Love Calls Us to One World at a Time 1 comments

Robert Cording

For Image’s twentieth anniversary issue, we asked a group of writers and artists to address the question of what it means to be fully human. In response, poet Robert Cording wrote about the importance of what Thoreau calls “craving reality.” We asked Cording to say a little about what makes craving reality especially urgent for us today. —eds.

“Each spring semester I teach a course entitled ‘The Bible and Literature.’ When we read the Exodus story together, I tell my students to think of the Ten Commandments as the map God gives to the Israelites to find their way out of the wilderness. And then I like to ask why the first of all commandments given to Israel is: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.’ In other words, why is idolatry the greatest enemy to finding ourselves and God? To my mind, idolatry can involve anything which prevents us from seeing reality or helps us distance ourselves from reality. Idolatry requires forgetfulness first: the Israelites forget that they were indeed brought out of slavery; we forget that we do indeed live in a world we did not create. Then, in the blank of that forgetting, we and the Israelites both create the world as we would like it to be: simpler, understandable, not fearful. The phrase ‘Fear the Lord, your God’ is repeated often in the Old Testament. The injunction is a reminder that the Lord cannot be reduced to human terms of understanding. When Thoreau asks us to crave reality, he is asking us to be comfortable with the strangeness and mystery of both the world we live in and our own existence. To crave reality is to love the world as it is, not as we might like it to be. As Kathleen Norris has said, ‘idolatry makes love impossible.’ In my essay I quote Iris Murdoch’s definition of love: ‘Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.’ I linked Thoreau and Murdoch together because they both remind us that if we do not attend to reality, it is easier for us to deform it, to erect idols that give us a kind of control of its mystery and, in turn, make us, rather than God, monarchs of all we survey.”

A FEW DAYS before his death on May 6, 1862, Henry David Thoreau was asked by Parker Pillsbury, a former minister become abolitionist, that question so many would like to have answered. Noting that Thoreau was “near the brink of the dark river,” Pillsbury asked Thoreau how the “opposite shore” appeared to him. Thoreau, according to the biographer Richard D. Richardson, “summed up his life” with his answer: “One world at a time.” Thoreau’s reply, polite but firm, was in accord with the way he deliberately chose to live his life. Just months before his death, he was still collecting material for projects on the succession of forest trees and seed dispersal, newly taken with nature’s economy of abundance and its genius of vitality. Years earlier, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau had come to a similar understanding: we need, he said, “not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of the earth.... We need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born.” Thoreau, who is too often mistakenly placed under the convenient label of pantheist, was not choosing to be “earth-born” over and against being “heaven-born.” He believed, rather, that both births depended on each other. To be “heaven-born” did not lie in redirecting attention from the natural to the supernatural, but in seeing more deeply into the sources of the natural. Those sources, like creation itself, were always a mystery.

In his famous poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” Richard Wilbur enacts the way love calls us to extend ourselves toward a world which will always remain irreducible in its otherness and yet open to our understanding and recognition. In Wilbur’s poem, the soul cannot exist free of the body’s restrictions. Each day it must learn to keep a “difficult balance” in a world which asks us, as Wendell Berry has said, “to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is.” As Thoreau’s life had taught him, if we try to leave behind the earth, if we choose religion simply to quiet our fears and prop up our hopes rather than connect us with the sources of life, we ignore the call of love and heed only the usual summons of the self and its needs.

Here I want to explore the “difficult balance” of being both earth- and heaven-born and how such birth requires that we “crave reality” as Thoreau put it in Walden. I want also to connect Thoreau’s adamant “one world at a time” to the way poetry, and art in general, can be, as Iris Murdoch has argued in her book Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, both “contingent limited historically stained stuff” and, nevertheless, a “source of revelation” that helps us experience those intimations of a world that is fuller and more real, and is and is not the very world we ordinarily move about in unawares. And I want to connect both these ideas to love—that loving the world and creating a work of art both require what Murdoch calls “morally disciplined attention” to “something quite particular other than oneself.”

As my friend and colleague at Holy Cross, Chris Dustin, has said in an essay on Thoreau’s religion, “Thoreau’s vision of nature points beyond nature, to a divinely creative source. As such, it incorporates a form of religious transcendence that is seldom recognized. As Thoreau sees it, nature points beyond itself, to a transcendent ground that is neither separable from it nor reducible to it.” Dustin goes on, “Thoreau’s point is not that we should forsake our heavenly aspirations, but that heavenly aspirations not bound to earth are not heavenly enough.” To be “earth-born” involves a “drawing near,” as Thoreau put it, to the world around us, and to draw near demands our exacting attention. Thoreau was as good a practicing naturalist as they come. He measured; he took careful notes; he made comparisons, even ran experiments.

