Abstract
Thinking and writing draw on those who have gone before, in a more than abstract way. In this article, I answer the call of one philosopher–Novalis, the early German Romantic–in the form of a séance, which is really a dialogue with the dead. I speak to him, as a Maori writer, about the abstract philosophical issues that Maori encounter and anticipate his responses and his thinking. I suspect Novalis would have taken delight in this sort of a-rational event, especially with his own tendency to focus on the supernatural and invisible realms. He revered the dead and darkness. He was an interdimensional communicator par excellence, and my aim in this article is to speculate alongside him and, as a Maori writer, form some productive ideas in community with him.
Introduction What I know is That to dialogue with a dead man, You have to die somehow – Learn the language of death, Or keep communion with the dead Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night Novalis
Introduction
Choosing to talk with a dead man, as Sallah suggests, has its risks. Yet, it is something we do immediately as we write. For the Maori writer, the backdrop of the so-called dead white male forms a conversation that we cannot ignore. He has structured the page, the manner of the ordering of things and events, even the very language most of us use; from the text, he continuously speaks. In turn, he has spoken with his ancestors, and so we are really speaking with a whole host of people, not just one. When we write, we are not merely in communion with the dead, as Sallah would have it; we are in community with them, always-already a part of them. Maori philosophy understands that call: now, we can answer directly if we want.
In this article, I answer the call of one such philosopher – Novalis, the early German Romantic – in a written séance, which is simply a more overt form of talking with the dead than inadvertently writing within their influence. I suspect Novalis would have taken delight in this sort of a-rational event, especially with his own tendency to focus on the supernatural and invisible realms. He revered the dead and darkness, played with literal shadows in his Märchen or fairytales, and deliberately cloaked his statements with the spectre of uncertainty: after all, ‘[i]t had become with him the most natural view to regard the commonest, nearest, as miraculous, and the strange, the supernatural, as something common’ (Hedge 1848: 490). Novalis was an interdimensional communicator par excellence, and my aim in this article is to speculate alongside him and, as a Maori writer, converse with him about some of the problems of our age.
Me: Let me begin, Novalis. There has to be a certain kind of arrogance among the living when they set out to summon the dead (and think they can ‘begin’). A further arrogance is the presumption that the dead are, in fact, not here anymore. Apparently, only the living are entitled to be present. Sitting around a table with others and calling out ‘is anybody there?’ is not the way to go, especially as you probably never went away at all. None of us expect great ectoplasmic displays, so let us not talk about summoning you – I will assume that you are here in some form or other and that we can talk, although sometimes unclearly because there is a gauze between us.
I have thought for a long time now that what we have taken for truth can be undone through a deliberate conversation with the dead. In traditional times with my people (and probably still to this day, in some instances), these deathly dialogues were hugely important. We can even see death when dusk sets in: the flashing in the horizon is the Goddess of Death, Hinenuitepo. She constantly calls to us by simply manifesting in that way and other ways. Truth lies in her sparkle as she calls us. And we see things in their reality when they pass away from our immediate sight, as she claims them.
Novalis: And so your Goddess continues to impinge on you all. Whenever you lot – who think you’re in the world of light, not the night – read us, you are performing a séance with us. We never completely went away. We claim you as well! Instead of leading your gaze to the meeting of surface and sky in the mode of your Goddess, though, we pique your interest through a different sort of guidance. We speak from the page, and ‘In manchen ältern Schriften klopft ein geheimnißvoller Pulsschlag und bezeichnet eine Berührungsstelle mit der unsichtbaren Welt–ein Lebendigwerden’ (Novalis 1960a: 276)/[In some older texts a pulsing beat reverberates and indicates a point of contact with the unseen world–a coming-into-being of life] (Mika, 2013). The passing of centuries does not weaken the pulse, yet the world of light always assumes distinctions that simply do not make sense. Surely it’s not just me who thinks that what is supposedly distant, is actually what is closest? We are always here, in the text. When you read us, you remind yourselves of that.
