“Consideration, taken to its highest diploma, is identical factor as prayer,” Simone Weil wrote in her beautiful reckoning with consideration and beauty. As a result of poetry is the artwork of consideration, anchored in a complete receptivity that judges nothing and rejects nothing, each poem is a sort of prayer, kneeling earlier than the wild marvel of the world with religion and love.
The good Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (October 8, 1892–August 31, 1941) articulates this dialogue between the poetic and the divine in Artwork within the Mild of Conscience (public library) — the fantastic essay assortment that gave us Tsvetaeva on the paradoxical psychology of our resistance to concepts.
Dwelling in a political ambiance that banished the divine from human life — the identical state-mandated atheism I too grew up with in communist Bulgaria — Tsvetaeva writes with a watch to the prayerful poems of her beloved Rilke:
What can we are saying about God? Nothing. What can we are saying to God? Every thing. Poems to God are prayer. And if there are not any prayers these days (besides Rilke’s… I do know of none), it isn’t as a result of we don’t have something to say to God, nor as a result of we’ve nobody to say this something to — there’s something and there’s somebody — however as a result of we haven’t the conscience to reward and pray God in the identical language we’ve used for hundreds of years to reward and pray completely every little thing. In our age, to have the braveness for direct speech to God (for prayer) we should both not know what poems are, or neglect.
A century later, within the ambiance of Western client capitalism with its cult of the self, it’s much more countercultural to converse concerning the soul — maybe the final human holdout towards commodification, too personal and furtive to be was a marketable knowledge level. And but if artwork is what we make to avoid wasting ourselves, to cotton the shock of residing, then the soul is the one studio we’ve.
Tsvetaeva, who thought-about artwork a bodily manifestation of the non secular and a non secular manifestation of the bodily, knew this and articulated it superbly:
Poetry — which I by no means take my eyes off after I say “artwork,” the entire occasion of poetry, from the poet’s visitation to the reader’s reception — takes place completely inside the soul.
Complement with Wendell Berry on find out how to be a poet and a whole human being, Lucille Clifton on find out how to be a residing poem, and this soulful learn on how poetry saves lives, then revisit Richard Jefferies on nature as a prayer for presence.