But Thoreau was a scientist who recognized that seeing also requires more than objectivity and close scrutiny. Rather than understand the world by distancing himself from it, or by framing it in objective terms, Thoreau wanted to “commune” with nature because he was looking for a way to participate in a fullness which both overflowed and yet was rooted in actual things. Yet he never presumed to understand nature’s “great secret” because his experience of nature taught him that any understanding would be a reduction, a limiting of nature to the terms of his understanding.

Thoreau’s faith was in the world around him. That faith did not involve a state of mind or a creed so much as a movement toward making the “real world as real as possible,” as Gary Snyder once put it. It was a faith that was rooted in that moment when we “return to our senses.” Here’s Thoreau in his essay “Walking”:

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.... It sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses.

We might say that our usual, daily experience of the world we live in is quite close to what Thoreau is getting at in his phrase “out of my senses.” We eat while reading the morning paper, rush off to work in cars or public transportation, passing by those things we have seen each day for years and have long lost sight of, and finally reach work, our minds rehearsing what must be done and inventing that daily to-do list that never, of course, gets entirely done. But we also know those moments when we “return to our senses,” when the world suddenly stands forth, and we “behold,” as Wallace Stevens has said, “a kind of total grandeur...with every visible thing enlarged and yet / no more than a bed, a chair....” I mean here our capacity to perceive the fullness which exists in each moment and is always waiting for us to be present to it—what the novelist Marilynne Robinson referred to in Gilead as a “thing existing in excess of itself.” Each of us has had countless experiences of being “returned to our senses”—when, say, the field we are walking through, or the city street we are walking down, suddenly captivates us, and the trees in the distance and the way they align with the field’s grasses and contours, or the buildings and the play of light on them and the people walking, all feel as if they belong exactly as they are. And we, too, are part of that belongingness; and the field, the trees, the light, the buildings are all part of a deeper, more real, reality. This experience is both ordinary and extraordinary, and involves mystery (from the Greek mysterion). I’m using mystery here not to refer to the unknown but rather to the quality of the known; to refer to awe rather than ignorance. We can never be finished with mystery—like beauty, it is not governed by concepts and it does not allow a conclusion. It goes beyond all the evidence. In his book The Demon and the Angel the poet Ed Hirsch quotes a line from Lorca found at the bottom of a drawing Lorca did in Buenos Aires: “Only mystery enables us to live.”

Yet, as “moderns” we are all too ready to say that belief in mystery is nostalgic. Caught in our positivist moment, we limit the meaning of mystery to that which is unknown. We then point to the inevitable acquisition of further knowledge which will reduce that which is unknown and, eventually, erase the unknown entirely. In a speech given at the World Economic Forum in 1992, Václav Havel, the Czech dissident who later became the President of Czechoslovakia, argued that the modern era has been dominated by the mistaken belief that the “world—and Being as such—is a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own benefit.” Speaking to the need for a new kind of political order, Havel saw the abandonment of “the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved” as a first step. Instead of our ill-conceived belief in universal systemic solutions, Havel called for trust “not only [in] a scientific representation and analysis of the world, but also the world itself...not only in sociological statistics, but also in real people...not only [in] an objective interpretation of reality, but also his own soul...his own thoughts...his own feeling.”

Now Havel may sound too much like he’s trumpeting a return to Romanticism. I don’t think so. His repetition of the phrase “not only” is crucial here. Havel knows full well that the self-centeredness and otherworldliness of Romanticism simplified our view of the inner life and led, ironically, to the pendulum-swing towards a narrow objectivity. But he knows, too, that our belief that we know everything we need to know for the purposes of life is not only arrogant but deforming. As Iris Murdoch has pointed out in Existentialists and Mystics, our “simple-minded faith in science, together with the assumption we are all rational and totally free, engenders a dangerous lack of curiosity about the real world, a failure to appreciate the difficulties of knowing it.” I have turned to Thoreau’s notion of “earth-born” because I feel that he, like Simone Weil in the twentieth century, provides a much needed vocabulary of attention, where attention is the opposite of willfulness, and demands a continual and careful devotion to a reality which as Murdoch says, “we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy.” Thoreau’s attentiveness is a kind of spiritual discipline, an exercise of constantly attending to the uniqueness and particularity of the world around him. In doing so, Thoreau helps us think about what Murdoch calls “the transcendence of reality,” those moments I have tried to describe when we are returned to our senses and experience the joy which Weil defined as the “overflowing consciousness of reality.” It is a moment of transfiguration where the ordinary becomes extraordinary without becoming otherworldly. Thoreau also makes us realize that when we rush to be “heaven-born” we lose sight of the particulars of the world, and often end up worshipping our ideas about life rather than life itself. We need to heed Czeslaw Milosz’s warning: “Little animals from cartoons, talking rabbits, doggies, squirrels, as well as ladybugs, bees, grasshoppers. They have as much in common with real animals as our notions of the world have with the real world. Think of this and tremble” (“A Warning”).

