Th Nov 10: clear, a little wet //
Page of Swords, reversed: use your words to empower yourself and others. Raise the vibe. I feel lucky and it feels serendipitous to have discovered Louis Komjathy. I am grateful that before he left academia he first went to the trouble of putting out two comprehensive books—textbooks for teachers, you could say—which together form the ground of the emergent field of Contemplative Studies. The blurb on the back of the first describes the field as “interdisciplinary” and “focused on contemplative practice, contemplative experience, and contemplative pedagogy.”
A people chained to aurora
I alone disarming you
/ Millions of facts of distributed light /
Helping myself with some big boxes
Up the steps, then turning to no neighborhood;
The child’s psalm, slightly sung
In the hall rushing into the small room.
Such fire! leading away from destruction.
Somewhere in the outer ether I glimpsed you
Coming at me, the solo barrier did it this time,
Guessing us staying, true to be at the blue mark
Of the threshold.
—John Ashbery, from “Civilization and Its Discontents” (from Rivers and Mountains)
So, what is contemplative practice as Komjathy and this new field understand it? In his introduction, he writes that the term encompasses various “approaches, disciplines, and methods” more commonly referred to as “prayer” and “meditation” which focus on “developing attentiveness, awareness, interiority, presence, silence, transformation, and a deepened sense of meaning and purpose” ... “[T]his includes art, dance, writing, photography, research, teaching, theatre, walking, and so forth” (ICS 14).
Komjathy was a Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego (where my mom did her graduate degree), though he is no longer affiliated with any university—he went rogue, as I am often threatening to go. Being first and foremost an artist, and secondarily a scholar of literary texts, I see a lot of potential for contemplative approaches to reading and teaching literature, especially lyric poetry; and being an ever-frustrated Teaching Assistant in a deliberately impoverished and impoverishing system of over-professionalized and de-facto-privatized university education, I have a strong and long-built-up desire to improve the quality of time spent in the classroom for both teacher and student. Using poems (in my example) as test runs for all manner of life experiences, teachers should be able to guide students in learning how to accept, process, rewrite, and consider their world.
Contemplative Studies provides a bridge between the humanities and the creative arts. It facilitates an integration of theory and praxis, reading and writing, imagined and applied experience. This is an integration that is missing in lyric theory and sorely needed, not just to make poetry great again (sorry), but to keep those in communities of education dedicated to ethical and personally-meaningful goals. To my mind, Contemplative Studies is what’s missing in lyric theory; and its upload would help the literature and language departments as they navigate the crushing losses of influence, of funding, and of faith underway in the traditional humanities under STEMified technocapitalism.
I am interested in looking at two of the four aspects of the study of religion in order to crack what I see as the de-facto doctrine and faux objectivity of the dogma of mainstream literary studies exemplified in lyric theory. These two aspects happen to be (unsurprisingly!) those commonly attributed to the mystical aspects of religions: that of subjective experience (tripping out, reporting back) and that of social expression (rituals, creation of culture).
In my view, poetic production is to be understood less as sacred text or the manufacture of doctrine (of a Transcendentalism, for example) than the recorded expression of experience (subjective, usually, unless we want to make the argument that certain art is channeled) and ritual (the ritual of writing, i.e., the ritual of paying concerted attention to a thing or person or situation and recording what your senses make of it).
Lyric theory has made a scientific business of analyzing language for its own sake, imposing political or moral significances onto texts based on inferences from historical data. “The author’s mother was a fervent Catholic, and so this poem about Mary must have been inspired by his mother.” Furthermore, it is assumed, this poem can only be valuable or affecting to others who are steeped in the same Catholic tradition that was present in the poet’s neighborhood of German-speaking Prague in 1900. And even further: this poem cannot truly ‘speak’ to anyone except by triggering psychological, emotional, and hormonal reactions which are so individual as to be empirically meaningless.
I am exaggerating for effect, but not by much. The dogmas of empiricism and literalism have driven the more radical, i.e. mystical, interpreters of poetry into strange realms of critique: aesthetics, phenomenology, the neuroscience of attention. Rather than delving deeper into the myths of cognitive machinery, I wish instead to stay in my creaturely lane, as it were, and to register, annotate, and reflect upon the humane: the subjective experience (yes, subjective—not, however, therefore automatically useless in pedagogy or even critique) of reading poetry, perhaps as a ‘new Formalist,’ with the development of a ‘postsecular’ contemplative pedagogy at the heart of this experimentation.
