Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Equanimity Les Murray Levinas and The Breath of God - Cooper
Equanimity Les Murray Levinas and The Breath of God - Cooper
"
doi:10.1093/litthe/frp019 Advance Access publication 27 April 2009
In poetry, then, something is embodied, and that process includes the reader
too, who becomes part of the embodiment through the poems effect on the
physical process of breathing: embodiment refers at once to the materials
in which a work is realized, and to its somatic effect upon the beholder
(pp. 26364). And the dynamic quality of this experience lies in the frequent
turns (oscillations) of the breathing voice. Indeed Murray describes the
breathing movement of poetry as providing a harmony between the two
main modes of consciousness, one that is characteristic of waking life, one
Literature & Theology # The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Abstract
IAN COOPER
193
we call dreaming (p. 260), which is to say poetry is a certain kind of speaking:
I call properly integrated poetic discourse Wholespeak, while discourses based
on the supposed primacy or indeed exclusive sovereignty of daylight reason
I call Narrowspeak. The former embraces all good poetry [. . .] the latter
embraces most of the administrative discourse by which the world is ruled
from day to day (p. 263). The contrast between Wholespeak and
Narrowspeak encompasses a further contrast, between dreaming and daylightthe concern with types of voice is also a concern with types of vision.
Yet Murrays distinctions are dialectical, since the vision possible in poetry
is a fusion (p. 261) of dreaming and daylight. This would seem to imply that
the proper integration of Wholespeak will somehow have to include
Narrowspeak: an account of fullment must nd a place for the diminishments of restriction.
Murrays descriptions can be related to a famous account of poetry in
terms of breathing and turning, that given by Paul Celan in his speech The
Meridian (Der Meridian) (though Murray himself does not make the link).
Celan sees poetry as a line (a meridian) which simultaneously separates and
connects (Murrays idiom of distinction and encompassment implies a similar
pattern). For Celan the words of the poem take us between words, into the
space where words emerge. As such poetry is what he terms a turn of
breath, an Atemwende.2 The site of poetry is the point where the speaking
voice turns (oscillates, in Murrays words). And just as Murray sees poetry as
a tightening and altering of breath in submission to commands from beyond
ourselves, so for Celan the turn of breath is the basis of what might be called
poetrys ethical dimension. For The Meridian argues that the poem is a quest
for encounter, a turning towards: The poem intends another [will zu einem
Anderen], needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it.
For the poem, everything and everybody is a gure of this other toward which
it is heading.3 The poem is a constant moving to its own edges, towards
the epiphany of the other.4 For both Celan and Murray the turn of breath is
a turning beyond.
The thought of Emmanuel Levinas is based on that encounter with the
other, and regards it as the founding moment of ethics.5 Levinas insists, in
opposition to Heidegger, that being with others is primarily an ethical matter:
the fact of other people and their singular embodiment is not reducible to
the project of individual authentic existence that Heidegger associates with
Dasein, but rather interrupts it and puts it into question.6 Furthermore, in our
encounter with the face of the other, we receive a call to responsibility
(a command from beyond ourselves, in Murrays words) which is a revelation: The proximity of the Other, the proximity of the neighbor, is in being
an ineluctable moment of the revelation of an absolute presence [. . .] His very
epiphany consists in soliciting us by his destitution in the face of the Stranger.7
194
The opening lines enact a manifold movement: between the tiny, enclosed
space of nests and the openness of the trees immensities; between fracture
(shattered) and reection (mirrored); between the three stages of a suggestive chromatic diminuendo, with gold moving down into violet, and nally
into the colourless dark of shadow. And from that dark the poem moves
again to light, the light which casts the shadows, and is the highly particular,
dening aspect of the scene being depicted: the droughty light, for example,
at telephone-wire | height above the carports (ll. 1011), which is contrasted
with the news-photograph light of a smoggy Wednesday (l. 12). These lines
are dense with detail but highly nimble in their recurrent geometry of
lines which organises the poems sense of perspectivelight which follows
the plane of telephone-wires marking suburbias highest reach before the
onset of unending sky, and which, in fact, lls out that vastness to make
it the enveloping source of vision, the innite backdrop to our seeing: it is
that light of the north-west wind, hung on the sky | like the haze above
cattleyards (ll. 1314).
