As might be suspected, the priest had a reading of the novel which might be thought to impose Catholicism (or at least Christianity) onto it.

Nevertheless, I found the ideas compelling (of course, I’m a Catholic catechumen and so am, also, biased). Here is what he said:

[T]hese small decisions you make about your character do matter—not least because your soul and character matter. That's the small town you have the most control over. Can you give the world one well-ordered soul? That's a great gift, and it will inevitably affect other people no matter what."

The novel, self-described as a “study in provincial life,” takes as its main character the township of Middlemarch, a rural setting which is beginning to grow as a result of industrialism, soon to get its first modern hospital, and undergoing a round of social evolution as it adapts not only to modern economics, but also a rising tide of reform politics. Eliot paints a brilliantly wide panorama of this small, parochial space, replete with fine brushstrokes representing the full psychological color of nearly every character—with these minute details fleshing out the larger canvas of an interconnected culture, complete with ideological, political, and theological differences.

Much of the tension we are shown arises from the economic and socio-cognitive complexity of class, in particular as it is manifested in marriage. Different married couples are contrasted with one another, each of them nevertheless exhibiting its mutually co-interdependent, contingent participation within the matrix of experience connecting all of them.

Will and choice are brought into full focus in characters’ struggles with alcohol and gambling (conventionally construed, as well as metaphorically in terms of professional decisions concerning investment and careerism), as well as “pleasure-seeking” in general. Young women leverage what little agency the culture-at-large gives them with regards to marriage prospects, resisting where preferable and pursuing where necessary. How their lives are shaped by these constrained and overdetermined conditions dictates the great importance such a decision entails. To lead with passion is a very great risk, indeed.

So, while the pressures of circumstance to a great extent dictate the extent to which a choice is available, further intensified by the difficulty inherent in the decision to act with agency and autonomy, there is revealed in Eliot’s portrait the potential for a transformative will to govern behavior for the betterment of oneself and others, if by no other means than by her representation of each character’s rich interior life (or lack thereof).

And whether or not Eliot is herself making a grand moral claim about such a potential, she is nevertheless depicting the fact that it exists. For me, in reading such a book, it is a call to desire just such an exercise of character. What little will I can cultivate seems of the essence.

As a middle-aged man with a problematic past too-defined by a history of drinking, the past two years spent soberly have largely served as an opportunity to tend to my own interior life. At some point it became apparent to me that conditions being what they are, any potential growth in any outward form (career advancement, possibly finding a life partner, that sort of thing) was going to be completely dependent upon my completely, radically accepting things as they are.

My primary means of doing this has been daily prayer, weekly Mass attendance, attention to the sacraments, and practice in Virtue. I have learned, very slowly, to get over resentments and begin to practice forgiveness. Conversation by conversation, I have started to be less self-absorbed and more curious about others, whatever their education level, background, or governing worldview. And I have learned to root this entire endeavor in a fervent love for and fear of my Creator, knowing that whatever merit I can accumulate in this world has come from them, and can be taken away.

But, most importantly, I have given up on the idea of being some kind of hero in some kind of story, and instead sought to learn to empty myself in humility, welcoming the Mercy of God, and accepting myself as simply one more being among beings, not least of these the birds, squirrels, trees, and other flora and fauna which surround me.

This quiet, semi-hermitic life I enjoy (and, honestly, don’t deserve) has allowed me to develop a general sense of gratitude, which I have purchased by constantly asking for forgiveness. My decision to write less and read and pray more has enabled me to slowly build a stable character across interactions, which consistently shows up with humility and very meager Grace. To what extent this can be of benefit to all beings, I offer it, both to my God and to all of You. I could hope for no deeper meaning, nor greater significance.

Affectionately,

Aaron

on spirit's wings, star-like, now float

throughout the world—how light

and immaterial they seem,

traversing aimlessly despite

the vast desire contained in them.

One day a few of them might stem,

should they find nutriment for might,

some just-so-sunny place where rain

might wet the throat to offer voice

to words which thought they had no choice

but to dissolve remembered pain.

But here they yet reside, in different form—

anew, transformed from simple orb

into new limbs which arm their souls' alarm

into embrace, indifferent to storm.

Such body this, in all its vast attire—

becoming is which once was but desire.

I could not feel like I was enough until I learned to ask for forgiveness.

About a month ago, in a conversation with Caleb Flores, I tried and failed to articulate a point. Several days later, I did the same thing in a conversation with my sister. I'm going to try to clear it up here.

I was trying to talk about the (Ortho)Catholic insistence on asking for forgiveness. Rather than being an obsession with feeling guilty, I argued, it was instead a constant practice of being forgiven.

