SPIRITUAL FLOWERS

Thirty years is to the life of an artist like three thousand years to a civilization. From murky origins there follows a period of eager assimilation, then the gradual formation of distinctive stylistic features. If the artist has lived and worked during a period of cultural upheaval, quite possibly he will look back on those things made long ago with a certain incredulity. How naive he will seem to have been, or how uncompromising!

My particular case has an added strangeness. I took on the role, early in my career, of would-be reformer, becoming a kind of silent revolutionary, whose utopian vision required radical artistic methods for realization, with the result that, when I moved on (as inevitably we do) the only path left was backwards, towards convention and comprehensibilty. It's not that, in the old days, I desired to shock and astound: my early work I now understand as manifesting the natural impulse of the creative mind to reach beyond accepted wisdom in search of an authentic point of origin.

It was my conviction, in those heady times, that the modern world needed a new, creative mythology, based not upon the inheritance of outworn faiths but on the living revelation of spiritual truths shining through the material world, expressed in appropriate symbols. That phase of my life, the phase of "creative spirituality," influenced all I did in the last two decades of the 20th c., but found fullest expression in a book of art-poems called Spiritual Flowers, and in a series of ritualized musical "feasts.” Central to both these works is the figure of Tzhing the unicorn, symbol of creative imagination.

In all those works, multi-colored script flows from symbolically charged symbols to text and back again. The words themselves morph from English into "musical sounds," evocative but untranslatable, a Language of Wonder and Delight in which “sound and significance are one.” I have included a little song in that language - a fair example of my “childish originality” in that period.

Alas, the art-work is amateurish, the poetry obscure. And in any case, by the turn of the century I had become disenchanted with the whole idea. The modern mind, I concluded, no longer responds to myth, to analogy, with the patience, the openness, the wonder, of our ancestors. And whereas formerly I experienced in the formulas of ritual a sense of freedom from the prison of the ego, I later felt those forms to be stilted and stifling.

So bemused am I, and abashed, as I contemplate the strange and fervent works of my youth. But perhaps regrets are not in order: if an artist's lifetime is comparable to the span of a civilization, then each abandoned hope bears the promise of a new beginning.

But let us not dismiss so much so quickly! The mythologies of the great religions may no longer nourish as they did in their day, but their beauty endures, and this is because they are true, insofar as they reveal, in finite language and in visible form, something of the infinite, the invisible. It is among the challenges of the modern world to discover new ways to respond to the enduring human need for meaning. And I find, in these poems and in these feasts, beneath the hermetic shell, a set of related ideas that are important to my current thought - that the universe is an emergent genius, that its component parts are related hierarchically, that the individual, in its wholeness and in its essential mysteriousness, is a microcosm of the world, that the exercise of curiosity and the practice of compassion bring delight.

Such ideas I now express without mythological trappings, in the form of poetry, a practice that avoids both the didacticism of prose and the rigidity of ritual - poetry, a practice wherein formal and sonorous design seeks to persuade as it were by its own example of order and beauty. (The interested reader is directed to The Immortal Conch in What Wild Hope on this site.)

But I have other reasons, deeper and darker, to dwell upon this nearly forgotten phase of my creative life, and it would be disingenuous to avoid them. I have excerpted Part Three, Ceremony of Pebbles and the Birth of Angels, from the larger Feast of the Pastel Angels of Sweetness and Joy. Gazing into a sea-hewn stone, the singer enters into a state of empathy with some individual in need. From a Pool of Vowels an angel is born, whose newly fashioned name is chanted. And in that chanting, and in that shared, imagined suffering, are the pains of the subject salved - that, at least is the hope.

Looking back on that ceremony today, it's not the belief in miracles I find embarrassing - indeed, a truly compassionate act is something of a miracle. For it requires nothing short of a revolution in the heart. Words and music won't do, and even good intentions are insufficient. Real, effective compassion requires a sacrifice, and I'm afraid that the man who wrote those poems and those feasts thirty years ago sacrificed nothing. Like many of his readers (here I'm imagining both that he has many readers and that they share his shortcomings) he felt badly for the world's unfortunates, but never allowed their woes to cause him an inconvenience. But no angel ever was born from compromise and hypocrisy. He'd have done better to have joined the Peace Corps: perhaps on the fields of rural Cambodia a song could have made a difference.

Of course that he is me - though I'm loathe to admit it. Do civilizations, in the same manner and for the same reasons, seek to forget or to disown their pasts, pretending that what we now are is separable from what we were and did? More dishonesty! Amidst the pain of things remembered are glimmerings of truth and goodness. We need to confront what we've done, acknowledge our failures, build upon our successes, and come to peace with ourselves. Only then can we see a clear path forward.

What can music signify, what can love be, in a fallen world? The artist seeks fame and immortality, believing that, as his influence spreads, the world is improved. But there is a fatal flaw in this, for his messianic dreams are at odds with his charitable inclinations, while the center of the universe is ever and always some quiet place where love is at work.

And so, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Spiritual Flowers, I affirm that transcendence is possible - but at the price of real sacrifice, and that the world can be redeemed by unknown acts of kindness, one piece at a time.