Introduction

Being impotent forces a shift of perspectives.
Being reduced to the enemy confronts your conscience.
Being one with despair and angst; tastes like nothingness.

What is poetry?

“¿Qué es poesía?, dices, mientras clavas
en mi pupila tu pupila azul,
¡Qué es poesía! ¿Y tú me lo preguntas?
Poesía… eres tú.”²
- Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

According to the Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, you are poetry as you gaze or set your sight on his pupil. This verse illustrates how each one of us has the capacity of seeing poetry in others, and as a consequence become empathic. The craft of poetry “challenges the fact-fiction dictum”³ due to the “evocative presentation of data.”⁴ Likewise, poetic silence (i.e. openness as transparency) can be created through art that allows us to attend multiple meanings and even embodiment. This silence can lead to “human connection and understanding,”⁵ or empathy.

The awareness of emotion through intersubjectivity that leads us to empathy occurs insofar one has developed the ability to pay attention to one’s embodiment. The attention to one’s embodiment is a process that results in the cultivation of empathy as a form of love. In fact, love and empathy are fundamental in times of suffering and impunity in order to heal through an understanding of the underlying wholeness that sustains human beings. For example, human rights in Mexico are not guaranteed due to corruption. Since my childhood, my parents have been fighting against corruption from the municipal to the federal level. Indeed, such lack of justice implies a dictatorial state. According to Jorge I. Dominguez, Mexico is an example of the perfect dictatorship because Mexico never actually achieved a democratic state but simulates living in one. Since the Mexican Revolution, Mexico entered an authoritarian regime under a one-party state called Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Every election, since the General Plutarco Elías Calles, has been fraudulent; and even although in 2000 the National Action Party (PAN) was able to take power under the then President Vicente Fox, the access to justice is still very limited and controlled to date. While the application of the rule of law is simulated, there will be no actual democracy, and the perfect dictatorship flourishes beneath the disguise of democracy.⁶

If basic human rights are not guaranteed, then what can be done? One might argue that a revolution might solve these problems, but Mexico’s authoritarian regime is the outcome of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. The problem was not solved. The revolution only provoked a shift of power. The rise of another form of authoritarianism ruled Mexico after the Mexican Revolution, why did this happen? Revolutions need to be internal, focused on the notion of being that strives toward liberty, rather than merely political and thus social. For example, according to Francis L. Jackson in the journal Animus, the indigenous empire of the Aztecs was conquered rather than colonized. The difference between a conquest and colonization is that a conquest has to destroy an already present powerful empire with the attempt of establishing a new rule of their law. In this case, Spaniards wanted to honor the Catholic monarchy with the New Spain. The Spanish were not emancipating from Old Spain. The Spanish wanted to create a New Spain. In the process, the Spaniards conquered the spirit of the indigenous population through Catholicism.⁷ After the imposition of Catholicism in the Mexican spirit, the revolution would inevitably depend on the values the Church imposed. For instance, Mexico to date can be considered mainly conservative. In contrast, the United States and Canada wanted to reach freedom from Europe’s monarchies as Jackson suggests:

“The profound diversity of colonial legacies has made the experience of what it means to be North American very different for Mexicans than for Americans and Canadians. In those latter countries liberal individualism and pluralism have become second nature whereas, in spite of an equally strong sense of themselves as New World people, three centuries of Spanish contra-modernism have fixed a decidedly anti-liberal bias in the Mexican soul.”⁸

This ‘Mexican soul’ or spirit does not change with the rational discourses and explicate political philosophies such as the Kantian enlightenment or Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Rather Mexican art and emotion are fundamental for their identities because the indigenous culture and their ways of knowing still play a role in the Mexican spirit as Jackson argues:

“There is, as [the poet Octavio] Paz points out, virtually no tradition of political philosophy in Mexico; its political visionaries and critics, even today, are not philosophers or economists so much as poets, novelists, muralists, sculptors, painters. The sources and symbols of Mexican patriotism are emotive, not intellectual; artistic, not doctrinal.”⁹

This latter paragraph explains why the Mexican culture is not easy to change, once its spirit has been emotively conquered. There has to be an evocative transformation that becomes an embodied experience. Once the experience has been appropriated, then it is again quite difficult to change the ‘Mexican soul’ because it is truly internalized. Therefore, social change in Mexico begins individually rather than through an empty and hypocritical political discourse. Considering this emotional and artistic way of knowing, I propose a new way of being, a poetic dwelling, in order to experience love in its fullest that transcends object-subject dichotomies.

