…Build Comfortable Walls Against the Wilderness.” This quip from poet Conrad Aiken has captivated me for decades now as his work and that of other poets continue to erode my “comfortable walls.”

I was born into poetry but the hyper-conservative, linear-thinking community in which I found myself disallowed any consideration of a nuanced way of perceiving and organizing my world.  That is not to assign blame; if I had to assign blame, I would have to blame myself for lamely imbibing into the depths of my heart the world view and experience that was proffered me; I did not even try to find my own voice. I desperately felt the need to fit in, to belong, which is a very human “need.” But my desperation to obtain this belonging-ness probably created a sense of dis-ease with many of my classmates.  Decades later I would learn the label for this existential malaise was “alienation.” 

But in the mid-eighties, the breath of life breached my endungeoned heart when a friend gave me a copy of W. H. Auden poetry and I fell upon a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  I have quoted Kafka on the resulting experience often before, citing his note that literature is like a pick-axe that “fractures the frozen sea within.”  And that “fracturing” of my soul was painful, and continues to be…and will always be…as the “einfall” of Carl Jung will often be. (Jung employed the German term for an irruption into a person’s psyche of what had been excluded.)

Language is not static…though static hearts can attempt to “static” it, or “staticize” it, and often succeed at least temporarily.  But poetry, or some visit from the arts, will often breach the walls of the stale prison of thinking inside a bubble, even if the bubble is inside one’s own head!  But when the bubble takes place in a group, the value of language itself is threatened as words will be used merely for perpetuating group think and the language itself will die spiritually. Here is a poem by an Irish poet, W. R. Rodgers that addresses this issue and poignantly notes the “death” that hides in a sterile language. 

WORDS (an excerpt) 

By W. R. Rodgers 

Once words were unthinking things, signaling 

Artlessly the heart’s secret screech or roar, 

Its foremost ardour or its farthest wish, 

Its actual ache or naked rancour. 

And once they were the gangways for anger, 

Overriding the minds qualms and quagmires. 

Wires that through weary miles of slow surmise 

Carried the feverish message of fact 

In their effortless core.  Once they were these, 

But now they are the life-like skins and screens 

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae, 

To terrify or tame, cynical shows 

Meant only to deter or draw men on, 

The tricks and tags of every demagogue, 

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys, 

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells 

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep 

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.