There have been philosophers after me who have talked about the Angst of nothingness, or a fear of encountering the world in all its mystery. Heidegger and Sartre come to mind here. Talk of life and death is really another instance of that problem. Reading with the world of the so-called dead is disconcerting as well. Anyone who speaks to me is aware – as a great scholar of your age describes – that I yearn for the night in which there is ‘a last faint trace of the numinous’ (Otto 1958: 19) and an almost-terror of ‘nothingness’ (ibid: 20). Not simply as an ontological reality but as an existential one!
This reality is a blurry one that affects our understanding, coming about because although we are present to each other, we occupy different realms and backgrounds. I have heard and seen the words that your people use, in your oratory on your sacred sites as well as simply in your everyday thinking: wouldn’t you say that I am now ‘kei tua o te arai’, or ‘beyond the veil’? Perhaps the so-called living step beyond the veil as well, when they are reading or thinking of us? The night pervades everything. If you are beyond the veil too, then a séance is merely an acknowledgement of that fact.
But I understand and sympathise with the fact that you think you are in the land of brightness, so by all means interpret what I say in that way. I leave it up to your imagination to channel me. Accept that my words are indistinct, and you will be closer to the truth than someone who focuses on the clarity of an idea. Let my words act as a planchette for your eye, skipping over the page, moved towards particular meanings by me, the dead writer; but remember the full vigour of the world. Hear the words through the veil of your ancient saying, if you like, and they will be like truthful music – the musicality of those things which are unknowable and seem to have met their shroud.
Me: Most of us who are apparently within ‘life’ or alive – a construct of our own making, an artificial one, as you say – would definitely find that difficult to understand. A Maori philosopher, Garrick Cooper (2008), sums it up nicely when he says ‘[p]erhaps we should look … at what is, and from there, what could be’ (p. 42); in the context of our current discussion, it means that we should stop considering ourselves either alive or dead and simply think about the potential that can arise from discarding those false binaries.
Would that mean we are currently conversing, through the medium of your writing? This makes sense from my cultural perspective. When Maori scholar Cherryl Smith (2000) asserts that writing is not free from life-force, she may be aware that those architects who have created a style of writing – but who have apparently passed on – are disgorging themselves through each page. We would call this endless bounding forth ‘tupuna’, which is commonly translated as ancestor but has a sense to it of persistent manifestation (see e.g. Mika 2014) – such that ‘[t]hings have a vitality and a capacity’ (Tesar and Arndt 2016: 197) – along with many other of our terms.
Novalis: And this persistent manifestation you speak of is not a predictable one, presumably. A philosopher closer to your time, Derrida, thought that conversations needed to be uneven; it is the inconsistencies between one person’s thinking and another that are important. As much as you say you cannot have control over your ancestors, you cannot have control over what someone else says, either – how that, as you say, ‘persistently irrupts’. It might mean you think-in-the-wake-of, what I earlier called Nachdenken (Novalis, 1960e), but that subsequent thinking is never free from the substance of the other person’s utterance. In that sense, I would go further than Derrida and, like you, understand an utterance as a kind of animal, with its own inspiration and autonomy but not independent of what went before it or follows it.
Nachdenken is more than an act of thinking, though; it is making a decision in concert with the rest of the world but in a sort of reactive way. This reactivity is not one that jolts one out of the world, but is simply a deep affirmation that one only acts because of the world. It is part of a hearing that acts as a type of mishearing, one that will ‘turn around … the essence of language, beyond its undeniable and necessary functioning, beyond its communicative intelligibility’ (Derrida 2005: 178).
Me: It is one thing to write and speak, and therefore just know that thought and speech are part of the world, but it does not go far enough for me. I wonder how we can present all things in our speech and writing? This has been an issue that has plagued me for some time – how to not treat our ideas simply as empty, human-derived things. Art, music and poetry have the upper hand in naturally being able to present the All, but those of us who write in the academy are at a distinct disadvantage. The truth lies, from a Maori perspective, in being able to present the All. The artists and poets know this: they can hold the sense of all things whilst moving from theme to theme, whereas those of us who speak like ‘the wise ones’ are, on the contrary, only able to discuss one thing at once. For Maori, it poses a massive contradiction because, on the one hand, we believe the world is interconnected; on the other, we write as if the world is disconnected (Mika 2017).
