"the exact temperature of a hand": Melissa Kwasny and the Mystical Imagination

Rusty Morrison

Henry Corbin, whose writings have illuminated the Sufi tradition for the western mind, states that the symbolic image “announces a plane of consciousness distinct from rational evidence; it is the 'cipher' of a mystery.” A number of women writing poems today are able to manifest that “cipher,” that zero, that code which allows us to access mystery, without attempting to de-cipher it, or bring it back to materialistic logic. Melissa Kwasny’s poetry is an excellent example of how a writer can use image to extend her awareness—to move outward, using image as cipher, beyond the parameters of the known.

Corbin claims that when we access the imaginal, we can experience an “articulation between the intellect and sense,” a mediation between the abstract and the world of appearances, between the mystical and the material. Tom Cheetham—another scholar of the imaginal—expresses this as the domain “between the purely physical and the purely spiritual” (Cheetham 100). Cheetham asserts that “the function of poesis, whether musical, poetic, religious, or scientific, is the creation and revelation of spaces: qualitative, complex and complexified, personified spaces.” And he discusses “poesis” as encouraging “the passionate imagination of connections between ourselves and those ‘real presences’ that lie beyond the merely human world” (26). 

In her book The Nine Senses, Melissa Kwasny is particularly adept at exercising a reader’s ability to use the senses to seek more than what is most commonly available to us. In accord with Cheetham’s speculation, Kwasny uses image to open, within the poem, a fertile space between the knowable material of our existence and what is unknown and perhaps unknowable. One might call it an intuition of spirit, or a sense of presence beyond our understanding, which arrives, however fleetingly or illogically, through access to the imaginal as perceived with the senses. How many senses remains an open question.

Most significantly, it is in responding to the natural world—where animal, vegetable, and/or mineral existence still enliven this planet—that Kwasny finds this interface most viable, most essential, and most fraught. And it is to the natural world that she returns again and again, as her images put pressure on the personal and cultural beliefs that normally guide and limit our understanding. For example, in the poem “Red Moon,” she considers one of our common euphemisms for the catastrophic impact of technologies on our planet’s atmosphere: “global warming.” She suggests:

We choose the word warming, so that we don’t have to use the 
word threat. Which is incandescent this evening, yellow as a 
sulphur’s wing. The flicker of a living creek through foliage.

Kwasny juxtaposes how we can be numb to our denial and to the beauty surrounding us in our crisis-filled present, and thus shows us that there is always more available to us in our experiences. As Gilles Deleuze suggests, we can experience “a sum but not a whole … Nature is not attributive but rather conjunctive: it expresses itself through ‘and’” (Deleuze 267). “Nature”—which the dictionary defines as all the phenomena of the physical world—offers us the essence of a radical continuity, an “andness,” which is constantly offering us insights outside of the lockstep of our normative logic. 
In seeking to embrace this “andness,” Kwasny nonetheless remains keenly aware of the fallibility of our subjective experience, how the limits of our culturally-inscribed perceptual interpretations lock us out of experiencing nature’s otherness. 

As she tells us in her poem “Talk to the Milkweed Pod”:

The ditch is filled with milkweed, Wind is tugging hard. 
The rain is warm, a plant warmth, an ideal. Can I join them? 
Can I open the trapdoor, a patch made of grass slats, with a 
rope—which is the wind—to hoist it? No time to be sacred.

Here is Kwasny’s poignant paradox: On the one hand, she holds in mind “an ideal,” “the plant warmth,” a sense of kinship to the natural world, and it is from such ideals that we create a sense of the “sacred.” But she senses, too, that ideas from our past experience of “the ideal” and the “sacred” actually can come between us and what is happening in the moment. We lose the moment’s otherness, we fall away from our actual experience, if we think too hard. Yet, on the other hand, we do need our mental constructs to call back previous experiences, in the hopes of building a kinship with that sense of otherness, of sacredness. 

Useful as it may be, a mental construct can only be an approximation—a representation held in mind—which is, by the nature of mind, divided from actual experience. This division, created by our yearning to know and to be in union with the natural world, cannot be escaped. Georges Bataille deftly points out how different we are, as thinking beings, from the non-human beings who live in an unmediated state, when he describes animal existence as being “in the world like water in water” (Batailles 23). Of course, the history of our differentiation as thinking beings from non-human beings is the history of the development of human consciousness. As Cheetham explains, “you can analyze the Neolithic transition in terms of a kind of disjunction between humans and nature" (Cheetham 2). 
Yet, as Cheetham and Kwasny would agree, it is this very differentiation—this very ability to continually form an internal image of what is outside our consciousness—that allows us to marvel at the natural world’s mystery, and to manifest that sense of marvel, that sense of awe, in poems. And it is in using the image, sometimes in unexpected ways, to examine the differentiation between 
human and nature, self and other, which allows the poet to further extend the shifting boundary of what remains outside our comprehension. 

In Kwasny’s poetry, the next image will allow us to hear a possibility offered from her own intuitive experience, implausible as it might first appear. Yet, that next sentence’s improbability is a lesson in opening ourselves to the audacious, disquieting, reconstituting possibility of the imaginal in our own experience. Cheetham, using Corbin’s terminology, calls this the “mundus imaginalis (the imaginalworld), to underscore the fact that it is not imaginary, not unreal” (Cheetham 3).

