8-30-24

THE SOUL SENSING—THOMAS HARDY AND EDITH PIAF

THOMAS HARDY—THE DARKLING THRUSH

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangle bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry.

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited:

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for caroling

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

EDITH PIAF—LA VIE EN ROSE

Hold me close and hold me fast

The magic spell you cast

This is la vie en rose

When you kiss me, heaven sighs

And though I close my eyes

I see la vie en rose

When you press me to your heart

I'm in a world apart

A world where roses bloom

And when you speak, angels sing from above

Everyday words seem to turn into love songs

Give your heart and soul to me

And life will always be

La vie en rose

I thought that love was just a word

They sing about in songs I've heard

It took your kisses to reveal that I was wrong

And love is real

It is said that whatever your attention polishes turns into a mirror. In that sense, then, when I first read this poem I had not turned on my full attention and it impressed me as a simple poem about how gloom was broken by birdsong. Perhaps the poet's attention to the details was his version of making a mirror. Perhaps he was documenting how the cold and barren landscape of his own life was interrupted (and maybe reclaimed from the gloom) by even as fragile a creature as the thrush. As I sat with this poem over several weeks, more and more of what it implied or linked was my way of letting my attention polish its surfaces.

Parsing this poem on its most obvious surface separated the first two stanzas from the last two. The first stanza begins to paint the very gray and cold landscape that has seized the poet. There is frost, a gray sky resembling the “strings of broken lyres.” There is no one here but the poet, all others have retreated into their houses.

The second stanza extends the gloom of the landscape to portray “the Century's corpse outleant (made visible)”, perhaps a reference to the dregs of war and maybe World War 1, which Hardy (1840-1928) certainly lived through. The corpse takes on a definite substance, as if a person whose death is accompanied by the outlines of the gloomy landscape—the “cloudy canopy,” the lamenting wind, all signs of life gone, and spirits disheartened.

Then, there is a transition, an opening window as Jane Hirshfield calls the part of a poem where some sliver of light is let in. In stanza three the poet hears birdsong (he is not alone, after all), albeit from a thrush “aged, frail, gaunt, and small.” The bird is part of this barren and cold landscape but managing to bring all that his soul can produce for the poet to hear. The birdsong is described as “ecstatic sound” emerging from a place not easily recognized by the poet but a source of “some blessed Hope/whereof he knew/And I was unaware.” The bird's song could not have been placed at the beginning of the poem to have the effect of bringing to life what is otherwise a bleak place in a bleak season.

It was at this point that I wondered what I might have missed in a poem so clearly defined by its contrast of the first two stanzas with the last ones. It seemed simple enough but I was drawn in by taking his references and themes a bit further by what I call a process of spelunking to suggest diving more deeply into caves of meaning. For instance, the thrush is often meant to symbolize inner peace, peace of mind, unlooked for hope (especially in dark times), and Nature herself. There is also the possibility of rebirth and regeneration in a world of decay and chaos, a moral winter. All of these references seemed to fit what Hardy was trying to tell us about the role of the fragile bird in a world of great constriction, ennui, and hopelessness.

Another reference to song and what is described as a “frail” bird reminded me of Edith Piaf (1915-1963), often referred to as a “waif” and “The little sparrow” for her diminutive stature and bird-like physique. Edith Piaf's own biography is an endless lament of abandonment, loss, exposure to the underbelly of life. She, in fact, could be the “aged thrush” of this poem, prevailing over circumstances of a life that might be described as “Winter's dregs made desolate/The weakening eye of day.” But she, too, was able to compose and sing “ecstatic” sounds that lifted her away from the winter of her own life time and again. The symbolism attached to the thrush could just as easily describe the spirit of Edith Piaf.

