Silence, the Word and the Sacred

By Wilfrid Laurier University Press

The result of a dialogue between poets and scholars on the meaning and making of the sacred, this book endeavours to determine how the sacred emerges in sacred script as well as in poetic discourse. It ranges through scholarship in areas as apparently disparate as postmodernism and Buddhism. The perspectives developed are various and without closure, locating the sacred in modes as diverse as patristic traditions, feminist retranslations of biblical texts, and oral and written versions of documents from the world’s religions. The essays cohere in their preoccupation with the crucial role language plays in the creation of the sacred, particularly in the relation that language bears to silence. In their interplay, language does not silence silence by, rather, calls the other as sacred into articulate existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9780889205246

Book preview

SILENCE,

THE WORD

AND THE

SACRED

Edited by

E. D. Blodgett and H. G. Coward

The result of a dialogue between poets and scholars on the meaning and making of the sacred, this book endeavours to determine how the sacred emerges in sacred script as well as in poetic discourse. It ranges through scholarship in areas as apparently disparate as postmodernism and Buddhism. The perspectives developed are various and without closure, locating the sacred in modes as diverse as patristic traditions, feminist retranslations of biblical texts, and oral and written versions of documents from the world's religions. The essays cohere in their preoccupation with the crucial role language plays in the creation of the sacred, particularly in the relation that language bears to silence. In their interplay, language does not silence silence but, rather, calls the other as sacred into articulate existence.

E. D. Blodgett is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

H. G. Coward is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of The Calgary Institute for the Humanities, The University of Calgary.

SILENCE, THE WORD

AND THE SACRED

Edited by

E. D. Blodgett and H. G. Coward

Essays by

Rudy Wiebe    Joseph Epes Brown

Robin Blaser    Monique Dumais

Smaro Kamboureli    David Goa

Doug Jones    Ronald Bond

Stanley Hopper    David Atkinson

Harold Coward    E. D. Blodgett

Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

for The Calgary Institute for the Humanities

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

Silence, the word and the sacred

Papers presented at the conference, Silence,

the Sacred and the Word, held in Calgary, Alta.,

Oct. 2-5, 1986.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-88920-981-2

1. Holy, The in literature – Congresses.

2. Languages — Religious aspects — Congresses.

3. Silence – Religious aspects – Congresses.

4. Poetry – History and criticism – Congresses.

I. Wiebe, Rudy, 1934- . II. Blodgett, E. D.

(Edward Dickinson), 1935- . III. Coward, Harold G., 1936- . IV. Calgary Institute for the Humanities.

PN49.S55 1989    809'.9338    C89-094111-4

Copyright © 1989

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

N2L 3C5

89 90 91 92 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Vijen Vijendren

Printed in Canada

Silence, the Word and the Sacred has been produced from a manuscript supplied in camera-ready form by The Calgary Institute for the Humanities.

No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system, translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

About the Authors

Introduction

Notes

I

Experience of the Sacred by Poets and Writers

The Words of Silence: Past and Present

Rudy Wiebe, University of Alberta

Poetry and Positivisms: High-Muck-A-Muck or Spiritual Ketchup

Robin Blaser, Simon Fraser University

Notes

St. Teresa's Jouissance: Toward a Rhetoric of Reading the Sacred

Smaro Kamboureli, University of Manitoba

Notes

Notes on a Poetics of the Sacred

D. G. Jones, University of Sherbrooke

Notes

The Word as Symbol in Sacred Experience

Stanley Hopper, Emeritus Professor, Syracuse University

References

The Spiritual Power of Oral and Written Scripture

Harold Coward, University of Calgary

Notes

II

The Sacred Word in Specific Settings

Evoking the Sacred through Language, Metalanguage, and the Arts in Native American and Arctic Experience

Joseph Epes Brown, University of Montana

Notes

Le sacré et l' autre Parole : selon une voix feministe

Monique Dumais, Université du Québec à Rimouski

Notes

The Word that Transfigures

David J. Goa, Curator, Provincial Museum of Alberta

God's Back Parts: Silence and the Accommodating Word

Ronald Bond, University of Calgary

Notes

Fullness and Silence: Poetry and the Sacred Word

David W. Atkinson, University of Lethbridge

Notes

III

Conclusion

Sublations: Silence in Poetic and Sacred Discourse

E. D. Blodgett, University of Alberta

Notes

Index

FOREWORD

Established in 1976, the Calgary Institute for the Humanities has as its aim the fostering of advanced study and research in all areas of the humanities. Apart from supporting work in the traditional arts disciplines such as philosophy, history, ancient and modern languages and literatures, it also promotes research into the philosophical and historical aspects of the sciences, social sciences, fine arts, and the various professional disciplines.

