​Rubbing Fire into Your Life
Notes on Process Theology and the Poetic Life

​A poem invites you to feel.  It rubs a little fire into your life.
The poetic life is not one that brings life together. 
​It's one that keeps life from being torn apart.

​"If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented  that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. And from that need, from the  relationships within ourselves and among ourselves as we went on living...poetry would be -- I cannot here say invented or discovered -- poetry would be derived...rubbing into life a little fire." 

-- Muriel Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry

"A poem invites you to feel.  More than that: it invites you to respond.  And better than that: a poem invites a total response...The response is total, but it is reached through the emotions.  A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually -- that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too -- but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling."

-- Muriel Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry

To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century
​

February 12: Muriel Rukeyser

by LAWRENCE BUSH 
on FEBRUARY 11, 2011
in Jewish Currents: A Progressive Secular Voice.

​Muriel Rukeyser, whose 1944 poem, “To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century,” became part of the Reform and Reconstructionist liturgy, died in New York on this date in 1980 at age 66, after a lifetime of writing, teaching and political activism. As a journalist, she wrote about the Scottsboro Case in Alabama, the Spanish Civil War, and the 1936 Berlin Olympics; as an activist, she led the PEN American Center into activism against the war in Vietnam. “Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry is unequalled in the 20th-century United States in its range of reference, its generosity of vision, and its energy,” says Adrienne Rich. “She pushes us, readers, writers, and participants in the life of our time, to enlarge our sense of what poetry is about in the world, and of the place of feelings and memory in politics.”

“To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,
Wishing to be invisible, you choose
Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.
Accepting, take full life. Full agonies:
Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood
Of those who resist, fail, and resist; and God
Reduced to a hostage among hostages.
The gift is torment. Not alone the still
Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh.
That may come also. But the accepting wish,
The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee
For every human freedom, suffering to be free,
Daring to live for the impossible.”

—Muriel Rukeyser

"She was the first poet that I knew personally," William Meredith once told the Paris Review, "I knew her when I was still an undergraduate. She was a very amazing human being and any traces of honesty in my life come from having seen how beautifully honest she was in administering her life and her poetry without any separation—you couldn't get a knife between the two things with her. The real influence was her human model of what a poet could be.

-- William Meredith
​

Process and Poetry
​

Fire

Poetry is an invitation to rub a little fire into your life.  So we learn from one of the leading poets of the 20th century, Muriel Rukeyser.  

For my part, I discovered her in reading "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century," offered above. I am not Jewish, but the poem helped me feel the depth and intensity of a Jewish way of living,  

Huston Smith says that the very heart of Judaism lies in its passion for meaning: meaning in history, meaning in suffering, meaning in hope, meaning in memory, meaning in justice, meaning in everyday life, meaning in messianism. 

Sometimes I'm not sure what "meaning" means, but I sense that, for Muriel Rukeyser, meaning has something to do with being fully alive and with offering a total response to life.  If I'm right, then a passion for meaning can easily take the form, not only of a passion for peace and justice, but also a passion for Poetry.  

I get the feeling that, for Muriel Rukeyser, Poetry with an upper-case P is pretty close to what process theologians mean by the Eros of the universe, that mysterious beckoning, in the stars and planets, but also in our hearts, which lures us to feel and make connections, to become fully alive to life.   

People say that God has many names.  Perhaps one of them is Poetry.  For some people the word "God" is too much tainted by images of a patriarch in the sky.  If they are to surrender to anything at all, they can only surrender to Poetry and to its sacred scriptures, poems.  

Connections

Writing poetry is a way of honoring relations that already exist, of lamenting relations that have been broken, of protesting relations that are being broken, of anticipating relations that can be unbroken. 

Poems are moments of passion, of meaning-seeking, in the life of consciousness.  Rukeyser tells us that consciousness is a form of energy and that a poem is a transference of the poet's consciousness from the poet to the reader. It is, to use Whitehead's language, a vector transfer of feeling.  The invitation of a poem emerges in the transfer of feeling, as something that is communicated by the poem but also received by the reader.  It emerges out of the relation -- like everything else.

The invitation is more than the eye can see or the hands can touch.  The words and the white space carry the invitation.  They are its body, so to speak.  But the soul of the invitation -- the soul of the poem -- is more than this.  

The Souls of Poems

Actually most poems have many souls.  The really good ones have as many souls as there are readers, because each reader adds part of the content -- namely his or her own life -- to the invitation.

The souls of a poem are what Whitehead calls propositions, proposals, lures for feeling. They are filled with contrasts of sound and soul which seize the imagination intellectually and emotionally.  Muriel Rukeyser has it right.  These souls are invitations to feel and respond.  