That's true, but it's not the whole truth. Rather, what happens in working toward this Grace is the admission that I need forgiveness in the first place.

Before my ongoing conversion, I generally felt that all of my actions could more or less be contextualized as the rational behavior of a being in the world. (I still think the same thing now, albeit with kaleidoscopic color.) While I certainly lamented the negative effects of my ill behavior, I nevertheless fit in into a narrative of reasonable (but not radical) acceptance.

I was failing to do the internal work of transformation. Though I frequently had a coherent position of understanding who I was, how the behavior was bad, and what better behavior looked like going forward, I was not opening and surrendering to the fullness of the All-that-Is, Theos, my Source and End, in whom I live and move and have my Being.

About a week after said conversations, I was graced with this passage from Dr. Timothy Patitsas’ Ethics of Beauty:

"We are 'the sinner' not because we are worthless but because 'my brother is my life.' I want to take the fall for him because I love him. That's all; calling ourselves 'the sinner' has very little to do with how sinful we've actually been."

Positioning myself as an imperfect person in the company of all other imperfect people helps me to shed my Pride and stop performing as though I have something to prove. It helps me to see that the divinity within me, which is boundless and infinite, exhibits its perfection in this finite world not by being grand, but by being real.

A little later, Patitsas furthers this:

“Creation is repenting from its first moment, for repentance does not require the prerequisite of sin. It simply means that we put our attention still more deeply upon Christ, to love him much more than we have before. Of course, compared to that ‘more deeply,’ the prior state looks like sin, but this is partly relative.”

This turning toward the Person of the Trinity to ask for forgiveness takes my solitary ego and positions it in relation to the infinite. This turning positions my uniqueness within an incomprehensible vastness and contextualizes it as the incomprehensible tininess that it is, a single flower or snowflake blooming and disappearing in an instant of eternal time.

And it empowers me to share this consciousness in loving-kindness to all I meet or know.

At Mass every Sunday we pray:

I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned. In my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do; through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault; therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sister, to pray for me to the Lord our God.

As I ask for the prayers of the Blessed Mother and my fellow sapientes, I'm also praying for them, creating a feedback loop of beneficent participation in the divine, mystical body of the church.

Like a poem who finally finds a reader, I am, momentarily, absolutely complete.

live. We’re joined by my friend Isaiah Freeman. He is an educator by day and a philosopher of education. In his spare time, he runs the Substack Insoling Education as well as the Ladder of Poetry and Essential Poetry. We’ve been kind of chatting for the past few months. He’s a poet as well.

And he’s got some interesting ideas about different ways of thinking about and categorizing different sorts of poets. So Isaiah, welcome. Thank you.

Happy to be here talking to you.

I guess one of the one of the things I was going to just sort of generally state to sort of see sort of gauge your reactions and see how well I have it in my mind. The way I understand it is you’ve sort of come across in thinking about a large group of poets.

You’re obviously well read and you’re obviously a fan of poetry and have read lots of different sorts of poets. it seems that you’ve sort of established for yourself something of a taxonomy of

poets would you say that’s accurate yeah yeah noticing um uh some of the the deep patterns in in the field of poetry and uh as I was uh explaining to Caleb Flores who you you passed on to me recently. He, what I was saying to him was that it’s a, how do I explain this? There are

Poets are the most articulate of the artists because it’s the medium they work in. So every artist in every medium is going to have some kind of philosophy or poetics in how they approach their art and the place that art fulfils in their worldview.

and but because poets are so articulate they it was easier to see how the differences and the similarities in poetics across this like a really large number of them and then to realize how they interlocked with each other like puzzle pieces and that’s what ended up sort of leading to that fourfold schema of the sentimentalist,

the scholar at the exoteric half, then the censor and the scry and the esoteric half. And once I could see how they all kind of interconnected in one sort of unfolding sequence of development, and that there was a, what I sort of refer to in one of my essays as a dialectical logic,

we move from the subjective to the objective to a fusion of the two into the transjective of the logos which is the sensor and beyond and there’s like a clear progression once I figured that out it was a bit like a bit like a circuit board

sort of like connecting and then the lights kind of starting to glow as it were but yeah yeah that’s my initial response

When you say that poets are particularly articulate with respect to their understanding and expression of their worldview due to the nature of the art itself being based in a linguistic medium.

Yeah.

Do you mean that poets are more able to define and explain that to themselves and others outside of the poetry or in the poetry itself or both?

Yeah, definitely both. It’s interesting because poetry is also one of those things that in a way the poets themselves and the tradition of poetry is somehow inherently like transgressive. So like philosophers typically or stereotypically can be quite analytical and it can be quite confined.