For example, we know primordially through our somatic consciousness. The philosopher Richard Shusterman coined the notion of somaesthetics to describe the study and cultivation of “how we experience and use the living body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning.”¹⁰ The term aesthetics comes from the Greek “aesthesis” which means “sensory perception.”¹¹ According to Schusterman, Alexander Baumgarten introduced the notion of aesthetics within philosophy arguing that aesthetics would allow a better study of our senses within the sciences beyond logical propositions:

“The term ‘soma’ indicates a living, feeling, sentient body rather than a mere physical body that could be devoid of life and sensation, while the ‘aesthetic’ in somaesthetics has the dual role of empathizing the soma’s perceptual role (whose embodied intentionality contradicts the body/mind dichotomy) and its aesthetic uses both in stylizing one’s self and in appreciating the aesthetic qualities of selves and things.”¹²

This awareness of the epistemological relevance of our embodiment allows emotional experiences and even qualia (i.e. raw feelings or sensations) to challenge the body versus mind dualism. This continual process of unconditionally loving dialogue with our soma could guide our actions through empathy and intersubjectivity. At their greatest, both art and science unveil the mysterious through the experience of wonder (i.e. openness to the world that surrounds us) as an endless process of attempting to grasp truth, but never as an absolute. Carl Sagan illustrates the latter through his interpretation about science:

“Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all scientists can retire.”¹³

In the same way as science, poetry will always be incomplete; there will never be the perfect poem where all poets can retire. In fact, the poet and social scientist Carl Leggo argues that a poet is a human scientist who provides fresh insights through the creativity expressed by the possibilities of language.¹⁴

As an artist-scientist, a poet can reveal and bring to our presence what is mysterious or ineffable through an artistic approach to the social sciences. It is through arts-based research where one can disrupt assumptions of fixed knowledge:

“Instead of contributing to the stability of prevailing assumptions about these [objective- and subjective “truth”] phenomena (either explicitly through statement, argument, portraiture, or implicitly through science or elision) reinforcing the conventional way of viewing them, the arts-based researcher may persuade readers or percipients of the work (including the artist herself) to revisit the world from a different direction.”¹⁵

According to the anthropologist Miles Richardson, “we find ourselves in poems”¹⁶ because poetry is enchanted with “the presence of the instant”¹⁷. In the instant, there is the realization of the whole and its web of interrelations (e.g. community and even the ecosystem which sustains a community). This understanding leads us to observe the fact of intersubjectivity. For example, communication is a way to encounter the other and realize the fact that we are dwelling in a flowing never ending wholeness or process. Our embodiment leads us to an evocative understanding of the other as oneself. The modern use of the word empathy comes from the German word einfühlung (i.e. “feeling into”). This concept was coined by the psychologist Theodor Lipps to describe an introspective: “fusion between the observer and his or her object.” The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl was influenced by Lipps’ notion of empathy.¹⁸ Husserl critiqued Cartesian dualism through the notion of a phenomenological reduction. The reduction is an approximation to the notion of poetic silence which brings us into “the presence of the instant”¹⁹ that leads to profound understanding of love and empathy. Whereas Lipps defines empathy as a fusion between the object-subject, Husserl argues empathy is possible through a mental representation, i.e. not an actual fusion but a fluid process of intersubjectivity. According to the philosopher Kevin Hermberg, Husserl argues that intersubjectivity is only possible through empathy:

“To have an intentional object is, then, also to have an awareness of Others (even if it is only a tacit awareness). …The intersubjective life-world is at the ground of all intentional activity, and validity is attained via intersubjective harmony. Consequently, intersubjectivity (which requires empathy) is required for any knowledge of any object whatsoever.”²⁰

