The imagination uses the phraseology of science. It attacks, stirs, animates, is radio-active in all that can be touched by action. Words occur in liberation by virtue of its process. ~ William Carlos Williams
The light
for all time shall outspeed
the thunder crack.
Recently I asked a good friend to write an article for this site. I might, she said through misgivings. I don’t, she confessed, know much about Integral. I recoiled, involuntarily. I asked, is that what we are, an Integral site? I suppose so, she said.
Oh, but, my dear, whatever this thing called integral is, you are that! I wanted to say this, but I didn’t.
What, exactly, is integral
and if we have pigeon-holed ourselves,
where pray tell is the exit?
It is the mind
the mind
that must be cured
short of death’s
intervention,
and the will becomes again
a garden. The poem
is complex and the place made
in our lives
for the poem.
Silence can be complex too,
but you do not get far
with silence.
Time is coming to scrub ourselves clean of the language, assumptions, and presumptive certainty. It’s not working. Better marketing won’t counter the decline. There is a flaw, fatal and unsalvageable, a flaw not of design but of imagination. A mistaken containment of broken light.
Those of us who have troubled ourselves to read the world of integral thinkers and hitch our hopes to its lineage are largely to blame. We suffer hubris and delusions of grandeur, talking presumptively about such things as being at the leading edge of this, awakening to that. Meanwhile infighting and self-importance rule while we hold each and every alternative divorced from the master code, a code in whose DNA is action.
We cradle
so many perspectives
in wet paper arms.
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.
Certainly we can agree that integral is not the dominion of one philosopher or another? And I’m confident we can agree it is not confined to an exclusive language.
It has been here always in various forms. Wisdom, sourced deeply, uncovered in form. Your bookshelves are filled with it, lineage streams emerging across history, whole and partial all. The Great Conversation unfolding beneath the turning soil, turning the soil.
This map, if it is a map, is of reality – reality! – and is useful only in so far as it is real.
Now it’s a hedge, a repetitive default, used to deconstruct effort - paralysis - or move pawn pieces - hubris. What it is is a way to see and help steer in the furious midst of living. What it’s become, an abstraction, worse, certainty. A tool now in the hands of an enemy.
The imagination has fallen asleep.
Your hello
into the receiver
of a toddler’s ringing toy phone
is more real.
The gentle turn
of your lover toward you
seeking a small squeeze
is real.
The deaths I suffered
began in the heads
about me, my eyes
were too keen
not to see through
the world’s niggardliness.
I accepted it
as my fate.
The wealthy
I defied
or not so much they,
for they have their uses,
as they who take their cues from them.
Negative Capability, a poetic term coined by John Keats, Williams’ literary hero, is, says Keats, the capacity
to be in ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. To live complete, at peace, in ambiguity, leaning in, to know. This he said was the locus of creativity. Emptiness as creative force.
giving entirely
everything
Naked before
creation.
The best available developmental research defines higher (or deeper) development in part by an increasing capacity to live, move, exist in increased ambiguity. While considering multiple perspectives. AND engaging transformative action. All together acrobatically.
The poem
if it reflects the sea
reflects only
its dance
upon that profound depth
where
it seems to triumph.
The bomb puts an end
to all that.
I am reminded
that the bomb
also
is a flower
dedicated
howbeit
to our destruction.
The mere picture
of the exploding bomb
fascinates us
so that we cannot wait
to prostrate ourselves
before it. We do not believe
that love
can so wreck our lives.
If it finds you holding a broken heart the better.
Finds you in Africa aiding the poor, amazing!
Finds you out there arms waving on stage, so be it.
Sends you enraged into old wounds, go there, bleed if it moves you.
Finds you ferreting out lifetimes on a couch, fine.
Have the temerity to try something different.
Generosity is all you have
your flesh and
everything behind your eyes.
The act of sacrifice.
Tell the truth
said Dickinson
but tell it
slant.
Grace
that accident
blesses sacrifice.