But like poets can include all sorts of things in their poems and that the poets themselves are kind of a bit more unconventional. They don’t want to keep everything compartmentalised and discreet. They want to they want to bring their whole worldview sort of into being through language and the shared worldview

they want others to inhabit as well so like it’s a I would almost go so far as to say that it’s like sensing poetry that the most truly profound like Wordsworth is probably a good example of this. I just read to my creative writing students at the school I teach at Lyon’s Composers Above Tinta and Abbey,

which I love. And it’s just so interesting. Harold Bloom has a line when analysing that poem he said that essentially Wordsworth is quite interesting as a poet because he started out he almost approached poetry in this as though it was a tabula rasa like a blank slate and he just did whatever he wanted

with it he did he spoke not only so more directly than others had before but more about the the lives and experiences of ordinary people, but also of his spiritual experiences in a much more free way. So there’s like and that transgressiveness is kind of what I think Bloom would also call inventiveness.

And yeah, is any of that?

Oh, yeah. Like, well, with Wordsworth, I mean, the whole idea of the spontaneous overflow of, you know, emotion recollected in tranquility, right? It, you know, and this is sort of characteristic of the era, you know, in which she was writing, you know, the romantic era, you know, where

uh revolutions were happening monarchies were being uh tried you know in favor of people wanting more uh democratic systems and you see in him it’s like kind of like a ballad but then but then he’s giving voice to these characters but it’s in a style that it’s like where is the style coming from

but then it’ll also be like I mean depending on the poem but it’ll be incredibly like intimate and specific to Wordsworth and his style like it he yeah and that’s interesting in that in that idea of it being a tabula rasa just um Yeah, the freedom, the liberty, you know, to play with all of these styles.

And could I?

Yeah, please.

So it seems interesting to me because I think the poet kind of has a really interesting function in society. And I would say that it’s analogous to the Bard in the Age of the Druids based on what I’ve been able to read. They kind of bring together into their being that they kind of embody something

that society doesn’t do naturally by itself. Like we’ve got some analytical philosophers who can abstractly compartmentalize everything, but it’s not always embodied. You can have people who are very emotional, but that’s not quite what the poet does. The poet’s almost like bridging into all these spaces and he’s never one of them.

And I’m just kind of like throwing a few things out here, see what lands, because I’m trying to sort of figure it out as we go. there’s also like a witnessing function that they do like they’re more conscious of like they hold more in their being um and they do that in a way that’s more

conscious that other people uh maybe in society generally struggles to do they struggle to be embodied experience be in their consciousness somehow I don’t know how to I’m just I feel like I’m on the thread of something I don’t know what it is though yeah and I think

you were really getting into something when you brought up the transjective let me see if I can pull this together because you and I have talked about this in other conversations that we’ve had where oftentimes when we’re writing we’re trying to or at least I said this I think that you kind of assented that it

was similar for you I there is something that I’m trying to behold or comprehend or apprehend and I’m not quite certain what it is let alone how to express it but somehow in the activity of writing I’m working through or sort of metabolizing like the breadth of these ideas.

And I think that the transjective is interesting because when I’m doing that, whether or not I have any intention of sharing that poem later with someone else. It’s sort of in the nature of the composition that there is the potential for a reader to apprehend this.

And then that’s where an even greater potential for emergence of that mystery is aspired toward or something like that?

Yeah. Yeah, totally. So I’ve been writing a long essay recently and it’s so long and it’s got so many different tendrils in it that I’m struggling to bring it to a close. But at one point I talk about how it it’s almost quite a Christian task in the original sense of Christ which was to be

a not just a follower of the logos but a minister of it like we’re trying to minister that to people and I think that is what the communion symbolically was originally meant to be we’re taking the logos into ourselves and we’re opening ourselves to it to the transjective we’re trying to like with our poems,

there’s a way in which, as you just said, it’s got that, it’s got the potential to meet others. It’s like we’re trying to, it’s so, there’s so many layers to it. We can tackle it from a few different ways, but like, it’s kind of like what we’re doing is we’re trying to birth the medium through which

other people can flow into a connection with themselves reality with the poet um and the the logos which is all of that um like yeah I don’t know how else to put

that there’s a lot there’s a lot a lot of juice there the yeah I mean just to start with I mean the whole idea of the logos right is like this idea that there’s like some kind of symbolical grammatical order or you know potential for pattern just in creation itself from nothing like

that sort of already implies that every instance of expression and manifestation of embodiment and being in the cosmos is always going to be an iteration of this thing that is always already not able to fully be represented within the logoy or logismoy or whatever the smaller logoy is. And then, yeah, that idea of where you were talking,

