David Need
Peter O’Leary, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age (Columbia University Press, 2017)
In one of my first conversations with Lissa Wolsak, a poet Peter O’Leary reads in his recent Thick and Dazzling Darkness, she shared a paraphrase of the 12th century Sephardic Torah scholar Maimonides to the effect that people read and pray according to their desire. The dark side of the thought is something folks who teach literature know only too well — it’s often hard for a reader to find what he is not looking for — hard for us to get out of our heads, out of what we think things mean to consider a second thought. Hence, when we speak we use shared terms, but we are not always talking about the same things.
With respect to this, a key insight in Religious Studies in the last thirty years stems from Paul Ricoeur’s notion that texts (films, plays, dreams, rituals) open out worlds that we enact and realize in our reading / performance. Reading, writing, performing, watching, participation — all these work to weave thought and imagination and the imagined world of these into body and sense.[1] Ricoeur’s observation works with respect to any text and, more generally, draws from a critical vogue of focusing on the discursive dimensions of culture, what language does — it realizes our thoughts. In this context we take it that thought reflects and operates in relation to both a sensed world and to culturally received categories about that world, and that thought reflects and operates in relation to our desires and hopes. Do I need to add that the relationship between any realized world and our desires is, shall we say, uneven? Or that — to borrow Nate Mackey’s term, the discrepancy between desire and world pushes us, requires that we attend to two things at once — sense and desire, touch and image?
The difficult thing about this is that we come to realize that “world” — the world of our texts and cultural perspectives, the ideas we have about how things work — is both 1) a name for the clearing in which we find ourselves, a space opened out in sense and thought in terms of body and 2) something we can’t see except in terms of the sensory motor schemas we use to perceive and the ideas and concepts by which we stylize things in meaningful ways. It’s common enough to think of this “world” as somehow a whole — as a circle or totality, or because we want to imagine we are whole — but our situation is more ragged than this, and we frankly seem to live in and across several worlds and ways of seeing.
If this is our condition, Religious Studies reminds us that the discrepancies of our situation have always also called us into an openness — I like to refer to this as a willingness to attend (the sort of willingness that underpins critical reading) — in which 1) the terms of the world, the terms we read by, and 2) we ourselves are at stake. At stake in two ways. First, because the discrepancies of our situation suggest that there is no single language / world-view / perspective from which to operate and thus any language is perspectival and pretense. And second, because there is an ethical stake related to how we impose our worlds on others.
***
These are tense, careful, perhaps too dense words in an effort to say just a bit about the way I’ve learned to read. It is not just a critical perspective; it reflects the way I interpret and realize my relation to life, to my own thoughts and dreams, how I understand synchronicity or apparent telepathy, how I use liturgy and scripture. And I offer it at the start of my review of Peter O’Leary’s new study of how religious poetry might be read in a secular age because the way I read differs from the approach O’Leary takes, and that has to be said.
I also need to state that I have a personal relationship to the book. I know Peter through a shared friend, Joe Donahue. Joe and I both teach at Duke University (I as a long time adjunct in Religious Studies). Joe and I have been close friends for over a decade, sharing what have often been weekly 2-3 hour lunches — long talks about religion and our own visionary life, our poetry, the poetry of those that inspired us and our ideas about this. Peter’s friendship with Joe is older; in recent years, Joe has had Peter do a final edit of his manuscripts. They are part of a handful of male poet/critics — Norman Finkelstein is another — with an interest in what Catherine Albanese calls “metaphysical religion” and the relationship of poetry to this.[2] Many of us were part of a panel at the Louisville Conference on Literature that not entirely playfully introduced the “New Gnostics.”[3] Through Joe, I also know another poet Peter has written about, Nate Mackey, and Nate encouraged me to reach out to Lissa Wolsak. So, I’ve been at the edges of this small world.
I am also both a religious person and poet. In my late teens (mid/late-seventies) I experienced a difficult erotic-psychic awakening that literally flung me into explorations in religious, spiritual and esoteric thought. I began to do an hour of calm-abiding meditation practice a day at twenty; over the next decade this engagement with Tibetan Buddhism deepened, and by the time I was thirty, I did a daily three-hour liturgical sadhana (daily ritual). I lived in Northampton, MA, worked in social services and staged performance rituals that mixed poetry and dance. And I read.
At the age of thirty-one I entered a PhD program at UVA — they had one of the only Tibetan Studies programs in the US. For those who know something about critical theory and the academy, I was in classes from 1989-1994. I wrote an MA on the social construction of a lama’s authority and a PhD on body language in the Vedas and Early Buddhist scriptures. I finished my dissertation in 2004, but taught courses in religious studies, first at NC State and then at Duke from 1997 on.
During this same period of time I was afflicted with intense chronic, cyclical back pain. I suffered a spiritual crisis, stopped identifying or practicing as a Buddhist (save for guru yoga), and, to quote John’s gospel, began to “climb up some other way.” I returned to poetry and the relationship of poetry to spiritual experience with a vengeance, first triggered by an almost decade long engagement with the poetry of Rilke and then, through Joe and others, an engagement with twentieth century American poetics. But I did this as an autodidact and as a religious scholar. The poetry wars of the 80s and 90s had passed me by completely, and I was amazed anyone could accept the dominant theories of language I began to encounter.
And so, I have a funny relationship to Peter’s book. I share his frustration with the limitations of materialist theories of language and culture. And, if we don’t share a practice or personality type, we share a long engagement with scripture and esoteric interpretation. I’ve attended an Episcopal church since 2000, sing in the choir, have an intense devotion to Mary. And yet, I would strongly qualify what he says in Thick and Dazzling, and I am as disturbed by his way of reading as I am of the constraints chosen by poets with a materialist world-view of one ilk or another.[4]
***
My sense is that Maimonides is right — we read (and write) for what we desire. This means that any text can (and perhaps should) be read and critiqued both in terms of the content it imagines and in terms of the principles it champions. The latter is almost always disclosed by first moves — by the work done to frame (or to hide the frame). It is as true of my text here as it is of Peter’s.
