Learning to Taste the World as Poetry

(The following was written to aid my own understanding. I expect some parts (perhaps many parts) of it would not survive serious examination. Neither am I wholly certain if I have achieved much other than a verbose circumambulation of an ambiguous center; yet while the afore would in all likelihood recommend the discerning reader to spend his or her twelve to sixteen minutes elsewhere, the meditation that follows may be of interest to those of you that are likely to find yourselves here, on this obscure Substack. Therefore it remains, and I have the responsibility for what is written. Forgive me if I have erred.)

Mother Siluana Vlad said that in the beginning man lived by taste, and not through consumption: however, after the fragmentation of man’s nature, “the deeper, more spiritual logoi of things [became]are covered; only their materialistic side and fleshly utility are seen. For example the beauty of an apple, the sweetness of a grape, are no longer seen as having the purpose of making us realize that the creative energies of beauty and of sweetness come from God; we should still have this knowledge even when there will no longer be apples and grapes; we see them pure and simple, for awakening and satisfying a bodily appetite. They say that the beauty of young girls is a tempting form produced by nature in the service of the multiplication of the species. The material attributes of things make a wall which prevents seeing anything beyond them. The world becomes exclusively material and utilitarian, or usable exclusively for the flesh… Thus the horizon is narrowed.: (Staniloea, Orthodox Spirituality pg. 210) The translation (in the full, twofold sense of the word) of meanings visual and semantic afforded by poetry and the other arts can educate us in this ‘tasting’ once again. “When we consume art, we are, however poorly, filling the role of illumination in our spiritual lives (Cormac Jones, Art as Food).” For indeed even the humanistic and self-interested labyrinths of the troubadour’s courtly love, adduced in a certain way the final transcendent telos of imminent beauty, and the veneration and courtesy (in the technical sense as I have used it elsewhere) due to its appearance; better than these however the epic poem The Knight in the Panther’s Skin of Shota Rustaveli, for whom the Areopagite’s grand ladders were near at hand, recovers the various desires of the two protagonists knights who figure therein into a framework of thanksgiving that unfolds the laudation of their respective brides from glory to glory: but rarely does the golden calf hinder the incense of their paeans from rising to the proper source.

The artist is more nourished by contemplation, as it were, of created essences than by their ingestion; he praises the giver of the gift even as he receives the gift. He never loses sight of the consubstantiality of created things, nor does he introduce into the choir of the logoi anything contrary to nature. He does not seek to myopically enclose anything for himself outside of the reciprocal communion of the gift; here we may recall the monastic dictum to ‘never eat alone.’ 

“We are a body. So we offer spiritual gifts to one another through material things- a flower, a kiss, a hug, a gift, a poem, a word. Each of these gifts is a bush burning without being consumed. It is a material offering, alive with the grace of love, which transforms mere matter into something divine by grace. A gift of love is a grace bearer.” (Aiden Hart, Beauty Spirit Matter, pg. 95)

For Poetry especially, the instrument of metaphor is principle in the education of ‘taste’. Tom Cheetham says that metaphor is how we can live the refusal of idolatry. Meta-phore means to “carry over,” and thus we carry over the beauty and glory of created beings, the gratuity of delight we have in music or in poetry, over to the Giver of Good Gifts, who is praised in all things. And metaphor becomes in a sense dialogical, because the creation itself is the metaphora, the carrying over, the plasticizing of God’s love for us, though created as wholly ontologically other from Him. “Everything is beautiful,” said St. Porphyrios; and metaphor shows the affinity, rhymes the logoi one with another, and educes the always smoldering ember of the eternal which calls each being to the fullness of its unique identity in God. And so we test a poem on our tongue like the handle of a door that leads into a series of endlessly interpenetrating hallways and rooms, and let ourselves enter the subscendent silence of apophatic betweenness that metaphor organizes. 

“Learning by heart poems is the most pleasant and insatiably fun activity in prison. Blessed are those who know poetry. Who knows by heart many poems is a happy man in prison, his are the long hours that pass quickly and in dignity.”

(Archimandrite Nicolae Steinhardt, The Diary of Joy)