I was thinking about going back to Wordsworth, who we were already talking about. He had that intimations of immortality and that yes idea of intimation where it’s like there’s nothing could be more private than me with pen and paper alone and yet at the same time I am confessor and professor

yeah and so I’m all of these things and I think that whole sort of transubstantial motif that you’re riffing on is is very apt because you’re taking into yourself the your inner experience and working with material that’s already present so but you’re taking it’s um

you’re taking it in and becomes a sort of indwelling where the phenomenal world is taken in to your mind which hopefully has been properly descended to your heart through spiritual practice and from that place of taking the phenomenal world into the inner psyche touch with the logos

you know fuck you know that’s the fire the divine spark that’s like you know the dream you know and then spirited right when spirited inspired then it grows into a

flame yes yes yes yes yes I agree with everything you just said um so that that’s quite interesting because I wonder like so this is what I actually couldn’t get to in my essay and I was wondering if we’re going to get to it today and we’ve just gone straight into it

which is how does this kind of repeated exposure. That’s not quite the word. Immersion is probably closer in the logos. How does that, what does that afford? Because I think Blake would say that not opposed, because that’s like, that’s making a binary that it’s more autonomous. There’s a tension between what Blake called the selfhood

which is separated um believes itself separated and just like you know Jung says the ego actually has a function it’s not like this thing that’s evil that we need to destroy um and then and then the the logos which is almost a super conscious thing um where the ego gets uh for that timeless moment sublimated

and it essentially becomes just like a melody can become a part of a symphony and the local part of it can then assume all of the meaning of the whole which it is a part of and it becomes one thing with the larger reality.

what does that afford the selfhood I haven’t been able to drill quite down into that because I think for both of us and for other poets with similar inclinations there’s a really deep sense that it’s somehow spiritually important not just for our own practice but to try and afford that for readers yeah

this well also this worked into something that I was thinking about possibly talking about too so I think that you know I alluded to you know hopefully having the mind properly descended into the heart through spiritual practice and like virtuous practice like I think that’s really essential especially when you’re in your taxonomy in the sensing and

the scrying realms because if you don’t have that rootedness and that piety and discipline devotion of practice it can be it like I don’t think Blake could have done what he did if he had not had that pious and like just beneficent loving like self if he didn’t have that he could

have easily just gone mad you know yeah and so as far as what is it what it what it affords I almost wonder if that’s not for us to know like maybe that’s like kind of God’s business like we’re called to do what we are called to do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And are we going to do that or are we going to resist?

I mean, yeah. I mean, for me, it’s interesting because I genuinely do not know. It’s been an extended aporia for me, that question. but there’s a there’s potentially a way it’s like a guiding principle of mind that if I can understand something properly and without rushing it or collapsing it and

collapsing the nuance and complexity if I can actually grow into as Rilke says grow into the answer to to that question maybe that could help me to understand and perform my task more skillfully uh in a way and again that’s an

aporia maybe maybe not but yeah that seems really right like I mentioned earlier before we got live that I was reading Owen Barfield’s poetic diction and it’s really helped me as a writer not because of like practical advice about word choice or you know construction or anything but in that the way that he thinks

about the way that meaning happens and of course Owen Barfield you know he’s very attentive to the fact that words change their meaning over time and you know different things are going to have the different texts are going to have different poetic responses for different readers

and like that you know that’s all there are a lot of variables that go into that and that has helped me because it’s instead of putting so much emphasis on what are the requisite skills to complete this task legitimately and you know such that I could be recognized as having talent or skill.

Instead of thinking about it that way, it’s more like, oh, it’s more about finding the state of consciousness that I’m trying to communicate and perceiving that as clearly as I can and as fully as I can with as much sensory interaction as I can. And then just conveying that as aptly as possible. And that gets,

because anybody can look at writing from the past and assess what are the rhetorical devices, where are they using assonance or sibilance or these types of things. And you can analyze it, you can pick apart the rhyme and the meter and all that stuff. But if you’re gonna go

to try to compose something with those things front of mind, you’re just not going to be able to compose. It’s just not how it works.

And I think, yeah, you’re touching on something that feels like almost the central practical point of the whole lateral poesis system, like how it actually hits where the rubber meets the road, as it were, because I think the lower two stages the sentimental poets and the scholarly poets have

that tendency to think that and then that well first of all that it it comes from just feeling and finding the right words and then and then using all these techniques the craft the tradition the aesthetics all of that. But I think it’s it’s really like that the greatest start is all about consciousness,

where you’re coming from in consciousness. And it’s why even though someone like T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, his poetics was all about getting rid of the personality. In other words, the subject is sentimental stuff because he was pushing against that because that’s because he was very, I would say, in the scholarly stage.

