Gabriel includes the below point as part of the list of what makes up strong centers explored in the previous posts; however, I see these as important enough to be separated and explored on their own. They speak to the whole poem more directly than to each center – at least so it seems to me.
Now to talk about the Void in poetry and in life, and the need for simplicity and not separateness.
The Void
The Void, which really is nothing more than a quiet center, poses as stillness or literally as a quiet point somewhere in a poem. “Sometimes it is the space between stanzas or lines, sometimes it is the place of quiet resonance just after a poem ends,” according to Gabriel. A good kind of “void” is found close to or at the heart of the poem, never at the fringes; in this way, all other centers support this quiet center without overwhelming it.
Many attempt to build in such quiet centers with retreats and vacations, brief periods of relaxation in exotic places that they save up for and anticipate months in advance. I have not travelled much for fun so I cannot say this for most people; but even the vacation itself is too often stress-building for me – the preparation, the packing, the commuting/flying, the unpacking, the getting-used-to-a-new-place, the wondering-if-we-could-afford-this, everything.
It seems like a better idea to build such voids into the life you live day-to-day – taking the time to steep the tea properly, sitting beside your dog and watching the sun set as you give thanks for the closing of another day, going on a hike and a picnic with a friend you have not seen in months.
This way, the quiet centers give life to the more noisy centers of your life without demanding too much focus and investment all at once; and when such little quiet centers become a way of life, you may slowly realize you no hunger after that elusive sense of quiet and peace as you used to, a sense that only came to you in the fringes of your life when you could afford to lie on a beach somewhere on the other side of the world.
Simplicity and Inner Calm
Simplicity is attained when all irrelevant parts are removed from the piece, and is maintained when the poem is as simple and spare as possible while still retaining life. Ostenatious words or phrases find no home here, nor does naïvety.
“It has to do with a certain slowness, majesty, quietness, which I think of as inner calm. This quality comes about when everything unnecessary is removed. All centers that are not actively supporting other centers are stripped out, cut out, excised. What is left, when boiled away, is the structure in a state of inner calm. It is essential that the great beauty and intricacy of ornament go only just far enough to bring this calm into being, and not so far that it destroys it.” — Christopher Alexander
For many, pursuing extreme minimalism is unnecessary; to our twenty-first century mindsets, St. Basil’s perspective on material wealth seems beyond uncomfortable, even bordering on the maniacal; for yet others, it is difficult to see why one should even bother to give so much thought to the things they have, the things they spend time and money on, the things that make up an “average life.”
When I began to contemplate this point, images of flowers growing upwards between cracks in the sidewalks, of bees flitting from bloom to bloom, and a cat yawning in the sunlight on a windowsill came to mind. Plants and animals never seem to care too much about whether they have the newest toy, whether they are in a better spot than the other flowers, whether the ROI of their day-to-day efforts at staying alive is optimal. They are growing; they have what they need; the sun is shining, the world is at peace for now; they are content.
I see the call to simplicity as not asking more of life than what is necessary to lead a quiet, joyful existence with stuff that work. Nothing more, nothing less. It all begins in the mind…
Not Separateness
“What Not Separateness means, quite simply, is that we experience a living whole as being at one with the world, and not separate from it—according to its degree of wholeness. This is, finally, perhaps the most important property of all. In my experiments with shapes and buildings, I have discovered that the other fourteen ways in which centers come to life, will make a center which is compact, beautiful, determined, subtle—but, without this fifteenth property, are still often somehow strangely separate, cut off from what lies around it, lonely, awkward in its loneliness, too brittle, too sharp, perhaps too well delineated—above all too egocentric, because it shouts “Look at me, look at me, look how beautiful I am.” — Christopher Alexander
The poem does not stand alone apart from the others, drawing attention only to itself for itself; instead, it brings the reader closer to themselves, deeper in their understanding and appreciation of life and of the world around them, helps them see more than just what the words in the poems mean.
This may well be the most important characteristic explored so far regarding poetic centers that ought to be brought out in a life – that of a life not lived for itself nor unto itself, regardless of how pretty, flawless, and complete it might seem to be. What is the use of getting better if all we do is keep the “better” for ourselves? It can be easy to get onto the endless treadmill of personal development and spiritual enlightenment and think we are improving, never realizing that even the most beautiful rose dies under a glass cover when it thinks everything must be for its own betterment.
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