Lyric clarity is gestural integrity.
– Jan Zwicky
My relationship to Zwicky’s notion of integrity is being played out through the lens of writing my first book, A Once and Future God. Integrity is an important principle for me whenever I sit down to write. You have probably experienced being asked a question which catches you by surprise. Surprise because it touched you at a very deep place, a secret place, a tender place --- and the strange naive way that the question was asked, --- the uncanny juxtaposition between the mundane question and the depths to which it percolated in you --- yes, that experience. You tremble, and you see the other person shuddering --- they know there is something sacred, perhaps even monstrous--- that has been illuminated, if even just a single ray of light has touched its face. In moments like these, we freeze, like the children in the old Art Linkletter show. We know the answer. We just can’t bear to speak it. It comes to us as too precious, precocious, precarious. We end up saying the darndest things.
Integrity means, to me as a writer, writing the way Aretha Franklin sings in the video clip below. It pushes the *lyric sensibility beyond what seems humanly possible. *She takes what is deeply hidden and stretches it toward the sky--- building an arc between earth and heaven. This is the purpose of humans, the daoists say, to thread tether the earth to the heavens, the soil to the sun, life to life-giver.
Integrity calls for grit.
Integrity: congruence, coherence, conviction. Congruent within the pluridimensionality of your self as a compound individual composed of other individuals. Coherent across the pluridimensionality of the larger, collective bodies, of which you are a member. Conviction with respect to your actions.
Integrity points to the condition of wholeness that persists within the pluridimensional universe. I can write many things, even contradictory things, and with a posture, a holding-in-with-integrity, they conspire (with-breathe) to be whole.
Integrity, like disclosure, is confronted by the question of language. This is my struggle as a writer, whose words are only given life by passing them through the witnessing, translating, alchemical prowess of another language-bearing animal. Text is speech at a distance; speech is song at a distance, song is kiss at a distance. Every expansion requires more effort at integrity. The effort is a pumping from below, comes from the core of the earth and stirs in the gut, and sets the heart on fire.1
Integrity means being bound to the wholeness of what is. Encompassing it all. On the other side of integrity is an escape route. You might slither away into the reeds of imaginary worlds. That’s why integrity is hard. It doesn’t close that option, it reveals it. Integrity means you get to choose between being real and being that which is not real.
The notion of authenticity creeps in when we feel the need to idealize the self. Integrity means that you take a stand, that you stand up for your self, despite the flaws and failures. But when you are in integrity, you don’t feel exposed. You feel you no longer have to make a case for yourself. It’s not prideful. It’s peaceful. Because the matter is settled.
Integrity of expression is determined both within a context of utterance, and in the larger sphere in which language is also a part of the world. – Jan Zwicky
Working on this book, I am struck by how all our all-too-human questions about God seem to be out of integrity with nature. I feel the whole sphere of “religious thought and dialogue” either tugging at my heart strings and suggesting I take the escape route towards the fire (theistic and salvific) or the ice (rational and mechanical). These accounts, written by masters and mystics, seem to be out of integrity and leaning toward contrivance. Why can’t we speak of God with a greater integrity?
Sensitivity to resonance, honed by love of clarity, gives us, I believe, our best chance of access to the real. – Jan Zwicky
Echoing Zwicky’s quote above, I would like to say “Sensitivity to integrity, honed by the love of the real, gives us our best chance of access to clarity.” Integrity, clarity and the real are an autopoeitic set, a perfect triangle, which, when given two sides, solves itself through some natural law.
What does it even mean to have a religion that is integral to the real without turning the real into a contrivance?
A real-igion. A real- alignment.
That is a question I’d love to explore.**
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Footnotes
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While I was writing this I had a quick exchange with my colleagues at Endemic. Zach surmizes that computation is text at a distance. At each step the message has greater “reach” but sacrifices intimacy (depth effect). I ask, What kind of animal might not have to sacrifice intimacy/ depth for reach? In original, occult terminology, Egregores were construed to be independent entities (not collective swarms) such as angelic watchers. This concept would satisfy the conditions I posed. ↩