But despite and so what he did was he tried to use a fragmented sort of, I would say, poetics, a fragmented approach to imagery and everything like that. And he was very conscious of the craft that went into it. And Ezra Pound helped him with that.

but at the end of the day I still very much get a sense of his in that particular poem of his personality and the place in consciousness where he was coming from which is a conservative middle-aged man and so like it’s so weird to me we we’ve almost in culturally got we’ve inverted how

reality actually is because the art for me isn’t necessarily about the words on the page the art for me is always about the underlying consciousness because if I can get in touch with the underlying consciousness of someone like Blake and even glimpse it or sense it in directly

that for me is like what actually is most spiritually nourishing and transformative um and so the words should serve the consciousness in a way rather than the other

way around yeah and my favorite poet is Sam and Taylor Coleridge not because I think that he wrote the greatest poems and not even because he wrote my favorite poems but rather because as a mind and as a soul I want to be with him like I’m

fascinated by him and feel a kinship with him and he leaves traces of it there are traces of his genius in the Mariner poem there are traces of it in Kublai Khan and Christabel and in Dejection Ode but he never actually as a poet he never actually got there poetically I don’t think he ever

reached the sublimity that Wordsworth did in anything he composed and he knew that and part of it had to do with an opium addiction and all this other stuff but you know I mentioned Owen Barfield earlier another thing I like about him is he’s got

this book What Coleridge Thought which I’m reading that as well and it’s just a fascinating It’s just a fascinating thing that, you know, Coleridge did so much studying but never quite left the essential document, the authoritative statement such that another scholar like Barfield could go

combing through all of the miscellanea to try to get the essence of that thought and state it. And he mentions in that book that Coleridge was always just chasing the pure truth itself and he only wanted the truth as truth yeah you know and so

literary arts were sort of there was there was secondary consideration for him you know and uh I think that’s there’s something beautiful to that and then uh that kind of makes me wonder about like somebody like Shelley after that because Shelley had very similar kind of inclinations he was pursuing something ideal

though Shelley was famously an atheist and I don’t know what the numinous thing he was chasing was if he doesn’t want to describe it in theistic terms or whatever yeah yeah that’s true yeah that’s really interesting

yeah it makes me think of just to return to that point about poets and artists that are inspired being a kind of ministers like it’s a priestly almost profession in a way because it’s but by its nature You can’t do it in a compartmentalised, disembodied, rote, artificial way

which I think just the general consensus would be that there’s a tendency for real priests to slip into that at times and just like I suppose there’s a tendency in some poets to not rise to the level of committing their being to the process of essentially refining their consciousness such that it

blends and merges with the Logos and the reader is put in touch with that. It’s like that moment where you become the Logos and through that moment you help the readers of your poems to become the logos for that moment, for that brief, like timeless window when they’re just in another space like that.

It’s just that that’s so strange to me what that is. It’s like a. Like an at one meant, like everything gets at one. and there’s suddenly no separation, the separation of selfhood from everything living in a chaotic material world where everything’s bouncing against one another in this harsh game of survival of the fittest and everything like that.

And everything’s just like, like seen as it really is. The doors of perception are cleansed to use Blake’s language and and there’s a marriage that’s kind of consummated in that moment or something.

yeah and i just think that it’s part and parcel of being the embodied beings that we are in our particular neural bodily corporeal state that we can’t live in pure yeah gross you know it’s like the whole idea of um of theosis, you know, that Christ Logos became man so that we could become gods.

That’s not to say that on Earth we become infinite beings and or that we become infinite being being self. because we’re individual finite beings on earth that, you know, live in, you know, specific material, social, physical configurations, you know, and that’s how we experience our part as logismo or logo or whatever.

And so it comes back to your question about like, what is it that we’re trying to do when we’re going toward that state? like because we can’t be trying to ultimately solve all myths all mysteries and like reveal truth as such in such a way that we are no longer what we are so

therefore it has to be going back to Elliot like a repetitive paraphrastic thing over and over repeating cycling like the seasons you know it comes forth and it recedes and it circles and it’s that is nice when it comes back to your analogy about composition too because there’s a you know the

musical framework the piece reaches its crescendo it concludes you know and then all is finished and the audience goes out and uses the restroom and mills in the lobby and goes home and then next season they have orchestra tickets again

Yeah, and then I suppose to return as you are to the question of what it affords, I suppose that there is in some way that can’t really be calculated an increasing sensitization to to that participatory state of being. and just a slight increase in fluency or with that or a slight maybe more openness

to that yeah I thought about that too while you were talking it seems like you know I mentioned you know virtue and piety and things like that and how I think they’re crucial to being able to get in touch with that inspiration without losing your coherence, without losing your your sanity, your grip, you know?

And I think along with that idea, I think that I think the best the best thing that can be done with that new grace and fluency that you gain from that experience of clarity, I think is to be kinder. I mean, William Blake is also said to have been extremely kind to everyone who knew him.

And this is how people describe saints, as just being so loving and caring and so responsive.

Absolutely. And Wordsworth even talks about that in the Tinternabi poem that he, I can’t remember the exact line, but he owes to his experiences as a young man in nature, in which he was immersed in nature. And he all but uses exactly that language of immersion. Like he says, it haunts him like a passion. That is

he owes to them basically something that made him kinder and impacted the actions that would be considered trivial, like the everyday sort of things that you do. It somehow made him a better man in a way that even he couldn’t quite pin down. He just had some kind of intuition that that was right.

Oh, man. and bringing it back to Coleridge this feels so good to be able to say this in public out loud to my friend like so you know Coleridge had the idea that the imagination was our like primary faculty of apprehension and it connected us to the divine mind, the repetition of the eternal I am, you know,

as appears in Exodus and Jesus Christ repeats it in a passage in the New Testament. And that, that co-creation that we participate in when we’re in touch with that faculty you know Coleridge had this poem called The Dejection Ode where he starts off at the beginning of the poem he’s disconnected

from the world he can see things but he can’t feel them and through the poem he goes through and he does like some sort of depth psychology sort of stuff and he gets to a still point where he had just recalled an early childhood trauma and he hears the silence and

he’s able to like gradually come out of it but earlier in the poem he says things like we receive but what we give and he talks about oh let me see I’ve got these lines memorized I’m surprised they’re not coming to be more quickly, but he says,

I may not hope from outward forms to win the passion and the life whose fountains are within. And anyway, all that is to say is that somehow his quieting of his ego mind which like like you said the ego isn’t necessarily bad or anything but

sometimes you need to quiet that aspect of your intellect to get to a spiritual sense like in quieting all that poet ego mind got to that point he was able to then like re-enter the world and anyway I’m just relating that to his theory of the imagination and that idea of participation co-creation in the cosmos that’s like

the depth that it sounds like Wordsworth was describing that he gained from having been immersed in nature and in my own life I’m kind of starting as I work with some of these ideas and really have them deep in my spiritual practice and I also spend

a lot of time in nature not really white wilderness you know it’s you know always a highway within a mile or two you know but but you know nevertheless I’m around rivers and creeks and streams and you know woods and stuff and the more time I spend uh not just reading, but like reading deeply and like,

and reading before bed, you know, so that my mind is getting in the cadence of language at, you know, at the unconscious level and in all my prayer and religious life, like it’s in spiritual life. Um, I’m start, I’m starting to feel that, you know, that sensing of

like the way that trees distinctly shape themselves as a response to temperature and moisture you know and like those types of mental experience that precede language but you tune it out if you’re not in in the habit and practice of spending

a lot of time in silence with them you know and little things like I bought a bird feeder and you know little things like this um a very long riff there so I hope there’s something beneficial yeah no there is

there was a lot there um that was really interesting I was enjoying going on the the trip you were taking me on um that yeah there’s um it’s interesting yeah because that yes we I think we’ve we’ve kind of like answered

one aspect of I think what it affords um it’s like the in the capacity for what we can call like a vertical intimacy with the logos actually seems to afford a horizontal intimacy, as it were, with the people around us, the world around us, perhaps. It’s more like the ego

I don’t want to say it becomes porous because that can imply it being not as strong but there’s like an ability for the psyche to just lay the emphasis not on the selfhood but something else for a while and to and that almost seems like a really

essential that’s probably I think I feel like we just defined the essence of love in a way the emphasis on something else for a while. And we kind of let the vibration of that other, whether it’s the tree that’s growing or a friend, to almost adopt that vibration in your own being, as it were.

I don’t know how else to put that.

So I was thinking about...

about that as you as you mentioned that you know like the the openness and the receptivity that make you capable of experiencing that empathy you know that caritas that that eros that love that is so like as an organism we can’t always be open to everything because that level of vulnerability, it’s just not sustainable.

