Postcards from Ulysses

     Aiden O’Shea is not the first poet to see poetry as a spiritual path.  A strong tradition exists in Japan, for instance, in which the Way of Poetry is seen as the Way of the Buddha.  O’Shea holds a deep respect for Japanese culture, including a great admiration for Hakuin.  Consequently, he harbors a concern for a problem Hakuin discovered.  Hakuin had quite a talent for calligraphy, but as a young man he saw a display of calligraphy that startled him.  He felt strongly that the masters who produced the works he saw had some deep insight into the nature of reality which he had yet to attain.  He promptly threw away his calligraphy materials and did not pick up a brush for 30 years.  By that point, sometime after he turned 50, he had attained the deepest insight promised by the mytho-poetic example of the Buddha himself.  His subsequent works are considered profound masterpieces.
    O’Shea freely admits that, like the young Hakuin, he lacks significant insight into the nature of reality.  Why shouldn’t he throw away his pen and burn his many journals full of insignificant poetic musings?  Why should we bother to read this book of poetry?  O’Shea advocates naive art (not “naive” in the most common sense of the term, but “naive” strictly referring to art produced without fundamental insight into the nature of self and world) first and foremost on the grounds that poetry works as a Way independently of the poet.  Some of the points he makes intersect with those made by T.S. Eliot, who noted that a poet may be immoral, boring, or foolish, while his poems may nonetheless exhibit an astounding radiance and depth of insight.  Likewise, Anne Sexton mentioned that her psychotherapist thought her poems exhibited insights which she had not yet consciously realized.  How do such things happen?  A common way of framing an answer goes something like this: by means of Inspiration, the poet visits the place where the mystic lives.  This strikes me as not quite right.  It seems to me that, somehow or other, the poet has his anchor cast over a place where drops of Bliss rise to the surface of the waters like drops of oil trickling slowly from a deep ocean crevasse.  The in the mind of the mystic, the crevasse has opened wide.  It has swallowed him, and he has swallowed it.  
    One can, like Hakuin, decide to go through that “process” first.  Though this impossible swallowing is uncaused, certain kinds of discipline seem to make it more likely.  Other sorts of discipline, or a relative lack thereof, allow one to go on riding the waves of Inspiration, tasting those drops of Bliss, and then coming back to the shore, in most cases with only the poem itself retaining any traces of wisdom.  O’Shea has chosen a third option: to follow art as a spiritual discipline that makes way for the impossible uncaused swallowing of the ocean and the source of Bliss.
    For the reader, any of these choices can offer great boons, even the latter two.  O’Shea sees language as a completely natural phenomenon, likening it to fruit growing on trees.  Even a relatively young tree has within it the potential to offer rich, delicious, and nurturing fruit.  As the poet matures, his fruit becomes more vigorous, more complex, more expressive of its terroir, and ever more nurturing–especially if that important insight into the nature of things pokes into his consciousness with increasing clarity.  
    O’Shea views his poetry as a record of his work toward insight, something like a poetic phenomenology of the process of transcendence which can delight the reader as reader and as seeker, and which, as it proceeds, offers greater and greater potential to spark insight into and appreciation for this very life.  Because of the nature of the aesthetic, that potential begins with the first authentic poem the poet allows to emerge.  If genuine Inspiration germinates the poem, it carries the potential for spiritual sustenance.  In point of fact, O’Shea thinks that Poetry writes poetry, hence one facet of his conception of Poetry in Search of the Way.  I would put the matter this way: the poet cannot work on the poem, but only on himself.  By working on himself, he allows something to work through him.  This is also what ultimately works on him.  To let poetry work on the poet makes poetry a Way.  It leads to Poetry's writing of poems, Life shining Light on Life.  And it means that experience comes to the poet, confirming the self of the poet, rather than the self of the poet going out to confirm experience and the objects of experience.  Even brilliant poets can miss how this works, and though their best work emerges in spite of it, their development as human beings still suffers.  
    Poetry in Search of the Way also means that poetry as a path involves contemplation and careful, compassionate observation.  It requires a meditation practice carried out as part and parcel of the Work, which may mean meditating in the stereotypical sense, but more importantly signifies doing the Work of poetry as a spiritual practice.  In meditation one searches oneself out.  This is not self-help or getting to know oneself as popularly understood and practiced.  Rather, it is a very rigorous and often uncomfortable movement into the Unknown.  The ox-herding pictures describe this process well.  One seeks what cannot be sought and finds what cannot be found, but one nonetheless begins by searching, and one never stops the process of observation to which searching gives birth.
    Poetry in Search of the Way also suggests that poetry must have its ceremonial dimension.  In the East we find the Way of tea, the Way of archery, the Way of calligraphy, and so on, strictly ritualized into rigorous, disciplined ceremonies.  Likewise the poet who wishes to allow poetry to work on him as a path to realization must establish rigorous, disciplined ceremonies for the making and reading of poems.  O’Shea unabashedly stole this conception from Ontological Realism, a literary movement which argues, among other things, that contemporary artists should establish their own artistic ceremony as a way to cultivate insight and originality.  This goes beyond the superstitions of writing at the same time every day, wearing the same pair of sweat pants, and using the same type of pen.  Such habits simply point toward the deeper spiritual currents which the artist as human being often fails to touch.  One must deliberately approach poetic action as Way.  O’Shea thinks of his work as Ontological Realist in spirit, and he has tried in the creation of these poems to allow poetry itself to define its Way, and to allow that Way to work on the poet and his readers.  One must take care not to reduce Ontological Realism to a poetics of mindfulness, or a conscious-conscientious poetics.  In doing so one might successfully capture much of the energy of this non-movement, but one also performs an action quite antithetical to Ontological Realism: one reduces it.  It then becomes a poetics of differance, a view of it which belies the fact that its mindful movements, when executed gracefully, neither differ nor defer.
    As I said, the reduction captures much of the energy of Ontological Realism, and it is accurate to a degree.  But its accuracy depends on what kind of Will goes into a text.  If the text has been tempered by a Will to a System, it has a great deal in its margins, a great deal of difference, with a great deal deferred.  Ontological Realism, on the other hand, does not seek to systematize–it seeks to quicken.  It seeks to present and precipitate authentic impulse, spontaneous experience, a standing within the now-not-now of Life.  The means (a means without Will–i.e., a means that involves non-doing) by which Ontological Realism tries to accomplish its awakenings involves a carefully self-designed religion of the aesthetic.  The poet, in this case O’Shea, follows his own poetic Way, his own strict and rigorous discipline, the repetition of which can help him attain spontaneity, insight, and creative artistic embodiment of experience, embodiment seen by us in every gesture, on and off the page.  Although ultimately self-created, the poet's Way nonetheless retains unbroken fidelity to the wisdom traditions.
    Minor White represents a great example of this making-into-a-ceremony.  When he taught photography workshops the textbooks had “nothing to do with photography.”  According to John Daido Loori Roshi, who studied with White, you would find yourself reading Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery and Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons.  You would also find yourself waking up at four in the morning to go through movements with a modern dance instructor.  Daido Roshi explains that making a picture of a tree meant approaching the tree with reverence and asking its permission to make the picture.  One might sit in front of the tree, meditating for many minutes, perhaps many hours, and one might get up having no idea whether or not one actually remembered to release the shutter and capture an image.  One would also realize that it didn’t matter.  The thing that really mattered had happened.  The photo was an afterthought, a nice consequence, but quite nonessential.
    Archery presents another fine example.  Anyone can pick up a bow and shoot it.  And, as Loori and the other students would have found out by reading Herrigel, a Westerner can certainly figure out how to hit the target with a Japanese bow.  But some Master made archery into a ceremony.  The student learns to approach the shooting area, string the bow, nock an arrow, draw the bow, and release it in a strictly prescribed manner.  Since the student must relinquish the goal of hitting the target, the ritual has nothing to do with archery.  It has to do with joining Life, joining Life’s energy, its rhythm, its breathing, and its rich intelligence.  Thus it has nothing to do with anything else but archery–and so archery becomes a Way.  As does poetry.  And in this art of poetry, just as in archery, one does not aim at targets, one does not point at things and try to hit them with words.  One could say in fact that this poetry does not refer in the standard sense.  It simply is.  It arises as an outward manifestation of inner events, like flowers blossoming on a bush, or fruit ripening on a tree.  
