Baccalaureate Address
Jonathan Scott Lee, Department of Philosophy
Listening for . . .
“This World Which Is Made of Our Love for Emptiness”
Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
this place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.
The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece
of straw
blown off into emptiness.
These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
existence, emptiness, mountain, straw: words
and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.
Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273)—translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne.
Graduating seniors of the class of 2009, loving families and devoted friends, Dean Ashley, distinguished colleagues, members of the Board of Trustees, President Celeste, warmly welcomed guests, and all those present who know themselves to be philosopher-poets or poet-philosophers, I am deeply touched and honored to have been chosen to speak to you this afternoon. In all my years of teaching, I have never been as fond of a class as I have been of this class, and I am very moved to stand before you today. I want to especially thank Val Mackinnon for her warm words of introduction and Ella Street for her poet’s voice.
For each and every one of you, this is a time of transition. Every address at every graduation or commencement ceremony that any of you have ever heard—and, surely, every such speech that has been or will be delivered on such an occasion—has made a point of stressing the transitional character of this moment. Often, the theme of transition is worked out in a metaphor, that of the threshold: you are now crossing a threshold, one foot in the past, one foot in the future. You are leaving behind the familiar, if not always comfortable, room of your life as a student at Colorado College, and you are—maybe exuberantly, maybe tentatively—stepping into that still unfamiliar new room in which you will make a new life, a life that is still largely unknown and even unknowable.
It is this moment of transition that the poet Rumi addresses in the poem you heard a few minutes ago, although—as a great poet and a great thinker—Rumi’s words force us to think a little more deeply about this moment, about this “here-and-now.”
Rumi is said to be the best-selling poet in the United States, but perhaps I should say a word or two about him. Rumi was born in 1207 in the borderlands between what is now Iran and Afghanistan, in the heart of a rich culture steeped in the Persian language and in a variety of forms of Islam. Then, as now, this region suffered from political instability and from waves of unpredictable and savage violence, forcing Rumi’s family to move west across the vast expanses of northern Iran, eventually settling in what is now central Turkey. Here Rumi spent the rest of his life as a revered Muslim spiritual teacher and as a mystical poet of extraordinary passion and philosophical insight.
Let us come back, now, to this moment, to this threshold-instant each of you is experiencing in some way. What Rumi suggests is that you are each experiencing the shadow play of existence and emptiness, the back-and-forth of presence and absence, the sudden shift—as swift as “one swing of the arm”—from the reassuring certainties of yesterday and today to the cold terror of tomorrow.
Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
this place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!
At first, I think, there is something a little disconcerting, a little unsettling, about Rumi’s insistence here on emptiness: what is it about this play of existence and emptiness that calls for our praise? Rumi’s answer to this question is, of course, very simple: it is in emptiness, in the uncertainty of that step across the threshold into the future, that we first find and feel and test our genuine, spiritual freedom.
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.
The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece
of straw
blown off into emptiness.
If you pause for just a moment, letting all the buzz and confusion of these last few days and weeks slip away, don’t you find that your experience, no matter how unsettling it is—both joyous and terrifying—don’t you find that your experience is, quite precisely, the experience of the radical openness, the complete indeterminacy of your freedom? You no longer have to do what you have done. You no longer have to think or believe or act as you have had to think or believe or act. You really are free, and your freedom is your experience of emptiness in Rumi’s sense.
I would now like to ask you all to join me in a little experiment, an experiment in “listening for . . . .” (If hearing is not your strongest sense, please think of “listening” as a metaphor for any mode of sense-perception that you prefer: after all, you are free.) So, here is the experiment: for a few moments, let us all settle into a comfortable position, fall into silence, and simply listen. Try not to worry about what exactly it is that you are hearing—or perceiving in any other way—try not to be concerned with the what it is that you are listening to and simply listen for . . . .
(Pause.)
Thank you. I cannot know what any one of you might have heard or sensed or how you might have heard it, nor can any one of us know this about anyone else’s experience. I do know, however, that if you were able to listen past the shuffle of a thousand bodies in this glorious space, to listen past the mechanical and electrical hums and clinks and whirs that constitute the background of our lives, if you were able to listen past the occasional reminders that there is a bustling world beyond this chapel of stone and glass, you just might have caught the slightest echo of what really cannot be heard, something like the afterglow harmonics of that emptiness of which Rumi speaks.
It is alright, of course, if you’re not sure you heard any such thing, but I want to suggest that there is a real value in trying to “listen for” what cannot be “listened to.” Each of you is now about to go out into the world, armed with a vast array of kinds of knowledge and varieties of skill. Each of you is graduating having completed at least one major course of study, and my colleagues and I have done all we could to nurture in you both a competence in the discipline of your choice and a broader love for the form of life that this discipline represents. Now, I certainly do not want to disparage any of the work that you have done here at the College, nor do I want to question the value of the reading and writing, the conversing and thinking, that we have done together over these past four years. Nevertheless, at this moment of your setting foot across the threshold into the unknown future, let me urge you to forget what you have learned just long enough to experience precisely the unknowability of your future. For it is in the radical openness—call it “emptiness”—of your future that you will find the special challenges and unique opportunities that will give your life its meaning.
Please bear with me: I would like to ask you to join me in another experiment, an encounter with another dimension of the emptiness of which Rumi speaks. I would like you to turn to the person beside you—friend or classmate, family member or stranger, they are in this moment your neighbor. So, please turn to your neighbor and simply see them. (Again, if seeing is not your strongest sense, think of “seeing” as a metaphor for any other way of sensing their presence.) Try to let slip away everything you might know about your neighbor, every category to which she might be assigned, every description that might fit him. Practicing this discipline of unlearning what you know, simply experience your neighbor with the eyes of unknowing.
