The Secret is in the Eyes: Marc Gafni

In Honor of White Umbrella:

The artist’s eye, the lover’s eye, is unfurnished. It is not blinded with the opaque trappings of pre-conceptions and mis-conceptions.

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It is for this reason that we often equate the lover and the poet. Indeed it is love that moves all of us to be poets. Who has not at some time picked up pen to write poety for their beloved. And if you haven’t yet you should now. Poetry and love are intimately related because poetry like love is an art of perception.

Poet Allen Ginsberg is in the traditions of the great lovers when he reminds us of the need for for “clear seeing and direct perception”.

Ginsberg wrote, “Don’t treat object indirectly or symbolically, rather look directly at it and chose the aspect more immediately striking… and then write”

Ezra Pound, talks about the “direct treatment of the thing.”

Love is in the details.

Baudelaire understood this well when he moved poetry from the ethereal and the abstract to the concrete and the real. All of the sudden, the poetic consciousness of 19th century started to include the city, real estate, carriages, machinery.

It was the great lover Walt Whitman who said, “Bring the muse into the kitchen.”

Scholar of Mysticism William James talks about “the solidity of specificity.”

Jack Kerouac, always reminds us that “details are the life of prose.”…

To be a lover, writes Zen Master Chogyam Trungpa is to know that ‘things are symbols of themselves’

What Trungpa means is that if you directly perceive a thing its completely there, completely revelatory of the eternal universe that’s in it.

In the lovers vision, perception is first narrowed, concretized and then expanded into the realization …that in the ordinary resides all of the extraordinary.

The lover’s eye is open, ready to receive the divine in all it sees.

marc gafni
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