There is an old dream which recurs in rather equal intervals in the history of ideas. We find it in some renaissance philosophers in the context of the search for the original language of mankind. We find it in Leibnitz, as a formalized universal language, which is supposed to make it impossible for us to misunderstand each other. And we find it under the influence of modern computer science as the dream of an ideographic superlanguage.

What all these – of course, unrealistic – language utopias try to accomplish is a language which carries its meaning immediately accessible in the same way in which a face carries its expression. The sign should be identical with its meaning and immediately accessible to everybody. But this is of course not possible.

Alphabets are very attractive objects for mathematicians. They can be used to make interesting transformations, they can be folded into themselves in elaborate mappings, thereby creating the most complicated codes. All of this is very interesting and gives results from which we can learn something, especially if we treat the empty space between the letters as a really existing sign which really exists in addition to the other ones.

But however much we fold, permute and transform a phonetic alphabet we will never find a means by which the syntactic dimension will bring us into the semantic one. There is a decisive difference between them.

‘My books standing here on the shelf do not know that I have written them,’ says Jorge Luís Borges in a remarkable poem. No sentence has ever expressed a thought. Phonetical signs and phonemes have no intrinsic meaning of their own. It is we who use them to communicate meaning to ourselves and to other people. Meaning results through speech acts which are carried out by the users of language. The meaning a sign might obtain is something that it acquires exclusively through our handling of it. Or, perhaps better expressed, through the history of its handling.

There is a sort of poetic utopia which is similar to the utopia of the universal language, a hope that the poem might work with the directness of an image. But that is not possible. Not even images work directly. Also images are read through conventions, even when we are not aware of it.

So what can Eliot mean when he says that the poem has already to establish a connection to the reader before it is understood? Is there such a thing as poetic address? A sort of harmonic key, which places the poem with the reader or listener?

Baudelaire often starts his poems as stories: “Autour de moi le rue hurlait” (“A une passante”). There is, as has often been observed, a very modern trend here, an influence from journalism, even from yellow journalism. We make acquaintance with a subject, who lets us share a part of its world and nothing else. Here no attempt is made to establish some sort of pseudo-third-person perspective. There is this poet and he is who he is. It is maybe this attitude which makes Baudelaire’s poems so immediately captivating. They don’t simulate an objectivity which they don’t have. We get to borrow the eyes and ears of an observer and we know that it is just this one person and nobody else. The street noise in the background and the buzzing sound of flies, assonant, and still enchanting music.

This is one possible poetical solution. There are, thank God, other ones. Tomas Tranströmer’s quick, exact metaphors which like the flash of a camera, for a very short instance, illuminate a darkness. And then there are Rilke’s strange constructions, where quite often concepts which no human would think could have anything at all to do with one another all of a sudden produce startling connections: God becomes a tower and the angels become staircases, the lion mask of the antique fountain becomes a mouth which talks.

The truth about the world is not an end station. It is a process.

All at once life stands
smiling softly like a girl
on the other side of the stream
and asks
(in its provocative way)
but how did you end up over there.

For lack of a generally accepted definition of poetry, we can agree at least on this, that poetry parallels the Universe, or rather is a reflection of the Universe in human consciousness. So it was in prehistoric times, confining itself originally to the creation of myths. And together with myths, it embarked on a lengthy journey, the same as was undertaken by human thought as such, reflecting and focusing Space and Time.

Individual consciousness, whatever stage it may have reached, directly or indirectly stems from the attempt to define one’s place in the universal scheme of things. Some basic questions follow: who am I. What is my purpose. As time passes and the further we advance, the more elaborate become these questions. Empirical experience alone is not sufficient to answer them. Something more than this is necessary. And we know that that Something does exist.

This attribute of human consciousness is usually called fantasy, imagination, which is precisely what lies at the root of poetry.

At no historical point does spontaneous experience, as registered by sight and hearing, touch and smell, suffice. Just as he did a thousand years ago, Man today needs a general picture, in its temporal and spatial dimensions. And if a mind, a personage, a destiny, in a word, a poet appears, capable not only of answering these questions, but also of producing a solution to them in terms of images, then that is how an answer, quite different to the empirical one, is formulated.

The Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid – and not only these, but the Babylonian epics and many others as well – constitute an authentic cosmogony, a response to the possibly unacknowledged feeling of each human spirit that must be accounted for in the non-accidental and exceptional nature of the personal life.

Not for nothing did Odysseus return to his native Ithaca ‘full of space and time’ – in the words of the brilliant Russian poet Osip Mandelstam.

