Meditation at Lagunitas
There’s a poem in the next post down. Let me try to explain what I like about it.
I like the wry awareness of the first two lines, the way the second undercuts the first. The move lets me think that the speaker is aware of the potential for overstatement in summing up “all the new thinking.”
The poem goes on to fulfill the promise of the first two lines: it takes an idea as old, at least, as Plato and tries to connect that idea to the speaker’s own sense of loss. If the concepts by which we define things are applied to particular, specific objects, they lose their abstraction. Hass suggests that there must be distance between a word and what it describes, since words are attached to concepts rather than specific, particular objects.
The strange word in the poem is “numinous,” meaning “having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.” Rudolf Otto coined the word in the early twentieth century to describe religious experience, consisting in his definition of three components: mysterium tremendum et fascinans—(loosely) mystery, awe/terror, and fascination. The mystery is the experience of the “Wholly Other,” which seems relevant to the poem’s description of wonder and longing during sex.
This feeling of longing and mystery seems common, or at least not unique to Hass. But he puts it well with the phrase “Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.”
What does it mean for the body to be as numinous as words? If I believe Hass’s point about words, then words are numinous—they suggest and reveal a connection between the world of particulars and the world of concepts. If the body is numinous, then the body also provides this type of connection—our bodies can connect us to each other in a way that reveals not just the connection but also the distance between us, and reveals within that connection mystery and awfulness and awe.
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Addenda:
I cribbed the Rudolf Otto section on numinous from various web references about Otto’s work. Since I am completely ignorant of (among other things) latin, I did not notice that tremendum and fascinans are adjectives.
An earlier Robert Hass poem called “Spring” ends with a sentiment about the body similar to that which runs through “Meditation at Lagunitas.” That ending goes like this.
when I said, “The limits of my language
are the limits of my world,” you laughed.
We spoke all night in tongues,
in fingertips, in teeth.
