The Spiritual Side of Meredith Monk: Primal Theopoetics

All Musical Truth Resides in the Body

Meredith Monk's Art as Primal Theopoetics

Meredith Monk's Art as Theopoetics

There is something both quotidian and reptilian about Meredith Monk's artistic productions. She loves people and, as we learn from the video below, she loves turtles and tortoises.

There's a connection.  Turtles and tortoises live in a world of wordless movement as they travel from place to place, and Monk lives in that world, too, as she creates her music. She sees the human voice itself as an instrument and also as a moving limb, like the legs of a turtle. She knows that all musical truth resides in movement, in the body. Accordingly, as she creates her art she moves with, and gives voice to, worlds of emotion, worlds beyond words, many of which are just underneath everyday life. Both quotidian and reptilian.

After all, say the process theologians, the whole universe is bursting forth with feeling, which is just another name for energy lived from the inside.

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How to name her art? Most people say that it fuses music, light, film, and movement, and leave it at that. I like to think of it as "primal theopoetics" -- art with a theological dimension that stretches the imagination, awakens emotions, and help us feel our connections with one another, other animals, and the earth.

Such art is ecclesial. It creates elemental forms of community, like the living cell, and invites us to see the cell as a possibility for how we might live. Here's how Caryn Havlik puts it in describing Monk's Cellular Songs.

"Monk takes the microscopic unit of the cell, then projects and expands it as a proposal for “an alternative possibility of human behavior, where the values are cooperation, interdependence and kindness,” (much like how a cell functions, minus the kindness part.) Using their voices-as-instruments, Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble perform some of these Cellular Songs, along with violin, piano and keyboard, in-studio."

Monk's Cellular Songs are but one instance of her primal theopoetics. Almost everything she does has a primal and poetic and theological side to it.

Primal theopoetics is poetic in that it communicates through music, movement, and images. It is primal in that it is visceral, palpable, shamanic, fleshy, and, in these ways, spiritual. It finds spirit in the flesh, not apart from it: in breathing and sound and motion. It is theological in that it awakens connections between spirituality, thus understood, and God, understood as the embodied mind of the universe.

Not that Meredith Monk speaks of God. A practicing Buddhist with roots in Judaism and affinity for all things spiritual, hers is a spirituality for connection and depth, mystery and awe, honesty and beauty. But are these not also names for God?

The universe is God's body: so the process theologians say. See Panentheism: The Universe as God's Body. This means that movements of the universe move God's too and that the sounds of the universe are God's soundscapes. All are filled with emotion, with feeling, with energy that is sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying, sometimes both.

Primal theopoetics usually has two tasks. One is to explore all of the emotions that reside in our bodies, in other plants and animals, in hills and rivers, galaxies and stars, and in the very body of God, which is the universe.

Another is to present alternative worlds of love and justice, intimacy and creativity into which we might live, freely and creatively, moment-by-moment, with sensitivity to the interconnectedness and impermanence of all things, ,grateful for the fragile beauty.

Influenced by Judaism and Buddhism, Meredith Monk performs both of these tasks. Her many years of work is a living gallery of primal theopoetics.

-- Jay McDaniel

Cellular Songs: Seeing What is Possible in Our World

Cellular Songs, musical forms evoke biological processes as layering, replication, division, and mutation in a “deeply affecting meditation on the nature of the biological cell as a metaphor for human society” (Financial Times).

Meredith Monk in her studio

Meredith Monk on CBS

From the Meredith Monk (official) website:

MEREDITH MONK (b. November 20, 1942, New York, NY) is a composer, singer, director/choreographer and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films and installations. Recognized as one of the most unique and influential artists of our time, she is a pioneer in what is now called "extended vocal technique" and "interdisciplinary performance." Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound, discovering and weaving together new modes of perception. Her groundbreaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which there are no words. Over the last fifty years, she has been hailed as "a magician of the voice" and "one of America’s coolest composers."...more

More on Primal Theopoetics

Speaking of the Zen teacher Norman Fischer, Meredith Monk says: "We both come from a Jewish background, so we're both Jew-Bus, so we have that in common. He's been going back to actually teaching meditation for Jewish practitioners, you know, people who come from the Jewish tradition. He's teaching Jewish meditation, which is pretty great." This gives me on way of understanding her theopoetics.