The Institute's programs in support of advanced study attempt to provide scholars with time to carry out their work. In addition, the Institute sponsors formal and informal gatherings among people who share common interests, in order to promote intellectual dialogue and discussion. Recently, the Institute has moved to foster the application of humanistic knowledge to contemporary social problems.

The conference Silence, the Sacred and the Word, October 2-5, 1986, brought together Native people, creative writers of poetry and fiction, and scholars of sacred scriptures to examine the way in which words do or do not evoke the Transcendent. This study has theoretical importance for our understanding of much poetry as well as for our awareness of the nature and function of various scriptures in the lives of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Native peoples.

We wish to record here our gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Minister of Culture, the Province of Alberta; The Institute for New Interpretative Creative Activities, and the University of Calgary Special Projects Fund. Without the careful attention to detail of Gerry Dyer, the Institute Administrator, the Conference would not have been the success that it was.

H. G. Coward

Director

The Calgary Institute

for the Humanities

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

David Atkinson is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Lethbridge. He received his Ph. D. in English from the University of Calgary. Among his publications are: (editor) The World's Major Religions: A College Textbook, Edwin Mellen, 1987; Tagore and Gandhi: Visionaries of Modern India, Asian Research Inc., 1988; Selected Sermons of Zachary Boyd, Aberdeen University Press, 1988; "Zachary Boyd and the ars moriendi tradition," Scottish Literary History, Vol. 4 (May, 1977), 5-16; 'Thomas Cranmer's 'An exhortation against the feare of Death' and the tradition of the ars moriendi," Christianity and Literature, Vol. XXVII (Fall, 1977), 22-28; "Tradition and Transformation in R. K. Narayan's A Tiger For Malgudi," International Fiction Review, Vol. XIV, No. 1 (1987), 8-13.

Robin Blaser is Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University. He holds an M.A. and an M.L.S. from the University of California at Berkeley. His publications include six volumes of poetry and numerous essays. Among the essays are The Practice of Outside, an essay on the poetics of Jack Spicer, 1975; The Violets: Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead, in Process Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, (Spring, 1983) and in Line, no. 2 (Fall, 1983); 'Here Lies the Woodpecker Who Was Zeus,' an essay on Mary Butts, 1985; and Mind Canaries, an essay on Duchamp and the art of Chris Dikeakos, in Vancouver Art Gallery Catalogue, 1986.

E. D. Blodgett is Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Alberta. He holds a Ph. D. from Rutgers University. He was a Visiting Professor at the Université de Sherbrooke in 1979. He is the author of Configuration: Essays in the Canadian Literatures, Downsview: ECW Press, 1982; Alice Munro, Boston: O.K. Hall, Twayne Series, 1988; and with Roy Arthur Swanson, The Love Songs of the Carmina Burana, New York: Garland, The Garland Medieval Library, 1987. He has also published five books of poetry of which the latest is Musical Offering, Toronto: Coach House, 1986. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Ronald Bond is Associate Professor of English and Head of Department at the University of Calgary. He is the editor of Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570): A Critical Edition, University of Toronto Press, 1987 and a co-editor of The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, forthcoming. Other publications include "Vying with Vision: An Aspect of Envy in The Faerie Queene," Renaissance and Reformation, New Series 8/1 (1984), 30-38 and ' Dark Deeds Darkly Answered:' Thomas Becon's Homily Against Whoredom and Adultery, Its Contexts, and Its Affiliations with Three Shakespearian Plays, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 16/2 (1985), 191-205.

Joseph Epes Brown is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Montana. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Stockholm. He is the author of The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian: The Sacred Pipe, Penguin, 1978.