Man indeed lives not by bread alone. To quote at length Archimandrite Touma, “When one becomes incarnational, he must treat everyone and everything divinely and humanly at the same time. After the Lord Jesus Christ, we have come to treat everything in a divine and human manner. For example, it is time to eat and we come to the table. We don't go there only to eat. This is something purely human. We go to the table to treat the table in a divine-human way. For this reason, we pray. We stand next to the table, we remember God, we ask Him to bless what He gives us, and we bear in mind that we are not just concerned with filling our bellies with food: our fundamental concern is that this food that we see before us is blessed for the heavenly table that we desire and we work so that it will be granted to us to sit with Jesus there. The Lord Jesus said clearly that we must ask for heavenly bread at all times. ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ When man eats of the bread that is in this age, he hungers again. The important thing is to ask for heavenly bread at all times. We carry all this within ourselves when we stand before the table that we go to eat of its good things and thank God for them. All this happens in one's mind, in one's heart. Otherwise, if we were satisfied with formalities in prayers, or even with merely blessing, if we only do what is necessary and then sit at the table to enjoy it, we miss the reality of dealing with the table-- and, in fact, everything-- in an incarnational manner. We treat everything divinely and humanly at once! At the table, in reality, we stand before God and we ask, first and last, for the Lord God to grace us with His Holy Spirit. Man is not sated with food. What sates man is heavenly manna… When one enters into the reality of the incarnation, everything becomes sacramental for him. We treat the whole universe, we treat all people, sacramentally, in the sense that we deal with what is outwardly apparent and at the same time, through what is outwardly apparent, that which is not outwardly apparent. Through human things, we deal with divine things, we scrutinize divine things, we bring down divine things, we ask God to give us Himself, His grace, His blessing, His Spirit, through everything that comes from us, through everything that we treat with our hands, our body, our soul, our mind.” (Touma, The Reality of the Incarnation)

Beholding the beautiful reciprocally invites us into conformitive union (without confusion) with the One who is Beauty Himself. And as the glory of the Lord is a living human being, so we should seek to discover and refine that glory in our own being, by entering into the fullness of communion. As Elder Arsenie Papacioc said (and I paraphrase) “humility is to not move from one’s own place.” It is to sing the choral part given one, and delight in the majesty of the Lord as manifest in His creation.  We must endeavor to live among strangers and brethren as within a gallery of persons bearing the image of God, for “if you are surrounded by beautiful icons, you will eventually become like one.” (Seeking Perfection in the World of Art, pg. 181) And poetry can, I think, begin to tutor us in such a recognition, if only a very little. For deep attention given to anything, will invariably awaken in one a sense of the sublime, of the gratuitous; persons and objects will begin to coruscate with the inscrutability of being; and persons a great deal more, will frustrate one with the infinitude of their tantalizing inaccessibility: one will begin to sense the created splendor that no eye nor ear can plumb.  

“What usually happens is that people look at objects- the sky, a house, a tree, people- simply to find their orientation. But for me each one of these was an inexpressible mystery. It was a wonder to me- how this vision comes into being. From such a way of looking at things the sense of beauty develops, because the deeper you penetrate the extraordinary complexity of every phenomena in life, the more you are aware of its beauty. Under this influence the feeling of beauty used to grow in me to such an extent that I completely lost awareness of time. (St. Sophrony, Correspondence 1)

Repentance in so far as I have known it (little enough that probably it does not even bear mentioning) consists precisely in the recognition of beauty, and one’s infidelity and dissimilarity thereto. It is shameful and embarrassing to choose the food of swine over a cordial fit for gods, solely because the latter were less expedient for the having. To come to an awareness of the beauty of an alder or a hyacinth disturbs the squalor of one’s internal domicile. Even more, the increasing consciousness of one’s potential end, causes tumult in the soul, both because of what one has been ignorant of theretofore, and the pain one has the caused Him who conferred on one the matchless horizon of such glorious being. “The thirsting soul is granted to see profound beauty in others. The soul is like a bee who seeks the nectar of a lone flower in a concrete yard. The hungry soul naturally seeks out all that is good in those whom she meets.” (Aiden Hart, Beauty Spirit Matter) And such a vision incites one to continually ‘change the mind’ in order to maintain the purity thereof. “Purity… is absolute presence. If we say that this glass contains pure water, we mean that it is only water. So the pure in heart are those who are all heart, all eye, all ear, who are fully human.” (Hart) One who loves poetry will wish to be beautiful, like a poem; this is a good beginning.

“The purified heart beholds the world with tears of thanksgiving, for it sees the kindness of God manifest in the beauty of created things. Even humble stones speak to him of God. Humility wells up within him, for he feels unworthy of such abundant gifts. The sweetness of God’s generosity which he sees in the created world enters into his own soul, and remains in him. He is incapable of despising anything, for he sees that everything comes front he hand of God, and has its special purpose. Even those people and things which, in this fallen world, have been distorted by corruption move him to tears, for he still sees their true inner nature and cries with compassion that they be released and allowed to blossom.” (Hart)

So may we then through whatever medium, learn the elegance of taste, the delectation that mutually enlivens in dialogue with the Source of all being; may our hearts begin to be purified out of desire for the Beautiful One, who calls all things to Himself. Thus “by the grace of God and our repentance, our senses are purified so that we can hear, can sense these words (logoi) hidden within each created thing… these individual words… form a pattern… the cosmos is a poem of love from the Creator to us. It is a fragrance trailing behind the divine Lover who is wooing us, enticing us to find Him.” And divinely-humanly may we therefore give

Glory to God for all things.