Colour, light and dark are the main co-ordinates of this scene. In the details
and associations a certain patterning emerges. The smoggy Wednesday,
caught in newsprint, smudges into a reminiscence of a poem often heard
behind Murrays landscape lyrics: Hopkins Gods Grandeur, where the
world wears mans smudge (l. 7) and morning light shines through the
smog of the brown brink eastward (l. 12).9 But there is another poem
to be mentioned here: Eliots Ash-Wednesday, a poem also full of colour,
whose title refers to a liturgical smudge, to the mark of Lenten, purplish
(violet) time. Eliot applies the colour thickly: Who walked between the
IAN COOPER
195
The scene is marked by the grid of intersecting lines that the birds describe,
and these lines point back, past the gardens and carports, to the mountains,
and ultimately to the hazy lightness of sky. Perspective in this poem, then,
is guided by any number of possible turns, caught in a multiple and dynamic
visual trajectory: our gaze is focused on the details of suburban scenery,
yet also turned outward to a landscape (and a sky-scape) beyond it, the two
planes connected by the drifting presence of the birds.
And in that focus something new emergeswhat might be called an ethical
dimension. We are told, rst of all, that talk of the good life tangles love
with will (l. 8): turning to expound the moral meaning of this composition
of place, the poem is quick to dispel the notion of this balance as the golden
mean .10 And indeed the associations brought by the mountain birds
commute seamlessly (carried by a drawn out and uniquely pure internal
rhyming, on sound itself) into something that clearly undercuts the vision
of contentment:
we must hear the profoundly unwished
garble of a neighbours quarrel, and see repeatedly
the face we saw near the sportswear shop today
in which mouth-watering and tears couldnt be distinguished. (ll. 1720)
The culminating image of the poems rst section, the hungry and tearful face,
presents itself in the destitution by which, Levinas says, the other solicits us.
The destitute face near the sportswear shop (famine [. . .] and the embodiment
violet and the violet (IV, l. 1). Such time is held in the violet immensities of
Murrays jacarandas too, which emerge from the fracture, the shattering,
of goldand in evoking them the poetry quietly compresses a sense of
brokenness amid balance, the tincture of sorrowed purple. Indeed the scene
evoked in Murrays rst stanza, with its play of colour and its tilting into
shadow, bears some likeness to the chromatic pattern of a famously enigmatic
image in Eliots poem, which guides the gaze from immaculate white, through
purple coloured trees, to shade: Lady, three white leopards sat under a
juniper-tree | In the cool of the day (II, ll. 12). However, the play of
light and colour in Murrays scene shifts it into movementinto a relationship
with a surrounding landscape, and into the criss-cross patterning of birds
ight:
196
IAN COOPER
197
Equanimity is the axis, the midpoint of movement (and so still but not inert)
of being in the world. And as possibility, it is opening, directing us both to
the centre of identity and to the edge of it. In Levinas the traversable distance
of perspective, of things whose signicance is dened through the way they
border other things, in itself reveals nothing, and must be interrupted by
a limit, a line that breaks through space and vision and opens them into the
new dimension, revealed in the face. Similarly, in Murrays poem equanimity
is where perspective, the sphere of identity achieved through comparison
evoked through the witty vying of internal contradictions as the traversable
space of community, with its churches, elds, nancial and cultural activity
is nudged off kilter, and in that moment re-centred. Equanimity is the line
running through existence that brings existence back to itself, where identity
is realised as something in excess of its self-denitions and particular perspectives. And since it is central to awareness it mostly ickers on the edge
of awareness, of perspectives which, because they are partial and narrowed,
push their own axis to the margins. But it can be neither refused nor
striven towardsit is simply there, as concrete as a law of nature: almost
the face of the other lets us glimpse innityor rather it does not: the visual
glimpse has already been transformed into the uttered word. Speech cuts
across vision (TI, 195), the epiphany of the face is entirely language15
it is a call. The call of the other at once limits the freedom of its interlocutor
and founds it, by revealing its inevitably ethical bearing, its grounding in
responsibility.16 And in the uttering of that call, Levinas believes, lies the
others holiness (TI, 195): this revelation means we can say that the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face (TI, 78).
