PAUL ANDREW POWELL

According to the often-quoted lines in Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Ars Poetica”:

A poem should not mean

But be.

I interpret this to mean that a poem's first function, prior to any content (of all art for that matter) is to mystify us, because Be-ing is itself a mystery. The function of art is not to solve the mystery, the function of art is to pose the problematic question implied by it. 

In my view, art's capacity to mystify is what defines it as art. From the Mona Lisa's ambiguous smile, to the most outrageous, Dadaist absurdity, art confronts and exposes the ambiguities and absurdities at the center of existence---at the center of Being. Art does this by, what I call "de-situating," assumed meanings from established cultural contexts. Van Gogh's paintings were dismissed by the art world of his time. The audience rioted at the opening of Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring.” Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” was described by one critic as “an explosion in a shingle factory.” The list is endless. Yet each helped to establish for us entirely new frames of reference for Being---by first mystifying us.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant/

Success in Circuit lies

---Emily Dickinson

Legend has it that a reporter once asked jazz great Louis Armstrong what the word jazz meant. Armstrong’s Zen-like response was: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know”. The same holds true for notions of de-situatedness, of course: it’s not so much about what it means as it is about its capacity for cultivating an authentic subjective experience of doubt and wonder.

Now, clearly meaning is important, and (of course) it is import for the individual to become situated in their culture; yet, this meaning, this situatedness, is constrained in the same way that Classical physics is constrained. At a very narrow range in nature, Classical physics serves us quite well, but when we examine the fundamental constituents of nature, Classical physics breaks down and is inadequate to describe it. The same is true for meaning and situatedness. They are both important for the “I” fiction. But for a more, shall we say, creative consciousness, the consciousness of process, of matter in motion (and increasingly for the demands of the postmodern condition), these meanings break down and are inadequate to describe it.

"Beauty will save the world"

—Dostoyevsky

In de-situating, I am not suggesting that we throw out meaning. (Please, no! I am not suggesting this!) The purpose of de-situating any(thing), be it (as in Zen) the representational self, or (as in literary deconstruction) a work of literature, is not to destroy it: literary deconstruction and Zen practice are not nihilistic. The purpose of de-situating is simply to detach from identifying with the subject and/or object long enough to witness the underlying duality that drives it—to witness the causes and conditions of its dependent co-origination—and then to return. As a Zen adage says: “When I began to study Zen, mountains were mountains; when I thought I understood Zen, mountains were not mountains; but when I came to full knowledge of Zen, mountains were again mountains”. The purpose of de-situating fixed meaning is not to liberate chaos, moral, ethical, or otherwise (this is the fear of the representational self), but to reveal an underlying order of complexity impossible to analyze or describe in words—let’s call it beauty!

Art can be categorized, studied, measured—situated; but the aesthetic apprehension of beauty is, first and foremost, an intuitive event within human consciousness. And, as a Buddhist, I will add that the apprehension of one’s true nature is, prior to all discourse, an intuitive event within human consciousness. The fixed meaning may be necessary to discuss the phenomenon, but the very discussion separates us from the event.

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"I mean---Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." 

--- John Keats

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“A poem should not mean/But be.” Art does not address the thinking mind, nor does it primarily address personal or societal concerns (though these clearly can be important vehicles for delivery). Art boldly, or through “success in Circuit”, exposes and engages us with the mystery at the bottom that repels all reason: catches us off-guard, suspends the stories we tell ourselves to order and create a sense of permanence in our impermanence, and in so doing, reveals, if only fleetingly, the great doubt and wonder which is the source of our creative imagination and the light of Be-ing.

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The world of imagination is the world of eternity.

--- William Blake

Bio: Paul Andrew Powell is the author of the books Zen and Artificial Intelligence, and other Philosophical Musings by a Student of Zen Buddhism (2019), TUNA in POODERVILLE: a screenplay (2020), and The Reality Mechanic (2020): available on Amazon Books and other outlets. His essays “Hobbits as Buddhists and an Eye for an “I” (2011) and “On the Conceivability of Artificially Created Enlightenment” (2005) appeared in the journal Buddhist-Christian Studies, and his essay “Infinite Games in the Age of Novelty” appeared as Chapter 26 in Consciousness in Theatre, Literature, and the Arts (2007). He presented his essay “Infinite Games in the Age of Novelty” at the Consciousness in the Arts Conference in Aberystwyth, Wales in 2007, and his paper “Zen and Artificial Intelligence” at the Toward of Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson, Arizona, in 2002. He has been a gallery artist (Telluride, Colorado), an actor (SAG 1987, long expired), and a coffeehouse musician. He is the father of four remarkable daughters and currently divides his year between Greenfield, MA; Boulder, CO; and Kearney, NE, where he taught Composition and Literature at the local university and community college. He has been a student of Zen Buddhism, in particular, for over four decades.