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We aren’t just a sum of parts but the product of constant division and multiplication, constantly denying the erratic arithmetic and calling our denial self. The parts we live with are who we are, and those we cannot live with are the turbine of our suffering. The most difficult decisions in life are difficult precisely because we are unsummed, too divided to reconcile the desires of one part with those of another. We watch ourselves undergo overnight phase transitions of feeling as a different part seizes the dials of pleasure and pain that govern all human behavior, then pull the quilt of time and thinking over our head to maintain the illusion of coherence, disavowing entire regions of our own experience as if someone else lived them. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.),” wrote Whitman, knowing that we are each “of one phase and of all phases,” that within us each live the slaveholder and the slave, the woman being burned at the stake and the man striking the match.
Perhaps “god” is just how we name our yearning for a single truth, for an integrating voice to conciliate the contradictions, for something large and total to hold what we cannot hold.
Sixteen centuries before Whitman, the Gnostics — those spiritual visionaries who saw the wholeness of being before modern Christianity partitioned the body and the soul — channeled that voice in “The Thunder: Perfect Mind,” part of what is now known as the Nag Hammadi Library: a set of ancient texts discovered in a jar at the foot of a cliff by two illiterate Muslim brothers in 1945. The long poem of contrasts and conciliation “appears to derive from the female-centered Isis worship preceding Christianity,” writes poet and ordained Buddhist Jane Hirshfield in introducing her translation of it in Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (public library).
In “The Heart Thunder,” spoken word artist Kim Rosen brings this immortal abacus of the soul to life in a breathtaking performance, fusing the Gnostic gospel with the concluding mantra of the Buddhist Heart Sutra to the pulse-beat of a multi-instrumental orchestra — cello, percussion, piano, guitar, and vocals by musicians Jami Sieber, Wayne P. Sheehy, and Chloe Goodchild:
from THE THUNDER: PERFECT MIND
translated by Jane HirshfieldSent from the Power,
I have come
to those who reflect upon me.
Look upon me,
you who meditate,
and hearers, hear.
Whoever is waiting for me,
take me into yourselves.
Do not drive me
out of your eyes,
or out of your voice,
or our of your ears.
Observe: Do not forget who I am.For I am the first, and the last
I am the honored one, and the scorned,
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother, the daughter,
and every part of both.
I am the barren one who has borne many sons.
I am she whose wedding is great
and I have not accepted a husband.
I am the midwife and the childless one,
the easing of my own labor.
I am the bride and the bridegroom
and my husband is my father.
I am the mother of my father,
the sister of my husband;
my husband is my child.
My offspring are my own birth,
the source of my power,
what happens to me is their wish.I am the incomprehensible silence
And the memory that will not be forgotten.
I am the voice whose sound is everywhere
I am the speech that appears in many forms.
I am the utterance of my own name.Why, you who hate me, do you love me,
and hate those who love me?
You who tell the truth about me, lie,
and you who have lied, now tell the truth.
You who know me, be ignorant,
and you who have not known me, know.For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am modesty and boldness.
I am shameless, and I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and I am peace.Give heed to me,
the one who has been everywhere hated
and the one who is everywhere loved.
I am the one they call Life,
the one you call Death.
I am the one they call Law,
the one you call Lawless.
I am the one you have scattered,
and you have gathered me together.
I am godless, and I am the one
whose God is great.
I am the one whom you have reflected upon
and the one you have scorned.
I am unlearned,
and from me all people learn.
I am the one to whom you reveal yourself,
Yet wherever you think I hide, I appear,
And wherever you reveal yourself,
there I will vanish.Those who are close to me,
have failed to know me,
and those who are far from me know me.
On the day when I am close to you,
that day you are far from me;
on the day when I am far from you,
that day I am close.I am the joining and the dissolving.
I am what lasts, and what goes,
I am the one going down,
and the one toward whom they ascend.
I am the condemnation and the acquittal.
For myself, I am sinless,
and the roots of sin grow in my being.
I am the desire of the outer,
and control of the inner.
I am the hearing in everyone’s ears,
I am the speech which cannot be heard,
I am the mute who is speechless,
great are the multitudes of my words.Hear me in softness,
and learn me in roughness.
I am she who cries out,
and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth.
I prepare the bread and my mind within.
I am called truth.You praise me and you whisper against me.
You who have been defeated,Judge before you are judged:
the judge and all judging exist inside you,
and the one who formed you on the outside
is the one who shaped you within.And what you see outside you, you see within.
It is visible and it is your garment.Give heed then, you hearers,
and you also, angels and those who have been sent,
and you spirits risen now from the dead.
I am the one who alone exists,
there is no one to judge me.
For though there is much sweetness
in passionate life, in transient pleasure,
finally soberness comes
and people flee to their place of rest.
There they will find me,
and live, and not die again.
Couple with “To Be a Person” — Jane Hirshfield’s magnificent poem about how to bear our human condition — then revisit Margaret Fuller’s account of touching “The All,” the Transcendentalists’ term for the totality of being the Gnostics eulogized in their gospel.
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