Work Those Epiphanies!!!

What epiphanies, intuitions and/or perceptions have you been experiencing lately?! Hope you're jotting them down...

My previous post edged us into one of the most hotly debated issues around the art world, and the spiritual world too for that matter (which I include here because the two worlds are so closely connected).

Can you spell ‘subjective'?!

The experiences I’ve been writing about have been very subjective and personal of course, and could easily be dismissed as the effects of an over-spiced enchilada. And while I have felt validated in discovering that others have written about this type of experience, I also recognize that there is plenty of room for error in the interpretation of these phenomena. But how rich the exploration!

Subjectivity—whether it refers to poetic or religious awe—is a hot topic. What do we do with writing (or religious experience) that is very subjective? Is there a place for it? Absolutely, but there is also a lot of confusion out there.

A few years ago, I got one of those great, clarifying, simple questions that help me think about such things, and in particular how to think about the strange, ineffable experiences we all go through. It came through one of my former pastors. I was grappling with the strange, ineffable experiences of a French friend, which had baffled my cognitive and theological constructs (as a lot in France did!). But this pastor wisely asked, “Is the person sharing this experience credible?”

Yes, she was. Did that make the experience credible? I know I certainly looked at it with a lot more care than if she had been a flake. And we got to the bottom of some things that were entirely credible. Credibility can earn a second look at the most incredible experience, which may be entirely valid and true, however subjective.

With that one question, and years of living in France, I learned not to dismiss things prematurely if they didn’t fit my paradigms, if the source was credible. Even our justice system, flawed as it is, runs on the testimony of ‘credible witnesses.’

Anyway, back to poetry and epiphanic moments: what was that epiphany and what did it mean? Can you write a poem or prayer about it? Make a piece of artwork from it? Write a theological doctrine on it? Is it personal, subjective, expressive, for you only, or can it benefit others? Is it art/prayer/doctrine for public consumption?

Yes, we are back to the question of what is art, with a new layer: public art vs. private art, self-expression vs. art for public consumption.

I gave you m y favorite definition of art last post. But we have lived for decades in a culture/artworld where self-expression is paramount, beauty is optional, and critique is “mean”— the cultural equivalent of bullying. For some, personal expression is far more important than adherence to any criteria for craft.

The clash arises when personal expression invades the public domain inappropriately. Let me give you an example:

You may not enjoy a poem I write raging against someone who offended me in some way, and correctly judge that it is self-expression. You’ll probably dismiss it for what it is (a rant); publishers surely will. What keeps my rant poem out of the publishers’ rejection pile? Working my craft. Working my epiphanies, not just blurting them out.

So if I take that rant, and bump it up to describe a journey from rage to resolution (even if only in my own heart), I enter universal experience, and that should resonate with you. You may not have dealt with the person I’m enraged with, but you have no doubt been enraged by someone else.

The well-crafted poem might give you the shock of recognition, the release valve of insight, possibly even a solution. The glimpse into your own humanity, and the companionship of common struggle might give you relief for the journey. You might just get an epiphany of your own, even some healing for your heart. This is why we need poetry, and this is why I will never stop working the craft.

But I’ll spare you the rants, and other personal expressions, which will stay in the notebooks! Time and place...

Epiphanies, Intuitions & Perceptions

Leanne Payne, one of my heroes, describes an experience similar to mine in one of her books, which I can’t cite at the moment, but which I read somewhere in between my two epiphanic moments. (I believe it is in The Healing Presence.)

She would call it a ‘seeing’—Perceptions of the Unseen Real—the quintessence of poetic awe, that phenomenon whereby the poet, the artist, sees past the visible into deeper, invisible realities. Keats the poet complained that Newton the scientist had destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to its prismatic colors. But that ain’t necessarily so. The scientist is merely approaching the rainbow from another perspective of awe, and trying to describe it with his mathematics, tools, words, telescopes.

The artist’s task is to select his medium, master his materials, and produce in tangible form that which is intangible. To ‘eff’ the ineffable, as Brennan Manning so wonderfully puts it. So my poetic awe of the moment might move me to write a poem one day, and not just call my brother and say, “Guess who I ran into at the post office today?”

No small task. Do I have time? Do I care to write about that moment? Did I ‘get it’—can I identify the epiphany in the encounter with an old neighbor in my home town? Did I even notice it? What is the metaphor?

In my poem “The Girl Scout Badge”, what moves it past another scout earning another badge? In “Navy Dentist”, what moves the poem past just another disagreeable session in the dentist’s chair, to the epiphany that we are prone to vices destined to earn us more disagreeableness (clue: answer in the last two lines of the poem)? What drives us to do the things we do?

One needs a lot of time to think and to be for this stuff. You may have noticed how loathe we are as a culture to think and to be.

So I only write a fraction of what I ‘see' in the frenetic pace of today's society. I wish I could capture more, stare out the window more, write faster, with more lucidity. But it sometimes takes me years to find the time to unpack what I ‘saw’—to identify the epiphany, find the metaphor, and choose the words that capture the ‘seeing.’

In the meantime, I jot down my Perceptions of the Unseen Real, for those days when I can sit and stare out the window and wonder what they mean. One of my favorite pastimes, one of my favorite definitions of art, and one of my strongest challenges in writing.

Incident on a French Beach

I love epiphanies, don’t you?

Writing about this epiphany at the post office quickly segued into the memory of another epiphany I had had, years prior, during my first summer in France.

I had traveled to another region this particular summer, from my language school in a southern suburb of Paris to the beautiful region of Brittany. As I arrived at the beach with some others, the earth shifted slightly under my feet. I was ‘home.’

Impossible, I thought, shaking my head. Must be some sort of culture shock experience, I decided (now in my 6th month of living in France). But I couldn’t shake the feeling.

I looked around. The beach, the gulls, the boats…

The music drifting out of a shop on the French version of a boardwalk was decidedly Celtic. That must be it, I reasoned, the combination of music, salt air and squawky gulls. I was just experiencing a bit of nostalgia.

But the whole time I was there—two weeks—I lived with that eerie feeling of being home. With or without the Celtic music, with or without the gulls. I couldn’t explain it. My roots were Irish, not French.

Imagine my awe, then, when I returned to my Paris school, and discovered a package from my father, who had been researching our roots in his retirement. The trail led him to France, and…yep, that exact region I had just been in.

He sent me all the info, with maps, family crest, and a wine label with our name on it—Bouteiller—which was translated “Butler” when the family arrived in Ireland, during the days of William the Conqueror, in 1066.

Like, wow.

How does one explain such things?!?