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[ by Charles Cameron — a poem of mine, with continuing exploration of Koestler’s notion of creativity at the intersection of fields, showing how three thoughts are braided in a single polyphony ]
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A Meditation in Time of War
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It is for the artist to see skeleton behind flesh
when depicting war, tho’ beauty too
deserves a hint of her inevitable decay,
flesh being heir to dust and dust its progeny:

nothing is so mechanical visioned in paint
as the tubing that supplies a gas mask with air,
yet the throat is no different, constricted
by an urgency to breathe as breath snuffs out:

gone, gone, paragon, quintessence of dust, svaha!

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William Butler Yeats has a well-known poem with the same title, so I am borrowing from, flattering, and wondering whether I might sneak under the same mantle as a member of the illustrious departed here.

And Madhu, friend and friend of this blog, encouraged me some while back to post poems here on occasion, so this one is for her by way of a response.

I also wanted to post this particular poem here, though, because its last line nicely illustrates the same notion of overlapping or juxtaposed elements that Koestler claims lies at the heart of the creative process which I have been exploring in my recent posts on Klimt, on Nancy Fouts, and constellational thinking.

Because yes, I now have a book project under way, and it concerns the development of a new style of multifaceted, complex / simplex thinking.

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The first lines of my poem were triggered by one of those fleeting glances at a blog logo — in this case, the logo of the Kings of War blog from London, which I’ve shaved down a bit to give you a taste of here:
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It’s impressive, eye-catching — and then you get used to it.

So a couple of nights ago when I glimpsed it, I slowed down enough to take a quick but deliberate look, came away with an impression — not necessarily accurate as to detail, but giving me my emotional response to the piece — and worked and played to get it into words, making this what I believe is technically called an ekphrastic poem, a poem about a painting.

The original painting is a mural — José Clemente Orozco‘s Catharsis (1934), from the Museo Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

So that, with a little wandering of the mind, is what gives us the first eight lines. It’s the ninth and last line I want to comment on, here.

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That last line reads:

gone, gone, paragon, quintessence of dust, svaha!

And what’s happening here that delights me, and that gives the poem either a perplexing close or a powerful one, depending on the associations which the reader brings to bear on it, “happens” as follows:

I am letting two, or you might say three, streams of language that are very dear to me braid together in that last line.

There’s the mantra that sums up the entire Prajnaparamita or Perfection of Wisdom literature — a major strand in Buddhist teachings — at the end of the Heart Sutra:

Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi, svaha!

There’s the English translation of the same, which Thich Nhat Hanh explains thus:

Gate means gone. Gone from suffering to the liberation of suffering. Gone from forgetfulness to mindfulness. Gone from duality into non-duality. Gate gate means gone, gone. Paragate means gone all the way to the other shore. So this mantra is said in a very strong way. Gone, gone, gone all the way over. In Parasamgate sam means everyone, the sangha, the entire community of beings. Everyone gone over to the other shore. Bodhi is the light inside, enlightenment, or awakening. You see it and the vision of reality liberates you. And svaha is a cry of joy or excitement, like “Welcome!” or “Hallelujah!” “Gone, gone, gone all the way over, everyone gone to the other shore, enlightenment, svaha!”

— and which I remember from my days at Oxford in Edward Conze‘s much earlier English version:

Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond…

And there’s this, from Hamlet, Act 2 scene 2:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

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So “gate, gate, paragate” gives me “gone, gone, paragon…” — and “paragon” brings me to “paragon of animals … quintessence of dust”.

If you have all three of these utterances in mind — and each one of them is memorable the way a passage in Isaiah or Job, or some great Churchillian speech, or phrase in Melville or Dickens can be memorable — they will all three be present, braided together as a single music, a polyphony, a constellation of meanings, in that one last line.

Roll them on your tongue, taste the beauty in each one of them, the nobility, the evanescence of this human life. And now read the poem through again.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2012 at 10:19 pm and is filed under art, book, Buddhism, Charles Cameron, cognitive goods, complexity, literature, medici effect, Patterns, personal, poetry of war, rethinking thinking, Uncategorized, war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.