The measure itself
has been lost
and we suffer for it.
We come to our deaths
in silence.
The bomb speaks.
All suppressions,
from the witchcraft trials at Salem
to the latest
book burnings
are confessions
that the bomb
has entered our lives
to destroy us.
Every drill
driven into the earth
for oil enters my side
also.
Waste, waste!
dominates the world.
It is the bomb’s work.
In contrast to Negative Capability, Keats described Wordsworth’s work, half affectionately I believe, as the Egotistical Sublime, the act of holding it all close giving away only the colours and scent.
The Egotistical Sublime is self-centred
A description of life, not quite living.
A world of adjectives.
Negative Capability is the
act of leaning into
the unknown
eyes open
What power has love but forgiveness?
In other words
by its intervention
what has been done
can be undone.
What good is it otherwise?
Because of this
I have invoked the flower
in that
frail as it is
after winter’s harshness
it comes again
to delect us.
Ashphodel, the ancients believed,
in hell’s despite
was such a flower.
With daisies pied
and violets blue,
we say, the spring of the year
comes in!
So may it be
with the spring of love’s year
also
if we can but find
the secret word
to transform it.
It is ridiculous
what airs we put on
to seem profound
while our hearts
gasp dying
for want of love.
We are clever, we humans, clever enough to hedge ourselves time and again from things that matter.
For weeks, months and years I’ve seen and read people even on this site – this very site! – using maps to abstract the flesh of being immediately alive. And I’m troubled by it. I don’t want my child reading some of it, this jizm onto empty maps.
What once appeared to be care and a considered mind is now clearly the entrails of some cunning animal, its home a warren of a thousand hidden motives, badly built.
Worst of all saying nothing
in so many words.
The Egotistical Sublime.
It is winter
and there
waiting for you to care for them
are your plants.
Poor things! you say
as you compassionately
pour at their roots
the reviving water.
Lean-cheeked
I say to myself
kindness moves her
shall she not be kind
also to me? At this
courage possessed me finally
to go on.
But something different is dawning. Invention at the heart of it. Vulnerability its doorway. We’ve neared a threshold of common complaints and now we the people are taking over. The crises point may well be at hand. Though, out my window, clouds, blue sky, alternate against ancient mountains, while in the foreground, a rough sea. A rough God comes riding while jesus still alive meditates you in prayer. All the sages, all of them, meditating you, cupped hands holding, urging you onward.
The water level rises. Rising people together aware at root of our common humanity. Beneath it all a touch of common knowledge, expanding care, mysterious acts that transform, crises points and fault lines triggering solutions with no attribution. Invention. Action from every angle at once, do it, an assemblage of awareness at every depth doing what works – invention -- what is right in front – invention -- at the end of the fork – invent! Leaning loving learning laughing dying openly to what God?
They’re everywhere, rising, one foot in front of the other, eyes ablaze, with edge, with heart. They don’t care about the chatter, don’t care about the map. It’s the territory, stupid, occupy it. Everything is sacred, everywhere heaven, all around us beauty, in every trash bin glory, within every rat trap a trap door. It’s raining, clouds gathering, forcefully, gently, gently, forcefully, open up, step in, listen, it’s time.
Only the imagination is real!
I have declared it
time without end.
If a man die
it is because death
has first
possessed his imagination.
But if he refuse death—
no greater evil
can befall him
unless it be the death of love
meet him
in full career.
Then indeed
for him
the light has gone out.
But love and the imagination
are a piece,
swift as the light
to avoid destruction.
So we come to watch time’s flight
as we might watch
summer lightning
or fireflies, secure,
by grace of the imagination,
safe in its care.
For if
the light itself
has escaped,
the whole edifice opposed to it
goes down.
Light, the imagination
and love,
in our age,
by natural law,
which we worship,
maintain
all of a piece
their dominance.
So let us love
confident as is the light
in its struggle with darkness
that there is as much to say
and more
for the one side
and that not the darker