Harold Coward is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary and Director of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, University of Calgary. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from McMaster University. Among his publications are: Sphota Theory of Language, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980; Jung and Eastern Thought, Albany, New York: State University of New York, 1985; Pluralism: Challenge to World Religions, Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1985; Sacred Word and Sacred Text: Scripture in World Religions, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1988 and The Philosophy of Language, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Monique Dumais is Professor and Head of Department of Religious Studies at the University of Quebec at Rimouski. She received her Ph.D. in Theology from the Union Theological Seminary, New York. Her publications include Femmes faites chair, Lafemme, son corps, la religion, Elisabeth Lacelle, éd., Montréal, Bellarmin, 1983, pp. 52-70; La mère dans la société québécoise. Etude éthique d'un modèle à partir de deux journaux féministes: La Bonne Parole (1913-1958) et Les Têtes de Pioche (1976-1979), Les documents de l'ICRAF, no 5, Ottawa, ICRAF, 1983; Situations méconnues dans Louise Bourbonnais et Denise Robillard, Réactions et réflexions de Chrétiens d'ici à Jean-Paul II. Montréal, Fides, pp. 105-109, 1984; Les femmes dans la Bible. Expériences et interpellations, Montréal, Les Editions Paulines et Médiaspaul, 1985; Religion catholique et valeurs morales des femmes au Quebec au XXe siécle, Religion/Culture. Etudes canadiennes, Ottawa, Association des etudés canadiennes, volume VII, 1985, pp. 164-180.

David Goa is Curator of Folk Life at the Provincial Museum of Alberta. His publications include: Seasons of Celebration: Ritual in Eastern Christian Culture, Edmonton, Alberta: The Provincial Museum of Alberta, 1986; Dying and Rising in the Kingdom of God: The Ritual Incarnation of the 'Ultimate' in Eastern Christian Culture, Material History Bulletin, National Museum of Man, Ottawa, 1986; The Poetics of Everyday Life: A Critique, for The Cultural Life of East Central Alberta conference, March, 1985; The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Church, A Calendar of Festivals, and Hinduism in Canada, Canadian Encyclopedia, Edmonton, Alberta: Hurtig Publishers, 1985.

Stanley Hopper is Bishop W. Earl Leden Emeritus Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. He received his Ph.D. in Religion and Letters from Drew University. He holds honorary degrees from Allegheny College and Upsala College. His publications include: Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature of the Imagination, Harper, 1957; Exposition on the Book of Jeremiah, Interpreters Bible, Abingdon, 1963; Bibliography in Echoes of the Wordless Word, 1973; Ambiguity in Kierkegaard and Kafka in New Imago, 1976; co-editor, Interpretation: The Poetry of Meaning, Harcourt, 1978.

Douglas Jones, Professeur Titulaire, Department of English, Université de Sherbrooke, is the author of Frost on the Sun, Toronto: Contact Press, 1957; Sun is Axeman, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961; Phrases from Orpheus, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1967; Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970; (tr.) The Terror of the Snows, by P.M. Lapointe, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976; Under the Thunder, the Flowers Light Up the Earth, Toronto: Coach House, 1977; and A Throw of Particles, Toronto: General, 1983. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Smaro Kamboureli is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Victoria. She is the author of in the second person, Edmonton: Longspoon Press, 1985; A Window onto George Bowering's Fiction of Unrest, in Present Tense: A Critical Anthology, ed. by John Moss, Toronto: N.C. Press, 1985; "Locality as Writing: A Preface to the 'Preface' of Out of Place" Open Letter, 6, 2-3 (1985); and "Stealing the Text: George Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies, and Dennis Cooley's Bloody Jack" Canadian Literature, 114-115,1987. She co-edited visible visions: The Selected Poems of Douglas Barbour, Edmonton: NeWest, 1984, and A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, Edmonton: Longspoon and NeWest, 1986, and is contributor to the Feminist Companion in English Literature.

Rudy Wiebe, Professor of English at the University of Alberta, received the degree of Bachelor of Theology from the Mennonite Bible College and an M.A. from the University of Alberta. His publications include The Mad Trapper, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980; The Angel of the Tar Sands and Other Stories, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982; My Lovely Enemy, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983; A Voice in the Land, ed. by WJ. Keith, Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1981; War in the West, ed. with Bob Beal, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985.

