. Davies
120. Gift by Czeslaw Milosz
121. The Old Elm Tree by the River by Wendell Berry
122. Love at First Sight by Wislawa Szymborska
123. Never Lose the Way by Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi
124. Living the Scriptures by Lalla of India
125. So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye
126. There Is a Wonderful Game by Hafiz
127. Poetry by Pablo Neruda
128. On Ordinary Daily Affairs by Layman P'ang
129. A Kiss by Deborah Garrison
130. Is My Soul Asleep? by Antonio Machado
131. On Mother Earth by Jamie Sams
132. When Your Life Looks Back by Jane Hirshfield
133. Memory by Jorge Luis Borges
134. Ask Me by William Stafford
135. Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks by Jane Kenyon
136. A poem - prayer about love and life by Kuan Tao-sheng
137. A poem-prayer for solidarity and justice by Arthur Waskow
138. Growing older with beauty by Robert Terry Weston
139. A Lover Who Wants His Lovers Near by Rabia
140. God Would Kneel Down by St. Francis of Assisi
141. How Then Can We Argue? by Meister Eckhart
142. Each Soul Completes Me by Hafiz
143. This Place of Abundance by St. Catherine of Siena
144. First He Looked Confused by Tukaram
145. Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda
146. Summing Up by Claribel Alegria
147. If You Have Nothing by Jessica Powers
148. Paper Cranes by Thomas Merton
149. God Paints the Rainbows by Barb Laski
150. ​A poem about wisdom by Makeda, Queen of Sheba
151. In a Holy Book I Have by Hafiz
152. Little Things by Sharon Olds
153. Joy by Robert Morneau
154. The Road to God by Melannie Svoboda
155. A poem by Henry Van Dyke
156. Chilean Creed by James Conlon
157. A poem by Edward Searl
158. A poem by Judith Billings
159. The Inner History of a Day by John O'Donohue
160. A Marriage, an Elegy by Wendell Berry
161. The Book of Endings by Sam Taylor
162. A poem by Hildegard of Bingen
163. Marriage by Susan R. Norton
164. A poem by St. John of the Cross
165. A poem by J. David Scheyer
166. My Life by Billy Collins
167. The Foot-Washing by A. R. Ammons
168. Simon the Cyrenian Speaks by Countee Cullen
169. Early Lynching by Carl Sandburg
170. Easter Night by Alice Meynell
171. Throw Yourself Like Seed by Miguel de Unamuno
172. The Madness of Love by Hadewijch of Antwerp
173. Human Wisdom by Charles Peguy
174. The Gift by Zoraida Rivera Morales
175. A poem by Ly Ngoc Keiu
176. Passing Through by Stanley Kunitz
177. From Recovery by Rabindranath Tagore
178. A poem by Novalis
179. Diving by A E I Falconer
180. Was it Light? by Theodore Roethke
181. The Journey of the Mind by Anya Dunaif
182. Looking West by Sofiy Inck
183. What Is a Hero? by Nimai Agarwal
184. The Word by Swastika Jajoo
185. After I Die by Niti Majethia
186. True… Or Not? By Swastika Jajoo
187. I See The Night by Maya Mesh
188. Sowing Hope by Tammata Murthy
189. Ever Deeper: A Poem for My Grandfather by Will Hodgkinson
190. Blue by Victoria Krylova
191. Pure Love by Gertie-Pearl Zwick-Schachter
192. When the Universe Sings Goodnight by Niti Majethia
193. Plastic Tractors by Will Hodgkinson
194. Perfume Bottles by Fareeha Shah
195. Rift into Childhood by Gracie Griffin
196. When the Sun by Charlotte Rauner
197. The Playground in Winter by Maria Christian
198. The Soul of Nature by Niti Majethia
199. Not Yet by Caie Kelley
200. Artemis by Alice Simmons
201. The Divine Vision by Tanmaya Murthy
202. Backyard Woods by Isabel Bautista
203. The Pear Tree by Caroline Harris
204. I always feel like myself by Pie Rasor
205. Volunteer by Rafik Maharja
206. With a Pencil in My Hand by Gracie Griffin
207. The Sunset of My Life by Meenu ravi
208. The Watching One by Lucia O'Corozine
209. Selected Poems from Around the World by Mary Ernesi, Tanika Stewart, and Odelia
210. Snowflakes Carry My Worries Away by Katie Champlin

Why Read?