This use of language, the multi-layered imagery, symbolism immerse us once again in the poet’s consciousness. We encounter again the principle to which poetry has adhered from the outset. Ages pass, but what remains is the primary image of a single tree with foliage permanently renewing itself. Sometimes it seems that social utopias, concrete events transform poetry. But a closer examination shows that they only provide it with new material, increasing the number of facts, and setting poets new questions.

As for the answers, the poet has always to delve as deeply into themself.

While I was walking in the street,
I saw a guy get out of the car
with a gun in his hand.
He put it in his sweat suit pocket:
At that very moment
he realized I was watching him.
There was a threatening look in his eyes,
like, “I’ll do you in too.”
I quickly looked the other way.
I’ll pretend I saw a bouquet of flowers,
not a real gun.
The most important thing is to stay calm.

The next moment I didn’t care any more.
I waited for the bullet to hit my back.
As if something itched me
and he was only to scratch that place.
I watched the moon up in the sky.
It was at the full.
This is a perfectly good time for me to die.
Anyway, I felt as if I had broken off
from everything in my life.
Collected, after a bath, having brushed my teeth,
before bedtime.

People were putting out TV sets and old furniture.
A real invasion of sweaty characters
in their undershirts and sandals,
piling silently on street corners
all that rusty, zincked iron, chromium-plated aluminum
and the rest.

It looked
as if they too had decided to start from scratch.
The only thing left for them to do is take out the garbage
and the guy with the gun and the sweat suit
can come to ice them all.

The dude must have sent a memo
to building tenant groups,
“Killer makes house calls.
Before you die you must get rid of old furniture.”

Over there,
at the second skyscraper block,
kids play hide-and-seek.
They don’t have a clue
a gink follows me with a gun in his pants.
“Whom do you like more, Martina or Mirela?”
A girl asked another
while they ran trying to hide.
I didn’t hear the answer.

Describing the clouds
I have to hurry up
because they change fast.

And we
could disappear
in a second
just like families of clouds.

This is why I have to write
fast
and all the time
when I’m writing about clouds and men.
Such that elusive shapes of words
do not follow one
transitional shape,
but describe
at least the smallest
arch of the crazy circle
where everything
goes around
pleasure in simple
existence
pleasure
and discomfort.

I rove for hours through a labyrinth of docks,
Drinking in sailor’s pubs: under the cover
Of the night and neon, rosy goers are
Sailing in the bunks of the wreck, called The World.

The hollowed-out boat of the moon sails out
So coolly between the southern continents,
Which have been marked with crosses on the blue marine charts
Of my memory treasures with the sleeping
Names of harbours, with the throats of screeching sea-birds,
All ports are like other ports.

No, home is where I’d rather be, even for
Just one night.

I search and wait for a taxi.

Prayer is the hardest of the virtues because prayer is warfare to the last breath.

In it, we are likely, and it’s certainly what we should strive for, to see ourselves as we really are. We can’t expect that we are going to be healed of the deep wounds of our heart without seeing what those wounds are. It’s also not a peaceful activity when we discover or come face to face with the reality of the world. And I would add that prayer is often long periods of ordinary shared life together with intense periods of wrestling with really serious stuff that can scare us to death but can also bring us into real life with God and real life with ourselves in a way that we can’t otherwise have it.

Well, silence speaks, the contemplatives say. But really, I think, this silence sorts. An ordering instinct sends people into the hush where the voice can be heard. This is the sorting intelligence of poetry for example, marked by an unbroken certainty of rhythm, perfect pitch, the placing of things in right order as in metrical form. Not rigid categories, but the recognition of a shape always there but ordinarily obscured by—what? By noise, which is ourselves trying to do the sorting in an order that may be a heroic effort but is unfortuantely bound to be a fantasy.

Prayer only looks like an act of language; fundamentally it is a position, a placement of oneself. Focus. Get there, and all that’s left to say is the words.

Who made your world.
Who made this grasshopper.
This grasshopper, I mean—
The one who has flung herself out of the grass,
The one who ate sugar out of your hand,
Who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down.
Who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and wants floats away.

I don’t know exactly how to phrase my request.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
How to be idle, how to make my way through the fields,
This is what I have been doing all my life.

Tell me, what else can I do.

Doesn’t everything go at last,
And too soon.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with this;
This fleeting and precious time.

A poet spends a great deal of time listening to their unconscious and slowly calling up a poem word by word, phrase by phrase, until something beautiful is brought forth, we hope, into the world, that changes people’s perceptions. And we respond to a poem emotionally. And I think we should take as great care when we write one another as we would if we were writing such a poem, instead of just trotting out a formulaic response, or an orthodoxical definition of frienship, or a catechism answer. So that when people listen to or read another’s words, they should feel as touched as when they read a great poem by, say, Milton or Dante.

