AE Reiff

AE Reiff’s name means Snow Leaf.

The Groan That Cannot Be Uttered

Thought and word and nothing besides the originary creation cry, the groan that cannot be uttered. Diapsalmata “profound anguish of heart, whose lips are so fashioned that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music” (Kierkegaard Either/Or).

Reading this from the outset seems like so much romance, but from the inset, after the fact of life it says exactly what has gone on all years and more in heart and mind, reached to varying degrees of life culminated more and more at the approach of death and deaths that absolutely surround everyone who travails the road. Except I would call these agonies of the spirit these groans that cannot be uttered and even if he, K, has them roasted in a taurobolium that is all just to deflect, to pay the mythic due, pictures not words—so I went to read Hopkins who knew, reminded every time of the face of a prisoner of war like Wittgenstein, Levinas…but this one a cotton farmer at 19 with the soul of Philo.

“From what then do I, with all my being and above all that taste of self, have selfbeing, come?” (Collected Works of Hopkins, Vol 5, 350). That’s from this commentary of the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola that Hopkins expounds, but we’ve not time to ask whether we are due to chance, to ourselves aliquid eius (part of it) and are self existent soul, mind and consciousness, or whether to some extrinsic cause. For these are critics. To be sure, a critic resembles a poet as one pea another, the only difference being that he has no anguish in his heart and no music on his lips – of life's great conflagration (Kierkegaard, Diapsalmata).

Averroes, a critic, says the active and passive intellect are separate from the individual soul (Hopkins, 352), but we are partners with the spirit and want to answer the cry. We want to recognize its call upon us for comfort, for response, for feeling. And even if we don’t feel touched we are. We are moved to the depths so that “all things, therefore, are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him (Hopkins V, 346).

I want to get the succor for myself and for the suffering and so drawn to these questions like in K where life has proved that romance is not the proper term for poet, but suffering is, and not just the poet, for all who stand in for the rest as more conscious of self, of a higher pitch, says Hopkins, of determination, so that “when I was a child I used to think, ask myself, what must it be to be someone else?’ (Hopkins 349), and this exploration of the vagus nerve consumes the lot of that thought at two years old in Hopkins world, “myself being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, so that I taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things.’

This knowing comes manifestly after the fact, after all pain, the feeling gone and seen abstract “is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor and is incommunicable by any means to another” Hopkins 349). For it’s just like what he has been saying or will say about the finger, as what Zhuangzi says about the horse, that ‘now if it, or he, has the same intimate feeling, consciousness of all that goes on in me as I have of what goes on in my finger’ (Hopkins 353), and ‘I am compounded only with him and that by no choice of mine,…this law of his being is unlike mine…for whatever can with truth be called a self, as persons must be…is part of this world of objects, this object world as much as one’s own body, and feels and acts in the center of reference of concentric circles around it, where outside of it nothing begins from one side and ends from the other (Hopkins 353-4), this much selected mash of Hopkins leads to the window and the air, the eye and the me, where the windowpane is me and not me and the self a circumference and the fiefdom a field.

I have seen this window and in looking in and out of it have had this moment I escape before the border is closed. Trees grow in the window glass and notes on the window panes reflect / What eye actually sees, ear hears of multitudes, the window pane of all reflection, another face singing without bodies. Saxophones against the glass shut the window and to your chamber go.

To travel thence, to hear a listening ear what none can say before the windows of the mind you know, what faces are behind, passengers or refugees, to speak the largest class, imbuement covered points of light before a thousand amenities against the window glass with alms that intervene, time traveler can't remember much. The belt of sunlight, bands of light, answers to prayers before they prayed, to wake interstices down labyrinths and fill the eyes to heal.

And all this comes in the SELVING of the aliquid eius where ‘incompatible frames of being exist together or are together (Hopkins 356) inset and outset that include all things,” but, and this is the crux, “the self of the universal is not the self of anything else,…that is, there is no such universal....for either it is selfless or a true self.” This takes us into another, which admittedly neither Hopkins says or Loyola but we are compelled, for the world then is word, expression and, the utterance of God analogous to the utterance that results in the Word one meets in and through the world that must be succored for the Diapsalmata originary cry of creation, the groan that cannot be uttered.

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