We will cease to exist. And I was thinking that’s sort of an analog for our conversation about like what we’re up to in this pursuit of being in touch with the logos and why it is that we’re called to do it and what function does that serve and what

purpose and you know what is the nature of that calling it’s sort of it’s like it’s the same concept you can’t constantly be in pure logos because then you’re no longer a being and as being so it’s the same concept with the love thing and I really like that idea of horizontal and vertical yeah

and it begs I was also thinking about like well what if you really could just really be completely open to nature well then I think about like that guy in that documentary who went out in the wild and got eaten by a bear or something or like

and so I guess I was thinking but maybe you could just do it and not just immediately meet a tragic fate like let’s say you could just leave and just live harmoniously and be completely open then I was thinking well then then you’re no longer pursuing the

the artistic poetic element anymore and then so that led me to like led me to consider is there a necessity for the poetic enterprise the fictive enterprise creative enterprise the imaginative artistic enterprise and it seems to me like i mentioned earlier well maybe we’re just called to do it maybe we’re actually you know we’re

called we’re we’re more or less It’s a commandment of us by a force larger than us. But then as I was considering your response just now, I was thinking, well, what if it’s a moral duty? Like if every age needs its prophets and poets because it can’t metabolize the the forces that are at work on it.

And so it needs these figures. Perhaps it’s a moral imperative that you must do it.

So there’s a there’s a line in there’s a I went there’s some Tibetan Buddhism. that talk about certain initiation practices and that there are masters of the wisdom they refer to them as the ageless wisdom which is a which is the best title to have master of the ageless wisdom and what they do in initiation is they

essentially because they talk about how the light of the uh they literally use the language of the logos the light of the uh the solar logos is too intense for a person to take the full brunt of. So they almost act as a prism and they refract the light and mediate it into a way

that becomes digestible for the person undergoing initiation. and I suppose poets have an analogous function in a way. The phrase you used I thought was perfect. It’s like the forces that for whatever reason hard for most people, for society and every age, as you said, to digest,

they need to come through to us in a way that’s been mediated, made manageable, humanized, embodied, all of that and that makes it that gives it a human aspect that we can that everyone else can then bridge into does that land with what you were saying yeah

absolutely and it get it gets to the um that whole problem of you know well not necessarily a problem but that condition of you know every era like cyclically everything happening and then always iterating and reiterating the same essential the same essential I hesitate to call it a

concept or an idea but the same essential yes numinous you know must always be translated every age over and over again because it is what is the conduit to that sort of depth perception that we were talking about earlier and so and and that the ability to

access that that um that depth consciousness is just it’s it’s kind of our birthright it’s and it’s the it’s what facilitates like the fullness of being you know and it’s an honor and a privilege as well as a duty to try to assist in conveying that.

I think so because I think poets and artists who are trying to, whether they know it fully consciously or not, facilitate that marriage between uh society the separated selfhood and that what that depth perception opens onto divinity logos um they sense that like i i’ll speak quite directly here i think for

me why do i want to do that is because i can sense that like people there are levels to suffering and levels to the subtlety of the suffering and we often have to a lot of people are working on relatively surface levels of trying to

help people out of their suffering which is good and needed that’s needed too we need to work at the level of the symptom also but I can see how there’s so much suffering that comes from a cause that’s so subtle that most people don’t even know it’s there because they haven’t tasted anything different and that

the separation of selfhood from everything the fact that we’re not at home in the cosmos that we are radically different from everything around us we don’t fit in in a way there’s no home here it’s a wasteland to use Elliot’s words and But then in those moments when you’re at one with the logos and it’s that timeless

thing that takes us out of our, as Wordsworth says in the Tin Tin Abbey, like where we’re laid asleep in the body and become a living soul. That’s like the perfect phrase for it. And I would also say the soul is um metaxu like it’s between which is what the logos is it’s the force that’s like

this marriage force it’s like drawing us into that at one moment and and that is the in that moment the amelioration of like the deepest or one of the deepest forms of suffering um and it’s what enables us to go on living in a way um yeah yeah

and yeah that the fact that it’s an in between is so fascinating because it’s at the same time that it’s evidence of the fact that our spiritual selves are of some different nature it’s also the thing that animates life, you know?