Thick and Dazzling stages a reading of a series of recent and contemporary English language poets from the perspective of Peter’s commitment to specific metaphysical currents in Catholic and American religious thought. Peter is open enough about this. He cites a tradition, which includes figures such as the 4th century Christian theologian Dionysius (also known as Pseudo-Dionysius and as Dionysius, the Areopagite), Dante, Meister Eckhart, Blake and twentieth century figures such as Thomas Merton, Henri Corbin, Robert Duncan, and the post-modern influenced theologian Jean Luc-Marion. It is not a wholly unknown tradition — we hear echoes of it in the traditions constructed by other poets — by Ginsberg and Duncan — Eliot knows of it.
All of the theologians Peter cites prefer a theology that emphasizes what is called a via negativa — a path (via) that approaches God through radical negation — either of sense, personal will and imagination, or as an object of thought. Implicit in the trope of via negativa are 1) the thought that truth (God) lies beyond what can be known or expressed in terms of concept (word, term), and 2) the assertion that direct knowledge (unmediated by word or term) of God is possible. Generally, in order to express this, these theologians refer to direct knowledge of God in negative terms — as a “not knowing” or in terms of no-self (having no sense of self as an orienting position), and that preference for negative language extends to the imagery used —of an encounter with darkness and silence.
The structure of relations and references opened out by this discourse have their echoes in more recent “secular” contexts. Novalis’ paean to darkness in Hymns to the Night stages a radical and absolute negation in the secular context of the German Romantic movement, and, arguably, negation functions something like this in Hegel’s dialectics, albeit in relation to material cases. More recently, the thought that truth/the real (in the secular psychological clothes of “real self”) exists beyond concept played a critical role in theories of Ego-Transcendence characteristic of the Third-Wave of Psychoanalytic Theory (in the 50s), and this, of course, had its own effects on the interpretation of psychedelic experience in the 60s and 70s.
The tradition of theologians Peter cites is often linked both to contemplative traditions in Christianity, Islam and Judaism and to what different authors refer to as “wisdom” traditions first visible in antiquity in Jewish and Christian literature circa 100 CE. Western Occult thought has further tied these currents to Greek and Egyptian wisdom culture — H.D. cites these connections in Trilogy. Peter introduces the very real tradition of presenting Jesus as a wisdom teacher in his chapter on Lissa Wolsak. A critical history of religious thought in antiquity would add the influence of and exchange with both Early Buddhist culture and its Perfection of Wisdom literature (as well as early Chinese Daoism). More recently one would want to add the attention given God’s wisdom as a feminine “Sophia” in late 19th century Russian theology and poetry as a possible recurrence of this diction. Peter is right that this is a persistent current of discourse — a culture that influences thought and imagination.
The writing that gets called or appropriated as wisdom literature thus comes from a vast set of contexts — historical study is useful for reading any one of these, but when the tradition is evoked broadly, its necessary to consider the principles and desires that underpin its representation. The rub for me is that what interests Peter in all of this is the magisterial, unparalleled power displayed in prophetic witness, a witness that one accomplishes through and in an “ascent” (a swirl of interpretive uplift) in which the difference between self and God blurs, an ascent that is willed and in which a radical freedom / reality is realized. For Peter, what excites is the thought that mantic and oracular language somehow compels us to experience its world as real, so that in the act of the poem, there can be revelation.
What is at stake in the hope for such prophetic witness is the thought that there is a power by which a “making right,” a justification could occur, and that a poet might accomplish a saying in which that power occurred. This means at the very least that what’s essayed involves a desire for or fascination with such power and the making real that such power does.
But do we really know why a particular poem or reading strikes us with such force — is this because of a power that has been accessed? Or is it because the poet has somehow made a performance that allows us to imagine that kind of power? And is power infinite and abstract as even Foucault would have it, or is this the way it seems from the kind of perspective we human creatures can have? I think about the way amplification of music and speech has allowed us to imagine we could share a common mind. Is this true or how it seems when the signal is jacked to a scale that we can no longer understand?
In any event, wisdom literature does not have to be read to this end, but it often is. And critiques of wisdom literature and culture — and Peter makes little or no mention of these — suggest that at least one pitfall for the contemplative would be to confuse one’s own will for that of God. In practical terms, I’ve found that the way a given wisdom proponent handles his or her personal boundaries says a lot about whether that is happening; and boundaries include the ways that you read or use form.
***
Peter’s interest in prophecy is set alongside a theology (a notion of what God is) inflected by a Neo-Platonic emphasis on the idea of God as a oneness in being. Hence, what he looks for are dictions that point toward or enact his notion of that oneness, that are in some way constrained by the idea of God as a unity and/or a desire for some kind of becoming-one. His readings of individual poets demonstrate different ways in which a poet might be constrained by the idea of God as a unity and/or by the persistence of a desire for radical union / a radical resolution of desire. He wants to read this material as prophetic or evangelical witness.
The cases Peter considers include 1) Christian/Catholic poets (Frank Samperi, Fanny Howe, and Pat Rehm), and 2) a cluster of poets who are either non-religious (Mackey, Wolsak) or have what might be called a metaphysical religiosity (Robert Duncan, Donahue). For most of these poets, the notion of a unified field (God as unity or some metaphysical idea of Oneness) is a signature constraint, and Peter offers that this could be read in relation to his idea of God. In different ways, each of the poets Peter champions has some notion of a minimus to which they pare —whether this is self, sensuousity, figuration and/or image, there’s a making bare that is read as a possible mark of a via negativa. Peter knows this is partly an effect of objectivist currents in 20th century American poetics that privilege the spare, whether this occurs as it does for Howe and Rehm as an economy of words, as it does for Mackey under the force of seriality and iteration, or as it does in Wolsak’s resistance to formal measure. It is one of the points of contact he hopes will make allies of experimental poets with materialist secular worldviews.[5]
For my money, persistent lies in American ideology include both an exaggerated claim that American life actualizes people’s longing for freedom (their longing for an escape from the contingencies of life) and the thought that we are some singular “one” people under “one” God. What we celebrate are displays that appear to show that both of these tropes are real — these lies are “realized” in the performances we allow to succeed, that become the stuff of tradition. I share Dorothy Day’s thought that this “American Way of Life is not worth sustaining,” and so I wonder whether we should continue to observe its disciplines. Is an objectivist relation to content really a way of ensuring that the content is somehow free? Is this discipline just another version of an older ascetic hope that there was a way to be free, to realize our hopes for immortality, the new emphasis on immediacy and surface simply the most recent utopian locus to be named after we’d exhausted other possible candidates?
