Tomasz Gil © 2006
For a while now I have been convinced that the root of our spiritual life remains planted in the body. This is of course in contrast to many teachers of spiritual life that are inimical to the body. Such teachers are not only in existence in organized religions and their churches but also hide among new age enthusiasts. The idea of disembodied existence, born perhaps more than 2000 years ago and professed by varieties of ascetics, is perhaps one of the greater falsehoods paraded as a recipe for a liberating spiritual experience. It finds an appeal among people who see their bodies scorned, decried as ugly and unworthy of attention, or outright evil. Those people and their supporters exhort us to seek the so-called beauty within after giving up on the actual physical body and its internal and external manifestations and acts.
Such is my introductory rant against scorners of the physical aspects of existence. Of course in addition to the physical we also have mental, emotional and spiritual life. But all these branches grow on the foundation of the physical. Why? Because few would willingly agree to lose one's physical life for the promise of an enhancement, even infinite, of the derivatives. It does not seem believable to our perception of existence that removing the physical basis has any value whatsoever. Yet most religions postulate just that. Time for change, time for another religious reform.
Roethke's cycle of "Four For Sir John Davis" - complemented accidentally by the fifth poem titled "The Waking" - speaks very directly to these concerns. "The Waking" is a sort of summary of the contradicting forces active inside one's spiritual life introduced and expounded by the concept of dance. Yes - he takes us through the steps of a dance to illuminate his philosophy grasped with the inevitable poetic vagueness. A friend had sent me that "Waking" probably unaware of the cycle of "Four ..." that precede it in my book. And the four are - The Dance, The Partner, The Wraith and The Vigil.
In "The Dance" the poet dances alone - not quite so but in the company of clumsy but gay bears whom he had observed enjoying themselves sliding down the snowy hill. Singing through the body is his purpose in dancing alone - he wants "to teach my toes to listen to my tongue". The language is to be commingled with movement. We will have to read the other pieces to have this idea justified and elaborated.
So he goes on to have a partner ("The Partner"). Perplexed to understand - "What is desire?". Does it make him the actor or the instrument of some other act? He dances with an exciting woman. He lets on that it is her who is in control of this dance and he is a mere instrument pulsing with desire.
That is exactly right - that is really why we dance or perform music. We throw the mathematical structures of the mind as prey and sacrifice for the glory of the moment. Think of music with its exacting and abstruse notation - how much of it remains when the moment of performance comes along. All is distorted, skewed, violated by the emotion and desires shaping the moment. The deathly beauty of the form is shaken up and brought up to life.
What is the consequence? This is told - not plainly but poetically of course - in "The Wraith". Quote:
The unity of the spirit and the flesh - how refreshingly non-Christian. The acts of the flesh, many of them obviously sexual, are needed to advance the life of the spirit. What is the spirit I keep talking about? It is the thing that conventional philosophy calls "will" and really has trouble grappling with the thing. Will is the organ of new, the organ that senses the future time with all those possibilities that have not yet become facts, an toward which we have the multi-valued attitudes of desire, fear, abhorrence and attraction. We live the contradictions of the arrows flying toward our chest from the future and deal with them precisely through the spirit also called will.
So here the poet and his consort rest in sexual embrace. Why is that needed? Why are two bodies needed to enhance the experience of spiritual life? Do I know a rational or poetic answer? Read on.
And later stating more clearly how the physical evokes the spiritual:
The dissolute equated with the spiritual - do we hide this truth from ourselves?
In the final (fourth) poem in the cycle, "The Vigil", the poet becomes more arcanely philosophical.
"The world is for the living. Who are they?
(...)
Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and light is all."
This prompts me to exclaim - what could be clearer! - but it is not supposed to be clear - as "the visible obscures". We need to leap into the dark - it is our human condition dictating this inevitability.
What makes it so desirable to have a partner in the existential and spiritual experience of life and its darkness? It seems that the answer is as dark as the question. Maybe it is illuminated by mythology - the ideal lover, the Savior. I was motivated to ask this question in the light of the Indian teachings about the chakra system, which seems to be a detailed theory of spirituality arising in the body. The Indian and similar Chinese teachings are very elaborate, yet they still dont explain this need for another. If they were true then being alone would be quite an acceptable spiritual life. I also asked teachers and practitioners of the expressionistic Japanese "butoh" dance - the answers were not satisfying. To us, in our civilization, it seems unbelievable - we have an abiding sense of value of a contact with another. This mystery of otherness is still unexplained and to be discovered and perhaps unveiled.
The poem "The Waking" is perhaps placed at the end of this cycle of four poems by accident but it does provice a kind of enigmatic exegesis or hymn to the dance of darkness. The waking leads through sleep to the discovery of the unconscious and very indirectly to practical life of activity, work, planning and calendar time.
So he needs a partner but really does not care who that partner is. So he does not care who he is himself - right? Right - because that individual identity is part of practical life and time. He lives with the mystical "you" - the partner and friend of the mystical "I". But "I" and "you" are not properly individuated in the mystical time. Still he hopes for the "Ground" - perhaps that is what reconnects with practical world - the world perceived by most as the "reality".