One of Piaf's most famous songs is “La Vie en Rose,” the lyrics of which are included here with Hardy's poem, came to my mind as an illustration of yet a deeper level of meaning. The word “ecstatic” suggested to me an expression of what might be called a mystical experience. The long history of mysticism in the Christian tradition includes women who sequestered themselves out of devotion to God (the Beguines, a collection of sisterhoods of the 13^th Century). Their devotion took on the flavor of sensual experiences and even a marriage with God with all that that involves, almost a direct sexual relationship, a relationship of the body and its sensing.

This very interesting level of meaning is explained more clearly by Dorothee Soelle in her book The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. I will quote her directly in order to show a full appreciation of the relationship between sexuality and spirituality.

“Those who at any moment know why and to what end they do this or that, have shut themselves off from the power of the rose that blooms without why or wherefore. In the face and for the sake of this energy that repeals rules and roles, eroticism seems to me a better name than love or sexuality for this place of mystical experience.”

“All religions testify to intersections of eros and religion that arise from a sacred power. Hildegard von Bingen—to name an example that applies to much of women's mysticism—speaks of the human libido in metaphors of heat and fire, very ones she uses when naming the divine energy.”

“The preferred place of mystical experience is eroticism.”

“... this piety understands the erotic as something that is in the Creator's very self. What destroys the human being is to be separated off rather than being united. Eros is one of God's names.”

“Distinguishing between the giver and the gift is an essential first step that appears frequently in mystical tradition. God is not to be loved for the sake of what God gives but for the sake of God's self.”

“Mystical love for God holds together both what causes us to tremble in fright and what never ceases to fascinate us.”

“... in love the boundaries of time, space, and assigned role are crossed over; mysticism is an ever renewed deconstruction of socially constructed sexual roles. It forever subverts and transcends the relations of domination and submission.”

“But love that crosses fixed boundaries is endangered also by a modern self-sufficiency that from the very outset denies mysticism of the erotic.”

“All mystics know that the incomprehensibility of God grows rather than diminishes when God's love comes close to us.”

“In this world of ours, religion is as superfluous as it is indispensable. In a mystical sense, however, religion is indispensable particularly for people who love. For religion still names our poverty and reminds us of the power in us that holds together and heals. Religion still speaks of the sanctity of life for all that we can locate in love.”

The questions that come to mind are: How are sexual energy (the energy of eroticism) and spirituality integrated? And how does all of this relate to Hardy's poem, a product of the Victorian Era? I read Hardy's poem as an invitation to break away from the mental landscape of the first two stanzas and to open up to what I like to think of as mystical sensuality. I am probably far off the mark here but it seems to me that Hardy was preparing us for the relationship sung in Edith Piaf's song. I think Soelle is correct when she writes that the freedom of mysticism is bypassed in contemporary religions, except in the mystical traditions associated with all of the major ones (Judaism/Kabbalah, Islam/Sufism, Hindu/Vedanta and Bhakti schools, Christianity/contemplative tradition). I am not educated enough with all of these to know if there are erotic connections within them. But it seems to me that Hardy's experience and insight in the second half of his poem are not arrived at despite the bleakness of the first half but because of them. This illustrates that part of the mystical experience that has as much to do with “the dark night of the soul” (in St. John of the Cross's telling) as it does with the transcendence that becomes possible. Again, it is a unification and integration of a full life experience that contains both dark and light, both bleakness and “blessed Hope.” The human species is blessed with the possibility of just such a path in a life fully realized and actualized, contingent on having passed through the stanzas of life that describe bleak winters.

My own experience leads me to think that Descartes decapitated our cognitive abilities from our physical bodies (“I think, therefore I am”). It has taken me the majority of my lifetime to begin to understand what mysticism is and, also, how the physical body with all its intricacies and energies is integrated with the powers of consciousness. But it seems logical to me that the miracles of the physical and those of the cognitive are all of one piece, a whole that also includes what is called spiritual. How could it not be the case that physical, sexual, energy is not integrated with our spiritual selves? If Descartes was wrong in his formulation, then we gain freedom to explore how our sexual selves interact with our mystical selves. I appreciate Sorelle's need to use a word different from “sexual” because of its many negative associations, especially as it relates to what is most basic and animal in us as a species. But it challenges us to use that same word to find a place for what identifies us, in part, as wholly integrated individuals. “Eroticism” has its own categories of reference and doesn't really ground sexual energy in a total body experience.

