Continuing to Inquire

I think the avoidance of the personal in comments or conversation blocks the access to the place beyond ego. The most personal and the most universal are the same. Our commonality of being is accessed through our commonality of feeling.....

I just got home to Virginia last night after staying in Stockholm with Maria over the week end... Here are the poems I promised to send, about how love is the source of co-intelligence...

It occurred to me at our conference many times that our true forbears in co-intelligence were poets. They have that ability to speak from their individual experience so articulately about what they have noticed it rings a bell in the rest of us in universal ways. We can affirm the truth about ourselves together because the poet has so accurately described our own experience of the way things are. The “magic in the middle” when the magic happens in our groups is poetry in motion.
The poem I was quoting from when I was crying when we were talking about celebrating the pain of shared loss, with the phrase “sing of human unsuccess, in a rapture of distress…” was from this wonderful poem by W.H. Auden on the occasion of the death of his friend and fellow poet William B. Yeats…I give you the whole poem here because I can’t edit it and because it is so much in honor of the courage to speak the truth.

In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
By W.H. Auden

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
The snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

We talked about co-intelligence being one kind of intelligence among many, kind of fitted into each other like those little Russian dolls that have another doll inside and another doll inside. The earth has an intelligence of it’s own, a plant growing toward the sun demonstrates a kind of intelligence, and human individual intelligence resides in the context of those intelligences. But the last doll, inside of which human co-intelligence, the wisdom that comes from sharing, resides, is love. Co-intelligence depends on co-conscousness which depends on love.
So I came up with this poem by e.e. cummings, which I think, articulates the basis of co-intelligence. As he often does he contrasts people with the capacity for compassion with people who can merely count facts and trade categories and live according to symbols of wealth rather than the richness of life itself. “Timorous itsters all” is what cummings calls all those who are involved in what Martin Buber called “I-it” relations where they relate to each other as categories, rather than as beings. “I-Thou” relations between people, Buber said, are characterized by people honoring each other as sacred beings. e.e. cummings’ (cummings didn’t capitalize his name and asked others not to) poems often explore the contrast between bean counters and human beans…here is cummings' poem about co-intelligence: