Returning to the Ripple

     ...My tryst with Hopkins is much different even from its beginnings.  I had only written several poems two of which were ‘brutal’ to me at the time.  The first remains unfinished inside me.  Of the second I remember only its final line.  After my own ‘burning’ of my writings and paintings in the trash bin my writing became merely copying parts of what I was reading into a personal diary-journal.

                      "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
                        Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
                        May who ne'er hung there.”

                       ~ Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ; No Worst, There is None

     The original impetus was not the poem itself but its appearance after a tragedy, much as the sinking of the Deutschland was for Hopkins.  A divine spark of an eagle and the comforting mantle of a friend planted me squarely upon the ‘North Face’.  From those cold polar heights through the broiling mists I too have witnessed the…”“The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “like a great dragon,” he wrote, “folded in the gate to forbid all entrance.”

---

The Interrupted Concert

                            By Federico García Lorca   Translated By W. S. Merwin

                                           The frozen sleepy pause

                                           of the half moon

                                           has broken the harmony

                                           of the deep night.

*Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.*  Henry Van Dyke
I can have dreams? Really?  Me?  I am trying desperately to listen, to keep my mind focused...Instead, I feel a ripple in the underwater; a crocodile entering a swamp or some mysterious creature waiting to destroy.  The image....morning sunlight touching the dew drops glistening on petals of marigolds and roses...withou a dream we have nothing.  ~Ruth

…to say, “but this is how the world is”.   ~ Jennie Erdal, ‘What’s the big idea?’

Skopeji

…As Fike suggests, perhaps the term inscape is a cognate of the Greek verb skopein (to look attentively) or the noun skopos (that upon which one fixes his or her look). ⁷⁰  In any case, the essential point is that Hopkins’ use of inscape implies many of the elements of Ruskinian aesthetics…

…Or seven tied by the rope on the Alps; four go headlong, then the fifth, as strong as Samson, checks them and the two behind do not even feel the strain’).⁶  Did ‘the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?’  Hopkins fancies that the cry of the tall nun may have alerted the other passengers to the reality of their situation (stanza 31), for their time of suffering is, in fact, the moment of their inevitable confrontation with God….he builds on that fancy…~Inspirations Unbidden, Chapter 4, ‘The Cavernous Dark’

   Does that fact negate the importance or the beauty of the writings of such poets as Lorca?   Personally, I do not think so.  We are called to a higher taskmaster than that as artists.  The beauty of a diamond is that it does contain many unfolding facets as it 'reflects' light. Reason and truth however cannot be petulantly discarded for they remain the necessary discipline and banner of all true 'creativity'---that which can continue to give 'hope' and 'life'.

Returning to the ‘Ripple’

   We live in the ‘age of the enchantress’ which has been unfolding for centuries.  More recently I have discovered that many ‘artists’ continue a fatalistic dance with this enchantress.  Many of the English poets such as the Brontë sisters openly admit to a type of ‘channeling.’  Many of the 19^th C. ‘artists’ were in attendance at spiritualist, theosophical salons. 

   It is pronounced in the surrealists.  Lorca confronted it in his study of ‘duende’.  Many of the Spanish artists have continued along this path.  While it continues to morph through its Medusa-like tentacles its source is the enchantress.  While Lorca and his companions followed it as ‘avant-garde’ surrealism, Roberto Bolaño restyles it as ‘magical realism’.  Its ‘amorphous’ shapes and its siren songs bring about many human ecstasies that often elude discernment as Odysseus knew.  The key focus is the 'source'.

  These false ecstatic experiences are antithetical to the work of the Holy Spirit as he continues His work of and in creation.  Duende, however,  is not ‘haecceitas’.  

==============

My topic is Hopkins and contemplation. It is a word we are hearing more and more as we enter the new millennium, but few of us are able to define it. Hopkins himself did so admirably, as we will see.

Contemplation contains a Metaphor of Seeing

First, instead of a definition, I would like to offer a paradigm experience of contemplation, that of Isaiah of Jerusalem, sometimes called First Isaiah: "In the year of King Uzziah's death, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne; his train filled the sanctuary" (Is. 6:1). Not only does Isaiah see the Lord, but he is literally dumb-founded, that is, mute before the vision, managing only to hear the Seraphim stammer out the phrase, "Holy, holy, holy, is Yahweh Sabaoth. Heaven and earth are filled with His glory."

Because contemplation contains a metaphor of seeing, Isaiah's vision is paradigmatic. He sees first into the sacred space of the temple, and then into the whole world filled with God's "glory". If the first moment of this experience, the Temple vision, is the more mystical one, the second moment, the glory of God filling the world, is the more incarnational. Isaiah experiences God both as utterly holy, "set apart", and at the same time hears the angels proclaim that God's kabod or shining presence fills the whole world, streaming out of and beyond the Temple. If contemplation is seeing that the sacred space of the temple is everywhere, the true contemplative, like Isaiah, moves this experience out of the temple, so that the temple becomes the template of the holy in our midst, the sacred that is right in front of us. At the moment of God's greatest transcendence, Isaiah hears of immanence.

Contemplation is the Legacy of Everyone

Being truly contemplative is being able to say like Jacob, "Truly Yahweh is in this place and I did not know! . . This is nothing less than the abode of God, and the gate of heaven" (Gen. 28: 16-17). If the spirituality of our time has learned anything, it is that this vision is not reserved for a Temple elite, that contemplation is the legacy of everyone. The paradox is that the holiness or "set apartness" of God fills up the world, and is to be encountered in the everyday; God's transcendence is immanent.

Contemplaton and Purification

But Isaiah is so overcome by his unworthiness before this vision that one of the seraphim must purify his unclean lips with a live coal. So the second element of the contemplative experience is purification, letting the "unclean" speech of ordinary thought and language be burned away so that one can be a true prophet, a "spokesperson for God." Finally, as the third element or moment of contemplative experience, Isaiah is commissioned; he is sent to the people to ask them to "listen and listen, but never understand" and to "look and look, but never perceive"  (Is. 6: 9).

Contemplation: Seeing the Sacred in the Ordinary

I find something of all three of these elements of Isaiah's contemplative experience in the life and poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins: seeing the sacred in the ordinary, being struck dumb and purified (even to the point of a seven-year silence), and being given the frustrated mission to get others to "look and listen", even if they cannot understand. Hopkins's experience was the contemplative experience of seeing the world's holiness, even in its ordinariness, peculiarity, and irregularity--its "piedness". "The world is charged with the grandeur of God"; "Glory be to God for dappled things." Hopkins was a contemplative, that is, seeking and seeing God, the Holy, in the world and in humans, in all of his life, no matter how opaque or complex or how troubled it became. Even when he came to Ireland, I do not believe he ever stopped being the contemplative he was when finding God's glory filling the whole world in his Welsh years. Only, as the darkness increased, the challenge to that contemplation was greater. Finally, Hopkins took up the prophetic mission in the same way Isaiah did: he shared the vision, often, sadly, like Isaiah, to those who, like his few readers, would listen and listen and not understand, look and look and not perceive….   ~ Maria Lichtman Beroea College, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Contemplative Hero’