I suspect Peter in his readings; more specifically, I suspect he is right that each poet is in some way haunted by both 1) a desire for unity or by the thought of the desired (God) as a unity and 2) by a hope for a promised freedom possible, in the end, only by way of an ascent. I think he is also right that some of the poets — Duncan and Donahue at least — realize in writing their experience of what Peter briefly calls anagogy, a spiraling interpretive linguistic uplift by which a specific intellectual structure is ramified. It is less clear to me that the drama that preoccupies him — the American drama of Freedom and oneness linked as it is to the Biblical drama of creation — should be the one that preoccupies us.
For several years I taught a course “Poetry. Desire and Religion” that considered the traditions of bridal mysticism across theological traditions. We read “Song of Songs,” Rumi, Indian Sant poets (Kabir and Mirabi), Buddhist Tantric poetry, San Juan de la Cruz, and we read a set of modern poets whose writing I thought bore some similarity to the bridal mystics (Dickinson, Rilke, Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and Celan). As is the case with what gets called “wisdom” culture, bridal mysticism is a form of religiosity and discourse found across the theological traditions; in some cases there is overlap between figures identified as bridal mystics and those identified as belonging to a wisdom tradition. In general, my guess is that the overlap is due more to the fact that, as literature, a given body of work can be read according to different lights (and thus be appropriated by different communities) than to formal similarities between bridal mysticism and wisdom culture.
The basic characteristic of bridal mysticism is that the relationship to God is thought of as a spousal relationship — to the extent that the spousal relationship is a relationship of putative equals, it is a horizontal relationship rather than a vertical one. It is also a tradition in which God is imagined — as person, as spouse, as lover — where image matters and where the power of the ideal image of lover is mined as a tool for thinking God. Above all, it is a relationship where the difference between God and lover persists, where, in fact, that difference is never overcome because to overcome that difference would be to dissolve the relationship.[6]
A third feature of the poetry of bridal mysticism — at least where we begin to have biographical details — is that in many cases we find that the poetry to God exists alongside an actual love relationship marked by radical loss (the death or madness of a lover, being married against one’s will, a love otherwise frustrated by social forces, or by one’s ambitions, and so on). In this context, the idea of God as lover becomes salutary because it gives one a way to read a radical frustration of desire as something other than abjection and defeat — it allows one to love in the face of radical difference / apparent abjection. And so it is a different way of managing single-pointed desire.
As a Religious Studies scholar, I can’t say which of these models — a mysticism of ascent and a bridal mysticism of intimate care — is more valid. Nor am I interested in interpreting one in the light of the other (explaining how, for instance, bridal mysticism is really ascent or visa-versa). What I can say is that these two models appear to reflect two different structures of desire — a longing for union / a loss of boundaries on the one hand, and a making room for on the other. The first seems subject to a Derridian critique of logocentric metaphysics and its violence, the second — because it admits a radical difference — less so. And this matters, whether we are talking in theological terms or in the terms of secular American culture.
At some point during the fifteen years of my graduate career, I became a critic of what I call the prediction of wholeness. I suffered a chronic pain condition that literally forced brokenness on me. I was also a student of the Tibetan scholastic analysis of the Buddhist Perfection of Wisdom literature. I’d learned there that even “emptiness” is a trope, that the Buddhist critique of essences pointed not to a some real beyond sense but to the (otherwise impossible) fact of appearance. I’d become a critic of the desire for mastery that I saw haunted not only Buddhism but asceticism more generally. The work I’d done on body language in the Vedas and Early Buddhist scriptures convinced me that wholeness (as immortality, as a freedom like that Rachel Blau duPlessis suggests we allow male poets to make a show of) was so desired we were willing to call our bodies corpses if being embodied meant we couldn’t be whole.
There’s a violence we do to each other and to ourselves because we are not otherwise moved and because we are not, in fact, whole, and we cannot bear this. It is a violence we continue to allow ourselves when we entertain the thought of magisterial power, when we celebrate its displays or the authority it requires, it’s a violence we do when we fail to critique the secular lies that we are one people and have been promised freedom. It’s a violence we keep alive even after we critique the gendered, binary mechanisms by which that power was once figured, because it is a desire we have until we choose not to have it.
***
In the end, I don’t agree with Peter’s reading not simply because I am a critic of his hopes and ideas about language. It is true that my own reading of theology is that the prophetic cannot be called but occurs from God’s side, as an act of grace. I think Peter may be right that his poets are haunted in different ways by an uncritiqued and in any event fair desire for such grace — Rilke was as well — but poetry, it seems to me, is a medium that forces difference on us, whether we want it or not. One can try to exile that difference into the white of the page or the gassiness of the formless, but its still there.
The point is clearer if we ask whether the poets he takes as lineage — Dante, Blake, Eliot, H.D, even Duncan — are prophetic in the sense Peter champions, that is, if in fact they are good examples of a making real in which an otherwise unsayable reality is revealed. Do any of these writers take us beyond the visible into a light, or to use Wolsak’s word, “beyondsense?”
I am not enough of a Dante scholar to assess the affects of either Dionysius or Neoplatonism on Dante’s writing, though the latter is somewhat easier to see. What I can say is that what Dante does cannot be done except as image and measure. We can bring the theological trope of darkness to this and say that the image and measure is somehow covered — a dark brightness in terms of which shines a real light — but we cannot do without image. And, of course, even darkness is an image, even silence, even emptiness, even light.
What’s at stake in my reading is the thought that all we ever have of any real (real world, real poem) are versions — we know this to be true of scripture and epic literature — and, because of this exactness is style and not measure. And none of any of that stops a version from being meaningful or means that a version can mean whatever a reader wants (though it can no longer be definite). But it does mean that we cannot speak of the “real” poem as Peter does, as if it existed in some Platonic purity, and it means we might need to critique the desire that has us imagine such.[7]
With respect to Blake, Peter is selective. There are certainly magisterial images and figures, but the heart of Blake’s thought here and elsewhere is perspectival and graphic — things are laid out in their differences, cannot be anything other than such and it’s our task to bear that. For this reason, I prefer the Songs of Innocence and Experience to the Zoas, but that is because Songs teaches us the way difference works and that is the lesson I am looking for.
