Cathedral for one
On Saturday afternoon just gone, I popped up as a guest for the Global Poet and Poetry Group online. They’d asked me to read to, and say some words on topic of ‘inner peace through poetry’. I ended up writing the following mini-essay, shared for you below, and then reading the poem ‘Melted cockerel’. I thought some of you might like the essay, so it’s below.
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I am writing this while I should be writing about the colour green in a masterclass I am taking.
I suppose that a shade of that colour can soothe. The shade of green in my room is arsenic.
Some greens scare me. A recurring nightmare is that I get trapped by a triffid, a giant walking plant. Plants are aliens after all.
Yes, we are all aliens, but still.
I am telling you this because nice things can deliver peace yes. But also unsettle.
Which is the same as poetry.
Which is to say: I have never found inner peace through poetry. I have never found inner peace through art.
Wonder, yes. An expanded view of the world. A sense of possibilities. A richer aesthetic sense. A heart that moves faster, perhaps.
But inner peace? No.
Can I tease you a little?
Why would you want that, inner peace?
Sounds nice for kittens, puppies, ducklings. But for poets?
A contention: the happy do not write. Do not create.
If you are happy and settled — have inner peace — you do not need to.
You, your inner world, the outer world, are in alignment. Harmony. Nothing needs to be corrected, updated, changed.
All is in balance.
So to create therefore is to upset that balance.
Unbalanced does not equal inner peace, to me at least.
Turn it round.
We write, we make, we create precisely because we see, feel, know there is a lack in the world. A lack in us.
And we hope that what we write, make, create, will fill that gap.
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And maybe create — restore — that balance.
And maybe it does. For a while.
But only a while.
Because the truth is: inner peace means stillness. And stillness means death.
We must move. Creation is kinetic. Writing is kinetic. Living is kinetic.
Now, some of you hearing this will be — rightly — thinking: what a shallow analysis. This man has no sense of philosophical and religious traditions that say, that know that poetry is an expression of the divine, and that revelling in and meditating upon the wisdom that only poets can bring us, share with us, absorbing those into our bodies and minds as fully as we can, then yes we can achieve something that looks and feels like an inner peace.
To which I say: I wish I knew your gods.
My god is Pascal. And even then, I do not think I would take the bet.
We are humans doing human things. And it is human to want to lessen pain, dodge it.
Be calm, be careful, be even.
That is not our role. That is not our job, as poets.
We arrange words, we do not absolve souls.
We cannot deliver inner peace. At best we can write some words that means someone reading them goes, someone separate from me in space and time feels this too? I am not alone?
That is a noble thing by the way. To give that to someone.
A sense of empathy. A sense that they are understood.
And maybe that gives a sense of inner peace to them, for a moment.
But do not confuse that with the sense that we as poets must have inner peace.
We cannot. We must not.
Maybe that is our power.
That we give people inner peace at cost of our own. That is a good trade off, in my view.
Let us keep making it.
A final thought. I am not religious. But I find peace in cathedrals. I love being in them.
Spaces designed in some way for peace, I suppose.
Let me challenge you as poets. Do not seek inner peace for yourselves.
Build your pain into something that can become peace for others. They do not even need to worship. But know that they can step into that space when they need to.
Write cathedrals for one person. So that readers might find a moment of peace for themselves, within the vaulted arches and beauty and stained glass of your language.