Part of Milosz’ greatness as a writer lies in his willingness to “tremble.” Milosz fought against the late-twentieth-century tendency to adore “the labyrinth of his mind” (“Labyrinth”), knowing that, while no one expected an answer from “questions addressed to the sky, the earth, to stars and clouds” in our time, there was still the “that, ready, formed in every detail” and “already existing” (“That”). Like Wallace Stevens’s attempts to describe “The the,” there is always in Milosz a world already existing that Milosz seeks to discover. Yet, even after ninety years of describing “countries, cities, gardens, the bays of the sea,” Milosz knows that they are always waiting to be “described better than they were before” (“Late Ripeness”). Here is Milosz in the first of his selected essays, “My Intention”: “I am always aware that what I want is impossible to achieve. I would need the ability to communicate my full amazement at ‘being here’ in one unattainable sentence.” As a result, Milosz’s writing is a process of self-correction—on the one hand, he recognizes the incurable illness of our self-delusions; on the other, he sees that his task as a poet is to restore the “lost face of the world” (see “A Semi-private Letter about Poetry”). My interest in Milosz is two-fold: he is a writer who is at once quintessentially modern, aware that “human speech cannot encompass any phenomenon in its total roundness” (“Letter to Jerzy Andrzejewski”) and that human beings can be cartoonish in the way they ape social fashions and ideas; and he is resolutely old-fashioned in his belief that human nature is fundamentally attracted to the goodness of creation. His poems suffer in the in-between of these two poles: “On one side there is luminosity, trust, faith, the beauty of the earth; on the other side, darkness, doubt, unbelief, the cruelty of the earth, the capacity of people to do evil” (“A Goal”). Milosz, like Martin Buber, like the Thoreau I have tried to capture, emphasizes what Buber called the “lived concrete.” As Buber understood, “the meaning of existence is open and accessible in the actual lived concrete, not above the struggle with reality, but in it.”

Implicit in what I have been saying is the role of the artist and art. Milosz’s willingness to “tremble” is a kind of selflessness, a process of holding the self’s needs in check in the interest of seeing the real. Great art, according to Iris Murdoch, delights us “because we are not used to looking at the real world at all.” In her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she uses Plato’s system of thought to give, ironically, a place to art and the artist that Plato did not envision in The Republic. Murdoch argues that the moral life in Plato is a “slow shift of attachments wherein looking (concentrating, attending, attentive discipline) is a source of divine (purified) energy.... The movement is not, by an occasional leap, into an external (empty) space of freedom, but patiently and continuously a change of one’s whole being in all its contingent detail, through a world of appearance toward a world of reality.” We know, of course, that the simple exposure to and even the study of great art may or may not lead to transformation, to care for the other. Art requires our consent, and in Murdoch’s view, our “morally disciplined attention” in order to enact the change from “a world of appearance toward a world of reality.” What we may learn from art is its closeness to morals, since for Murdoch the essence of both art and morals is love. And love, as Murdoch defines it in her essay “The Sublime and the Good,” “is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real”; it is the “discovery of reality.”

Great art is the enemy of fantasy; fantasy always leads to the creation of idols. Our weakness as human beings is our tendency to make idols of whatever is at hand, whatever makes the world easier, more understandable, and meets our most immediate needs. Poets have always argued that the imagination is the opposite of fantasy. Imagination is an exercise in overcoming one’s self, of extending oneself towards what is different from ourselves. And, in their loving respect for a reality other than oneself, imagination and art call us to attend, with devotion and care, to a world which will always remain a mystery, but a mystery in which love calls us to the things of this world where we may become most fully human.

Robert Cording teaches English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross where he is the Barrett Professor of Creative Writing. He has published five collections of poems, the most recent of which is Common Life.

Visit Robert Cording as Image's Artist of the Month for January 2003