The only way I can think of doing that is to be deliberately negative. Going back and revisiting what one has just written or said and pointing out its spectre, its association beyond meaning, what it evokes emotionally – these are some tools that I would often like to employ when trying to present the world, if that is at all possible. Mocking oneself is another way, so that not only do we not take ourselves too seriously, but we also expose a rupture in the apparently smooth surface that usual truth expects.
Like the fissures and cracks in the earth, truth is really about the disjuncture between things in the world. Those rifts are responsible for our thinking – not the flat surfaces of a modified Nature that exemplifies rationality.
And so it is the rough uncertainty of the world that produces true thought. I remember you saying ‘The poet employs things and words like keys, since the whole of poesy is based on the active association of ideas – on the self-active, purposeful and idealistic production of chance – (fortuitous–free concatenation)’. (Wood 2007: 168). I guess this is somewhat similar to what I am saying, but would emphasise more that, from a Maori perspective, we are employed by things and words, too (see e.g. Thrupp and Mika 2012). In many respects, we have to reverse the assumption that it is the human self who starts with using things (and words and so on).
Novalis: One part of that quote in particular – “poesy is based on the active association of ideas” – deals with what you are suggesting, although it’s not immediately obvious. Ideas actively associate themselves, with each other, and they can do this without the human self. My thinking is that language needs to be playful, and because of that it forms its own procession with things. Thus, the normal sentences we construct usually have the human self as the main operator. What if we were to turn the situation around, though, so that it is the world operating on the human self, as you say? What if ideas turned to humans and asked them to think in a certain way, and language became a signifier of that state of affairs? And what if language itself was something that was non-human?
Ultimately, we can speculate on that and nothing else. The ‘Sprachlehre’(Novalis 1960c: 79) or grammar we are talking about here is not one that belongs to linguistics; it is instead a ‘Chiffernschrift’ or cipher script, which is the language of nature. Try as we might, we cannot fully come to terms with that self-structure of nature (O’Brien 1995). There is no coming to a complete understanding of the language of nature because it’s always-already itself. We cannot use the language of nature to arrive at a definite formula that explains the language of nature.
This raises the issue of mystery or uncertainty. A thing retains to itself some hiddenness; it impacts on us unclearly, and then we are meant to be equally unclear in our thoughtful response to it (how we talk about it and so on).
Me: For me, that speaks to the overall position of the human self in relation to all other things. One of the most profound forms of colonisation for Maori has come in the idea that the human self is the most important thing among all others. We have not been unaffected by this distorting principle. It is a force that pervades every single aspect of our lives – and it leads to an untruthful conclusion that all things in the world are reliant on the self’s awareness of them. Our terms are defined for us in government policies as if the human self is the superior agent (think here of that word ‘tupuna’ I mentioned earlier, which is now most often regarded as confined to humans who have gone before us).
Although we have various traditional stories that resist this – the Maui and Tawhaki narratives, for instance, which offer some human agency but not in a wholesale way–we have to guard against it because it shows itself in more subtle ways than other forms of colonisation. Tawhaki and Maui are central figures in our ancient accounts. Tawhaki, according to Cooper (2008), represents the importance of social norms, and Maui is the trickster, the one who pushes the boundaries. In an immediate sense, they set down the non-human (and human) potential of our expression; in another, they are themselves not so central but they illustrate that there are phenomena – even beyond them – which allowed them to act in the first instance. In other words, they represent the beyond-human as much as themselves.
This might be something we would have said traditionally, and perhaps still would. We would have said that, with the ‘I’ being a weak ‘I’ – to the extent that it cannot ground itself in anything apart from the rest of the world – we can only have an authentic idea about something if it is allowed to reflects its worldedness.
