To bring things in from the shadows requires a light in which they can be seen.
We attend so often to the objects in the room, without acknowledging the illumination in the room that makes these objects visible.
Sometimes one has to throw up some dust or fog to reveal the illumination in the room. But then, this makes the objects harder to see.
Concealing and revealing always work together in a double movement. Without a frame there is no picture.
Is this a concealing that merely casts shadows? Or is it a concealing that frames, that establishes a horizon under which things meaningfully unfold? A clearing that protects a space for cultivation and then appropriates us to cultivate it?
And then too, what kind of clearing? Is it one that gathers everything in its fundamental unity and interdependence? A clearing in which, thus appropriated, we may dwell?
Language is that which appropriates; it is that which flows through us and that by which our fundamental story is told. Language is the concrete manifestation of sub-creation. The way of cultivation is always through a poetic language, one rooted in the idea of poiesis or bringing-forth.
What is meant by language is not merely words, but exteriorization, habit and memory itself. The basic mode of exteriorization is not speech but writing. The writing in books, the marks on trees, the genetic code. The tools we make and which also make us. The trails we form simply by walking on them.
It’s not so much the form of writing, but the fundamental way of comportment out of which writing flows and appropriates – a way in which one opens oneself to what is forming and helps it come forth – maybe trimming a few weeds here and there, but otherwise respecting what is, letting things be. When instead we become the commanders, the controllers, we the appropriators and not the appropriated, writing no longer flows.
So too, the idea of making or shaping, the act of creation itself, is rooted in poetry. Not in ordering, commanding, challenging forth. The root of the word “shape” relates to the Anglo-Saxon scop; the medieval poet who continually reshaped fundamental mythic narratives by way of which everything showed up as meaningful.
When the mythic space or clearing has collapsed, when the illumination is itself only the dying embers of a civilization that has run its course, when all objects are buried in shadow – then the work is indeed to expose this illumination, to throw up some dust and fog, even if in so doing, it may darken the night even more. Only then is a new beginning possible. Only then will we once again have words.