INTRODUCTION

Daß, wenn die Stille kehrt, auch eine Sprache sei.¹

If to be human possesses a certain aret , surely that defining characteristic is the ability both to speak and to speak about the significance of speech. The continuous return to Plato's Phaedrus in contemporary philosophical discourse is only one of the many reminders of this fact. But such a specifically human property is to be understood as more than a fact. It is a condition and habit of our being. While it may be that thought is possible without the articulation of language, its social realization is perceptible only insofar as it may be organized as part of a system of signs. It may be possible to assert, then, that when we speak, therefore we are. And it is not only we who find our being there. The world too —as we know it—becomes what it is, reminding us of the singer in Wallace Stevens's poem, The Idea of Order at Key West:

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker.²

So the sea is realized in song, and so we sing, for no other reason than

The maker's rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

For what else evokes in us the sense of ourselves and of origins? Surely it is not [t]he meaningless plungings of water and the wind, for the discourse they possess does not appear, at least, to have the capability of self-explication, to translate itself into other discourse of the self. It is. It cannot transform itself and say, as the fine old Latin proverb declares, sum ut fiam. We are because of the self-transformatory character of the discourses with which we are engaged.

It should be said, then, the world for us is a discursive possibility, and the world in which we sing becomes world for us as it is given birth in language. To say as much, however, should not imply that what we call world is only a figment of a perfervid imagination, any more than that we are a figment of the real. For the world cannot be feigned, and to pretend as much would be the same as saying the world is only art, which is a mistake that some readings of Stevens are capable of making. The world is not other. We are the world in what appears to be a necessary realization through which the world utters itself, as Rilke puts it in his Ninth Duino Elegy:

Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar in uns zu erstehen?³

For David Bohm such a relation is expressed as one of implicit to explicit in which what we refer to as our or human consciousness is an enfolding of matter and world. What marks their relationship is the continuous movement between consciousness and world, each profoundly and mutually transforming the other. As each human being takes part in the process of this totality, he argues, he is fundamentally changed in the very activity in which his aim is to change that reality which is the content of his consciousness.⁴ So it is impossible to think the world as a human feigning, for each is part of the other. We are the world, then, as its consciousness, and both of us, one is summoned to say, are projections, to use Bohm's word, of some higher-dimensional reality, which we are given in the course of its unfolding to raise to consciousness.

An aspect of that raising (and the metaphor of raising, which itself implies a transcendent order and seems so natural after Rilke, is perhaps only valid as a cue) is the uttering of the implicit.

Unlike the languages that developed from Latin, consciousness does not for us connote conscience, suggesting that to be conscious is to raise perception to a higher level of perception in a movement analogous to a world rising within. We are, perhaps, wrong to use the metaphor rising, for it seems to suggest that the transcendent destroys a possibility of immanence. Let us say, then, that we cannot transcend (no climbing over, no transgression); let us say that if all relations are those of implicit and explicit, only immanence explains, that is, the dwelling within. This means that the sense of space that is required for the transcendent to have dimension is overcome. Consciousness cannot function standing apart, giving names to the other academically. Nor can it mean that words — the signs of consciousness — are not something over which we, the possessors and guardians of consciousness, are entirely in control. Words are, language and discourse are, a part of the world coming to be within us. Words and world are together a consdentia, a shared knowledge, and together they witness themselves as something conjoined.

All con-science has consequences, events that follow, that form another wholeness. One consequence would be that the world dwells within us in some final way. And we dwell in it, not as if we were sojourning upon a planet for a certain number of decades, but in it in a manner analogous to its dwelling in us. This does not mean that we humanize the world, for that would suggest a distance between consciousness and world sufficient to give us (the illusion of) power over the world. Rather, the immanence of consciousness with world is the condition of mutual transformation. The worst effect of such a transformation is the continuous destruction of world and, consequently, consciousness. Opposing this effect, in a relation that suggests Blake's contrarieties, is something more mysterious, for it is more difficult to know how world and consciousness continuously create themselves. They are contrarieties to the degree that both creation and destruction involve a kind of losing. The losing of destruction is one that removes from consciousness and world what they are. The losing of creation is a process of mutual surrender of difference to permit transformation, clearing a space for what Bohm calls the inception of new content.⁵