We have a term in the Maori language – ‘whakapapa’ – that suggests this very thing (indeed, most Maori terms quite possibly have a weaker human subject in the background of their meaning). ‘Whakapapa’ breaks down into two words: whaka (to become) and papa (an abbreviation of the Earth Mother, Papatuanuku). Papatuanuku exists beyond space, time and the human self (Marsden 2003). The term whakapapa is often meant to be ‘genealogy’, but with its greater connection with the beyond-human and beyond-temporal, the human subject is shaded somewhat. The human self is now indistinct, folded within the world rather than above it (Mika 2017).
I think we arrive at a similar conclusion to the one you do: that the human self is not as supreme as it believes itself to be, simply because the human self is so completely part of everything else.
Novalis: I agree that it is impossible to say what the ‘I’ is. Fichte tried, by stating that ‘I=I’, meaning that the self is the beginning and end of all experience. The I is the I, as simple as that – not constituted by any other thing in the world. Fichte himself states that the self is ‘absolute subject’ (Fichte 1868: 70), where the self is pure thought (Lindberg 2007). If we ever thought Fichte’s teacher, Kant, was uptight, with his division between thing-in-itself and concept, Fichte was even more so. For Fichte, we are deeply certain about what the I is. Strangely enough, this does not make us any freer because it just adds to our woes. As sceptical as Descartes was, Fichte made the non-human the not-I; non-human things just reaffirm the self’s certainty about the self. In other words, they add to our I=I by verifying that I-am-not-that-thing-there.
But I am grateful to Fichte. By saying what he did, he brought our attention to the I and the not-I, and I was able to think about that because he brought it up. There needs to be gratitude towards people who have wildly differing views because, without them, you would not have arrived at the conclusions you did.
Me: I am somewhat like that about Kant. He was hugely influential on western thought (and hence, by extension, on the thinking of my people), Fichte nowhere near so much. From a Maori perspective, I suspect there is not much difference between the two, apart from the fact that one was more overt about human-centredness. I do quite like Kant insofar as he at least reserves some uncertainty through the thing-in-itself; we cannot all at once apprehend the inside, the outside, and all the angles, of a mountain, for sure. What I am wary of is that the thing-in-itself is reduced to some sort of mental stimulus, where it has no agency of its own, it has no ‘mauri’ or life-force. It does not have the ability to organise the human self in other ways beyond the perceptual. Indeed, it is not connected to us apart from how it allows us to apprehend things and then categorise them.
I know you had problems with this issue of the Kantian thing-in-itself, and it seems most of your members of the Early German Romantic movement did. But did it ever occur to you that the thing-in-itself is an actual, material relative of the human self and of all other things?
Novalis: I suspect you place much more emphasis on that than I would, but it’s entirely possible. The thing-in-itself is absolutely both a preservation of mystery and a reductionism, though. The problem with most western thought, from even before I was writing, is that it has read the thing-in-itself as a way of avoiding reality. If you can control the sheer force of something through the way you think, you can keep horror at bay. The thing-in-itself is a supremely useful tool for doing this.
It maintains the human self as the judge of what happens to a thing. But in the arts and poetics, you should not have that luxury, and the mystery of the thing-in-itself should be something reflected on and then celebrated. As an uncontainable force, it should have much freer reign to infiltrate all areas of life, not just arts and poetics.
I do know that apparently inanimate things in the world chatter and laugh, but how can the thing-in-itself be a part of the world – a relation, as you put it?
Me: I need to approach language differently here, to convey what I suspect! In Maori thought and metaphysics, there is a phenomenon or ancestor called ‘whakaaro’, which is often translated as ‘idea’ but, in the context of our discussion, could point to two aspects. Firstly, it may indicate the fact of the world; the fact that the world and its things are, even before human perception. Then, it represents the fact that the world and its things impinge on the human self in myriad ways, including through what we now call ‘thought’. Maybe it also indicates the impact of the world and its things on non-human entities as well. Whakaaro may reference, in this context, ‘corporeal emergence’: it is an ancient phenomenon that recognises what we now might call the ‘life essence’ of entities. The way has been paved, through that ancient metaphysics, for everything to emerge. Now, there might be a temptation here to simply call this ‘perception’; however, the Maori astonishment at the fact of the world is not so coolly observed, and a study of that perception alone is invalid. We have to understand that a thing can only be apprehended as if it is also the world. If a tree announces itself to me, I have to approach it as if it is not divorced from the world – indeed, it is the world.