    That is what the student of this discipline would like to see anyway.  In the beginning, it occurs as rarely as the occurrence in archery of allowing a good shot to happen.  And note, to emphasize the point again, one can be a Master of archery without consistently hitting the target, though hitting the target seems to happen quite often for most Masters.  This relates to another idea one finds in Ontological Realism, one which helps explain the nature and role of discipline envisioned by it.  O’Shea believes that, as a criterion of Mastery, every true Master must transcend his discipline.  Having transcended it, the Master will not necessarily abandon it.
    Perhaps only a true Master can establish a new discipline that will work for large numbers of people.  However, given the rapid pace of change, many contemporary artists will find already established disciplines lacking in some way or other.  For some poets, iambic pentameter is as good as dead; haiku belongs to the Japanese, some of whom may find it outdated; abstract expressionism is a moment in time many painters care not to relive; surrealism did what it could do; and so on (note, of course, that many of our Western disciplines were likely founded by people who had limited, if any, sustained insight into the true nature of self and reality).  We have nothing firm on which to stand.  The old myths are–old.  We can no longer relate to the Bible in the same way people did two thousand years ago.  We need new mythologies, new ceremonies, new disciplines of art that stay completely in tune with contemporary life, its rapid pace, and its pressing challenges.  Perhaps in the future we will share a common center again.  If we are to survive as a species, that future may have to come quickly.  The point of following poetry as Way is to find that center, and allow it to guide the creation of a new age of humanity, the age of the Sustainable Human.  What the full mythology of sustainability will look like, no one can tell for certain.  Perhaps it will make room for the structure in the Grail legend that Joseph Campbell so admired: the Knights of the Round Table enter the forest at the spot least traveled and most dark.  We each walk our own way of the Way, our own Te in relation to the Tao.  
    One may say that we need to give up mythologies altogether and simply pursue Truth.  Generally speaking, O’Shea rejects the notion of poetry as a path to Truth and the Meaning of Life.  In this respect his work differs very significantly from the philosophical poetry of Laura Riding Jackson, to take a well known and talented example.  She ran into the problem that, from a certain rationalistic point of view, beauty and truth seem antithetical.  So much so that she gave up writing poetry.  But this problem exists only if you think, for instance, that the ritual of archery should orient itself to the target, to hitting the target. ;In which case you would also think the Master could not possibly transcend the discipline, since that would mean transcending the target, which makes no sense from such a rationalistic perspective.  According to this limited vision the discipline of poetry aims at something, and it has a clear and distinct goal (hear, “clear and distinct ideas,” separation of body and mind, etc): a judgement of Life, an uncovering and weighing of its Meaning, an analysis of its Truth and Falsity.  But for O’Shea, the discipline serves only as an aid to joining with Life, to standing up within it (innerstanding).  Having joined with Life, it naturally follows that one has transcended the rituals that supported you, because they do not stand outside of Life . . . they count as a very small piece of it, smaller even than you.
    O’Shea looks to poetry for neither truth nor meaning in the common sense.  He looks to it for experience.  But not experience as knowledge, rather, experience as a quickening of the body-mind, a movement into the unknown.  He asks poetry to help him live a human life and die a human death in a more-than-human world.  He follows the Way of poetry in order to see–beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsity, and even beyond beauty and ugliness.  In this respect he represents a good example of an Artistic Socrates, a rational-romantic figure conjured up by Nietzsche over a century ago and looked upon today by certain philosophers, eccentric ones, as a (forgivable) graven image of ethical heroism.  
    In this enjoyable volume of poems, O’Shea provides us with moments of very accomplished philosophical argumentation, and he demonstrates a potential to do better philosophy than many academic philosophers will ever do–beautiful philosophy that charms the ear and awakens the spirit rather than grating the ear and putting the spirit soundly to sleep (anyone remember Philosophy 101?).  This record of a poet on the Way to Wisdom, and of Poetry in Search of that Way, should stand as an example for all lovers of Wisdom, all readers of prose, fiction, and poetry.  It serves as an example for writers, too: from those writing “serious” works to those keeping personal journals that will never see the light of publication.  We can all take up this poet’s challenge to ceremonialize the acts of reading and writing, whatever we may read or write, so that these very human endeavors, these sophisticated body-mind activities, can help lead us into an authentic experience of human life and an insight into the complete flowingness of this remarkable existence.