In the clatter and clamor of our lives, we need ways to connect deeply with our souls. Whenever we feel depleted, our favorite poets invariably refresh and refuel us. The quality of their attention, the way they notice things we easily overlook, summons the joy and wonder within us. Their songs of both praise and lament speak the words it is sometimes hard for us to articulate. They put us in the presence of the ineffable and the holy. We drop our jaws and swallow our pride...Businessman James Autry captures another attraction of poetry — it "gives you permission to feel." The best poets tap into our deepest yearnings.

- Mary Ann and Frederic Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

What makes a poem sacred?

​

A poem is sacred if, after reading it or listening to it, you are just a little wiser and kinder, more creative and playful, more attuned to beauty and shocked by injustice, than you would have been otherwise. The poem makes a difference in how you think and live.

The poem need not be religious in order to be sacred. It does not have to be about God or heavenly ecstasy, or use words like holy and sacred and spiritual. Yes, it can have such themes. It can be obviously religious. But it can also be about ordinary life, about cars and dogs and sidewalks, about whole or broken relationships, about sadness and beauty and moonlight, about planets and tulips and cat's eyes.

Sacredness is a relationship between you and the poem. It lies in how you read the poem and in the fruits of your reading. Here are some of the best fruits of sacred reading, borrowed from Spirituality and Practice.

​​​attention - beauty - being present - compassion - connections - devotion - enthusiasm - faith - forgiveness - grace - gratitude - hope - hospitality - imagination - joy - justice - kindness - listening - love - meaning - nurturing - openness - peace - play - questing - reverence - shadow - silence - ​teachers - transformation - unity - vision - wonder - x, the mystery - yearning - you - zeal

These fruits are practical and ordinary. The sacred becomes fully sacred only when its values are expressed in daily life: at home and in the workplace, among neighbors and strangers, in the parking lot and the schoolyard, in the voting booth and community center. The purpose of sacred poetry is to help you live wisely and compassionately, with love and vitality, in the world beyond poetry. As it achieves its purpose, it simultaneously refreshes and refuels your soul. It gives you permission to feel.

- Jay McDaniel, December 2020

Reading Fragments of Poems

​as a Spiritual Practice

​

Recently some friends of mine started an online poetry journal called Heron Tree. It offers you one poem a week - absolutely free.

As I write this, the poem for the week is Onion Pie by Joey Nicolletti. It begins like this:

The wind, the rattling wall, dinner

baking in the oven, the dead of winter

a string of salt diamonds

alight in a street of slush and starlit ice,

and the cat retires

to his feathery bed.

It is wintertime. I picture my own cat named Zooey, retiring to her own feathery bed. I think of how delicious it would be to have some onion pie. I picture the street outside, which had not long ago been salted with crystals. I remember the diamonds.

I may not read any further. I know that Joey Nicolletti hopes I will. After all, he wrote the poem as an organic whole, with each part related to the other parts. In her now classic The Life of Poetry (1949) Muriel Rukeyser speaks of poems as organic wholes full of movement, which grow like trees. She is famous for saying that the universe is like stories, not atoms. For her a poem is a story, too.

But sometimes I think it's fine just to nibble at a poem, taking a line or series of lines that somehow nourish the imagination and not even completing it. If it's worth reading at all, it's worth reading halfway.

The western religious traditions have a tradition called lectio divina or sacred reading. When you read in a sacred way, you are not looking for rules to live by or ideas to master. You are looking for nourishment of the soul. You take in images from scripture, however fragmentary, and simply rest in them trusting that somehow, in the very resting, some divine nourishment is received. You let the images wash over you and inside you, in a kind of baptism of the imagination.

I need these baptisms. I need one poem a week. I need some onion pie to sink my imagination into, taking a break from the compulsively busy lifestyle into which I so often fall. Buddhists tell us that paying attention to the world around us and the worlds within us in a mindful way is the heart of spirituality. Poetry can help - even if you nibble.

Nibbling

I choose the word nibbling with care. Reading poetry is a physical activity even as it is a spiritual activity. Even if we read silently, we hear our own voice reading inside our heads. We pause at the end of lines and between stanzas, not unlike the way in which we pause when we take a breath. Sometimes we quietly move our lips, too, in a subtle and unconscious way. And sometimes we read out loud. Some people draw sharp distinctions between reading out loud and reading silently. Not me.