So a thing arises, through whakaaro. But if you look at some of our genealogies, you will see ‘whakaaro’ appearing in them. This suggests that whakaaro itself is not free from thinghood (Mika and Southey 2018). In that case, the paving-the-way-of-all-phenomena-as-things, that I mentioned earlier, also has thinghood. It’s as if the ultimate thing (whakaaro) has set itself up to be a thing: the first entity has created itself. Therefore, the initial drive to discuss something is a thing – an inclination or comportment is not simply a feeling or idea. And as you might imagine, this becoming-thing-of-an-inclination (one way of translating ‘whakaaro’) can continue infinitely because the moment we have captured a phenomenon in discussion or thought, it is a thing.
At that point, the inclination part might seem human-reliant, but the capacity for this to evolve is already laid down in our genealogy/metaphysics, through the mention of ‘whakaaro’ as an ancestor. So we participate in its thinghood, but are not the creators of it.
Therefore, if Maori assert or understand that, for instance, ‘we are warriors’, that assertion or understanding takes up a certain space, it has thinghood. It is not just engaging with an idea. We see this in our metaphysics, with various predispositions and states of being – which would normally be called just ‘ideas’ or ‘concepts’ in dominant western thought–having their own but interconnected essence, as much as the human being does.
In this instance, we are discussing the thing-in-itself. We are moved towards it as another construct of many; it is hence a phenomenon indivisible from all other things, and forms part of the thinker. But it is no more or less a thing than any other predisposition. And whatever motivated Kant to create the thing-in-itself, was a product of that ‘setting-down’ I discussed earlier. We are therefore not so much interested in studying the thing-in-itself, as we are in considering its relationship to the world as a whole, and also how the world (including all unseen worlds and its things) engaged with Kant to discern and focus on the thing-in-itself.
To put it more briefly: all inclinations, drives and tendencies have as much thinghood as physical entities. This has repercussions for how we discuss them. They do not provide the human self with certainty. On the contrary, they destabilise us. We would say they are our ‘whanaunga’ (relations). In a trendy, post-structural way, we might say that we live in a community of ideas, feelings and emotions, but actually as I have said, we don’t want to talk about those tendencies in that distant way; they are things as much as humans are things, having their interconnection with all other entities.
Novalis: I suppose I tried to convey a similar impression through my discussions about Being, and then to demonstrate that in my fragments and stories. To go back to Fichte: the problem with him was that, according to him, the ‘I’ immediately advances itself as itself. But Being, as an academic from your time has noted, preordains ‘not only the subject/object distinction, but also the subject’s consciousness of itself’ (Stone 2008: 145). Being is a substance within which all other things are situated – much as you describe Papatuanuku earlier. It allows you to make statements and, indeed, is your statements in the same way as the Chiffernschrift I mentioned earlier.
We cannot say much about Being, but I do think it’s possible to understand it not entirely by rational thought, not entirely by emotion, but by a mix of faculties. Probably the emotional aspect of the human self is at the forefront, though. It is uncertainty that is the issue here: at present, the human self ‘feels that he is lord of the universe, his self- soars all-powerful over this abyss’ (Novalis 2005: 49), but in fact, it is the abyss that will save him – if by ‘abyss’ we mean uncertainty.
Me: Well, I agree that uncertainty is where hope lies. Uncertainty allows us to approach things in the world as if we are part of them, and we can reflect this through obscurity of language. There is hope in this because we can act in concert with the world rather than simply delude ourselves that we are its owners. We can also call uncertainty ‘mystery, darkness, nothingness and enchantment’. I am fascinated by your use of the word ‘abyss’ and its possibility for different meanings.
What do you think of the abyss being something real, and not separate from Being? I know you think of Being as pervasive – what about nothingness?