Many people are probably uncomfortable thinking about and using the terms sexuality and eroticism, let alone imagining the actual experiences they imply. I am one of those people too. I am not writing from a soap box. But the energy behind the sexual urge is universal among all living things and beings. There are reasons for developing such a powerful energy source among living things. The reproductive urge is an engine that drives much of how we think and act and exists as it does for “purposes” of maintaining life's abundance. Linking sexuality and spirituality is not a connection that makes much sense intuitively—or in the Cartesian universe. But so much of what we perceive of the world filters into our subconscious. Sexual energy is available for channeling into other pursuits besides sex and may include the mystical urge. In his book, An Immense World, Ed Yong explores the senses humans share with a set of creatures across the wide landscape of life. He makes the point with all of the senses that other creatures are attuned to their Umwelt (the causes and conditions of their particular ecosystems) in ways that we do not sense in our own Umwelt. The differences are very subtle and extend from senses of smell, hearing, touch, pain, taste, and vision. We simply don't have the sensing equipment to mimic what other species can experience. But that begs the question about what subtle senses we do have that we do not exercise. I think that the mystical sense is one of these. I think it is available to everyone but lacks actualization because we are attuned to what distracts us in our lives by technology, general science, and the media. We are a calculating, poll-taking, statistics analyzing, fact-based society. Many critics of our society refer to these distractions as “The Machine.” But it may be that the mystics among us have tapped into a different plane of sensing the world.

What does all of this have to do with Thomas Hardy's apparently simplistic poem? A poem is a vehicle, a portal, for larger and deeper concerns. The poet gives out hints and leaves it up to us as readers to make of them what we will. Hardy is speaking out of the milieu of his own life, his personal Umwelt, and offering us insights into what that life is like. We can pick up the themes and incorporate them into our own time and space. The beautiful linkages are gifts the poet has encouraged, I think. As with the polished objects, our attention to the hints make a mirror that reflects back at us someone we might be surprised to see there. Things we observe are not always what they seem to be at first glance. So it is with this poem of Hardy's. Yes, it is a natural landscape he describes and the soul song of the thrush is part of that landscape. But the poem is also about darkness and light, about the beauty of what he describes as an “aged thrush” whose song is “such ecstatic sound.” Doesn't that hint at a different level of meaning in his poem?

I think Piaf's poem/lyrics (I am thinking of how Bob Dylan's song lyrics were judged as poetry when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature) are more than an expression of sexual energy and the attendant love for another. They are sensual in a way that Soelle described among the women mystics over time. They are an expression of a full life in which emotions, feelings, passions, are not separated from some cold and barren concept of decapitated cognition. They are a linkage with what is incomprehensible and necessary and beautiful.

My sense of mysticism is that it is about mutuality and co-creation as well as a desire for intimacy and unity with the higher concept of the divine. For the mystics with whom I am familiar, apprehending the divine is as much God knowing them as it is them knowing God in the fullness allowed by the limits of human senses, cognition, and emotions. Hardy assigns “some blessed Hope” to the song of the thrush, but I think it could also be an expression of Hardy's love for the world (as Edith Piaf's song is a paean to mystical love), only temporarily dampened by “Winter's dregs.”Love for the world and all it holds is the mystical life if it recognizes our terrestrial being as well as a transcendent link to divine creative energy. This, then, is another channel for the sexual energy that tends to define us in all that we do. And it is this energy that we can choose to utilize in subtle ways that also express what a whole life contains. Perhaps a love for and a marriage with the divine presence is about finding grounding in the only life we have with the only body we have with all its senses.