Even though Peter cites “Burnt Norton,” his Eliot is really more the Eliot of “The Wasteland.” And this too is selective. He chooses not to read The Four Quartets as a whole, which means he passes over Eliot’s critique of via negativa in “East Coker” (Eliot takes up St. Juan de la Cruz’s dark night and then puts it aside) and misses the way Eliot echoes Melville’s account of “Oceanic Feeling” in “Dry Salvages.” Of course, we progressive “experimentalists” don’t like Eliot and consider his conversion to the Anglican Communion an anathema, just as we reject Kerouac’s end of life critique of Buddhism. And we Baby Boomers love that “oceanic feeling” amplification and drugs have exposed us to (despite the bad trip the 60s actually seem to have been). So we might not notice that the way Peter dismisses Eliot follows a convention; and this means we don’t notice that what the poetry does in Four Quartets is a critique of the tradition Peter cites, and it’s frankly sublime.
Finally, Peter’s H.D. is really Duncan’s, and Duncan’s is speculative and selective — Duncan reads H.D. for what he wants. Peter calls her a Christian mystic which is a reach — I prefer to use the identity terms people use, it’s why I wouldn’t say Mackey or Wolsak were religious — H.D. did explore her Moravian background, but even this was inflected through the thought of connections between the Moravian revelation and occult figures like the 18th century Count Saint-Germain. To my knowledge, she doesn’t call herself Christian, and that is worth keeping straight.
What H.D. does do is consider what it might mean if the worlds in which we lived were somehow palimpsest, laid on top of each other, if times and worlds weren’t versions of each other, if reading didn’t involve sometimes a seeing in which there was an impossible doubling of surfaces, one world alongside another — oddly just the way it is when we are curled up in a day bed, lost in the world of a book, but at the same time, because of the way the body insists in its angling, the sun or rain outside also register, and we are twice there. So why not read that she says that?
***
Peter’s book is a book about poetry and religion, about a possible détente between a materialist (often Marxist) experimental poetics and a worldview he wishes to speak from. In this, his chief image for the poet is not Jesus nor any human bard, but Moses, who we know of only through legend. When Peter speaks of what revelation discloses, it is always in the language of creative majesty — displays of light, clouds of darkness, an impossible suprasensible radiance that breaks out in darkness — the word love does not appear even though by my estimation the most sublime passages in the Gospels and Epistles are those on love. There is no sense of a radical participation in creation, no sense that Blake’s recognition of human creatureliness names a limit, a line in which love is figured, and no sense that our language is broken precisely because we are several and at stake in our relations, because to speak is to slip.
I wrestle sometimes with the way Nate Mackey’s process tends to erase figuration, but I think the notions of slip and splay, of discrepancy are right. To be is to make and read images, to make images is to slip, and my poets and artists are poets who fall — Rilke, Kerouac, Dickinson, Celan, Tarkovsky — who know that there is nothing else but image, its dive and the diving into, the diver’s clothes on the sand, and the fish in the sea.
We know this not because this is coded into our reading or because its what we want, we know this despite the fact that we want everything at once. We know this simply because we think and speak and feel and are entangled in world in thought and in each other. We know this because even if we hardly ever get out of our heads we are still open, exposed, touched, and stake, and the record of that leaves its hands all over us, doesn’t it.
***
I want us to read more creatively and critically as much as Peter. I despair at times about the way our desire for wholeness structures our choices, and I wish I could share the way I read with you. There are few things I like better than to read, which is also to write. I am convinced though that we will realize none of what we might except and unless we critique our fantasies of power and see them for what they are. We are in each other’s way and what exists between us is at an angle, discrepant. We will not solve that by becoming invisible, we do not solve the problem of being different colors by becoming white. But there is a way to write and read that makes space where there otherwise is no space — a space made by falling, in love, to love, to error, to our own finitude — that impossible thing that happens when a corn of wheat dies and falls, my space for you that otherwise can’t be. That’s what we need to read-write each other — what can’t be there otherwise.
[1] See Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, (Texas Christian Press, 1976). For uses of Ricoeur’s thought with respect to religion see William E. Paden, Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion, (Beacon Press, 1995), and S. Brent Plate, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-creation of the World, (Wallflower Press, 2009).
[2] See Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion, (Yale University Press, 2008).
[3] Papers from this panel appeared in Talisman (2015).
[4] For some seven years, Amy Hollywood has directed a program at the Harvard Divinity School on intersections between what she calls difficult poetics and mysticism. Recent readers at the seminar include Peter and Fanny Howe — Susan Howe was an earlier speaker. The seminar directed by Amy has had a shadow at Yale, where friends of mine have attended a similar colloquium on difficult poetics and theology. I’d long been a fan of Amy — her 2002 study Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History was the first serious study to take up critiques of traditional academic accounts of mysticism that defined mysticism in relation to a suprasensible experience of boundlessness. My own work on Indian theological thought, tantra and on Buddhism had led me to question the stakes of the rhetoric of selflessness — was ascetic renunciation of world / life simply a last-ditch effort to keep a hope for freedom / immortality alive? In addition, I was aware that such asceticism was by-and-large acted out among men; I was eager to consider a second kind of being-in-the world that did not involve an effort to control or repress desire, a mode of being not phrased in terms of mastery.
In Sensible Ecstasy, Amy introduced the idea that notions of mysticism rooted in via neagtiva are masculine and asked us to consider a second current of embodied, feminine mysticism. When I read the book, I was excited as I’d already begun to share her suspicion that via negativa too often reflected a desire for power. Since then my ideas of gender have gotten more refined — I would qualify any reference to masculine or feminine as a trope. But I share Rachel Blau duPlessis’ suspicion that we entertain a vision of being able to be everywhere (of not having boundaries) in the idea of the poet, that Pound and Ginsberg are recent exemplars of this. I’d say would still like herself to have such power (which is fair enough), but I am less convinced that such power exists. For duPlessis on the construction of masculinity in American poetics see Purple Passages: Pound Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchy (University of Iowa Press, 2012).
[5] For these connections, see Thick and Dazzling, pp. 45 & 50.
[6] Historically bridal mysticism seems to develop alongside the emergence of wisdom culture, but also possibly subsequent to it. The earliest dates of bhakti culture in India, for instance, post-date by many centuries the wisdom-oriented cultures of Early Buddhism and Theistic Yoga.