Novalis: In essence, ‘[j]edes Ding ist positive und negative Größe; denn es ist ja nicht das nicht, was es ist–Was es nicht ist, ist es nicht,that is, es wird von Seyn und Nichtseyn, von Setzen und Nichtsetzen, bestimmt und nicht bestimmt/bestimmbart und nicht bestimmbart’ (Novalis 1960d: 180)/[everything is positive and negative size, because it is not not what it is–What it is not, is that it is not – that is, it is made up of Being and Not-Being, place and Not-place, definite and not-definite, determinable and not-determinable] (Mika 2017: 311-312).
Me: It seems to me, in that list you have just given, that the ‘Not’ has the advantage because in our current time we are so focused on a thing’s positive attributes – what can be seen and measured in relation to it. Now, when you come along and say ‘wait, there is something that detracts from that measurement’, then you are automatically, necessarily, undermining its positivity. You cannot have a fully measurable thing when there is something unmeasurable about it. For the human self, as we have already discussed, the positive can be likened to self-confidence, which is always-already undermined by its opposite.
It reminds me of so-called rational thought: you cannot have any rational thought if something emotional is at stake in that thought as well (and there always is!)
Novalis: Yes, if we had gone in the opposite direction and become too romantic in our worldview, then it would have been the positivity that undermined the negativity. We should not become too romantic. Being would become the issue, not Nothingness. But as we all know, the chances of the world ever becoming too mystical or romantic are extremely small.
I once said (and it seems to be my most quoted fragment): Die Welt muß romantisirt werden. So findet man den urspr[ünglichen] Sinn wieder…. Indem ich dem Gemeinen einen hohen Sinn, dem Gewöhnlichen ein geheimnißvolles Ansehn, dem Bekannten die Würde des Unbekannten, dem Endlichen einen unendlichen Schein gebe so romantisire ich es – Umgekehrt ist die Operation für das Höhere, Unbekannte, Mystische, Unendliche – dies wird durch diese Verknüpfung logarythmisirt. (Novalis, 1960f: 545)
[The world must be romanticised. In this way, one again finds the primordial sense…. In that I give the general a higher sense, the usual a mysterious look, the well-known the dignity of the unknown, the finite an infinite appearance, I am romanticising it – the converse operation is for the lofty, unknown, mystical, infinite – they are logarythmised by this association.]Mika 2017: 40
As you can see, you can become either too conventional (rationalistic) or too mysterious. But another thing about enchanting (making mysterious) or scientising (making rational) the world is that, in doing either, we are automatically associating with/in Being. When we go to manipulate the world as poets (keeping in mind we are manipulated by the world in the first instance), we therefore should not make distinctions between Being and Nothingness as a rule, and I suppose I could have used the word ‘presence’ when speaking of Being earlier, as Derrida would, to sidestep ruining the word ‘Being’, but it’s sometimes useful to point out that very playfulness of terms we were discussing before: my use of Being was itself undermined by Nothingness! It was this general concern that brought me to pen a poem, which is not particularly prominent in Heinrich von Ofterding (Novalis, 1960b: 360), but is important nevertheless Wenn nicht mehr Zahlen und Figuren Sind Schlüssel aller Kreaturen Wenn die, so singen, oder küssen Mehr als die Tiefgelehrten wissen Wenn sich die Welt in’s freie Leben, Und in die Welt wird zurück begeben, Wenn dann sich wieder Licht und Schatten Zu echter Klarheit werden gatten, Und man in Märchen und Gedichten Erkennt die ewgen Weltgeschichten, Dann fliegt vor Einem geheimen Wort Das ganze verkehrte Wesen sofort. When numbered technicality has ceased to be the single key to every life’s identity and those who kiss or dance or sing their deeper truer knowledge bring, restoring this world’s liberty, setting all living beings free in all their primal clarity, the real world in which we live poets and story tellers give, where one potent single word scatters all nonsense we have heard. (Dane 2011: n. p.)
I am absolutely convinced that it is the poets and story tellers who can strike a balance between the ‘I’ and the more-than-human world.
You academics, though, belong to the Tiefgelehrten – the only kiss your text gives is a frigid one. To dance with your ideas is like cavorting with a cadaver, and your song freezes Nature; on the other hand, the poet infuses her with life again. We should all aim to be philosophers in the poetic sense, leaving behind the search for ultimate truths in favour of revivifying Nature.