Wow. Totally. Totally. That’s, yeah, that’s such a great connection. Totally. because the logos is the thing that holds it all together and it, as Blake would say you know that that is the reality and that’s what he sees in the in the wildflower in his famous aphorism on the wildflower yeah like it’s it is reality and

And it’s a reality that’s present through every age Because it’s reality Yeah,

and I guess I’m just going to repeat myself But yeah, it’s just the privilege and the honor and the duty to Yes Apprehend how that manifests within our particular age

yes yes and and I suppose there’s just for me I think there are of course grey areas but generally speaking my sense of things is that there’s it’s pretty there’s a clear cut line and I think Christ even says he like he came to bring a sword and not peace between the false prophets who instead of

putting people in touch with the divine essentially the logos in this participatory way where they’re basically becoming, they’re allowing the force, the magnetism of the soul to work through them to draw other people into the soul, into that union. There’s a difference between, I would say that kind of creative kind of person, individual prophet,

and someone who’s trying to put people in touch with something that is still somehow separative and and so and we’ve touched on this before like there was I mean at the beginning of this conversation we brought up some priests who instead of doing that and Blake really disliked these priests would erect a empty shell of

dogma because they haven’t got the sense and the essence of the thing working through them and that can be at its worst destructive and actually get in the way of like it can traumatize people and keep them from accessing that state at its

best it doesn’t quite work but it gives people a language that they can then you know later down the track or in their own practice you know use yeah

yeah absolutely and like I think I don’t know I just feel like it’s for how many parishes need a priest there it’s just like logical that a number of them are not going to be great and you can easily just kind of sense when you’re near a priest whether they’re holy or not you know

and part of that has you know there are probably so many different factors and you know it’s I’m sure it’s you know it’s I’m sure I project things onto people and it’s not my place to judge the interior of someone else’s heart but you know yeah when when you’re kind of working

when you’re kind of worried that like you mentioned like people could be harmed you know if the priest isn’t competent then then it’s I think it’s worth being

healthfully skeptical yeah yeah and and this is where like because so the the ladder of uh poesies the the framework which I change it from letter of poetry to letter of poesies because because really what I’m trying to talk about is um the inherent

creativity the creative agency of of humanity because it it shows up in poetry and it shows up in priesthood um it shows up in teachers I think because we know the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher oh absolutely and I would say that the workers of light, logos, love,

soul can show up in any field and that there’s a sequence of development that needed to be that I guess that needs to be unfolded for people to get to the point where they can consciously do that.

Yeah. Well, I’m glad you brought up your ladder of poesies. for everyone who joined thanks for being here and you should definitely check out Isaiah’s work he’s doing some good things and hopefully we will chat again I’m just certain that we are likely to but unless you have anything more that you’d like to

add I think that’s a pretty good place to break off is just delight to talk to you

yeah it is I feel like our conversations regularly end in some kind of aporia because we contemplate something quite divine and then we don’t know what to do with it

absolutely do they absolutely do um and you mentioned Caleb Flores’s channel c-a-l-e-b-f-l-o-r-e-s Caleb Flores his youtube channel um he uh does commentaries on um uh fairy tales and and folk tales and moral tales um and uh he’s been interviewing people lately he’s interviewed myself jake favor

michael deck clerk and now you i understand so check out galeb flores on youtube but you see all of us in conversation with him isaiah it’s good to see you yeah you too we’ll speak so you have a wonderful night or a day for you night for me all

right yeah

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Previously Published in Versed.

https://versedcommunity.mn.co/

The supple darkness sucks the dawning bleach

And lavender succumbs to wounds of pink

In healing lightening — rosefire of the breath

As into sky the eye of heaven sinks

Up, up, as in to Grace of Spirit’s womb.

Although I mourn the moon already I

Embrace the fury yet to come —

The blinding light, the ever-suffering sky.

And still I gaze, devouring deep within

Each longing pore the bath of every light

And, more, each every shadow filling in

This space which makes this morning of the night,

And settle like the lawn my aching soul,

A mercy letting parts compose a whole.

https://versedcommunity.mn.co/

The supple darkness sucks the dawning bleach

And lavender succumbs to wounds of pink

In healing lightening — rosefire of the breath

As into sky the eye of heaven sinks

Up, up, as in to Grace of Spirit’s womb.

Although I mourn the moon already I

Embrace the fury yet to come —

The blinding light, the ever-suffering sky.

And still I gaze, devouring deep within

Each longing pore the bath of every light

And, more, each every shadow filling in

This space which makes this morning of the night,

And settle like the lawn my aching soul,

A mercy letting parts compose a whole.

Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

she said and, looking out,

we knew. But that

was not all. We thought.

And, though we thought we knew,

the thought was not

that. Not could it be.

And there, there was

the music which we thought

we heard. And saw that it was Good.

It was surprising, and seemed something odd

compared to all the grave surrounding it,

a sudden word quite out of place, like “God.”

I took it for my own, and learned to live

its quiet pace with little to amuse

and found its graces suitable for this

just-perfect little way to pray the Muse.

Oh, Sweet Catherine who I did not treat

with proper Love’s devotion in the past,

you still are with me even though retreat

has come to be the only treat that lasts —

all patterns yet remind me of that hymn

which, being yours, I now beget to Him.

Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.