(Pause.)
Thank you. I realize that this experiment was probably almost impossible in the context of this moment, this place, this day. Such an experiment might simply be impossible to do “on command,” so to speak, at any time. But haven’t you each, at least occasionally, experienced someone in this profoundly unconditioned way? Haven’t there been moments when the absolute mystery of another person has overwhelmed you, when the “otherness” of the other has been so striking that nothing you could say about them could possibly capture or reflect who they were?
This very simple—and yet so very difficult—experience of another human being lies at the heart of the work of the great Lithuanian-born, French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. Himself a survivor of the Nazi death camps, Levinas movingly describes what it is to experience a human face. “Prior to any particular expression,” he writes, “and beneath all particular expressions, which cover over and protect with an immediately adopted face or countenance, there is the nakedness and destitution of the expression as such, that is to say extreme exposure, defencelessness, vulnerability itself.” It is this vulnerability, Levinas insists, that makes the other person my “neighbor,” and it is this vulnerability—this always present possibility of suffering registered in every human face, if only we can set aside everything that we know—it is this vulnerability that, Levinas says, “. . . summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question.” *
Bringing our two experiments together, then, I want to suggest that “listening for” the emptiness that cannot be heard and experiencing the sheer vulnerability of our neighbor are really two paths towards the same end: Rumi and Levinas are each trying to capture in words what cannot be captured in words, each is trying to say the unsayable, and this is—perhaps—where the poet and the philosopher most surely meet.
But I think that something like this is what each and every one of us is doing throughout our lives. Whether you are trying to decode the mysteries of the genome or to comprehend the even deeper mysteries of the economy or to master the subtleties of the use of the subjunctive in Italian, you are trying to open up the possibility of encountering something new, something heretofore simply indescribable. Whether we think of our lives as devoted to discovery or to creation, we are—in truth—devoting ourselves to the ultimate mystery, what Rumi calls “emptiness” and Levinas describes as “responsibility.”
As you make that step over the threshold into your future in this moment of transition, I hope you will also pause to experience the mystery of this moment. Thus far, I have echoed Rumi and Levinas, stressing that the path to such an experience demands a kind of unlearning or even forgetting of what you know. There are ways in which everything you have achieved at Colorado College, everything you have gained, can seem an obstacle to getting in touch with the deepest reality of the world and of the neighbor. I suspect we have all had the experience at least once in a while of losing sight of why we are doing what we do as we immerse ourselves in the details of doing what we do, the what and the how. And I hope, if nothing else, that my remarks this afternoon might encourage us all to recall precisely what it is that is most important in our lives.
At the same time, I want to encourage you to remember that the discipline you have come to call your own—even if it can sometimes be an obstacle—is also your very best means for trying to say in your own way what cannot be said. Rumi and Levinas both are too hard on words—or concepts or theories—for it is only through our language and through the practice of our disciplines that we can hope to encounter what matters most to us. This, I think, is the fundamental lesson of the second poem to which we listened earlier. Lorine Niedecker was born, lived much of her life, and died on Black Hawk Island—an island in the midst of Lake Koshkonong in southeastern Wisconsin. Although she briefly attended Beloit College in the 1920s and eventually came to know some of the most important American and English poets of the 20th century, Niedecker spent most of her adult years working in a local hospital cleaning the kitchen and scrubbing floors, while writing poems of deep sensitivity and clear-eyed observation. I have asked Ella Street to read to us one more time “My Life by Water,” one of Niedecker’s last poems.
“My Life by Water”
My life
by water—
Hear
spring’s
first frog
or board
out on the cold
ground
giving
Muskrats
gnawing
doors
to wild green
arts and letters
Rabbits
raided
my lettuce
One boat
two—
pointed toward
my shore
thru birdstart
wingdrip
weed-drift
of the soft
and serious—
Water
Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970)
It is, of course, a moment of transition that Niedecker marks in the poem you have just heard: in this case, the coming of spring. And it is, as well, scattered moments of “listening for” that give the poem its shape: the poet’s “life by water” is punctuated by the sounds of a frog, of muskrats, of rabbits, of a board, and of boats. These moments of listening, these signals of transition, are each described in simple, almost prosaic language. Yet this is all something of a set-up: in her final lines, Niedecker jolts us out of our ordinary existence and familiar expectations with words both plain and yet magically mysterious, and in doing so she encourages us to believe that it really is possible to say what cannot be said.
Listen:
thru birdstart
Listen:
Wingdrip
Listen:
weed-drift
of the soft
and serious—
Water
There could be no better way to suggest the deepest mysteries opened up by the here-and-now than by such words, so familiar and yet so strange. Niedecker demonstrates in her writing that the most familiar tools of our disciplines always retain the power to spark the imagination, so long as we remain open to the indeterminacy of that experience that I have characterized as “listening for . . . .”
In the same way, the patterns of movement that you develop as you choreograph a dance open up a world of perception and thought that might not even have been possible until the dance made it real. In the same way, the simple steps you take as you work out a complex proof of a new mathematical theorem serve to articulate a kind of reality that was simply inconceivable until your proof revealed it.
In the hope that this here-and-now of your moment of transition might retain its warm familiarity and, in the same moment, might overcome you with its fundamental strangeness,
in the faith that this experience of the strange/familiar and the familiar/strange can serve as an inspiration throughout our lives,
and in the love born in the experience of something like the emptiness of which Rumi speaks and nurtured in the disciplined life of the path that you have chosen as your calling,
in this hope and this faith and this love,
I want to thank you for taking this time to listen.
Thank you.