[7] See Thick and Dazzling , p. 114 for an example of this.
In one of my first conversations with Lissa Wolsak, a poet Peter O’Leary reads in his recent Thick and Dazzling Darkness, she shared a paraphrase of the 12th century Sephardic Torah scholar Maimonides to the effect that people read and pray according to their desire. The dark side of the thought is something folks who teach literature know only too well — it’s often hard for a reader to find what he is not looking for — hard for us to get out of our heads, out of what we think things mean to consider a second thought. Hence, when we speak we use shared terms, but we are not always talking about the same things.
With respect to this, a key insight in Religious Studies in the last thirty years stems from Paul Ricoeur’s notion that texts (films, plays, dreams, rituals) open out worlds that we enact and realize in our reading / performance. Reading, writing, performing, watching, participation — all these work to weave thought and imagination and the imagined world of these into body and sense.[1] Ricoeur’s observation works with respect to any text and, more generally, draws from a critical vogue of focusing on the discursive dimensions of culture, what language does — it realizes our thoughts. In this context we take it that thought reflects and operates in relation to both a sensed world and to culturally received categories about that world, and that thought reflects and operates in relation to our desires and hopes. Do I need to add that the relationship between any realized world and our desires is, shall we say, uneven? Or that — to borrow Nate Mackey’s term, the discrepancy between desire and world pushes us, requires that we attend to two things at once — sense and desire, touch and image?
The difficult thing about this is that we come to realize that “world” — the world of our texts and cultural perspectives, the ideas we have about how things work — is both 1) a name for the clearing in which we find ourselves, a space opened out in sense and thought in terms of body and 2) something we can’t see except in terms of the sensory motor schemas we use to perceive and the ideas and concepts by which we stylize things in meaningful ways. It’s common enough to think of this “world” as somehow a whole — as a circle or totality, or because we want to imagine we are whole — but our situation is more ragged than this, and we frankly seem to live in and across several worlds and ways of seeing.
If this is our condition, Religious Studies reminds us that the discrepancies of our situation have always also called us into an openness — I like to refer to this as a willingness to attend (the sort of willingness that underpins critical reading) — in which 1) the terms of the world, the terms we read by, and 2) we ourselves are at stake. At stake in two ways. First, because the discrepancies of our situation suggest that there is no single language / world-view / perspective from which to operate and thus any language is perspectival and pretense. And second, because there is an ethical stake related to how we impose our worlds on others.
***
These are tense, careful, perhaps too dense words in an effort to say just a bit about the way I’ve learned to read. It is not just a critical perspective; it reflects the way I interpret and realize my relation to life, to my own thoughts and dreams, how I understand synchronicity or apparent telepathy, how I use liturgy and scripture. And I offer it at the start of my review of Peter O’Leary’s new study of how religious poetry might be read in a secular age because the way I read differs from the approach O’Leary takes, and that has to be said.
I also need to state that I have a personal relationship to the book. I know Peter through a shared friend, Joe Donahue. Joe and I both teach at Duke University (I as a long time adjunct in Religious Studies). Joe and I have been close friends for over a decade, sharing what have often been weekly 2-3 hour lunches — long talks about religion and our own visionary life, our poetry, the poetry of those that inspired us and our ideas about this. Peter’s friendship with Joe is older; in recent years, Joe has had Peter do a final edit of his manuscripts. They are part of a handful of male poet/critics — Norman Finkelstein is another — with an interest in what Catherine Albanese calls “metaphysical religion” and the relationship of poetry to this.[2] Many of us were part of a panel at the Louisville Conference on Literature that not entirely playfully introduced the “New Gnostics.”[3] Through Joe, I also know another poet Peter has written about, Nate Mackey, and Nate encouraged me to reach out to Lissa Wolsak. So, I’ve been at the edges of this small world.
I am also both a religious person and poet. In my late teens (mid/late-seventies) I experienced a difficult erotic-psychic awakening that literally flung me into explorations in religious, spiritual and esoteric thought. I began to do an hour of calm-abiding meditation practice a day at twenty; over the next decade this engagement with Tibetan Buddhism deepened, and by the time I was thirty, I did a daily three-hour liturgical sadhana (daily ritual). I lived in Northampton, MA, worked in social services and staged performance rituals that mixed poetry and dance. And I read.
At the age of thirty-one I entered a PhD program at UVA — they had one of the only Tibetan Studies programs in the US. For those who know something about critical theory and the academy, I was in classes from 1989-1994. I wrote an MA on the social construction of a lama’s authority and a PhD on body language in the Vedas and Early Buddhist scriptures. I finished my dissertation in 2004, but taught courses in religious studies, first at NC State and then at Duke from 1997 on.
During this same period of time I was afflicted with intense chronic, cyclical back pain. I suffered a spiritual crisis, stopped identifying or practicing as a Buddhist (save for guru yoga), and, to quote John’s gospel, began to “climb up some other way.” I returned to poetry and the relationship of poetry to spiritual experience with a vengeance, first triggered by an almost decade long engagement with the poetry of Rilke and then, through Joe and others, an engagement with twentieth century American poetics. But I did this as an autodidact and as a religious scholar. The poetry wars of the 80s and 90s had passed me by completely, and I was amazed anyone could accept the dominant theories of language I began to encounter.
And so, I have a funny relationship to Peter’s book. I share his frustration with the limitations of materialist theories of language and culture. And, if we don’t share a practice or personality type, we share a long engagement with scripture and esoteric interpretation. I’ve attended an Episcopal church since 2000, sing in the choir, have an intense devotion to Mary. And yet, I would strongly qualify what he says in Thick and Dazzling, and I am as disturbed by his way of reading as I am of the constraints chosen by poets with a materialist world-view of one ilk or another.[4]
***
My sense is that Maimonides is right — we read (and write) for what we desire. This means that any text can (and perhaps should) be read and critiqued both in terms of the content it imagines and in terms of the principles it champions. The latter is almost always disclosed by first moves — by the work done to frame (or to hide the frame). It is as true of my text here as it is of Peter’s.