Indeed, for those of us in the Whiteheadian tradition, the entire universe consists of actualities that feel and respond.  We feel and respond, and so do atoms and molecules, living cells and other animals, planets and stars.  If they don't feel and respond with subjectivity of their own, they are aggregates of events which feel and respond.  

If feeling and responding is poetry, we live in a poetic universe.  Even the adventure of the universe as One -- even the Soul whose very body is the universe -- is an ongoing activity of creating poems, creating invitations, which invite a fullness of feeling and response.  They are fresh possibilities for responding to the moment at hand.  We process thinkers call them initial aims.  

The Primacy of Felt Relations

Roland Faber, quoting Whitehead, speaks of God as the poet of the world. And he reminds us that our calling is to be poets, too.  In the words of Muriel Rukeyser, we are called to "rub into life a little fire."

The heart of the matter, says Faber, is that we live in a relational universe. This is Whitehead's view and Rukeyser's as well.  For both of them we live in a vast network of inter-becoming in which all actualities -- all becomings -- are implicated in the existence of all other becomings.  In the beginning are the relations.  

The deepest relations are not those we measure with instruments, as if we were detached spectators watching life go by.  They are those that engage us at personal level, as we respond to the multitudes around us and within us: other people, to be sure, but also hills and rivers, trees and stars, ancestors and spirits.  We feel them as they present themselves for our experience, as they give themselves to us.  We hear their voices.  

As we hear their voices they become part of us and, at the same time, we respond to them, adding something new to the ongoing history of the universe.  These voices come in different tenses.  Some are from the past, some from the present, and some from future.  We hear them through memory, perception, and anticipation and they become part of us through our feelings of them.

Felt relations can be healthy or unhealthy.  Rukeyser is interested in healthy felt relations, just felt relations, fiercely peaceful felt relations. She was interested in a world without boundaries.

Living for the Impossible

A world without boundaries is not a utopia to be fully realized, but rather a possibility to be meaningfully approximated in life.  In its perpetual transcendence of its approximations, it feels and is impossible.  But in its approximations it is tasted and known.  It is an Impossible Possibility.

In her life and her poetry Rukeyser challenges us to living daringly, receptive to this impossible possibility. Hear her words in the final part of "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century."

Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh.
That may come also. But the accepting wish,
The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee
For every human freedom, suffering to be free,
Daring to live for the impossible.

And where does this Dare come from?  In process theology, so Faber explains, it comes from a divine Eros deep within the very heart of the universe, a divine Soul whose body is the universe itself.  The Soul of the universe is present within us, among other ways, as an ultimate dare, an invitation, to live for the impossible.  

Yes, the Soul is within us as the very dare of Poetry with an upper case P.  Understood deeply, Poetry is not simply words on a page or the white space in which they appear.  It is an invitation to total response.  Understood deeply, Poetry is God.

Poetry is forever inviting us into the impossibly possible, surprisingly approximable, world.  The world toward which we are beckoned is not colorless or tasteless, odorless or skinless.  It is a world of vibrant bodies, each of whom has subjectivity worthy of respect: human bodies, plant bodies, animal bodies, mountain bodies, cell bodies, angel bodies, god bodies.  

Protecting the Flesh

All of these bodies have membranes: that is, boundaries that distinguish them and help them realize their uniqueness.  Even the god bodies have them, albeit invisible to the eyes.  And certainly the ancestor bodies have them.   

The membranes are skin.  They provide a context for individuality and a context for connection.  As we seek a world beyond boundaries, these are not the boundaries to be transcended.  They are the boundaries to be protected.

It isn't that one brings life together;
it's that one will not allow it to be torn apart.

Sometimes it takes great struggle to protect these boundaries.  And great pain:

Full agonies:
Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood
Of those who resist, fail, and resist.

The boundaries to be transcended are the armor that people put on, day by day, in order to pretend that we have a purpose in life.  They are armor we hide behind so that people cannot see our eyes.  Greed and hatred, envy and jealousy, domination and dominion: these are our armor.  Muriel Rukeyser invites us to seek a dis-armored world.  The process can begin, among other ways, by writing poetry.

Crocheting With Words

Writing poetry begins with an acknowledgment of already existing connections, healthy and unhealthy.  It begins with the world, but it does not end there.  It ends with making something useful of the world that is given, albeit in a loving way.

Perhaps crocheting provides a metaphor.  Moment by moment, day by day, we are crocheting our lives out of felt connections from the past.  The past includes events we have undertaken or undergone and events that have occurred in the world around us.  These events are embedded in our conscious and subconscious memories.   They are our yarn.  Our hook consists of the kinds of intelligence we bring to the process: verbal-linguistic, mathematical-logical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical-rhythmic, empathic, introspective, and naturalistic.  

