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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
In The Grain of Wheat, Hans Urs von Balthasar quotes St. Basil on the intent contemplation of God's works. In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis speaks of making “every pleasure into a channel of adoration”, by praising “these pure and spontaneous pleasures” as “‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.” According to Iris Murdoch, such attentiveness requires a degree of “selflessness” that resembles aesthetic contemplation and— it may be inferred — prayerful reflection. Using these passages and others by Kathleen Norris and Simone Weil, this essay offers related perspectives on the process and the effects of attentiveness, in poetry and prayer. Poets practise, and thereby teach an attentiveness that is analogous to that achieved in certain forms of prayer. Prayer, like poetry, gives thanks for the mysteries — even as it seeks to understand and respond to the injustices and sufferings — of life. Denise Levertov illustrates in her poetry an awareness of how such attentiveness can be productive, in her late religious poems especially.
An earlier form of this essay was read at the Western Conference on Christianity and Literature, Point Loma University, San Diego, California, March 2004.
2 Kermode's, Frank Forms of Attention (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985Google Scholar) uses the term to refer to how we value works of art or literature. The third essay is of tangential interest. We “pay attention” to things that are called to our attention. The person who calls our attention to things, by pointing them out, can be important. While my interest in “attentiveness” is rather different from Kermode’s, the two forms of “attention” are related.
3 Hartmann, Geoffrey “Text and Spirit,”Western Humanities Review LIII no. 4 (Winter 1999–2000), pp. 297–314Google Scholar addresses some of the same issues that this essay does.
4 Davey, Nicholas, “On the Polity of Experience: Towards a Hermeneutics of Attentiveness,”Renascence LVI no. 4, (Summer 2004), pp. 220.Google Scholar
5 Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London, Routledge, 1970), p. 84Google Scholar.
6 Brudney, Daniel, “Marlow's Morality,”Philosophy and Literature (27 2003), pp. 318–340CrossRefGoogle Scholar refers to the “virtue” of “attentiveness” (318) and later cites Simone Weil as a source for “attentiveness to the other.”
7 Davey (p. 229) refers to a “disposition of attentiveness” that is a dialogical disposition. He also says: For all its seeming privacy the disciplines of attentiveness seek an opening for the self to receive the mediation of the transcendent in and through the mediation of language (230). This is an almost Zen experience, such as William Blake obliquely acknowledges (“To see the world in a grain of sand, infinity in an hour”). Pitched to a higher level, it is the “enrapturement” that Hans Urs von Balthasar characterizes in aesthetic experience, or that Abraham Maslow has called a “peak experience,” an experience of “Being” itself.
8 Davey, p. 220. The same author refers to George Steiner, who, he says, finds “that attentiveness has an ethical dimension.” Steiner “speaks of a civility towards ‘the inward savour of things’” (Davey, p. 220 ref. p. 148).
9 Levertov, Denise, Collected Earlier Poems: 1940–1960 (New York: New Directions, 1979) p. 35.Google Scholar
10 In Real Presences (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989), Steiner stresses the importance of “re-cognition” in the aesthetic experience (“to re-cognize is to know anew”) pp. 9 and 50.
11 Collected Earlier Poems, p. 55.
12 Collected Earlier Poems, p. 103
13 Kerr, Fergus, Immortal Longings (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame U P, 1997), p. 83Google Scholar. Kerr also refers to Murdoch, and to Plato's Republic. As an essentially Romantic poet, Levertov believes in something like a world of Platonic forms.
14 The Poet in the World (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 54.
15 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1995), p. 2Google Scholar.
16 “An Interview with Denise Levertov,”Renascence 50, nos. 1&2 (1997–98), p. 9.
17 The Grain of Wheat, p. 20.
18 The Grain of Wheat, p. 3. In his lectures on aesthetics Hegel approaches something like the issue of attentiveness when he discusses prosaic consciousness.
19 Lewis, C. S., Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. 89.Google Scholar
20 O Taste and See is the title of another Levertov collection of poetry; that title being taken from a poem of the same name.
21 Letters to Malcolm, p. 91.
22 Letters to Malcolm, p. 92.
23 Letters to Malcolm, p. 93.
24 See Macmurray, John, Religion, Art and Music (Liverpool: The Liverpool Press, 1961Google Scholar) for a cogent explanation of how and why this may have occurred.