Thick and Dazzling stages a reading of a series of recent and contemporary English language poets from the perspective of Peter’s commitment to specific metaphysical currents in Catholic and American religious thought. Peter is open enough about this. He cites a tradition, which includes figures such as the 4th century Christian theologian Dionysius (also known as Pseudo-Dionysius and as Dionysius, the Areopagite), Dante, Meister Eckhart, Blake and twentieth century figures such as Thomas Merton, Henri Corbin, Robert Duncan, and the post-modern influenced theologian Jean Luc-Marion. It is not a wholly unknown tradition — we hear echoes of it in the traditions constructed by other poets — by Ginsberg and Duncan — Eliot knows of it.
All of the theologians Peter cites prefer a theology that emphasizes what is called a via negativa — a path (via) that approaches God through radical negation — either of sense, personal will and imagination, or as an object of thought. Implicit in the trope of via negativa are 1) the thought that truth (God) lies beyond what can be known or expressed in terms of concept (word, term), and 2) the assertion that direct knowledge (unmediated by word or term) of God is possible. Generally, in order to express this, these theologians refer to direct knowledge of God in negative terms — as a “not knowing” or in terms of no-self (having no sense of self as an orienting position), and that preference for negative language extends to the imagery used —of an encounter with darkness and silence.
The structure of relations and references opened out by this discourse have their echoes in more recent “secular” contexts. Novalis’ paean to darkness in Hymns to the Night stages a radical and absolute negation in the secular context of the German Romantic movement, and, arguably, negation functions something like this in Hegel’s dialectics, albeit in relation to material cases. More recently, the thought that truth/the real (in the secular psychological clothes of “real self”) exists beyond concept played a critical role in theories of Ego-Transcendence characteristic of the Third-Wave of Psychoanalytic Theory (in the 50s), and this, of course, had its own effects on the interpretation of psychedelic experience in the 60s and 70s.
The tradition of theologians Peter cites is often linked both to contemplative traditions in Christianity, Islam and Judaism and to what different authors refer to as “wisdom” traditions first visible in antiquity in Jewish and Christian literature circa 100 CE. Western Occult thought has further tied these currents to Greek and Egyptian wisdom culture — H.D. cites these connections in Trilogy. Peter introduces the very real tradition of presenting Jesus as a wisdom teacher in his chapter on Lissa Wolsak. A critical history of religious thought in antiquity would add the influence of and exchange with both Early Buddhist culture and its Perfection of Wisdom literature (as well as early Chinese Daoism). More recently one would want to add the attention given God’s wisdom as a feminine “Sophia” in late 19th century Russian theology and poetry as a possible recurrence of this diction. Peter is right that this is a persistent current of discourse — a culture that influences thought and imagination.
The writing that gets called or appropriated as wisdom literature thus comes from a vast set of contexts — historical study is useful for reading any one of these, but when the tradition is evoked broadly, its necessary to consider the principles and desires that underpin its representation. The rub for me is that what interests Peter in all of this is the magisterial, unparalleled power displayed in prophetic witness, a witness that one accomplishes through and in an “ascent” (a swirl of interpretive uplift) in which the difference between self and God blurs, an ascent that is willed and in which a radical freedom / reality is realized. For Peter, what excites is the thought that mantic and oracular language somehow compels us to experience its world as real, so that in the act of the poem, there can be revelation.
What is at stake in the hope for such prophetic witness is the thought that there is a power by which a “making right,” a justification could occur, and that a poet might accomplish a saying in which that power occurred. This means at the very least that what’s essayed involves a desire for or fascination with such power and the making real that such power does.
But do we really know why a particular poem or reading strikes us with such force — is this because of a power that has been accessed? Or is it because the poet has somehow made a performance that allows us to imagine that kind of power? And is power infinite and abstract as even Foucault would have it, or is this the way it seems from the kind of perspective we human creatures can have? I think about the way amplification of music and speech has allowed us to imagine we could share a common mind. Is this true or how it seems when the signal is jacked to a scale that we can no longer understand?
In any event, wisdom literature does not have to be read to this end, but it often is. And critiques of wisdom literature and culture — and Peter makes little or no mention of these — suggest that at least one pitfall for the contemplative would be to confuse one’s own will for that of God. In practical terms, I’ve found that the way a given wisdom proponent handles his or her personal boundaries says a lot about whether that is happening; and boundaries include the ways that you read or use form.
***
Peter’s interest in prophecy is set alongside a theology (a notion of what God is) inflected by a Neo-Platonic emphasis on the idea of God as a oneness in being. Hence, what he looks for are dictions that point toward or enact his notion of that oneness, that are in some way constrained by the idea of God as a unity and/or a desire for some kind of becoming-one. His readings of individual poets demonstrate different ways in which a poet might be constrained by the idea of God as a unity and/or by the persistence of a desire for radical union / a radical resolution of desire. He wants to read this material as prophetic or evangelical witness.
The cases Peter considers include 1) Christian/Catholic poets (Frank Samperi, Fanny Howe, and Pat Rehm), and 2) a cluster of poets who are either non-religious (Mackey, Wolsak) or have what might be called a metaphysical religiosity (Robert Duncan, Donahue). For most of these poets, the notion of a unified field (God as unity or some metaphysical idea of Oneness) is a signature constraint, and Peter offers that this could be read in relation to his idea of God. In different ways, each of the poets Peter champions has some notion of a minimus to which they pare —whether this is self, sensuousity, figuration and/or image, there’s a making bare that is read as a possible mark of a via negativa. Peter knows this is partly an effect of objectivist currents in 20th century American poetics that privilege the spare, whether this occurs as it does for Howe and Rehm as an economy of words, as it does for Mackey under the force of seriality and iteration, or as it does in Wolsak’s resistance to formal measure. It is one of the points of contact he hopes will make allies of experimental poets with materialist secular worldviews.[5]
For my money, persistent lies in American ideology include both an exaggerated claim that American life actualizes people’s longing for freedom (their longing for an escape from the contingencies of life) and the thought that we are some singular “one” people under “one” God. What we celebrate are displays that appear to show that both of these tropes are real — these lies are “realized” in the performances we allow to succeed, that become the stuff of tradition. I share Dorothy Day’s thought that this “American Way of Life is not worth sustaining,” and so I wonder whether we should continue to observe its disciplines. Is an objectivist relation to content really a way of ensuring that the content is somehow free? Is this discipline just another version of an older ascetic hope that there was a way to be free, to realize our hopes for immortality, the new emphasis on immediacy and surface simply the most recent utopian locus to be named after we’d exhausted other possible candidates?
