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George Bowering
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The Holy Life of the Intellect
I believe that the human intellect is the closest thing we have to the
divine. It is the way we can join one another in spirit.
Sometimes when you are listening to a great jazz musician performing a long
solo, you are experiencing his mind, moment by moment, as it shifts and decides,
as it adds and reminds. This happens whether the player is a saxophone player or
a bass player or a pianist. You are in there, where that other mind is. His mind
is coming through your ears and inside your mind.
The first time I heard Charlie Parker playing “Ornithology” I was delighted. I
was about 11 years old. You are so much alone with your mind as a kid, so when
you hear someone else’s mind improvising, you feel an excitement you will never
get from some music that just wants to keep a steady beat.
I got that delight again when I first heard great improvisatory poetry. When I
read “The Desert Music” by William Carlos Williams, the book fell out of my
hands and made a loud splat on the library’s concrete floor. Later I would hear
the poet Philip Whalen call this kind of poetry “a graph of the mind moving.”
Yes, it is.
It can happen with prose, too, sentences you hear in your head and know how they
felt inside another’s. I believe that if there is a god, this is what he wanted
us to do. It is the holy life of the intellect.
If we can experience another’s mind in our own, we know that love is possible.
We understand why the great poet Shelley wrote a poem to what he called
“Intellectual Beauty,” and called it an invisible power that moves among the
things and people of this earth.
It descended on him when he was a youth looking for wisdom from the words of the
dead. Intelligence literally means “choosing among.” Shelley called it the
spirit of delight. It is the gift of wit, which literally means the kind of
seeing that makes you smile and clap your hands together. I believe that this
provokes what the Greeks called agape, the Romans called caritas, and what we
settled for as love. It’s greater than hope and faith, according to St. Paul of
Tarsus in an otherwise questionable letter to the Corinthians.
If you want to hear it happen rather than suffer any more of my apostolic prose,
listen to the improvisation by John Coltrane in his immortal album called “A
Love Supreme.” There we are: A fine intellect, a tenor saxophone and a reach for
perfect prayer.
George Bowering is Canada’s first poet laureate and the author of over 80
books. A native of British Columbia, he has worked as a professor, editor and
writer. In 2002, Bowering received the Order of Canada, the country’s highest
civilian honor.
This essay was produced by Anne Penman for the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
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