But more than this, it is Nature that decides to play with the poet, and the poet is acutely aware that s/he is thrown headlong into that abyss we talked of earlier: as Hölderlin (2002: 10) once said, ‘we delight in flinging ourselves into the night of the unknown, into the cold strangeness of any other world, and, if we could, we would leave the realm of the sun and rush headlong beyond the comet’s track’. The challenge for the poet is to show that in their work. Their formation, as it were, is both by and of the All.
Me: At least you offer an optimistic outcome. One Maori poet, from Ngati Tuwharetoa–Rowley Habib–said something similar when he was talking about land: Where once my ancestors grubbed for the fern’s root They build their hygienic homes now. And where the wild pig roamed and rooted They’ve measured the land into precise sections Worth 3000 dollars (or to sound better For the prospective buyer, 1500 pounds] (cited in Roscoe 1992: 154).
Land is one entity that is thought of as the embodiment of the Earth Mother (Papatuanuku, I mentioned her earlier). Land, like her, is meant to be thought of as indefinite, obscure, but here we have her being carved up, made conceptually clear. There is a problem of attaching money to her, but I suspect you would be (as I am) most interested in the attitude of clarity that allowed that to happen. It is this sterilisation of the world that Rowley is aiming at, as you were in your earlier poem.
Again, though, it is the night – which represents obscurity – that generates the truth of poetry.
I surmise that Habib, as a poet, would have understood the responsibility of that work. Of course, as you suggest, poetry is not simply the domain of poets; mathematicians can be poets, as can geologists – you were all these things. Song also ranks highly in our culture because it attunes the soul of the person to the world. Poetry in all its forms brings the world together, and invites the other to not just participate but comprise a verse – to be cultivated by the world.
Novalis: I never mentioned it much when I was alive but I can see, even in our conversation, that there is something about the written word that causes problems for an obscure discussion. I can see it in our conversation because we are both striving to be clear, despite our attempts to sabotage clarity. Neither of us is submitting to our own standards!
Me: I can hear you deliberately garbled ‘alive’ to show it’s not a word you like. But you’re right about the bigger issue. We, ourselves, remain completely clear! It’s as if we have to strike ourselves out before we get to any discussion – put our entire selves under erasure, not just particular words. We would have to acknowledge a massive amount of uncertainty about ourselves in order to do this. Then, to show this, we have to acknowledge not just other, particular sources of writing as your generation of academics does: we have to put parentheses around the entire text and reference the night, like this (
Another Maori scholar once said to me that we would have to be dead in order to be darkly truthful. If we are basically operating on the same plane, as you suggest, then words such as death and life, dead and alive, are nonsense, and we are always-already capable of the actions of death. So we have the capacity to be darkly truthful. It’s what our term ‘whakakore’ means, which includes in it the material Nothingness-yet-potential of ‘kore’. Alongside our thinking, it is whatever we create that is claimed by kore. In relation to that, Nepia (2012: 70) argues about kore that:
As eternity, Te Kore articulates space into which we may speak and move, or be denied opportunities to express ourselves. Moments of calamity, or uncertainty when all seems disconnected, and unsuitable must be overcome if a creative journey is to fulfil its purpose. The creative process, like a journey, may also have abrupt halts.
I read from him that our work, such as our current discussion, is always-already under erasure as a whole (not just discrete bits of it).
Novalis: It is the perfect way to end this séance (even though, as I pointed out at the beginning, neither of us are ‘moving’ and the séance is ongoing). Without actually halting, as your colleague puts it, I want to respond to the vulnerability that death, nothingness and the night impose. I once said:
‘No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence – they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations – into it the gods went back – and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world’ (Novalis: 2015, n. p.).
Like those gods, I want to continue to wrap myself tightly in the same dark shroud, and my engagement with the world will then be a tentative one. As you say, then, everything that we propose must show itself as our own limitation. Bring your certainty to an end, and then we will have true mystery.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