I suspect Peter in his readings; more specifically, I suspect he is right that each poet is in some way haunted by both 1) a desire for unity or by the thought of the desired (God) as a unity and 2) by a hope for a promised freedom possible, in the end, only by way of an ascent. I think he is also right that some of the poets — Duncan and Donahue at least — realize in writing their experience of what Peter briefly calls anagogy, a spiraling interpretive linguistic uplift by which a specific intellectual structure is ramified. It is less clear to me that the drama that preoccupies him — the American drama of Freedom and oneness linked as it is to the Biblical drama of creation — should be the one that preoccupies us.
For several years I taught a course “Poetry. Desire and Religion” that considered the traditions of bridal mysticism across theological traditions. We read “Song of Songs,” Rumi, Indian Sant poets (Kabir and Mirabi), Buddhist Tantric poetry, San Juan de la Cruz, and we read a set of modern poets whose writing I thought bore some similarity to the bridal mystics (Dickinson, Rilke, Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and Celan). As is the case with what gets called “wisdom” culture, bridal mysticism is a form of religiosity and discourse found across the theological traditions; in some cases there is overlap between figures identified as bridal mystics and those identified as belonging to a wisdom tradition. In general, my guess is that the overlap is due more to the fact that, as literature, a given body of work can be read according to different lights (and thus be appropriated by different communities) than to formal similarities between bridal mysticism and wisdom culture.
The basic characteristic of bridal mysticism is that the relationship to God is thought of as a spousal relationship — to the extent that the spousal relationship is a relationship of putative equals, it is a horizontal relationship rather than a vertical one. It is also a tradition in which God is imagined — as person, as spouse, as lover — where image matters and where the power of the ideal image of lover is mined as a tool for thinking God. Above all, it is a relationship where the difference between God and lover persists, where, in fact, that difference is never overcome because to overcome that difference would be to dissolve the relationship.[6]
A third feature of the poetry of bridal mysticism — at least where we begin to have biographical details — is that in many cases we find that the poetry to God exists alongside an actual love relationship marked by radical loss (the death or madness of a lover, being married against one’s will, a love otherwise frustrated by social forces, or by one’s ambitions, and so on). In this context, the idea of God as lover becomes salutary because it gives one a way to read a radical frustration of desire as something other than abjection and defeat — it allows one to love in the face of radical difference / apparent abjection. And so it is a different way of managing single-pointed desire.
As a Religious Studies scholar, I can’t say which of these models — a mysticism of ascent and a bridal mysticism of intimate care — is more valid. Nor am I interested in interpreting one in the light of the other (explaining how, for instance, bridal mysticism is really ascent or visa-versa). What I can say is that these two models appear to reflect two different structures of desire — a longing for union / a loss of boundaries on the one hand, and a making room for on the other. The first seems subject to a Derridian critique of logocentric metaphysics and its violence, the second — because it admits a radical difference — less so. And this matters, whether we are talking in theological terms or in the terms of secular American culture.
At some point during the fifteen years of my graduate career, I became a critic of what I call the prediction of wholeness. I suffered a chronic pain condition that literally forced brokenness on me. I was also a student of the Tibetan scholastic analysis of the Buddhist Perfection of Wisdom literature. I’d learned there that even “emptiness” is a trope, that the Buddhist critique of essences pointed not to a some real beyond sense but to the (otherwise impossible) fact of appearance. I’d become a critic of the desire for mastery that I saw haunted not only Buddhism but asceticism more generally. The work I’d done on body language in the Vedas and Early Buddhist scriptures convinced me that wholeness (as immortality, as a freedom like that Rachel Blau duPlessis suggests we allow male poets to make a show of) was so desired we were willing to call our bodies corpses if being embodied meant we couldn’t be whole.
There’s a violence we do to each other and to ourselves because we are not otherwise moved and because we are not, in fact, whole, and we cannot bear this. It is a violence we continue to allow ourselves when we entertain the thought of magisterial power, when we celebrate its displays or the authority it requires, it’s a violence we do when we fail to critique the secular lies that we are one people and have been promised freedom. It’s a violence we keep alive even after we critique the gendered, binary mechanisms by which that power was once figured, because it is a desire we have until we choose not to have it.
***
In the end, I don’t agree with Peter’s reading not simply because I am a critic of his hopes and ideas about language. It is true that my own reading of theology is that the prophetic cannot be called but occurs from God’s side, as an act of grace. I think Peter may be right that his poets are haunted in different ways by an uncritiqued and in any event fair desire for such grace — Rilke was as well — but poetry, it seems to me, is a medium that forces difference on us, whether we want it or not. One can try to exile that difference into the white of the page or the gassiness of the formless, but its still there.
The point is clearer if we ask whether the poets he takes as lineage — Dante, Blake, Eliot, H.D, even Duncan — are prophetic in the sense Peter champions, that is, if in fact they are good examples of a making real in which an otherwise unsayable reality is revealed. Do any of these writers take us beyond the visible into a light, or to use Wolsak’s word, “beyondsense?”
I am not enough of a Dante scholar to assess the affects of either Dionysius or Neoplatonism on Dante’s writing, though the latter is somewhat easier to see. What I can say is that what Dante does cannot be done except as image and measure. We can bring the theological trope of darkness to this and say that the image and measure is somehow covered — a dark brightness in terms of which shines a real light — but we cannot do without image. And, of course, even darkness is an image, even silence, even emptiness, even light.
What’s at stake in my reading is the thought that all we ever have of any real (real world, real poem) are versions — we know this to be true of scripture and epic literature — and, because of this exactness is style and not measure. And none of any of that stops a version from being meaningful or means that a version can mean whatever a reader wants (though it can no longer be definite). But it does mean that we cannot speak of the “real” poem as Peter does, as if it existed in some Platonic purity, and it means we might need to critique the desire that has us imagine such.[7]
With respect to Blake, Peter is selective. There are certainly magisterial images and figures, but the heart of Blake’s thought here and elsewhere is perspectival and graphic — things are laid out in their differences, cannot be anything other than such and it’s our task to bear that. For this reason, I prefer the Songs of Innocence and Experience to the Zoas, but that is because Songs teaches us the way difference works and that is the lesson I am looking for.