Thus empathy solidifies and confirms knowledge, rather than falling into solipsism; empathy through intersubjectivity allows you to conceive the fusion with the other through thought experiments as embodied experiences.²¹ In the Fifth Meditation on Cartesian Meditations, empathy solidifies the existence of both (i.e. oneself and the Other) through an “intersubjective harmony” that actualizes the Other beyond oneself. This is done through a thought experiment, the epoché or phenomenological reduction, which requires the suspension of judgement (i.e. let the object or subject stand in its openness). One undergoes this process in order to observe beyond personal bias which allows you to empathize and feel the other, i.e. as a real and actual person who suffers and experiences as yourself through embodiment.²²
Husserl’s reasoning is an example of how “empathy is possible,”²³ as Mary Weems argues, because poetry is a mode of language that:

“…represents a path to a greater understanding of what is means to be othered, to the importance of thinking deeply about an experience you’ve never had, to constructing a passion for acting as an agent for social justice and love.”²⁴

The poetic act is essentially empathetic. In order to attend to something or someone, there must be an intentional act that contains an implicit eros or desire toward some sort of good toward oneself or others.²⁵ For example in the book Blackfoot Ways of Knowing: The Worldview of the Siksikaitsitapi, member of the Blackfoot Confederacy Betty Bastien and the psychologist Jürgen W. Kremer argue that most western epistemologies operate under an implicit assumption of rationality (e.g. Kantian enlightenment) and objectification (e.g. Cartesian dualism). Consequently, human beings conceive themselves as fragmented particles, i.e. individual subjects, who are independent from the world that surrounds them and even each other.²⁶ On the other hand, the Indigenous epistemologies reject this objectification and defend the following assumptions:

“The nature of the world is interconnectedness. It is interconnectedness through spiritual intelligence or consciousness, Ihtsipaitapiiyo’pa. It is the nature of the universe to work for balance. The universe has a sacred power and influence; it works in reciprocal ways among all the interdependent parts.”²⁷

In other words, the Blackfoot epistemology favors wholeness rather than fragmentation because “knowing is experiential.”²⁸ This means that experience is a present moment flow of consciousness through an embodiment that leads to a sacred and spiritual epistemology which transcends fragmentation.²⁹ The process is prioritized over objects. Hence, the knower becomes one with the known through the spirit of knowledge:

“Following Niitsitapi logic means experiencing the whole, the interconnectedness of an indivisible universe. Rationality, on the other hand, denies the spiritual nature of knowledge and sacrifices the wholeness of human beings (Ani 1994, 32).”³⁰

For example, according to Alexandra Gillis informed by the theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan, an artist objectifies an aesthetic pattern of experience.³¹ This object provokes an embodied but open flow of consciousness that leads to sacred sense of freedom that is a fundamental aspect of art-based research:

“When the artist objectifies in concrete forms (music, painting, drama, poetry, sculpture, and so on) is this ‘purely experiential pattern’ or in my words, my, your, our free flow of consciousness in its open wonder and awe and in its reach for possibilities of being – in its desire and striving for adventure, daring, majesty, for realms of the possible. As both participatory and creative, then, it struck me that art is primarily an experience and invitation to an actuated orientation to openness, daring, adventure, to cherish the sacred wonder at our core: to liberty.”³²

Although a pattern could be considered a fragment because it implies difference within multifaceted experiences, Lonergan writes about this aesthetic pattern of experience that: “complexity mounts and yet the multiplicity is organized into a whole.”³³ It is the implicit wholeness that has to be revealed within a rigorous introspection in order to encounter with Gillis’ notion of liberty and art that results from responding from the sacred core within. In fact, Gillis describes her experience with the freedom within children as beautiful because “their flow of consciousness was free, exuberant”³⁴ and that allowed her to realize that:

“…the aesthetic pattern of experience is simply not a response to, but something at the core in me, in us. …What I appreciated and felt in those children was their liberation of being, their openness to the world, to adventure, to greatness and goodness. The majesty was in them, in their orientation to the fullness of being.”³⁵