To be sure, in literal crochet we have patterns, sometimes quite exact, to follow; whereas in existential crochet, the act of crocheting a life, we have mentors and guidelines, rituals and traditions, but no exact, pre-existing template. Moment by moment we make decisions as to what kinds of knots to tie.   They are not made in advance for us.  We are created by the world around us, but we create ourselves, too.

Writing poetry is crocheting with words.  It is part of the larger process of trying to crochet a life and its specific aim, so we learn from Muriel Rukeyser, is to help us feel and respond to things in a total way.   It is rubbing into life a little fire.

The poems are the fire.  To be sure, many poems have a deeply intellectual or philosophical side.  The fire is cool.  Indeed, some poems are much better philosophy than is philosophy of the moral sterile kind. 

But we are whole people, and poetry weaves its way into our intellectual lives through the house of emotion.  Muriel Rukeyser is right:  A poem invites you to feel.  When we crochet with words, we are inviting ourselves to feel.

Unraveling

One way or another, poetry needs to deal with evil.  Evil is the tearing apart of meaningful, life-enhancing connections.   Rukeyser tells us that, in American poetry, Herman Melville was a poet of outrage and Walt Whitman was a poet of possibility.  

Melville was struck by the way in which evil assaults the world through violence and tragedy, and his poems give voice to the outrage of its presence.  Whitman was struck by the sheer multiplicity of the world as it presents itself to the senses, and by the possibility of embracing the world in a full-bodied, hope-filled way.  Outrage is a protest against broken connections and the threat of broken connections; possibility is the hope for a restoration of broken connections and a delight in connections unbroken. One way or another, says Rukeyser, many poems are dealing with these two realities, outrage and possibility:

Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know, the long line from the first magic and the rituals of the heart and hero.  

In our time there is more than a little need for outrage.  Connections are torn apart when healthy forms of local community are torn apart by the violence of global capitalism; when free spirits, who crochet to the rhythms of their own yarn, are torn apart by those who insist that they be the same as others; when young children are torn apart from dysfunctional families, who are themselves torn apart by drugs; when old people are torn apart by societies which tell them that, after they reach a certain age, they aren't worth much anymore; when veterans are torn apart by memories of violence inflicted on others in the name of causes not worth killing for; when the mystery at the heart of the universe -- God -- is torn apart by all the suffering.  There's violence in all of this, some terrible unraveling of what could have been satisfying felt connections.

In the face of such unravelling people need to speak up and speak out, to protest against the unravelling.  That's one of the functions of poetry, says Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry:

We are against war and the sources of war.
We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.

Poetry is Freedom of Speech

The idea that poetry is, or can be, a source of peace is one of the most important points you'll take away from Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry.  Toward what end are these connections claimed?  For Rukeyser the answer is peace.  Peace is not a static peace.   For her as for the Hebrew prophets, peace is not simply the absence of violence.  It is a dynamic peace that must be sung for but also fought for, amid "the wounds of the young and the unborn." (214)  

Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.

Of course, she is against the kinds of wars that we see fought in the world today, so often under the aegis of fundamentalisms of heart and mind.  But she favors battling for felt connections.  In Islam this kind of battling is called Jihad, which literally means struggle, and which need not take the form of violence.  

The Divinity of Poetry

Alice Walker writes that "Muriel Rukeyser loved poetry more than anyone I've known.  She also believed it could change us, move the world.  This deep and challenging book is testament to her faith that we need not encounter Poetry with fear.  That openness to Poetry opens us to our most essential inner life."

Alice Walker is right.  Our most essential inner life is inspired by a lure for richness of experience amid felt connections.  It is a lure for love.   I would like to say that Poetry can change or move the world in this loving way, but I sometimes fear that the sounds of advertising ditties and elevator music override its more ferocious voice.  We process thinkers believe that Poetry is powerful, but not all powerful.  It requires our response for its will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.  We must become poets ourselves, if not with our words then with our lives.

​- Jay McDaniel, May 2020

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What make poetry sacred?

It gives a "wider sense of the real."
It facilitates spiritual growth.
It is a window to divinity.
​

​What makes poetry sacred?  It’s not that it deals with religious themes.  The subjects of a sacred poem can be water lilies, violence, agony, sexual ecstasy, war, broken relationships, yearning, historical hopes, God, or peanut butter.  When it comes to sacred poetry, the division between secular and religious is irrelevant.

It's not that it is perfectly understood.  A poem can communicate when it is not perfectly understood, says Helen Vendler in Poems, Poets, and Poetry, and sometimes, at least in my experience, the activity of not understanding is part of the power of the poem.  It leaves space for mystery. 