Theopoetics is a verb not a noun. It is the activity of exploring the fullness of life - its rawness, ugliness, pain, and pleasure, to quote Meredith Monk -- with honesty and courage, and with the aim of helping add a little healing. For process theologians this aim is a primal place -- a place where the embodied mind of the universe, and the deepest aspirations of the heart itself, come together. Together with God, from the depths of our own hearts and bodies, we co-love the world.

Meredith Monk helps us explore these depths by exploring them herself. In this sense her art is an ongoing exploration in theopoetics. As she explores three forms of spirituality come together. The first is the prophetic imagination of Judaism with its twofold dynamic: imaging the world as it can be and ought to be, and attending to the injustices of the world as they have been and are. A second is attention to the primacy of the present moment as emphasized in Buddhism; with the present moment understood as a place where the past and present and future intersect. And a third is primality itself - where "isms" and "ologies" fall away and something more elemental, more turtle-like remains.

Art as Healing Power

The Buddhist Side of Meredith Monk

"When Meredith first encountered Buddhism in the 1970s, a whole lot of things clicked into place. She learned to accept the moment for what it is, "in all it's rawness, ugliness, pain, pleasure." Meredith found that she had always known this as Meredith the Artist, but not as Meredith the Person. Buddhism allowed her to become whole, through all the twists and turns of a hard life pursuing art."

Exploring the Emotion of Fear

'Most of my songs deal with emotion, you could say, between the cracks of emotion. You know, they're not really dealing with a particular, you know, anger or something that you can point your finger at, but I usually think of them as the shades between the emotions, that the voice can dig those shades of emotion out.

But I got very inspired. My early practice was in the Shambhala training, which was created by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher. These teachings usually come out during times of hard times in the world. Shambhala was a mythical kingdom that was ruled by an enlightened king who asked the Buddha to not come with his monks, but to basically come and teach him how to have enlightened society. That's the tradition.

And in many, many different Asian countries, Shambhala is like a mythic kingdom. It's not only in the Tibetan tradition. So it's very much about how do you become a citizen in this world, very simple, down to earth. Your practice is very simple, but it's very much about how are you in the world? You know, how do you look at the person that's counting change for you in the grocery store or how do you deal with a person that you don't get along with well? How are you waking up all the time to see what the moment is? How are you on the subway? How are you when something really bad happens to you? You know, just how do you become a citizen in this world and perpetuate nonviolence and, you know, there are many, many aspects to it.

And one of them is about and fear and fearlessness. And it's about acknowledging your fear rather than pushing it away because a part of the violence comes from not even acknowledging that you're afraid. It's actually that you're afraid of the fear." (from interview with Krista Tippett)

Interview with Krista Tippett in On Being

Transcript of Interview with Krista Tippett

"Meredith Monk is a kind of archeologist of the human voice and body. And the woman we meet is also an archeologist of the mind and spirit, with a longtime Buddhist practice. Through music as through meditation, she pushes the boundaries of what we can do without words — reaching to places in human experience where words can get in the way."

Quotes from the Interview

"Singing together is very, very intimate, and I always say that the music or the images or anything are just a kind of armature for revealing the radiance of these performers...it's such an amazing template of the possibility of human behavior, of generosity and being there for the other person and, you know, being so sensitive to the environment and to the other people."

"I always think of the relationship between the audience and the performer as a kind of infinity sign or a figure eight of energy that goes from the performer to the audience and then back from the audience back to the performer, and it's just this constant flow of energy between these two bodies of people. But the beauty of a live performance is that we're all in the same space at the same time, and I don't think we have that many situations in the world like that."

"I think that actually all of us as human beings are part of the world vocal family. I like to think that all of us are part of that world vocal family. When you start exploring your voice, there are sounds that you find that do transcend a particular culture. You know, they're used in different ways in the culture, but they are sounds that are part of the vocabulary of the human voice, and the human voice is the original instrument. So you're going back to the very beginnings of utterance and I think that's why, when you hear it, it brings up — in a way it's like the memory of being a human being."

​All Musical Truth Resides in the Body​Meredith Monk's Art as Primal Theopoetics​