In Levinas account ethical encounter, and so the opening of the dimension
of the divine, are rmly rooted in the everyday. Indeed he takes the view
(clearly against Heidegger) that to call things everyday and condemn them
as inauthentic is to fail to recognise the [. . .] signicance of the ordinary.17
He is concerned with ordinary life as the locus of revelation. And this is the
concern of Murrays poem too. The signicance of the ordinary for him
consists in its revealing what he calls equanimity (l. 25):
198
IAN COOPER
199
Speech cuts across vision, says Levinas, and: language thereby announces
the ethical inviolability of the Other and, without any odor of the
numinous, his holiness (TI, 195). If vision is always a laying claim to
others, an act that appropriates the seen to itself what Murray calls
a dimension of the selfs assertionthen speech, being addressed by an
other, contests the meaning I ascribe to my interlocutor (TI, 195), opening
the self beyond its own perspectives. Voice, expanding from and contracting
to silence, takes vision beyond itself. And breathing, the suspension and ow
of quiet air that enables voice and unnoticeably underlies physical existence,
is the most powerful signso fundamental that we hardly notice itof shared
bodily life, participation in something that exceeds the individual self, as
Murrays account of breaths tightening and altering describes. Our breathing,
over which we have no control, no power of assertion, is the half-felt
bodily marker of what Levinas sees as our primal ethical obligation to the
other. And this insight into otherness might also be seen as Murrays version
of an idea expressed by Celan. The paths taken by poetry are, in the words
of The Meridian, paths on which language becomes voice; they are what
Celan calls creaturely paths (kreaturliche Wege).22 Certainly the path taken
in Equanimity is a vocal one, and its climax is the realisation that in its
essence shared life is not simply creaturely, but created (Murray insists on
the link between creation and poesis23). Shared life is life sustained by gift,
unpurchased plenishment. Accordingly the dening and ultimate instance
of voice, whose breath moves through creatureliness and confers dignity
on the vegetative life of the body,24 is the utterance of what Levinas calls
the innitethe voice of God.
But Murray has been taking a step that Levinas does not. He sees that
dignity as based not ultimately in difference but in something beyond difference, a unity that speaks through grace, dened as the dimension which
theology calls infusion.25 Infusion for Murray is the entering of the innite
into the nite, its self-giving. Murray has said that all grace is really one; the
200
grace in the shape of a tree, in someones walk, the grace in a kind action, are
all ultimately the same.26 And that ultimate oneness of all grace comes from
the participation of individual, nite life in the innite life of God. As such,
when we transpose this theology of infusion into the sphere of community
what we might call the poems ethical understanding, its concern with an
ethos, a being with otherswe see that the other, captivating us by his grace,
as Levinas says, does not in fact reveal by virtue of his ungraspable difference,
but rather by virtue of his otherness turning us toward recognition: of the
presence that is infused into the life of both parties. That presence, the poem
now states, is God born in the likeness of men, that is, Christ.
Christs speaking comes at the close of the long mid-section, as breath
approaches a turning. Murray has discussed that voice at length:
IAN COOPER
201
give the converse sense to that described by Levinasthat voice too is taken
beyond itself, through seeing. Vision, Levinas says, describes a traversable
distance, a realm of objects that only becomes a site of revelation when it
is cut across by speech, converted into voice through the command uttered by
the neighbour. That command, revelatory of something that is absolute by
virtue of its sheer difference from the visually perceptible, and appropriable,
world of things, is issued by the face of the other, and opens us to the innite.
