Jean Valentine: This-World Company

“The History of the World Without Words”: Mysticism and Social Conscience in the Poetry of Jean Valentine

BRIAN TEARE “The History of the World Without Words” Mysticism and Social Conscience in the Poetry of Jean Valentine Mystical language is a social language . . . For the mystic to “prepare a place” for the Other is to prepare a place for others. —michel de certeau,“mysticism” Listening to “the under voice” Poetry, for Valentine, is listening put to active use, a lifelong vocation that includes “everything that happens,” from the mundane to the numinous, from Ordinary Things to The Cradle of the Real Life. As the title of her 2000 volume suggests, Valentine’s poems see divinity as inseparable from the quotidian, a feminist variety of religiosity that might best be called mystical, if mysticism can be de‹ned as both “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect” (James 380) and “the direct experience of the real . . . an unmediated experience of God” (Petroff 3–4). From 1979’s The Messenger onward, Valentine’s poems seem to have issued directly from what she later calls, in The River at Wolf, “the under voice,” a consciousness that experiences the material and the spiritual planes with equal immediacy. In the visionary realm of “Annunciation,” for example, the speaker’s “soul become[s] ›esh” even as “linseed oil break[s] over the paper” and her “pelvis thin[s] out into God” (3). This is an intricate series of gestures characteristic of the under voice, which exists at once as a category of experience , a poem on paper, and a spoken voice: the lines of “Annunciation ” exceed the grammar of the sentence and erase the discrete boundaries of a single consciousness even as they insist on issuing from a material, sexual body. Thus Valentine’s under voice is—like the personae of visionaries such as Blake and Rilke—essentially a series of paradoxes, the 164 most obvious of which is that it is warmly personal in tone yet impersonal in its otherworldliness. Forthcoming with image even as it’s sparing of autobiographical narrative, the under voice argues that, as poet and critic Carl Phillips suggests, “something like the sacred is constantly at intersection with the most secular contexts, if only we could see it” (39). A Catholic convert with strong Buddhist sympathies, a person of prayer and of sitting meditation, Valentine draws deeply from Christian theology and iconography, but her poems treat individual belief systems and religious symbols in a more syncretic way, revealing or gesturing toward spiritual mysteries largely without recourse to dogma (Interview, 16).1 Instead of relying on any one institution for power, her work depends on the paradoxes characteristic of all mystical texts. Mystical paradox, as de Certeau de‹nes it, “cannot be reduced to either of the aspects that always comprise [it]. It is held within their relation. It is undoubtedly this relation itself ” (16; emphasis added). Thus mystics argue that “God is neither personal nor impersonal,” as Bernadette Roberts writes in The Experience of No-Self, “neither within nor without, but everywhere in general and nowhere in particular” and thus can be experienced as both presence and absence (33). Emerging from what Janet K. Ruf‹ng in Mysticism and Social Transformation calls “the matrix of an encounter between the divine and the human,” Valentine’s under voice asserts its own version of paradox by insisting on mysticism’s use to the social realm, where its visionary power enables it to speak of social reality and the truths it hides as well as the earthly real and spiritual realities beyond it. For a sense of how Valentine’s poetry creates and sustains mystical paradox by extending it across social and spiritual realms, we’ll turn to two examples from “Her Lost Book,” the autobiographical sequence that ends The Cradle of the Real Life. “At the Conference on Women in the Academy” and “You walk across your self” show the range of material Valentine’s under voice is able to hold in relation, how easily it slips between secular and sacred, witness and vision, self and radical otherness: at the conference on women in the academy The young scholar, her weeping ‹nger the anger reality under the “social construction of reality” 165 under the deaf blind TV ‹lmed broadcast auditorium: the woman talking in the split-open room under the room of what we say. (264) You walk across your self as you walk across a dirt road crossroads at dusk and across a...