25 Achebe, Chinua speaks of the power of literature to “celebrate existence” in “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration” in Chinua Achebe: A Celebration, Petersen, Kirsten Holst and Rutherford, Anna ed. (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991), pp. 1–11.Google Scholar
26 Levertov, Denise, The Sorrow Dance (New York: New Directions, 19), pp. 183–185.Google Scholar
27 Bernard Basset, S.J., in The Noon-Day Devil (Fresno, CA: Academy Guild Press, 1964)Google Scholar, cites John Macmurray (pp. 79–80) and enjoins “sensitive awareness,”“living in the senses.”This is what Levertov's poetry teaches. Basset says that “sensitive awareness” redirects us, away from a selfish perspective that can become habitual in middle and old age.
28 In the Poetics Aristotle discusses the complicated “joy” that comes in really seeing the representation of even evil and ugliness (Chapter IV) in Adams, Hazard ed. Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), p. 51Google Scholar.
29 See Grain of Wheat p. 4: “Time is the fully unfolded intensity of love, since within Time love can take on the wonderful meaning of a story, of a process … .”
30 Lewis, C. S., The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1943), pp. 76–77Google Scholar.
31 Letters to Malcolm, pp. 109–110.
32 Scientists, too, tell us that our attention affects our sense of time. See “Remembering When,” by Antonio R. Damasio Scientific American 287.3 (September, 2002), pp. 66–69.
33 Norris, Kathleen, Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead, 1998)Google Scholar, “Prayer as Mystery” p. 350. If Norris's straightforward approach is not convincing, consider Gerald Bruns' quotation from Jean-Luc Marion (in a dense, dense essay on Lyotard, Levinas, and Marion), “The Senses of Augustine (On Some of Lyotard's Remains),”Religion and Literature 33.3 (2001). There he notes: “As Jean-Luc Marion says, praise is the only discourse that can traverse without abolishing the distance that draws us close to God”: “The Discourse of Praise”Idol and Distance (1977; New York: Fordham U P, 2001), pp. 184–91. Thomas Keating disagrees: Intent, not attention is paramount. Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel (New York: Continuum, 1986, 1992), pp. 73–74.
34 Weil, Simone, Attente de Dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1966), pp. 96–97Google Scholar. Translated by McKenna, Andrew in “Rorty, Girard, and the Novel,”Renascence 55.4 (Summer 2003), p. 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Weil also states that a sense of our own mediocrity, even obtuseness (“bêtise”), can be favorable to such attention, as can be the travail of peasants and workers to the extent that their long-suffering condition immunizes them from delusions of social preeminence, of “considération social” (96).
36 Schloesser, Steven, “’Not behind but within’: Sacramentum et res,”Renascence 58 no 1 (2005), p. 35Google Scholar, has pointed out that Levertov had some acquaintance with Weil's writings, particularly in a piece called “On the Art of Prayer,” (1990), in which she quotes from Weil on attention: “… absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and only extreme attention is religious,” in Miles, Sian, ed., Simone Weil: An Anthology (New York: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1986), p. 212Google Scholar.
37 This is an issue which W. H. Auden addresses in one of the Eliot, T. S. Memorial Lectures titled “Words and the Word,”Secondary Worlds (London: Faber, 1968), pp. 120–21Google Scholar.
38 Simone Weil, p. 311.
39 In another selection from her works, Waiting for God, translated by Emma Craufurd, with an Introduction by Leslie Fielder (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), Weil is quoted as saying that the work of genius, or “work of the very highest order, true creation, means self-loss.”
40 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, “Semantics and Hermeneutics,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 87–88Google Scholar, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 102. Or again —with Balthasar — we might say: “perfect (intuitive) self-awareness would be an awareness of one's own origin from God and thus an indirect intuition of God” (Grain of Wheat), p. 6.
41 Ibid.
42 Marcel, Gabriel, “Creative Fidelity” in Creative Fidelity (New York: Fordham U P, 2002), p. 148Google Scholar.
43 Weil refers to its being an “unprecedented time,” a time for saintliness; Waiting for God, pp. 98–99.
44 Levertov, Denise, Evening Train. (New York: New Directions, 1992), p. 71Google Scholar.
45 One would like to speculate. Is Levertov writing about a real event, a scene described in the paper, or perhaps reported on TV or shown in a movie? Cf. Wordsworth's “imagining” the vivid scene in “A Solitary Reaper.”
46 Levertov, Denise, This Great Unknowing (New York: New Directions, 1999) p. 48Google Scholar.
47 In an earlier poem, “Ascension,” she had sought to “impersonate” Jesus at his Ascension. But the poem also compared that ascension to the Resurrection, which also alluded to Lazarus's rising.
48 The Grain of Wheat, pp. 112–113.
49 Letters to Malcolm, p. 93.