Gillis’ interpretation of Lonergan’s notion of aesthetic pattern of experience is not a movement or a response toward something, but a being within freedom. Thus, a social revolution is illusory because it only will provoke a shift of power rather than a powerful transformation that leads us to the being in true liberty. In fact, according to Gillis’ interpretation of art, poetry becomes a methodology for exploring the “possibilities of being.”³⁶ Gillis’ narration of such essential liberty illustrates the experience of what I define as Being Poetry; i.e. an open process (i.e. flowing wholeness), that implicates (i.e. enfolds) the unconditional love (i.e. agape) from the explicate (i.e. unfolded) eros, philia, and storge, that leads to goodness and liberty. The enfolded agapism could be revealed (i.e. become unfolded) through historical (e.g. remembering your mother’s unconditional and attentive love, Murdoch’s open ended process toward the Good) and unhistorical (e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche’s amor fati, Murdoch’s notion of attention as love) experiences of the fullest love that have the consequence of seeing others and oneself as Being Poetry through unconditional communication (e.g. Charles S. Pierce’s notion of creative love).³⁷ This attentive and giving dialogue (e.g. David Bohm’s notion of dialogue) is an orientation toward wholeness, openness, wonder, and awe that culminates in the possibility of seeing others (i.e. human or non-human) as Being Poetry, too.

According to Pushkala Prasad, both postmodernism and poststructuralism are currents of thought that places an emphasis on language to define ‘what is true’. The self is defined in linguistic terms. Postmodernism distrusts grand narratives, and therefore adopts fragmentation and plurality as key aspects of their discourse. Postmodernism also shares other characteristics with poststructuralism such as the “disenchantment with Enlightenment thinking”³⁸, being “in favor of multiplicity, plurality, fragmentation, and indeterminacy”³⁹, and also the rejection of meta-narratives that attempt to silence the epistemology of minorities such as indigenous people.⁴⁰ Likewise, autoethnography which studies the self introspectively, can be regarded as “inherently poststructuralist” because the discourse disrupts “positivist research practices and disciplinary boundaries” within qualitative research.⁴¹

In particular through the examples of Michel Foucault’s and Jacques Derrida’s autobiographies, the feminist and poststructural theorist Susanne Gannon’s interpretation of autoethnography establishes the assumption of a fragmented self: “These authors write themselves as unreliable and contradictory narrators who speak the self – the multiple selves that each of them is and have been- in discontinuous fragments informed by memory, the body, photographs, other texts, and most importantly, other people.”⁴²

Gannon is interested in an autoethnography that is fractured but at the same time leads toward love. However, how can one “promote an ethics of care”⁴³ if the poststructural epistemology assumes a fragmented ontology? Indeed, poststructuralism could be considered an example of Bastien’s and Kremer’s claim that states that most western epistemologies do not allow us to visualize ourselves holistically and interconnected due to an acceptance of an implicit fragmentation.⁴⁴ Nonetheless, the importance of the linguistic turn through a fragmented epistemology has been highly relevant in order to disrupt the detached and analytical discourse. Subsequently, autoethnography was allowed to be considered a form of qualitative research within the social sciences because it differs from the positivist stance that favors a minimized and apparently impartial subjectivity. For that reason, poststructuralism as a sub-genre of postmodernism is responsible for the establishment of “a context of doubt” where “all methods are subject to critique but are not automatically rejected as false.”⁴⁵

Hence, if both poststructuralism and postmodernism support silenced voices, then why haven’t these discourses listened ontologically to the voices they seek to support such as the Blackfoot people and their ways of knowing? According to Gannon, the post¬structural perspective assumes the self as “a fractured and fragmented subject”⁴⁶ that cannot actually know holistically about the world. This assumption has led poststructuralism to argue that the self can be characterized in terms of: “particular bodies with particular feelings”⁴⁷ that disassociates being from the ‘real’ as Derrida states: “There is nothing outside of the text.”⁴⁸ If the fragmented self is real through the text, then what happens with our embodied experiences? The text can be fixed, but our experience is a process that allows also difference and uniqueness. Blackfoot’s ways of knowing assumes an ontological holism and interconnectedness without rejecting differences, processes, and openness. It is a holistic discourse that acknowledges difference as a state within a complex of interrelations or process leading to growth and healing. Thus, as a whole, autoethnography does not need to entail a fragmented self. This combination of autobiography and ethnography acknowledges the researcher’s perspective, emotion, and human depth: “In writing from the heart, we learn how to love, to forgive, to heal, and to move forward.”⁴⁹ In fact, according to Bastien and Kremer, the word wholeness refers to both “a state and process”⁵⁰ that is constantly being healed:

“ ‘To heal’ is etymologically connected with the German heilen, and the IndoEuropean root *kailo, referring to the state and process of wholeness (“whole” also being related to this root). But “to heal” is also connected to “holy” (as heilen to heilig), which gives an ancient root to the reemergent holistic and transpersonal perspectives on healing.”⁵¹

According to Bohm, flowing wholeness (i.e. open ended process of movement that is constantly unfolding and enfolding) is an implicate order, i.e. a fundamental order in the universe.⁵² In view of that, Bohm argues that fluid language (e.g. Bohm’s notion of rheomode which is a mode of language that values processes over objects) allows us to transcend fragmentation because it reveals the continuous flowing process of an implicate order that is constantly hiding (i.e. enfolding) and revealing (i.e. unfolding) information (e.g. light, quantum fields) and therefore, even possibly our physical reality!⁵³ The process of explicating (i.e. unfolding) and implicating (i.e. enfolding) in a broader sense is defined as the holomovement. An example of this movement is a colored drop of ink that becomes enfolded (i.e. invisible) as it dilutes in a cylinder glycerin but as one rotates the cylinder in the opposite direction the colored drop becomes unfolded (i.e. visible) again.⁵⁴

That said, Bohm’s position is based on a philosophical and physical interpretation of quantum physics. Bohm was a renowned scientist who the physicist Albert Einstein “once spoke of as his intellectual successor.”⁵⁵ Bohm is also known for his discovery of the fourth state of matter, i.e. plasma, in 1945.⁵⁶ Initially, Bohm argued in favor of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. This interpretation is considered to be the orthodox version because it follows the quantum physicist Niels Bohr’s line of thinking that assumes quantum processes are exclusively indeterministic. However, this interpretation left Bohm unsatisfied because, according to the philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen, Bohm believed that there:

“…was no need to assume a fundamental level, and thus the question whether the fundamental is deterministic or indeterministic would not even arise.”⁵⁷

This ontological interpretation of quantum physics that assumes no deterministic or indeterministic fundamental level has paradigm shifting implications within quantum physics. Still, it was not enough to bridge the macro- (i.e. general relativity) and micro- (i.e. quantum) theories of the universe. In order to do so, the physicist Basil Hiley and Bohm began in the 1960s to develop a more general approach that could actually bridge the macro- and micro- perspectives called the Implicate Order.⁵⁸ The latter concept was the culmination of a philosophical quest that started during Bohm’s stay at Princeton during the latter part of the 1940s where Bohm realized that: “physics was an inner journey grounded in the conviction that his own body was a microcosm of the universe.”⁵⁹ It was since then that Bohm began to search for a relationship between consciousness and physics.

Lamentably, Bohm became persecuted due to the McCarthyism era, i.e. the era in the United States during the Cold War where Americans who were believed to be associated with the Soviet Union were considered traitors, and was eventually driven to exile.⁶⁰ Therefore, Bohm’s theories were rejected without a thoughtful critique from his colleges for sociological reasons due to his politics and interest in eastern philosophy. A renewed interest in Bohm’s work occurred when Peat published Bohm’s biography Infinite Potential.⁶¹ Furthermore, in the preface of On Creativity, the former Director of Native American Studies in Harvard University Leroy Little Bear argues that Bohm’s interpretation of quantum physics is similar to Blackfoot epistemology. However, it was Bohm’s notions of creativity and dialogue that most captivated him because⁶²:

“I have come to greatly appreciate David Bohm’s openness to the “new”, to “difference”, and to “possibilities” arising out of boundaries crossing into different disciplines, cultures, and ways of knowing, as well for his appreciation of science as art and beauty.”⁶³

For these reasons, my journal explores the possibility of an ontological holism within myself as Being Poetry using fluid language as a medium to express an aesthetic pattern of experience that could lead to goodness, openness, beauty, and love. Although fluid language can appear fragmented, such an assumption is the consequence of a dualist mindset that presupposes a contradiction between wholeness and difference. There is no need of fragmentation in order to favor difference as it occurs in Blackfoot’s and Bohm’s ontology. The emphasis on the verb rather than an emphasis on objects and subjects would unfold difference into wholeness within the mundane through a fluid and flexible language such as it is illustrated by Leroy Little Bear’s notion of mind:

