Introduction to 'The Fire of Darkness'

My Introduction to the new book of poems and collages by Rashani Réa and me, which is available this Spring. It is entitled, 'The Fire of Darkness: What Burned Me Away Completely, I Became.'

Art, like beauty itself, is a cauldron of opposites: light and darkness, Winter and Spring, the Warrior and the Mother, the political and the contemplative, the swirl of chaos and the stillness of the center. Only in vain do we seek victory against our antipodes. For that very battle feeds the polarity and divides the One. The answer is always wholeness.

My poems are a cauldron of opposites too. I cannot speak of the triumph of light, for that would disdain the creative potency of the dark. I cannot deny the spiritual power of the Warrior, even though he is born of the Mother’s womb. The best Mother is also a Warrior, and the best Warrior is also a mother.

And just as my poems refuse to divide the wholeness, so the art of Rashani Réa embraces divine paradox, and gives birth to syzygies —the ancient Gnostic term for mated pairs of opposites held in the harmony of God’s pleroma, the All. Her collages are still-points of contemplative silence spiraling out into the play, the dance, and the politics of creation. She is deeply influenced by Chinese aesthetics in her heroic refusal to give in to the cliché, the stereotype, the false victory of the half.

I hope, then, that her art and my poetry tend toward beauty, rather than sentiment. For is not sentimentality the false victory of the half—light over the dark, gentle over strong, a perpetual Spring that would deny the poignancy of Autumn?

Rashani’s dharma art can make us dizzy and disoriented, yet it energize the heart. Her images challenge us to leap into the “the Bardo.”

In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo is the period between death and rebirth. But it is really any liminal state, any passage in-between. In truth, we experience the Bardo all through our lives. We spend almost all our time there without knowing it! Yet we imagine that there is some ideal destination in the future, some Edenic beginning in the past. Past and future are not, only the transition between them— This! We are actually, as one of the poems in this book says, “the grey stuff in the cocoon, neither wing nor worm.”

The Bardo between death and birth could be one moment or a trillion years: between dissolution of the cosmos and the next big bang, between out-breath and in-breath, between two lovers’ mouths about to kiss, or a day between Winter and Spring, Imbolc. The Bardo could be the brave adventure of the Trans, passing from male and female. The Bardo is your moment of choice. Let that moment expand. Rest there awhile. Be alive in not-knowing…

The Bardo in Rashani’s art is an alchemy where one state is ever transmuting into its opposite. Yin is never quite Yang, Yang never quite Yin, without the seed of the antipodes already planted at its core. The groundlessness of the Bardo is not Hamlet-like indecision, but immense energy, creative power, the Shakti of the womb.

Physicists tell us that the source of creation is something like the Bardo: a quantum void, vibrant with a chaos of virtual particles, ever about to Be. I think the Bardo is also the dynamic that compels true mystics to become artists. Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Zen Master Haquin, Thomas Merton were not only contemplatives, but poets and painters. Their silence was energetic, their darkness on fire. I think the art and poetry in this book might come from the Bardo.

A note on the poems: they do not ‘interpret’ the collages, but are rather whole worlds springing out of visual seeds. And just as there are recurring motifs in the collages, so in the poems, all linked by one cosmic pulsation, the Breath. These are all breath-poems. For it is the breath that links the body to the soul, the individual to the cosmic rhythm. Therefore, I hope you will find these poems aids in meditation. Peace.