Creativity begins small. A word starts a sentence, then expands into a paragraph and essay. One brush stroke after the next becomes a painting. One fingernail-size tessera set among others make a mosaic bathroom floor.
Creativity also shapeshifts from one medium to another: words can be colourful, even musical, and shapes can be expressed in words. The line between creativity and creation is so thin, in fact, that after I put my hands in clay and begin to write, I want my words to be palpable. I want to feel words in my fingers. Hum them.
When this happens, my mind must be subtly changing gears. Sometimes it silently shifts from the real to the imaginative. This doesn’t happen when I’m doing intellectual stuff, like writing this essay, but in other sorts of writing or when I’m creating something with my hands. At these moments, my mind “lets out” or expands.
Hegel -- not the easiest philosopher to understand! -- described the creation of the universe as “God othering Himself.” I like this phrase. On a miniature scale, when I create, I inside myself out which means that I, too, am “othering” myself. “Othering” makes me bigger. The essence of all human creativity is, in fact, self-expansion.
The poet George MacDonald would have intuitively understood Hegel’s “othering.” Even though these two men never knew each other, there is a strange likeness between Hegel and MacDonald, a shared tendency to start small and increase. Hegel never stopped expanding. By the time of his death, Hegel’s philosophy included everything; he was the last of the great systematisers – he even claimed that his philosophy was the culmination of logic, nature and spirit! Though MacDonald’s creativity is not as unbounded (or egoistic) as that of Hegel, MacDonald has a similar expansive creativity.
His, though, has an empyreal grounding.
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For several months, I’ve been reading MacDonald’s “sevenling” poems which he compiled as a devotional in 1880. Entitled, “A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul,” this compilation is a series of seven-line devotional poems, one for every day of the year. Each poem is written on the verso (left side) of the opened book. The recto (right side) was left blank for the reader to jot down his or her own ideas and prayers. He dedicated his book to the readers:
Sweet friends, receive my offering. You will find
Against each worded page a white page set:--
This is the mirror of each friendly mind
Reflecting that. In this book we are met.
Make it, dear hearts, of worth to you indeed:--
Let your white page be ground, my print be seed,
Growing to golden ears, that faith and hope shall feed.
YOUR OLD SOUL
Knowing something about the structure of these poems makes it easier to grasp their meaning, so permit me to list some of the structural qualities of a MacDonald’s “sevenling”:
o It is a poem with seven lines
o It has three sets of rhyming words: A, B and C
o It has two stanzas or grouped ideas, the first before the second
Lines one through three/four comprise the first idea or stanza
Lines three/four through six comprise the second idea or stanza
o Words often rhyme across the stanzas – each stanza does not have its own rhyme, that is.
o The solitary punchline is always the seventh line.
o There are no blank lines or indentations separating the stanzas.
o All verses are ten, eleven or twelve syllables in length.
I want you to look at a few poems randomly picked from the month of January. In order to see what’s going on, I put the rhyming category (A, B or C) and the number of syllables to the right of each line. Note that MacDonald’s “first language” was a Scot’s dialect, a language that few contemporary English speakers can read or pronounce. His Scottish Gaelic pronunciation of words and text, then, may NOT have the same number of syllables I have put here. In other words, my syllable count may be off by one or two! You decide.
January 20th
Help me to yield my will, in labour even, A 11
Nor toil on toil, greedy of doing, heap-- B 10
Fretting I cannot more than me is given; A 10
That with the finest clay my wheel runs slow, C 10
Nor lets the lovely thing the shapely grow; C 10
That memory what thought gives it cannot keep, B 11
And nightly rimes ere morn like cistus-petals go. C 12
January 16th
If I should slow diverge, and listless stray A 10
Into some thought, feeling, or dream unright, B 10
O Watcher, my backsliding soul affray; A 10
Let me not perish of the ghastly blight. B 10
Be thou, O Life eternal, in me light; B 10
Then merest approach of selfish or impure C 10
Shall start me up alive, awake, secure. C 10
January 17th
Lord, I have fallen again--a human clod! A 11
Selfish I was, and heedless to offend; B 10
Stood on my rights. Thy own child would not send B 10
Away his shreds of nothing for the whole God! A 10
Wretched, to thee who savest, low I bend: B 10
Give me the power to let my rag-rights go C 11
In the great wind that from thy gulf doth blow. C 10
--
Ultimately, what’s important about MacDonald’s poems, or any poem for that matter, is not structure or cadence, rhyme or Scot’s dialect, but your experience reading it; what matters is what the poem means to you … not the meaning of the poem. A poem can mean differently to you than me which is where MacDonald’s expansiveness comes to play for a “big” poem, one with creative, amorphous ideas, can mean many things.
He is man with a mind that easily crosses the bridge between fantasy to reality and then returns the way he came: his words hover between visionary reality and down-to-earth fantasy; his verbal images transcend mere metaphor and enter the realm of “othering.” You can experience MacDonald’s thoughts and feelings because he exposes you to his imagination without saddling you with (very much) of his 19th century circumstances. Because his words are imaginative, you can imaginatively insert the meaning you intuit.
In poetry as well as fantasy, meaning is fungible.
So, to enjoy MacDonald, you must let go a bit. Read it quickly, then slowly, and then aloud; try not to analyse but absorb it. Let it speak to your heart as well as your mind.