“The Blackfoot mind is a repository of creativity because of the notion of constant flux. … The constant flux results in a view of constant change and constant transformations. …The Blackfoot mind is a repository of creativity because it eschews boundaries and because, where there are boundaries, it can readily transcend them. …Lastly, the Blackfoot mind is a repository of creativity because of the Blackfoot language used to communicate.”⁶⁴

For example, Leroy Little Bear argues that one can find more than 300,000 forms to express the verb ‘to be’ due to its creative use of morphology. It is difficult to understand such framework of thought if one is part of those who speak solely European languages such as English. This occurs because one is constrained to a determined grammatical construction (subject-predicate) to communicate a complete thought.⁶⁵ In contrast, the philosophy behind Blackfoot challenges this notion of communication and language. Whereas European languages “stress the notion of syntax”, Blackfoot language “stresses morphology”, and in the same way Bohm’s mode of language called Rheomode stresses the verb rather than the object-subject.⁶⁶

As a result, I will reinterpret Bohm’s mode of language through my journal which is divided in two main parts: Part one consists of a series of poems or §. Part two is an autoethnography that analyzes the poems in order to make explicit the underlying motif in them: I am poetry. Perhaps you can see that you are poetry, too. Part one is implicitly informed by David Bohm’s notion of the rheomode where morphology and the verb are emphasized over grammatical structures and the object-subject dichotomies. The poetic model is based on an initial Spanish framework of thought that was translated into English. Spanish allows the omission of the “subject” through verb conjugation. So, I attempted to omit the subject in some phrases in order to stress the same effect of an implicit subject, and at the same time elaborated upon these poetic themes: §1-3 describe the suffering and despair that I felt due to corruption in Mexico.

§4-5 describe the evocative and embodied experience that fragmentation brings to the self.

§6-11 explore the use of the rheomode as an unconditional form of communication that leads to wholeness.

§12-18 describe how there are two ways of experiences, the historical and unhistorical that lead to a sense of wholeness and love that culminates in Being Poetry.

Part two begins with the poetic analysis through autoethnography by explaining the fluid nature of Being Poetry through the notions of poetic communication, the rheomode, and being as unconditional communication that inform §6-11.

Second, I will analyze poems § 4-5 that describe fragmentation. I will illustrate how the mechanical philosophy of Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton are Bohm’s explicate order, and how mechanism is the fundamental pillar that allows the dismissal of Bohm’s notion of flowing wholeness (i.e. implicate order) through assumptions rather than facts. I will also distinguish how our fragmented conception of language could be the result of mechanism. This section will illustrate how dwelling in fragmentation impedes our capacity of seeing ourselves as poetic beings.

Third, I will offer a solution to fragmentation through a poetic being that uses fluid language in order to experience aesthetically wholeness. § 6, 15, 18 draw from the notions of wholeness and agape to poetically describe the essence of Being Poetry.

Fourth, I will describe suffering as a daydream. This is so because angst can actually open a space for being poetry rather than impede us to do so. Despair in its fullest allows the self to become aware of its limit and provide the necessary courage to leap into the openness of being as illustrated in §10.

Fifth, I will define the notion of love in its fullest because it is a recurring and essential concept within my poetry. I will begin by defining the different types of love (i.e. agape, nomos, eros, and philia), and then I will explain how Bohm’s implicate order could be used to illustrate the process of enfolding and unfolding of agape within nomos, eros, and philia. Then, I will explain how the unfolded agape could be experienced through two different ways: the historical as a notion that allows us to remember past experiences with an unfolded agape and the unhistorical as an unfolded agape that is felt through the present moment. Both of these historical and unhistorical experiences peak with the experience of the fullest love which is an analogy to Being Poetry.

Finally, the totality of poems culminate in exploring the possibility that you could see yourself as poetry too because once one experiences the fullest love as Being Poetry, the other is revealed as Being Poetry too. I will illustrate through an evocative experience how Bohm’s notion of dialogue can allow us to communicate unconditionally, and therefore through empathic intersubjectivity the poet becomes implicate and the inner meaning of unconditional communication becomes explicate as Poetry itself.