David Whyte: Do words have place in Meditation?
Much of my 36 years has been a search for the right words. Over that time what I need from those words has changed. Broadly it has oscillated between objectivity and music, between a flint-hard tool and a musical instrument.
As a child I needed them to convey information about the world as I discovered it. The magic lay in that discovery and needed no ancillary, lyrical function besides. Later in my teens when I became a twitching bundle of raw emotion I needed words to soothe as music - to deliver and articulate emotion - and make me feel less alone. Again in my late twenties as I embarked on a career I demanded words be objective, to yield absolute meaning to serve as scaffolding to my ideas. I can feel over the past few months my appetite for music again growing. I have many people to thank for this. David Whyte is one of them.
I came across Whyte in a conversation between him and Sam Harris on Harris’ meditation app. They were an odd pair. Whyte spoke with a melodious Irish lilt. He spoke of words, their power and a meditative way by which they reveal their meaning. Even over the pre-recorded, compressed audio you could hear Harris’ razor sharp analytical mind relax and enjoy Whyte’s sublime sentiments.
Whyte read out some of his poems including The Bell and The Blackbird retraversing lines to give them an incantatory feel. Whyte also spoke of discovering the actual meaning of what he had written, twenty years after he had written it, after having read it aloud on a regular basis.
The tone of the conversation was profound and gentle yet its inclusion on a meditation app is curious. Usually, so much of meditation is the escape from words. Words so often lasso your mind because they naturally lead to other words which opens the portal to daydreaming or judgement.
At a more atomic level an individual word arises in the mind to label what we are experiencing. While meditating this serves to narrow experience because the word acts as a filter and mediate the rawness and nuance experience contains. This can also be a point of departure from experience in which meditation ends and we become lost in thought.
Yet Whyte spoke of words as if they were possible objects of meditation in themselves. This was not contemplation of words but allowing them to unfurl in one’s mind with a meditative slowness. Words were less studied then explored - very much as how one explores consciousness itself. Words, for Whyte, cannot be interrogated but reveal their meaning in time of their own volition. This is to say they are living entities that have their own layered history.
Whyte’s radical reinterpretation of words not as a meditator’s trap or a static bearers of meaning but as living has been explored in detail in his book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. These are poems on individual words. Words like Courage, Disappointment or places like Istanbul. Each poem is exquisitely composed far more lyrical than philological. Consider the opening poem Alone:
The difficulty of being alone may be felt most keenly in the most intimate circumstances, in the darkness of the marriage bed: one centimeter and a thousand miles apart, or in the silence around a tiny crowded kitchen table. But to feel alone in the presence of others is also to understand the singularity of human existence whilst experiencing the deep physical current that binds us to others whether we want that binding or no: aloneness can measure togetherness even through a sense of distance.
Can this be considered meditation? There is definitely something about the mode through which the meaning of each of these words revealed itself. You have the feeling that Whyte is less constructing than allowing the word free play in Whyte’s mind. He is opening himself to the subtlety and sentience of words. It’s less about control and dominance than receiving and openness. It seems a radical idea but one close enough in attitude to meditation that it may work.