“Witness of Poetry”

My kin made these – flint ax 10,000 years ago, bronze small ax 4000 years ago

This first mornng here on the Island of Iona I listened to a chapter of an audiotape of The Witness of Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz. He states that a poet should be” truthful to reality” and surprisingly he thinks that the challenge of this time is to find that reality in history.

He suggests that the biological search for evidence of higher evolution in people and the techological availability to research art and science is a form of compensation for what is being destroyed rather than delving into potential. He sees “signs every day of something new on an unpredecentated scale, something being born; humanity itself as an elemental force that is conscious of transcending nature and lives by the memory of itself that is in history”.

The next part touched me deeply and seems central to my pilgrimage tour with Labyrinthos in Argyll, the Western Isles, Orkneys, Highands and Lochs of historic and bronze age sites. My compulsion has been to connect with my ancestry in land and culture and creatures and weather and yes history of this region – that which is kindred to me.

He discusses the poetic act of exploring the dimensions of the past of humanity, “the excepionality, loneliness and strangeness of a creature mysterious to itself, that incessantly transcends its own limits – turning back to itself” This involves “contemplating the entire past – a key to our enigma; and penetrating through the soul of bygone generations and of whole civilizations with empathy”.

Take a moment to re-read that last paragraph.

For the next while I will have limited acess to wifi and my journal entries will not necessarily be linear in time. But these thoughts by Milosz give a context that is critical to the underlying meaning of pilgrimage and how I will tell the story. Here on this stormy morning by the sea on an Island historically known for literacy and enlightnment when the rest of Europe was in the Dark Ages. Here on this island of few inhabitants where pilgrims still come for deeply personal reasons. Here an epiphany on the act of poetry without having even yet walked the labyrinth lets me know I have found a related center from which to move.