As we read we bring our bodies with us. We are sitting or walking, standing or lying down. We are looking with our eyes. The founder of process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, says that all of our experiences begin with what he calls the withness of the body. Our bodies are not simply means by which we take our minds from one location to another; they are where the world meets us, including the world of poetry. As we read a poem our minds may be lost in a faraway land, but our bodies are here, with us, in the reading.

Imaginative Nibbling

Of course our imaginations are in the reading, too. Our imaginations enable us to move from one portion of the text to another, not unlike the way in which we might eat fruit salad. When you have a bowl of fruit salad in front of you, you choose the particular fruit -- bananas, strawberries, pineapple-- that strikes your fancy.

I think we can read poems like this, too. By this I mean two things. We do not need to read the whole poem if we are nourished by a part. We can stay with that part, and call it a night.

And even if we do read the whole poem, there is no need to read it in a linear fashion. We can jump from one section to another and then go back, not unlike the way in which we jump from one poem to another in an anthology, flipping back and forth. Call it non-linear nibbling.

Many contemporary poems are conducive to imaginative nibbling. They are a collage of lines which can be strung together in a linear order, forming an organic whole; but they can also be enjoyed in a non-linear way as a collage of fragments which can be seen as a whole but also have independent integrity.

Many sacred scriptures have this quality. Consider the Holy Qur'an. It is a collage of many different poems, and poems within poems, and poems within poems within poems. It is not a rule book, it is a cluster of warnings and invitations, helping us awaken to the unity -- the tawhid - within which we live and move and have our being. Some suras are warnings and some are invitations, but all are inviting us to experience awe and wonder.

Many poems are like mini-Qur'ans. This means that as you read them you can move from beginning to end; but you can also move from middle to beginning or from end to middle. And you can just stay on one or two lines if you are so inclined. You can begin in the middle, where all beginnings begin.

Beginning in the Middle

Think of how people read the Bible. There is no commandment in the Bible which says: "Thou shalt never begin in the middle." Jews and Christians begin in the middle all the time, turning to this book and that book within the good book. And for process thinkers, influenced by Whitehead, there may even be some divine sanction in it. According to process theology, the universe is without beginning or end. God does not create out of nothing but rather out of the pre-existing chaos at hand. This means that even the Holy One began in the middle when he or she began creating our universe. The chaos already existed. The Holy was just giving it a little order. If God can begin in the middle, we can, too. Let the winds of the spirit blow where they will.

For my part, when I begin in the middle, I always look for sentences that do not begin with "The." There is far too much declaration in the world today. Too many attempts to tidy things up, when there's so much beauty in the untidy. Too many ideologies of heart and mind. Buddhists teach us that there is a lot of spirituality in not having fixed views.

Kissed by Steam

There is a Zen rock garden in Kyoto that's designed so that, wherever you stand, you cannot see the whole. You see sand and the rocks, but no possibility for a controlling overview. All good poems are like this. Even if they come across as organic wholes, there's no final interpretation. Freedom from finality of statement is one of poetry's greatest gifts to humanity.

This is why it can be important -- even spiritually enlightened -- to focus on fragments. You are reminding yourself that even if you read the poem as a whole, this whole is nested in a larger whole -- the forever fluid rock garden of the universe -- which is never fully encompassed by any finite observer. Heidegger reminds us that we are always already inside this whole, and that we can never stand outside it and pretend that we are mere spectators.

When a simple line or phrase in the middle of a poem becomes the subject of your attention, you are aware of an immediate textual background that you don't know and comprehend. You are deciding not to know this background, at least for the moment.

This deciding not to know the whole is an act of faith. It is faith that there can be meaning in the particular which transcends the meaning of the whole, even as there is meaning in the whole which transcends the meaning of the particular. Here are the last two lines of Joey Nicolletti's poem:

my wife pulls the Onion Pie

out of the oven, kissed by steam.

Blake reminds us to see heaven in a wildflower and the universe in a grain of sand.

Onion Pie reminds us that there's more than a little divine steam when you take an onion pie out of the oven on a cold, cold day.

Maybe that is one of the purposes of poetry at its best. Maybe it helps us become kissed by the steam.

​- Jay McDaniel, December 2020

Photo by Ricardo Espejo Catalán on Unsplash