REFLECTIVE ESSAYS: TUNINGS

Introduction
These reflective essays or Tunings explore new habits of mind that bring us into attunement with the creative process. There is a Chinese proverb that says "A bird does not sing because it has the answer. It sings because it has a song".

These words capture my hope that these Tunings may also set free the human spirit and sing into existence our own song of the imagination. And that this song may help us discover what is natural to our own sense of being and hold the candle for navigating a more complex world.

"The boundaries of our language are the boundaries of our world"
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Recently the Christian Science Monitor reported the following story. Historically Nezahualcoyotl (1.2 million population outside Mexico City) has been one of the country's most crime ridden cities. Recently it has turned to an unusual method in an attempt to curb police corruption. Its 1200 officers are now reading Bertolt Brecht and Raymond Carver as well as a collection of poetry anthologies. Program co-coordinator Eric Lopez, says that 'a person who reads is a cultured person, someone with more perspective, who can enter into the mind-set of another person." Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the city is named after a 15th century poet-king.

The language of Brecht and Carver expanded the worlds of these police officers. They became less devious and cynical. These words caused a shift of mind helping them to see and develop empathy for the other in new and fresh ways. What is interesting is that the works of Carver and Brecht and poetry anthologies often don't tell us what to do or even what to believe. If anything they present us with even greater ambiguities. But it is this perhaps that we need more than the other - that is, to experience a greater compassion for the unknown.

As the highly regarded Canadian Poet PK Page writes of her love of poetry;

"It was the language I loved not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant."

There is something in the rhythm, cadence and tonality of language that speaks to us even more strongly when it does not prescribe what we are to do or say. TS Eliot goes even further to suggest that the meaning of a poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its real work.

And what is the real work of language? As TS Eliot says; " We know words, but we have forgotten the Word." And the Word is to make visible life's deep mystery - what we may think of as the invisible nature of wholeness that lies behind all things. To speak from the Word behind the word offers on guarantees. Often we don't know what to say until it is said. Instead it is to let the words form on the tongue as we speak. In our busy world of instant production this can be terrifying. It is not uncommon to come up empty - to find when we pick up the pen or sit at the piano or stand to speak- that there is no Word behind the word. We find ourselves instead, in the immense presence of the blank page.

What does bring the word to our lips or to the page is attention. That is, our capacity to notice things. And what we notice is not usually theoretical or abstract. The language of wholeness does not often begin with abstract concepts or fixed ideas. Instead it emerges naturally in the ongoing subtle current of our moment to moment felt experience as it connects us to a language of the imagination - in which we become, in the words of PK Page; ' the mute observer, the inarticulate listener'. In this newfound stillness we may become witness the playful dance of sunlight on water, the brilliant greenness of a leaf on the forest floor, and the whispering of the wind through pines on a soft summer night.

Recent studies in the neurosciences suggest that there is a pattern of high level oscillations in the brain that occur just prior to moment of increased stillness or attention that signal opportunities for deep insight. Futhermore these oscillations are often conducive to creating links or connections across many parts of the brain. These in turn lead to a further heightening of insights and attention. In other words attention yields more attention - a wakefulness that expands in the direction of cultivating a mind that is more fluid, sensory, complex, and free flowing.

Words create worlds in that they evoke these extraordinary powers of the mind. This is particularly true of language that expresses a certain cadence, rhythm and tonality as we hear in good writing and poetry.
Some of my earliest memories with language were creating storylines created by sound pictures that played across my mind as I sat at the piano at night. The story was the journey. It transported me to distant places in geography time and space. I rode bareback and hunted buffalo with the first peoples on distant plains, I joined in the poetic songs with cowboys calming their cattle under clear dark skies.

As time passed I look forward to the opaque light of evenings, times when my mind could leap free of the bondage of linear and reductive thought. It was the atmosphere, rhythm, sound and musicality of words I searched for. Words that captured not only the thought but the feeling of horses hooves on gravel, great ships their high masts leaning to the wind on the giant swells of threatening seas, the silence of high pastures, the crackling of fires at night, and the lightness of rain on a tin roof.

And perhaps it is this, the feeling - life in words, and not only the meaning of them, that lies at the heart of language. It helps explain why we often can take so much from a poem or story even when it is read in a language we don't understand. It is in how it is spoken and not only in what has been said.

In the sharp glare of facts and reason these first words of wonder, hope and possibility drop from sight. To regain them we need to re-engage a 'picture language' again. That is to revisit words that compel us to imagine and visualize new opportunities and dreams. To notice their power we have only to compare the energy contained in phrases such as; 'if only' and those that begin with ' what if'. Folktales are filled with what ifs. They invite us to light the fire, suspend the limits of our ruminative minds and travel the world again. Unlike us, these stories don't need passports. Instead they are the passport to rediscovering the central themes, images and questions to which our deepest humanity has always made its home.

African writer and explorer Laurens van der Post says this of language and stories;

"I think they are important to mankind because mankind is a character in a story - we are living the story all the time and this story can only be fed and enriched by other stories."

Once upon a time we knew this, but it has for the most part been forgotten. When we dim the light these deep archetypal stories of the imagination come into view again. They are the stories of the senses and appreciation as told by the lover, the stories of courage and the dedicated heart as told by the warrior, the stories of enchantment, magic and mystery as told by the magician and the stories of renewal, truth and wisdom as told by the sovereign.

Most likely this is what these police discovered in the poetry anthologies and words of Brecht and Carver - powerful stories and images that connected them more deeply to themselves and through themselves to a vastly expanded view of an interconnected world. Too often it is this that we miss in language. It is not to achieve a greater measure of information or understanding- for this we can go to the Internet - but for that sliver of time when we feel gripped by something that feels authentic and true.

Unfortunately this feeling life of language withers in the hard light of facts and reason. It is not because it is not strong but because it is not seen. A language formed in relationship and the imagination needs to be shared. We are in our essence relational beings. When this language cannot be seen, felt and celebrated it cannot live for long.

It is this deeper reality that the great pianist and Beethoven interpreter Alfred Brendel spoke to when he said;

"If I belong to a tradition it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what he should do and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like…"

To give ourselves over, to be moved by what forms on the tongue, this is a world where more is given to us than is made by us. The Word is musical, to sing our life into existence is what we are here to do.

It is also the key to creating a larger world.

References
Michael Jones Creating an Imaginative Life, (Orillia, Pianoscapes, 2006)
PK Page The Filled Pen, Selected non -fiction (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2007)

Words Create Worlds in one is a series of Tunings or reflective essays by Michael Jones. Other Tunings in this series can be found on Michael's web site at www.pianoscapes.com