Dear Readers,
Last week I wrote about Carl Jung’s term gradient. A Poetry Table is a reflective experience, a reflective moment, which can take you back to your gradient. The experience can access your deep inner life and touch your soul. Wisława Szymborska puts forth the notion that the soul is something that comes and goes. You can’t force it to show up. You can be attentive for it to appear. The paradox is that expecting it can hinder its attendance. A Poetry Table helps us to coax the soul to come forth.
A Few Words on the Soul
We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.
Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.
Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.
It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.
It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.
For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.
Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.
It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.
Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.
We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.
Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.
It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.
We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.
Wislawa Szymborska
The soul may surface during the silence of reading poems during a Poetry Table. Ripe conditions may be silence and unexpectedness. If you immerse yourself in the experience and let down your guard, then the deeper self may emerge. But if you know a Poetry Table is planned and approach the experience with the expectation your soul will show up, then it may not. It probably won’t. Life—your soul—may not comply.
To be continued. Part III on Gradient will be next week.
Have a good week!
David