The face, then, always already converted from visual encounter to vocal
command, is the point at which the innite is registered precisely through
its not being grasped as nite matter. Indeed this non-embodiment of the
innite is the basis of Levinas entire account of the relationship between
the face and revelation: The Other is not the incarnation of God, but
precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the
height in which God is revealed (TI, 79). God is revealed in the vertical
height that is innitely beyond the mere lateral signication of things on
the plane of visual recognition (TI, 191). In Equanimity, however, the
speaking of holiness returns us to seeing. But it also confronts us with
the difculties of seeing:
202
More natural to look at the birds about the street, their life
that is greedy, pinched, courageous and prudential
as any on these bricked tree-mingled miles of settlement,
to watch the unceasing on-off
grace that attends their nearly every movement,
the same grace moveless in the shapes of trees
and complex in our selves and fellow walkers: we see its indivisible
and scarcely willed. (ll. 4754)
IAN COOPER
203
These lines return us to Levinas. For him, light cannot establish a transcendent
perspective because it remains caught up in an irresolvable sliding between
presence and absence. It displaces the emptiness of darkness and so produces
another void, in the space where darkness was. And though the coming of
light into un-illuminated space is a lling up, a plenitude (TI, 190), it does
not take us beyond a eld of forces over against one another (nature, we might
say), in which things simply and impersonally are (that is, a world governed
by what Levinas calls the il y a).30 Darkness, once negated, simply asserts itself
as a negation, over against light: there is this void itself [. . .] In driving out
darkness the light does not arrest the incessant play of the there is (TI, 190).
Light is not transcendent; to be in illuminated space is to traverse the plane
of the void, and to traverse it is not equivalent to transcending (TI, 190). For
Breathing and seeing, voice and vision, are therefore inseparable for
Murray. The breathing of the poemor rather the way it makes us breathe,
tightening and altering our breathopens us to a vision of the world.
The momentary, fragmented perception of grace, which is the most it
seems our unfocused perspective can attain, reveals itself to be part of a continuity that is not a matter of isolated ickers but rather encompasses the
whole sphere of vision, objects and the shapes of trees. Poetic experience,
as Murray understands it, is a turning towards this realisation, a turn of breath
through speech and cadence that does not so much cut across vision, as make
proper vision possible. For the commands from beyond ourselves that we
half-notice through our breathing are, as Levinas says, the expression of an
ethical obligation to the other; but full awareness of that ethical dimension
arises through our recognising fellow walkersother selves with other faces,
independent of ours but infused with the same grace. And recognition of
those faces, the poem suggests, is itself recognition of the interleaved continuing plane which was hard to focus. As such Equanimity is not in fact
content with a Heideggerian analysis of this otherworld. Where Heideggers
account of everydayness serves to reinforce a separation between the fallen
public realm and the transgured self-isolation of authentic being in the
world (Heideggerian grace), for Murray chatter, assertion and relentless
action themselves only exist through the underlying possibility of a resting,
and therefore a heightened vision.
The nal movement of the poem guides us towards seeing this:
204
IAN COOPER
205
manifestation that is already discourse (TI, 66), but rather of the plenishment reected in visibly recognisable and spatially located sites of breathing
in faces. And space redeemed from narrowing is the vision breathed out in the
last, balanced cadences: a eld all foreground, and equally all background,
detailed and also innite. To glimpse that is to breathe with the rhythms
of Wholespeakto be in the world of perspective but freed from its diminishments. For Murray poems make us aware of our breathing and our seeing,
and therefore of our capacity to experience such momentseeting, but
recovering and therefore always recoverable, quietly given in grace and
therefore innitely possible.
REFERENCES
1
3
4
5
L.
Murray,
Embodiment
and
Incarnation in The Paperbark Tree: Selected
Prose (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992),
pp. 25169, at p. 258.
See P. Celan, Collected Prose, trans.
R. Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet,
1986), p. 47. Original in P. Celan,
Gesammelte Werke in B. Allemann and S.
Reichert (eds), 5 Vols (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1983), III, pp. 187202.
Collected Prose, p. 49.
Ibid.
On Levinas and Celan, see K. Ziarek,
Inected Language: Toward a Hermeneutic
of Nearness (New York: SUNY Press,
1994), and M. Eskin, Ethics and Dialogue
in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandelshtam, and Celan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
See M. Purcell, Levinas and Theology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), p. 79.
E. Levinas, Totality and Innity: An Essay
on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 78.
C. Gaffney, Les Murrays Otherworld,
Quadrant 78 (1984) 5558 (p. 55). See
also V. Brady, Caught in the Draught:
On Contemporary Australian Culture and
Society (Sydney: Angus & Robertson,
10
11
12
13
14
206
15
16
17
18
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
19