Zofia K. Aue: Conversation
(Nova Scotia Pitcher Plants;
diluted acrylic on cotton;
used as curtain in our hourse.)
I tell you, I was severely tempted: The personal pronoun in the punch line (with my italics), "Erscheint der Gott und rührt mich an", i.e. "the God appears and touches me" sounds most awkward. In German and English. Or so it seems.
"Der Gott", "the God"? Why not "ein Gott", "a God"? Why not just "God", or "my God", or even "the Gods"? Would not "a God appears and touches me" or even "appeareth God and touches me" sound altogether smoother for the ultimate line of so smooth a poem?
"The God" is a jolt but, seems to me, a deliberate and revealing one.
Wer Ohren hat zu hören, der höre! (Who hath ears to hear, let him hear) Geibel seems to say under his breath.
(If you want to read that often-used phrase in a relevant context - e.g. in the Luther Bible of 1545 or in the King James Version - try
Matthaeus/Matthew 13:8-10.)
Geibel describes - or so I surmise - the mystic experience of "God", i.e. the onset of one-ness in the quieted brain. Remember how the poem starts: "Wie ward es tief in mir so stille!", "How silent it has become deep inside of me!" And, proceeding, the focus remains on the depth inside, on listening there to one's own flutenden Wohllaut, the mellifluous harmony of one's own Being.
"Listening inside" is a classic meditation technique. But no, no need to have learned or even to have heard of meditation. Meditation is like making love (it uses even similar neuron circuits, at least in kundalini-type tantrics, I am told): The human instinct can do that quite successfully without the need for supercilious instruction.
(Well, yes, I know. Both meditating and making love are quite dangerous. Both can screw you up and empty your brain - and, in turn, your wallet. But both brain and wallet empty much faster in the presence of a catalytic guru. And consider this: Some animals have been observed to enter and exhibit meditation-like states. Really! So why should this animal be so different?)
But let's get back to Geibel, before the AAAG (the American Association of Assorted Gurus) sues me.
Geibel's "time" has turned from mundane linear (past, present, or future) to poetic integral (all three, right now). It's there, if you just care/dare to take it that way. All you need is love, will say poetry...
But Geibel - just a guess of mine, of course - does not subscribe to the orthodoc creed of the Christian mystic, who experiences God as an independent reality revealing Himself. Apparently, for Geibel it is "the" God, i.e. a particular god: the ecstatic expression of the poet's own Being. A higher state of consciousness, as New Agers would say. Interesting...
But, you say, so what? Poetry, at least the good stuff, is mystical insight anyway. Something that can bring about - and be absorbed only in - a higher state of consciousness. So what's the big point, you ask, that am I trying to make?
Oh... thanks! And congratulations. Maybe my cybersite has finally done you some good? To celebrate enlightenment, I'll append a cold comment by the Missis:
The Little Prince
