Spirituelle

Spirituelle is my favourite candle scent by a Grasse based craft perfumers Mad et Len (no commission, I just love their non-toxic vegetal wax concoctions). Its feminine french word form suggests women’s connection with the divine. A soulful female manifestation of her being. Perhaps a mood, seasonally changing, yet always with a crisp note of mint. Men can benefit from her force for each of us contains either energy – the male and female, the yin and the yang. East meets West, genders embracing each other by allowing each other into oneself.

My poems are usually conceived from the void, of the motherly womb beyond one’s self. They are a newborn existence without defined personality, the blank slates scribbled with daily evolution through growth, struggle, pain, love, joy, compassion and pure, innocent bliss. The words flow from some undefinable source that I join along. As if the aether was filled with poetry. Sometimes the meaning of those words in a language I learned much later in life than my mother tongue, but had an instinctual affinity to as I do to French, evades me, but with time’s passing I grasp the essence veiled behind metaphors. Some poems are oracles, others reflect the collective feelings emerging onto the visible field of lived experience.

In Spirituelle, the poetic muse connected with nature. She echoes Earth’s struggle with human vices, our short-sighted disrespect for her limited resources and our greed to control every aspect of our life. As if we were punished for our divorce from the natural world of which we have been part ever since we evolved to exist, the loss of fertility, compassion, real life interaction between living beings as technology isolates our flesh from the warmth of others, the emotions of other creatures alive are rendered into water colours we no longer recognise the meaning of.

Is God exhausted by our whimsy trysts

In nature’s womb loosing fertile eggs

And sun’s heat consuming alive sperms

As not she, nor he know how to kiss

Memories are lost to artificial bits

The most ancient of fond harmonies

Chiselled into clay Sumerian cylinders

Found in the abyss of material past

But is there something like a sound

More ancient — the unnamable —

But we must have called it something

— the spirit — perhaps? 

That vapour of eternal love, the

Omnipresent divine force behind life

For something must be behind it all

The primordial engine driving the car 

Of life towards the necessity of death.

Decay of everything, unsparing metamorphic rock

The existence changed through time and space

But there, here — is or are — perhaps

Other dimensions to everything — or —

At least that something which concerns us

That life we have at least until we die, 

That humanity bestowed with desire 

For eternal being, immortality and love

A conflict we fight with gods in arts and myths

Through liberal, unabashed, unafraid creativity

Yet, is God exhausted by our whimsy trysts?

We like to think that we rule the game,

While the paradise was lost to our lust

And we can never take it back, repentance is vain

— Burn, burn or the flood is coming for you sinners — 

For all of us, unless we create paradise NOW by accepting that God is within, not separate from us

~

Of course my poem is about my instinctive belief in human need for spirituality. Not just to get answers to the unknown, for we are surpassing the dark holes of knowledge through the ever evolving science, but to lean on something resistant to change. At least the illusion of that infinity.

Philosophy in Spirituelle

While I feel more affinity with the pre-socratic, on the elemental nature focused philosophy than the judgement-awakening accent on morality and politics of there post-socratic schools (which I believe divided the east from the west already before Christianity infiltrated the Western codes of conduct), order is preferred over chaos, and in that reason and the rule of law are essential necessities of culture as is social cohesion over war.

Further, like Anselm Kiefer, whose powerful art I include in this post, I philosophically diverge from Platonism. I don’t view God as superior, flawless, the holy grail. While I humbly bow to nature, my thought has evolved to feel that God is more a part of everything that exists, not exclusively accessible to the holy few. It is a potential for good that is naturally infiltrated with destructive force, the wholeness cannot sustainably evolve and change without the presence of both — the light and darkness. In one word we are One. Oneness is all.

There are more nuanced messages in Spirituelle. I invite you to openly investigate them yourself and to form your own conclusions. My poem is just a vessel of notes, like a song that hopefully stirs your own contemplation, perhaps even revelations that gush from your connection with the incomprehensible, with what we call divine, intuitive or the security system above our individual power.