Finally, what makes poetry sacred is not that it is beautiful, although a poem can be beautiful.  A sacred poem can instead be off-putting and challenging, something we might like to turn our heads away from.  It can make us angry not peaceful, troubled not calm, afflicted not comfortable.  

Part of what makes a poem sacred is that it gives us “a wider sense of the real.”  Here the "real" is not simply the reality of the outer world: that is, of bodies and buildings, boxes and bridges in three-dimensional space.  What is "real" is also the inner world of feeling and our relationship to that world.  This world may well include something deeper or wider that is divine in its way.  God, too, can be part of the world we experience.  But God or no God, what makes a poem sacred is that it gives us this wider sense of the real.  A sacred poem is a wake up call.

A second thing that makes a poem sacred is that it helps us grow spiritually.  With help from a poem we may grow in qualities of heart and mind and forms of relatedness that many deem spiritual: attention, beauty, devotion, enthusiasm, faith, forgiveness, gratitude, hospitality, imagination, justice, kindness, love, meaning, nurturing, openness to the shadow side of life, openness to mystery. play, questing, reverence, silence, transformation, unity, vision, and zest for life. These qualities of heart and mind are borrowed from the spiritual alphabet of Spirituality and Practice. Such qualities are among the byproduct of a poem's truthfulness. We read or hear the poem and we become more attentive, we accept our yearning, we own the shadow side of our lives, we become more loving.  

How does sacred poetry evoke these qualities?  Its means are as varied as poems themselves.  The evocative power of poems can come through rhythm, rhyme, structure, images, questions, poignancy, and the constructive use of pauses and white space.  Poetry is different from prose in that its very aim is not to make an argument filled with detail.  It is instead a lure for feeling, an evocation and invocation, leaving space for the reader and listener.  It is a dialogue partner.  

It operates like God, through persuasion not coercion.  This is why the philosopher Whitehead speaks of God as the poet of the world. 

This takes me to a third thing that makes poetry spiritual.  As our wider sense of the real unfolds, so process theologians suggest, we participate in the very Consciousness by which the universe is gathered together in love: namely God, who is a deep witness to what is real in the world, happy or sad, tragic or wonderful.  This does not mean that we have to believe in God in order to enjoy sacred poetry.  It means that as we enjoy that poetry, we participate in God's own life, quite apart from questions of belief. 

God's life is not contained in a separate dimension of space; it is the living Consciousness in which the universe lives and moves and has its being and in which life unfolds in all its splendor and agony. God is the "fellow sufferer who understands," says Whitehead.  This is still another way that sacred poetry is sacred.  It may not be religious but it enables us to participate in divinity, even if we do not believe in divinity.  Another name for God is Poetry.  When we feel our way into the passions of a good poem, we participate in Poetry, however named, and we feel, in that moment, more fully alive. This full aliveness is Poetry.

- Jay McDaniel, May 2020

What is a Poem, Anyway?

If poems are invitations to feel, then Whiteheadians have a word for these invitations. They call them propositions or lures for feeling.  

Propositions are one of Whitehead's eight categories of existence.  They are not physical objects like we see in the world around us; he calls these objects societies or nexus.  Nor are they pure potentialities that we entertain in our minds; he calls these eternal objects or timeless possibilities.  Indeed, they are not even particularized agents in the world, such as "this person" or "that person" at any given moment of time.  They are not actual entities of this kind.  

Rather they are what Whitehead calls propositions or lures for feeling, not unlike goals toward which we might feel drawn, and which have a magnetism of their own, albeit invisible to the eye.  They have their traction in the human imagination through contrasts, which is still another category of existence in Whitehead.  And the contrasts depend on multiplicities, which is still another category of existence in Whitehead.  

A poem, then, is an event in the world, which is composed of and which evokes, a sense of multiplicity and contrast, the function of which is to make you feel things you might not otherwise feel, or to awaken you to things you already feel, but of which you were not consciously aware.

The working of a poem depends not only on the words that are used, but the silences -- the breathings -- between the words.  And the working depends on the rhythms of these breathings.  In this respect a poem is very much like breathing, and if it loses too much of its breath, it loses its life.

Only some of the breathing within a poem is visible to the eye.  To be sure, there is also a visible side to a poem: namely marks on a page or a screen, with blank space, forming contrasts, which evoke a sense of the poem in the first place.  Still, the soul of the poem is not the marks or the space, although they form its body.  A poem is a cluster of propositions -- a cluster of invitations -- that are evoked by the marks and the space but also more than them.    

​- Jay McDaniel, 1/20/2022​