The Poetry of Intentional Silence (part 3)

The word ‘poetry’ has roots in the Latin and Greek terms poeme and poema - ‘to create or make’.  But poetry is more often thought narrowly as a rhythmical composition, written or spoken, or as a way of exacting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative or spiritual arrangement.  A poetry of silence, unrestrained by cultural convention, recovers the wild face of this beautiful world and is sensitive to life in its pre-verbal immediacy.  It is to practice the belief that poetry is more than just a language, it is an attitude and frame that we need to rediscover in silence. What else is poetry other than the deep silent witness of the way a butterfly rides the currents of invisible air, the sudden coolness of the Malaysian breeze that carries the promise of rain, or the contented sigh of an infant’s full belly?  Poetry always comes at us from two sides - inside and out, physical and psychological, mundane and spiritual.  Only intentional silence is empty enough to appreciate the inherent beauty of such tensions.

Poetry is often in the listening. It isn’t only the words on a page that a poet whimsically records and shapes, though that’s obviously poetry too. It's also the sound of a lawn strimmer, of the hefty sigh of a puppy before sleep, the first hint of the rhythmic hum of ocean waves as one crests the hill towards rugged point break. The poetry that naively emerges from intentional silence empowers us to find beauty in the chaos and noise of an industrialized world as well as seek out the oft shy notes of the natural world.  Intentional silence allows for the ‘thusness’ of things to be revealed.  It is to keep the doors and windows of our self-conscious and busy mind wide open; our ears, eyes, nose, skin and all receiving communion through a cultivated ‘peripheral awareness’. We participate in an intentional sounding of the world.  Gita Sarabhai, the Indian musician and designer known to influence Cage, put it that poetry and music should “sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.”  This is genuine spiritual practice.

In Zen, a reorder of sorts occurs with a return to ‘original mind’; A heightened intuitive knowledge that is not sourced by the phenomenal self or through social constructs or objective scientific knowledge.  According to Suzuki (1949), jinen is the natural state that is experienced when one is free from self-willed intentions or intellectual reflection - when one gives ‘self’ over in silence to poetic mystery and responds nakedly to the pregnant mundane.  I imagine Cage would have appreciated that.  To live immersed in intentional silence is to practice a kind of existential haiku; To poetically seek what is most intimate and immediate in our encounter with life.  There are no experts in haiku, only haiku that ‘hit the mark’.   The art of unwrapping ourselves to the world in intentional silent wonder is to recalibrate focus necessarily away from oneself.  Only then might haiku write itself upon us.