The River
John Senior on the necessity of poetic knowledge
I don’t have a Sunday homily today, so here’s a reflection that I hope is of some worth.
Remembering the Mississippi River of his childhood, T.S. Eliot writes, “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river/ Is a strong brown god…” Poetically, the river represents a boundary. Confronting bridge-builders, it flows wild and untamed even if a crossing is achieved, and as we hum over the span in our comfortable automobiles intent on commerce, the river flows on, unknowable.
The river “is within us,” writes Eliot. That which we choose to forget or ignore, perhaps because we could not master it, nevertheless moves in us. It flows and brings life and flood, empties and washes away. It carries life. Within us, it is the boundary principle, the unknowable self drifting along the threshold. Occasionally, a mystic or a poet dives in and returns to attempt to tell the tale. Often, we only know of its presence by the broken shells and whalebones washed ashore, the watery wind that cuts like a knife, the unease within of knowing that we are made for a great destiny but, in order to achieve it, must sacrifice everything.
In his essay “The Last Epistle,” John Senior references the conundrum of Heraclitus, who understood that the flow of the river, or the flow of time and experience, means that every moment slips away from us and, in doing so, reality itself slips away. What then of knowledge? Real thing (the res) is lost in the current, swept away beyond our ability to analyze, and the phenomena we experience are but passing indications of reality. Senior points out that “trees and rocks are just slow rivers.” In other words, even what we assume to be stable phenomena only grant the flux. But we want more. We want to know things, to know them as God created them, and to know our selves.
Senior references the parable of the Master and his Vineyard. The Master leaves behind his tenants and goes on a journey into a foreign land. Those left behind keenly feel the Master’s absence. They feel they have lost knowledge of his presence.
Commenting on the parable, St. Ambrose notes that a verbal game is being played in the parable, because the Master – understanding him to be Our Lord and understanding that we are the tenants of the Vineyard – is not actually moving from place to place. We feel him as a departing river, but in fact the river is within us. God is not in flux. We are. If the Master seems to be absent and we struggle for knowledge of him, it’s because of a lack within us, something unsettled in our souls. There is something missing that causes a disconnect from his presence.
The problem, Senior says, is not the flow of time itself, the fact of the river within us. To exist in time is to be human. The problem isn’t that everything changes and we only know the world through surface, sensible phenomena. After all, those very same sensible phenomena are reflections of their Creator. The problem is that we get stuck at the surface. The issue is that we don’t know the river “as a lover does.”
Senior offers an explanatory example that, as a Missourian, is close to my heart. “Heraclitus,” he writes, can propose his experiment to “urban and suburban university students with no experience of rivers,” and they are “easily convinced.” Try the same explanation on Huck Finn, though. Tell him the river cannot be touched twice and thus is incapable of experiment and unknowable to scientific knowledge and conclude that the river might not even be real because we’re stuck at the surface. Point to the water while explain, to the very same Mississippi River that “held Huck in its arms, taught him to talk and swim, terrified him in anger, cooled him in the heat of day, and on starlit nights showed him the skirts of angels.”
Huck Finn knows the river is real.
He has a different sort of knowledge of the river that allows him to break through the phenomena into the heart of it, the reality of the water. He does not need to do an experiment. He does not need a mathematical proof. For him, the Master is still home.
Whether Huck Finn knows it or not, he is a student of the poetic, and the poetic is knowledge of the real. It imparts zeal through attentiveness, like a lover watching and waiting for the arrival of the beloved. Huck Finn loves the River. This is why he knows its depths.
A quick aside on poetic knowledge, and hopefully the example we just went through makes this clear. A vast majority of people have become convinced, probably by some twisted modernist academic approach to knowledge, that the poetic is the domain of an elite few poets and artistic types who “get it.” In fact, quite the opposite is true. Poetic knowledge is for everyone, and its main principle is that of Cicero, “De gustibus non est disputandum / There is no arguing about taste.” Poetic knowledge begins with a simple question – did I like it?
Did I like the way that poem sounded?
Did the image it brought to mind please me?
Is this mountaintop view inspiring?
Does the river water feel cool on my skin and the sun pleasantly warm?
After hearing that song, do I want to listen again?
After finishing the novel, does it feel as though something has shifted inside of me?
These first stirrings of beauty and desire are the stirrings of love, and the stirrings of love are the beginning of knowledge. It begins in the heart, not in an intellectual formula. Now, not all things are worth loving, and sometimes that which is worth loving must be contended and struggled for, so we must be wise and we must do our homework but, suffice it to say here, we are made by our Creator for the very purpose of tilting at windmills. We are made to craft our little rickety rafts and push off into the swift current of the river. This is the romance of knowledge.
Jump in. St. Peter did. It was a reckless act, to be sure, but he leapt because he had knowledge of who was in the water, the One he loved who was already buried in those baptismal depths.
The poetic is not merely a means of expression. Beauty is not an extra. It is knowledge that arises in the imagination and memory, transformed by love.
And so we take the river into our very selves and suffer it to work in us. It runs over, floods the shore, and as the prophet Ezekiel saw, becomes the mother of a fruiting paradise. Plenitude overwhelms the boundary, and this we must risk.
And so T.S. Eliot asks Our Lady to pray for us and all who go upon the waters: “Fare forward, voyagers.”