And we should take as great care with our personal dialy rituals as if we were putting on a great performance at a theater, because our rituals are designed to lead us to transcendence, instead of just sort of mechanically going through motions of our various days. We should be trying to make them into something absolutely beautiful and inspiring, because I do see living as a kind of art form.

Equal parts confession, I would say that it never occurred to me that I should think about this before because I never thought I belonged to myself. I could commit to everything intellectually, but none of myself was going into it. I found it almost impossible to have a fresh idea, an original response or my own response to a poem, unless I found that somebody else was there first to tell me what to do, some other critic or some other teacher, to tell me what to think. Because for years every time I’d had an idea of my own, it was stamped down on. You know, I’d had doubts about the existence of God, I had doubts about myself, I had doubts about the wisdom of the academic system, all of which I have since had to quash. And I think basically I damaged my brain. Not neurologically, but I had deflected it from its healthy bias towards seeing things as they are. It was a long time before I started to come back, and the first moment when I noticed a change actually was when I heard a lecturer reading T.S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday.”

The center of that poem is when Eliot says, “because I do not hope to turn again, consequently I rejoice, having to construct something upon which to rejoice.” And it seemed to me that my project was if I couldn’t find joy spontaneously, I was going to construct my well-being and my life, and even try to manufacture joy as carefully as an engineer will put together an airplane or a piece of intricate technology. This was to be my project, giving up hope of some salvation coming at me from outside myself. And things did take a turn for the better after that. They really did.

There is a word that the neuroscientists use when talking about why a certain series of circuits or group of circuits in the brain is activated. The word is value. There are pathways in the brain that have survival value. So when a stimulus comes in and the brain has 50,000 different ways of responding to it, some of those are useful for survival and some of those will either prevent survival or mar survival, and the human brain, in classical evolutionary pattern, will pick the one that is healthiest, that gives greatest pleasure. So I think of this as natural selection in a form, in an emotional form, and I think it is almost like choice because when you’re talking about selection in the brain, there are processes of choice. The brain has a way of evaluating what is best for the organism. And what is best for the organism is not just survival and reproduction but beauty, but an esthetic sense.

It’s an unconscious process, but what we know about unconscious processes are that for every conscious process there are 8 million zillion trillion unconscious ones, and they are in fact what will eventually determine what’s conscious and what we can understand. So again, to reiterate, this is a process of natural selection. A stimulus comes in. There are many, many ways of responding to it. Some of those ways are counterproductive, some are kind of ordinary, and some really give satisfaction and enhance the richness of our lives. And without knowing it, our circuits are choosing those, and this is what I feel is human spirit.

It’s exciting. Here are these 75 trillion cells, and every cell has hundreds of thousands of protein molecules in it and they are constantly interacting with one another in what would appear to be chaos. And in fact, if you were to be able to lower yourself into a cell, you’d be terrified because it would seem so chaotic. If it had sound, you couldn’t live with it, it would be so noisy. And yet what is actually occurring is that these reactions are all counteracting threats to the survival of that cell. And I think that there is within the human organism, only the human organism because of our cortex and our ability to process information, I think that there is an awareness of the closeness of chaos.

And I think there’s a lot of evidence for that, including cultural evidence. I think often about the polarity of our thinking. I talk about good and evil, and one of my favorite examples of this is something I extracted from my own background, which is the principle of the good inclination living in balance with the evil inclination, and one must make that choice at all times. Now, the Greeks, who expressed it as chaos versus cosmos, already, without knowing anything about cells or anything about how the body really worked, they had a sense that there was an order up there in the universe, but we live in chaos. And we can use the example of the cosmos to seek the reassurance of that stability. And you know and I know we all listen to popular music, and if we listen carefully we’re always going to hear the heartbeat in the background.

Now, the spirit, for all of its wonder and the good that we associate with it, also has base qualities and has a dark side. I think it has to do with the nearness of chaos, which is always a temptation. It’s like the butterfly and the flame. We are tempting ourselves with evil, we are tempting ourselves with that which is destructive, and we, to some extent, succumb to it. If you talk to psychoanalysts about severe neurotic disease, they often talk about the personality that skates to the edge and then rescues itself from the edge. We are so tempted to go to hell with ourselves, as it were, that’s a theological expression, that we actually do come near it, even recognizing the other pole. And this is what the Greeks meant when they were talking about Eros versus Thanatos, the love and life sense against the death sense. I don’t think it’s in very many of us to deliberately choose destruction, but we play with it and it licks us and burns us and can ruin lives. So this is all part of that polarity that I was talking about, the fear of chaos, which makes us look for order.

Sometimes I think I understand human societies and human nature. For certain, I understand that because we live in a fallen world, because we often don’t get to pick between good and evil but between evil and more evil, we must always ask for forgiveness and be very frightened of hubris.