Kwasny begins The Nine Senses with a poem that enacts this awareness of the imaginal as a shifting boundary, which is also a conduit to what can be sensed outside our materialist logic. In it, she begins by offering an example of the kind of fixed ideas that we use to label and organize our world. Such ideas have their uses, but can too easily limit our intuition of what we might find if we heighten our attention to actual experience. The poem’s title, “The Language of Flowers,” alludes to a Persian system popular in the 1900s in Europe for assigning attributes to each type of flower. Of course, our human desire to create fixed referents with attributable meanings or allegoric labels is understandable. We name and use the name’s concomitant associations to navigate the otherwise incomprehensible experiences of our lives. Kwasny respects our longing to qualify what we know, and who we know, even as she lets us see that these meanings we hold are as ephemeral as the budding and seeding and decline of the flowers themselves. Yet, in any moment, these meanings seem as resonantly real to us as a beloved. Kwasny speaks to the flowers of this poem as one might to a lover, with directness and desire: 

I wish you were here on my arm. 
I wish I could crawl beneath your sheets. 
My Poppy. My Tulip Tree. My Sweet Basil. 

Is this her lover, named as flower, or is she responding to the flower as a lover? Whichever way we read it, Kwasny calls attention to the customary and yet limiting method of naming what we love with a label from our past experience. 
The poem continues:

You are what I used to dream of as a child, 
what my mother did, not so much a dress as 
its fabric, pink dotted swiss, a white voile shirt 
with French cuffs. Tell me your name, what you 
seek, and to what you aspire. I will mount a 
campaign for your world. Magnolia, cloudy and thick,
each petal the exact temperature of a hand.

Here, the flower is not perceived as a dress from her childhood, whole and complete, but as what she dreamed of that dress—its textural elements and design. These would be most alive to a child: the fabric, its colors and qualities, the aspects most closely observed by the senses, rather than their usefulness as a dress, a covering, societally correct. As intimate as this connection seems, we sense that it is devoid of the flower’s actual presence, its otherness. And it is at this moment that the speaker, with all of her memories and preconceptions exposed, suddenly asks the flower “Tell me your name.” She senses that she does not know it; the word “poppy” isn’t its name, but merely the accepted name that her language has given it. How childlike is the notion that the speaker can “mount a campaign” for the flower, for its needs and aspirations. I am reminded of all the well-intentioned attempts in books and films to bring more understanding of the natural world into our culture. We can hear in her tone, and in the word “campaign,” that she is chiding herself, even as she is suggesting, desiring this course of action. Thus, the desire stands: To offer to the flower what we would want if we were in its place, what we think it would want. What else can we do in order to welcome a guest, to make a friend of a stranger? Yet there’s more in this: the speaker wants to “campaign for your [the flower’s] world”: not simply welcome the otherness into her human world, but somehow make room in our human world for its world to enter. She asks questions of the flower, and it makes us laugh, yet we have to laugh with recognition. The speaker queries the flower with the only language she has. Which, we implicitly understand, is indecipherable to the flower. Or is it? The magnolia’s petals are the “exact temperature of a hand.” Are we tempted to believe a relation, a kind of understanding, that passes between the flower and the hand? Through touch? Is that “exact[ness]” of temperature a shared language? 

When a poetic image invokes such questions, the mundus imaginalis, mediates between what one might call a physical and metaphysical accounting of our perceptions—if one wants to use such polarizing labels. But rather than focusing on the differences that such labels connote, in Kwasny’s poems we attend to a surprising continuum within experience between what Cheetham calls “the purely physical and purely spiritual" (Cheetham 39). For Kwasny, as for other poets who engage the mystical imagination, the image is constantly reforming a meaning of vision, a measure of the field of perception. We are offered a clairvoyance that glimpses what Deleuze calls the “Harlequin’s cloak” of nature, made of “solid patches and empty spaces,” “plentitude and void, beings and nonbeings, with each one of the two posing as unlimited while limiting the other,” an “addition of indivisibles" (Deleuze 267).  

In the image, all sensations—call their arrival physical or metaphysical—are intensified, even those which common logic proscribes. Testing the proscriptions in our preconceived notions is, of course, one of the primary aims of much innovative writing. But in each poet’s work, we ask ourselves, to what end? Kwasny seeks to enact what Cheetham proposes: in the imaginal space we “reclaim a sense of the substantial presence and concrete significance of human life,” finding more in the materiality of our world than our logic had previously allowed. When our attention is attuned by the imaginal, then “the dichotomy between substance and spirit collapses.” Thus we “avoid… the realist leveling of the cosmos proposed by literal science and literal religion" (Cheetham 26). Perhaps one of the most significant opportunities we gain from Kwasny’s images is to learn to ask more probing, more courageous questions of our own perceptions—to increase the space of possibility that our intellect inhabits.

Cheetham goes on to clarify that “[a]ll our imaginings are necessary. But none of them should be grasped too tightly, none of them taken too literally" (26-27). For Cheetham, no methodology, no hierarchy of understanding, no scientific truth, no poem’s revelation, should be held as sacrosanct, no matter how inspired it may seem at its inception. In Kwasny’s work, we experience not only how a poet uses image to open intuitions outside her normal ken, but also how a poet demonstrates the freedom, the spaciousness, to question the turns of awareness that the images have suggested to her. I recall the writings of I. Rice Pereira, an American artist known for her work as an abstract expressionist. She tells us “life is the unknown essence concealed in the space which supports it" (Pereira 3). Kwasny does not suggest that she can make that essence knowable; rather she offers a sense of space in which mystery comes sensually alive to us. 

 
                                        Works Cited
 
Bataille, Georges, trans. Robert Hurley. Theory of Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1992.
 
Cheetham, Tom. Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.
 
Deleuze, Gilles, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
 
Kwasny, Melissa. The Nine Senses. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2011.
 
Pereira, I. Rice. The Nature of Space: A Metaphysical and Aesthetic Inquiry. New York: Privately Published, 1956.