Even though Peter cites “Burnt Norton,” his Eliot is really more the Eliot of “The Wasteland.” And this too is selective. He chooses not to read The Four Quartets as a whole, which means he passes over Eliot’s critique of via negativa in “East Coker” (Eliot takes up St. Juan de la Cruz’s dark night and then puts it aside) and misses the way Eliot echoes Melville’s account of “Oceanic Feeling” in “Dry Salvages.” Of course, we progressive “experimentalists” don’t like Eliot and consider his conversion to the Anglican Communion an anathema, just as we reject Kerouac’s end of life critique of Buddhism. And we Baby Boomers love that “oceanic feeling” amplification and drugs have exposed us to (despite the bad trip the 60s actually seem to have been). So we might not notice that the way Peter dismisses Eliot follows a convention; and this means we don’t notice that what the poetry does in Four Quartets is a critique of the tradition Peter cites, and it’s frankly sublime.
Finally, Peter’s H.D. is really Duncan’s, and Duncan’s is speculative and selective — Duncan reads H.D. for what he wants. Peter calls her a Christian mystic which is a reach — I prefer to use the identity terms people use, it’s why I wouldn’t say Mackey or Wolsak were religious — H.D. did explore her Moravian background, but even this was inflected through the thought of connections between the Moravian revelation and occult figures like the 18th century Count Saint-Germain. To my knowledge, she doesn’t call herself Christian, and that is worth keeping straight.
What H.D. does do is consider what it might mean if the worlds in which we lived were somehow palimpsest, laid on top of each other, if times and worlds weren’t versions of each other, if reading didn’t involve sometimes a seeing in which there was an impossible doubling of surfaces, one world alongside another — oddly just the way it is when we are curled up in a day bed, lost in the world of a book, but at the same time, because of the way the body insists in its angling, the sun or rain outside also register, and we are twice there. So why not read that she says that?
***
Peter’s book is a book about poetry and religion, about a possible détente between a materialist (often Marxist) experimental poetics and a worldview he wishes to speak from. In this, his chief image for the poet is not Jesus nor any human bard, but Moses, who we know of only through legend. When Peter speaks of what revelation discloses, it is always in the language of creative majesty — displays of light, clouds of darkness, an impossible suprasensible radiance that breaks out in darkness — the word love does not appear even though by my estimation the most sublime passages in the Gospels and Epistles are those on love. There is no sense of a radical participation in creation, no sense that Blake’s recognition of human creatureliness names a limit, a line in which love is figured, and no sense that our language is broken precisely because we are several and at stake in our relations, because to speak is to slip.
I wrestle sometimes with the way Nate Mackey’s process tends to erase figuration, but I think the notions of slip and splay, of discrepancy are right. To be is to make and read images, to make images is to slip, and my poets and artists are poets who fall — Rilke, Kerouac, Dickinson, Celan, Tarkovsky — who know that there is nothing else but image, its dive and the diving into, the diver’s clothes on the sand, and the fish in the sea.
We know this not because this is coded into our reading or because its what we want, we know this despite the fact that we want everything at once. We know this simply because we think and speak and feel and are entangled in world in thought and in each other. We know this because even if we hardly ever get out of our heads we are still open, exposed, touched, and stake, and the record of that leaves its hands all over us, doesn’t it.
***
I want us to read more creatively and critically as much as Peter. I despair at times about the way our desire for wholeness structures our choices, and I wish I could share the way I read with you. There are few things I like better than to read, which is also to write. I am convinced though that we will realize none of what we might except and unless we critique our fantasies of power and see them for what they are. We are in each other’s way and what exists between us is at an angle, discrepant. We will not solve that by becoming invisible, we do not solve the problem of being different colors by becoming white. But there is a way to write and read that makes space where there otherwise is no space — a space made by falling, in love, to love, to error, to our own finitude — that impossible thing that happens when a corn of wheat dies and falls, my space for you that otherwise can’t be. That’s what we need to read-write each other — what can’t be there otherwise.
[1] See Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, (Texas Christian Press, 1976). For uses of Ricoeur’s thought with respect to religion see William E. Paden, Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion, (Beacon Press, 1995), and S. Brent Plate, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-creation of the World, (Wallflower Press, 2009).
[2] See Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion, (Yale University Press, 2008).
[3] Papers from this panel appeared in Talisman (2015).
[4] For some seven years, Amy Hollywood has directed a program at the Harvard Divinity School on intersections between what she calls difficult poetics and mysticism. Recent readers at the seminar include Peter and Fanny Howe — Susan Howe was an earlier speaker. The seminar directed by Amy has had a shadow at Yale, where friends of mine have attended a similar colloquium on difficult poetics and theology. I’d long been a fan of Amy — her 2002 study Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History was the first serious study to take up critiques of traditional academic accounts of mysticism that defined mysticism in relation to a suprasensible experience of boundlessness. My own work on Indian theological thought, tantra and on Buddhism had led me to question the stakes of the rhetoric of selflessness — was ascetic renunciation of world / life simply a last-ditch effort to keep a hope for freedom / immortality alive? In addition, I was aware that such asceticism was by-and-large acted out among men; I was eager to consider a second kind of being-in-the world that did not involve an effort to control or repress desire, a mode of being not phrased in terms of mastery.
In Sensible Ecstasy, Amy introduced the idea that notions of mysticism rooted in via neagtiva are masculine and asked us to consider a second current of embodied, feminine mysticism. When I read the book, I was excited as I’d already begun to share her suspicion that via negativa too often reflected a desire for power. Since then my ideas of gender have gotten more refined — I would qualify any reference to masculine or feminine as a trope. But I share Rachel Blau duPlessis’ suspicion that we entertain a vision of being able to be everywhere (of not having boundaries) in the idea of the poet, that Pound and Ginsberg are recent exemplars of this. I’d say would still like herself to have such power (which is fair enough), but I am less convinced that such power exists. For duPlessis on the construction of masculinity in American poetics see Purple Passages: Pound Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchy (University of Iowa Press, 2012).
[5] For these connections, see Thick and Dazzling, pp. 45 & 50.
[6] Historically bridal mysticism seems to develop alongside the emergence of wisdom culture, but also possibly subsequent to it. The earliest dates of bhakti culture in India, for instance, post-date by many centuries the wisdom-oriented cultures of Early Buddhism and Theistic Yoga.
[7] See Thick and Dazzling , p. 114 for an example of this.