Reserving and protecting resources is extremely important, and especially for people who live in highly industrialized enriched countries. Often people who live in such countries have a feeling that even if they don’t have resources within their borders, they can get them from wherever those resources are. But even if you can buy those resources, even in that anonymous place, there is a limit to what extent you can get those resources and not create a conflict. Because remember, in the resources that are left behind, people have to fight over them. And because the world is now so interconnected, conflict anywhere in the world will come right into your living room, either through television or peacekeeping forces from areas where there is peace.

As a party to the finance and media world, I tell myself we are in a completely new era when we are learning to find resources not in a place, but rather in ourselves. I often see how quickly women, often very competent women, are sacrificed on an altar of political convenience.

The truth of the matter is we are all resources. We are a human resource. And one of the greatest problems that I have witnessed, especially from a women’s perspective, is trying to convince some other half that we are an important resource and we do make great contributions, and therefore we should be respected, we should be appreciated, our work should be quantified, we should be compensated, and that we should not be taken for granted.

We are sitting at the table. Your eyes light up a room.
Luminescent, your large hands stir the air as you speak
To me, or quiet in sleep on the black cloth remain.

I want to touch them every day. Their lifelines know my name.
Their transparent veins conceal the course of my fate, the beat
Of our blood that changes the white of your cheeks to desire’s mottled bloom.

The back door blows open. The first drops of rain rustle through
The trees, sprinkling the wind-shaken window in which you sit glowing,
A light which shows me myself, into whom I may fade and pass.

You pile up the plates, brush the crumbs off an fill up my glass.
From the kitchen I hear the clink of knives and blue porcelain echoing,
Far off. My legs are aching with not being able to go to you.

Slipping

and that’s how you fall
off
you fall into
it

the verdict
stretches
extends
honour
to the sentinel –

you fall
into it
and slip

It is
not the man who points
who cracks
he yawns
the gap open and rises
up

that’s nice
good to know
on scientific stand-by

the bridging of a valley
in three-quarter time

when the stealth-dance speaks
and the candleman leaps
then all the lecterns flower

they are put
up with

without a hearing

Look, the craneman comes
between
both of them now start jamming
the great leap forward, and even longer march, the step never taken
that puts everthing in a different light

the twenty-seventh letter

It is with the deepest conviction
that I stand before you now
to tell you, ladies and gentlemen,
that a limit has been reached
that boundaries have been crossed
that we must go back
if we don’t want to jeopardise

Growth in prospects

This I can assure you
and I know
that you know
that I’m counting on you
because you’re counting on me

Racing down the right
an eel slips one in.

the camp has been evacuated
the circuit disabled, incessantly,
incessantly

over
never over

you know
not this
never this

did you know
it’s not the dimensions that count
not the calibre, the standard
the banner of shifting positions

you mean?

This is clear
you see
this lucid line
never shown before
innocence lost
purity renounced

ah
systemic contractions
configured dysfunctions
ha

It is
the slight disparity
in a fine-tuned difference
almost inaudible

the subtle
opening of the dispute

It is
because
that’s why,
that’s why.

I would like to place
that nightly blackbird
on a branch in a poem,
but after all why should
I, it’s perched there
where it should be: in
a poem out there.

God did something much more clever than create a clockwork world, He created a world that could make itself.

And you know what else He did — let’s say categorically we’re all people of faith — He gave humankind free will, and free will becomes the essence of the whole thing. Because it’s not just free will in the conscious sense, but He would have created the free will that makes the synapses and the nerve cells and the neurotransmitters, allows them to make choices. And given the opportunity to make choices, they will always choose the more, let’s use that big word, salubrious way, and salubrious in the classical sense of healthy way, physically healthy, emotionally healthy, the thing that’s going to make it survive most likely and provide it with the most pleasure.

And the moral sense provides people with more pleasure than anything.

That’s been my experience, that a sense of oneself as a good person whose life isn’t sacrificed for others but is based around community and love gives one a sense of self that is the greatest pleasure that anybody can have. We say virtue is its own reward. And, you know, it’s a little homily, but there’s a lot of stuff behind that homily. Every cliché has a reason.

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? And what does secularization have to do with religious proliferation and pluralism?

The answer to both questions is the same. Athens and Jerusalem have created a whole history through their interaction with each other, and so have religion and secularization. In both cases, as soon as one achieves a kind of dominance, the other swoops back from exile to challenge it. When reason and intellect begin to ride high, they invariably make unrealistic claims. And faith and intuition awaken to question their hegemony. Then, just as the sacral begins to feel its oats and reach out for civilizational supremacy, reason and cognition question its pretentiousness. In past eras, this seesaw battle often took centuries.

Today, events move more swiftly; we haven’t the bandwidth for hysteria.