One day, out of this fleshy cocoon
The WingMakers poetry offers another modality of approach to the new psychology of the Sovereign Integral. Poetry, for the most part, taps into our emotions by expressing observations of life through creative metaphors designed to awaken our imaginations and sensitivity to everything around us, including our inner, subjective world. The poetry of the WingMakers does not fail in this regard when certain familiar phrases are used. When it comes to the overall sense of any particular poem, however, neutral and abstract qualities predominate.
There are two poems for each chamber resulting in forty-eight poems. A peculiar aspect of the poems is that they are difficult to pin down to any particular social order. They appear to be deliberately designed to offer a neutral view of human emotions, generally avoiding any connection to a particular and identifiable geographical location, culture or time period.
This abstract and neutral style has the effect of subtly loosening the reader’s feelings and thoughts from the mind’s pre-defined associations, familiar—and habitual—reactions to words appearing on paper. As the Indian philosopher, Krishnamurti, once said, and I paraphrase, “The word is not the object.” Meaning, the full impact of observing a tree is short-circuited by the reaction of the mind, which immediately interferes with the observation by producing past, stored definitions of what a tree is, along with our associations to trees.
Naturally, many of our associations cannot be totally avoided in the neutrality of the WingMakers poetry simply because the words we use everyday must be employed to write the poems. And in many of the poems words appear that can be associated with the familiar things of our lives.
For instance, the Chamber Ten poem “What is Found Here” contains phrases such as “one foot on the curb,” “the other on the pavement,” “drifting of curtains,” “mountain winds,” and “juries of the night.” Even though these are familiar words to our ears, the poem does not offer a hint as to the location, culture or time related to the existence of the individual expressing their feelings. We don’t even know the gender of this person. Granted, this is not necessarily important to the mood of the poem, but it does go to the points of neutrality and the abstract. The Chamber Ten poem appears below:
What is Found Here
What is found here cannever be formed of words.
Pure forces that mingle uncompared.Like dreams unspoken when first awoken by a sad light.
What is found here can limp with one foot on the curb and the other on the pavement in some uneven gait waiting to be hidden in laughter.
What is found here can open the swift drifting of curtains held in mountain winds when long shadows tumble across like juries of the night.
What is found here can always be held in glistening eyes.Turned by silence’s tool of patience. Like feelings harbored for so long the starward view has been lost.
Chamber Ten Poem, “What is Found Here.”
John Berges, Collected Works of the WingMakers