STRETCHING LANGUAGE INTO AN ANIMATE WORLD

 

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem 'Pied Beauty' starts 'Glory be to God for dappled things' - things counter, original spare, strange. Hopkins was that most rarefied and terrible of spiritual creatures, a Jesuit priest, an unusually sensitive soul, genuinely tortured by several forbidden desires, physically frail, and crashingly depressed. When I read him in my youth, I was uplifted by his joyous feel for the world around him, and the way he stretched language so it sang all by itself. I did not know about how different a soul he was, or how cruel his life. 

 

Hopkins played fast and loose with language even outside of poetry, and he had his own term for the specific essence of things. He called it 'inscape'. What I find valuable here is the idea that we experience inscape through specificity, and through the senses. The inscape of a tulip is experienced by appreciating its characteristics, such as the delicacy of its petals: that tulip, those petals. God makes everything unique. The experience of this is called instress, and our own experience is as unique as the thing we are experiencing. Thus, non-ordinary reality is immediate, here and now, and not an abstract thing at all. Hopkins, tragically for him, was wedded to God and his truly dire attempts to vanish into the approval of a fearsome deity juxtapose with this delicate specificity when it comes to experience and the world of nature. Here is that juxtaposition in 'The Starlight Night'. His animist soul is naturally uplifted, as if by the sudden discovery of a glorious peopled reality,  but then he must be drawn away to contemplate the religious life before reaching a temporary equilibrium.

• The Starlight Night

• Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
• O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
• The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
• Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
• The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
• Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
• Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—
• Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
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• Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
• Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
• Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
• These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
• The shocks.   This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
• Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

 

How fortunate I am to have fewer spiritual inhibitions. My inhibitions are all my own, in fact.

 

 I think the animistic world view lends itself to a kind of panentheism, where we experience the divine as entangled in the world. The world is not divine, nor is it separate from the divine. It is imperfectly manifest. When we feel we are one with it, as we sometimes do when we explore it in a Shamanic state of consciousness. that does not make us perfect or even wise. It is more that this is a natural state, from whence we begin. The beginning is thus with our relationship with the world, this entanglement with the world. It is outside us as well as inside us. Working with a world outside of us helps ground us, literally. No, I don't make all my own reality, as the new agers and the chaotes think.

 

Dappled light is my favourite. It moves all the time, stochastic. It is best seen sideways, like the small beings who move in it. There, I can feel the different paces of light, from the shuttle of sunlight between leaves, to the lengthening of shadows, to the slow source of the sun. I have taken to giving homely offerings to forests on my walks. The light returns the gift over and over.