The world, then, speaks through us, and we through it, and to do so requires a certain sacrifice, each for the other becoming a kind of sacrificial victim, a hostia, that permits each to be host to the other. I want to suggest, however, more than what J. Hillis Miller argues in his discussion of the word parasite, where he points to the fact that there is no conceptual expression without figure, and no intertwining of concept and figure without an implied story, narrative, or myth.⁶ For hostia, while cognate with all the words derived from hospes, is derived from Osco-umbrian sakrim, which forms Latin sacer. Thus intimately woven into the sacred is a notion of giving up. It is a word, as Robin Blaser reminds us, that carries a double meaning, connoting something either criminal (cf. Virgil's auri sacra fames: accursed hunger for gold) or divine. It is not a word of moral dimension, but one that implies a giving over to the gods, whoever they are. Hence, we may consider the articulation of the world as a sacrificial act in which the word or discourse enters into the domain of the sacred. Certainly Miller would permit a reading of Stevens's phrase, ghostlier demarcations, as one consonant with a notion of host as derived from ghos-ti, but we would argue that the world as sea becomes sacred in the woman's song, having surrendered in its transformation to her voice.

But Stevens's poem suggests something further. He speaks of [tjhe water never formed to mind or voice/Like a body wholly body. True it is, as we are later told, that the sea possesses a dark voice, but the simile comparing the sea to a body reminds one of the silence of matter, world, and cosmos. This is the silence that discourse as sacrifice would redeem, permitting the world to find articulation. This is the kind of silence that persists within the sounds that nature makes, sounds which, as Rudy Wiebe evokes, define the surface of fundamental silence. Such silence remains at the core of what we have been calling world, and it is perceived everywhere in the things that surround us — not only objects made with human hands, but also trees, flowers, the sky, the ground. This world is only ours as it issues from silence into discourse, in a moment that we have described as sacred, in which world and word yield to each other.

These initial reflections are designed to give some sense of what we had in mind when this conference was designed. Our aim was to situate scholars and poets⁷ in a place that would facilitate the kind of exchange we sought, and unquestionably the genius loci, moved by centuries of native meditation, was a primary inspiration. Hence the conference began with a Stoney speaker, with the help of an interpreter, telling tales of the sacred from another culture. This was followed on the following morning by Rudy Wiebe's meditation on seven words for silence that begins in sound and concludes in writing. Easily demonstrating that the line separating poet from scholar is ghostlier than we might think, Robin Blaser and Smaro Kamboureli enter the personal world that Wiebe creates only to use the modernity of the scholarship to argue how much the sacred is intimately a part of who we are and our articulation of the world. Hence, poetry is a discourse of cosmos, suggesting that the cosmos is only voiced as poetry, and poetry only acquires voice as it becomes cosmos. It would appear that the impediment to the intercourse that poetry seeks with cosmos is God, and, as a consequence, Kamboureli argues that that only through writing in Derrida's sense can God be removed as a bar to the sacred. She does so by writing herself through the writing of St. Theresa, allowing her to discover that apostrophe, the trope of address and adversion, becomes the mode by which the sacred is preserved. And like those of Blaser and Wiebe, her discovery is one derived from personal experience with both the delights and the delusions of the sacred, marking the sacred as a function of the parole that each writer acquires as being in some way a hostia of the world.

So intimate are the sacred and discourse that D.G. Jones is prompted to assert that the eternity of the sacred is characterized by recurrence. It is, then, a convention, the form without which the poem would not acquire the shape of poetry. The form that enters difference becomes the palpable trace of the sacred, and at a certain point they become indistinguishable. One implicates the other, in Bohm's sense. But if absolute repetition becomes God (I am that I am) and absolute difference a Babel of angels and demons, their interrelation would seem to redeem them from themselves. Yet this is only metaphor, for language, finally, is where the sacred comes from. Thus the recurrent in discourse may be likened to a form of dance, which, Jones suggests, is the Tao of language, at least.

Providing the philosophical context of Jones's meditation on the dance of poetry,