May 6th
Through all the fog, through all earth's wintery sighs,
I scent Thy spring, I feel the eternal air,
Warm, soft, and dewy, filled with flowery eyes,
And gentle, murmuring motions everywhere--
Of life in heart, and tree, and brook, and moss;
Thy breath wakes beauty, love, and bliss, and prayer,
And strength to hang with nails upon thy cross.
Surely, you’ve experienced spring, yet I doubt you associated it with the crucifixion. To me, spring begins life – the crucifixion ended it … for three days. This, then, is a jarring juxtaposition. Why …? Why did he write this? What meaning does it have for me?
Sometimes meanings aren’t easy to come by. Often, after I read a poem, I put it down, sip tea, do something else and then later, read it again. At other times meanings easily percolate upward. I have no evidence for saying this, but it seems that the meaning of a poem – the meaning I give it – is easier to obtain when the author’s ideas are big enough to find parallels in my own mind and life.
I think this is important. The meaning of a poem isn’t objective. It isn’t found in the definition of its words but in my creative appropriation of those words. Meaning isn’t “out there” like Platonic forms, but inside of me. I make it meaningful. BUT … a good poet makes this process easier for me. He guides me along the meaning trail by providing text that suggests without being definitive or constraining. MacDonald does this well.
He does it by “othering” himself in his poems. He’s naked in them. No, that’s not right – he’s transparent. His words are so sheer and thin that I hear his thoughts beat. He’s so transparent that I barely see him in his words which gives me the space, the mental space, to assign meanings as I see fit.
The meaning of MacDonald’s poems involves his deep spirituality; MacDonald is a sincere, salient Christian, though not a typical one. His faith is positive and affirming, impractically so. He is remarkably upbeat. Always. He’s also so deeply in touch with his feelings and imagination that he borders on being out of touch: he’s got a Holly Golightly approach to life, skimming over its surface while plumbing its depths. He’s doesn’t hang in the middle where most of us are. He’s on top and underneath. Both.
April 28
What can there be so close as making and made?
Nought twinned can be so near; thou art more nigh
To me, my God, than is this thinking I
To that I mean when I by me is said;
Thou art more near me, than is my ready will
Near to my love, though both one place do fill;--
Yet, till we are one,--Ah me! the long until!
What is he saying here? MacDonald may be describing how both creativity (the making) and creation (the made) come together as he writes, and how when this happens he feels God’s presence and love as well as a fleeting oneness with Him. Admittedly, this poem is difficult to read, particularly lines 2, 3 and 4, but it still suggests (without stating) his deep, mystical faith
It’s difficult to express faith. Words fail. This may be MacDonald often dips into metaphor and fantasy.
MacDonald is a Scotsman. Much can be made of this, perhaps too much, but it has been said that the Celtic wishful, almost dreamy way of looking at the world opened him to fantasy and myth. I’m not sure what to think of this. Why would this be a Scottish trait? I’m thinking, now, of the Englishman C.S. Lewis’ Christian fantasies as well as those of J.R.R. Tolkien. Lots and lots of people, including Americans, like to make things up. So is cannot his imaginative poetry and prose that makes MacDonald unusual but the spiritual deepness within his make-believe and poetic worlds.
How does this work? Why is Christian spirituality the key to understanding MacDonald? Perhaps it works because the same Holy Spirit that inspired MacDonald is also in you, assuming you’re a believer. The Spirit enables you to heart-feel his words, spirit to spirit. Non-Christians may knock at this door, but it won’t open for them. They’re in the cold. But you … you have his Spirit, the same Spirit. One.
--
I find the bridge between fantasy and reality to be profoundly disorienting, at times. Even MacDonald’s characters aren’t always sure where they are. Neither are you, reader. You may be asking yourself where you are, if you’re in objective reality or his imagination … real or Memorex? Am I in the land of phantasy creatures like fairies, ravens and goblins, or in the mossy woods of evidential nature? As the line between fantasy and reality disappears, it’s unsettling to a hard-core but creative rationalist like myself!
This reminds me of the theology of the pilgrim’s errand into the wilderness (the intellectual historian Perry Miller comes to mind right now) in that it’s like walking without a map, or being sent away without a destination. This isn’t psychosis or some sort of schizophrenic break, but a purposeful toeing of the line between the spiritual and the phenomenal worlds. To get to God … to grasp His spirit, your feet must be light on the earth. Closing in on the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, is not something done rationally, or at least purely rationally, but supra-rationally. The world of Spirit is not “less real” than the world of cars and cats, but more so. God’s world is not irrational but transcends human rationality.
Thus it is the case that reality, for MacDonald, is in the supra-real, not surreal.
Feb 8th
Thou wilt interpret life to me, and men,
Art, nature, yea, my own soul's mysteries--
Bringing, truth out, clear-joyous, to my ken,
Fair as the morn trampling the dull night. Then
The lone hill-side shall hear exultant cries;
The joyous see me joy, the weeping weep;
The watching smile, as Death breathes on me his cold sleep.
As I read his poems, I find it impossible to describe what could be going on in my mind, your mind and MacDonald’s mind. I’m not doing it well because I’m just not smart enough to put it all together. I don’t think I ever will. Most of us take only a minute to read a sevenling but a lifetime to grok it’s depth. Poems chock-full of unreasonable truths take time. What more can be said?
I think I’ll stop. Let me end with a sentence not from his devotional but from his novel Lilith:
“ I knew now that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, not the being beloved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness.”
Kristen Burroughs blogs at kristenburroughs.com