A very interesting essay, Alison. It made me think of a talk I gave at a
one-day conference on writing as spiritual practice a couple of years ago.
The text is below

Richard

The Rectification Of Names

By Richard Jeffrey Newman, Nassau Community College

Originally Delivered Spring 2002 in New York City at the Sophia Center’s
conference “An Afternoon of Poetry and Spirituality.

Published March 2003 in Conversations, The Sophia Center’s Newsletter.
In my experience, the spiritual practice that writing poetry cannot help but
become once you’ve chosen to make it your way of life is inseparable from
the erotic practice my writing had to become before I could produce the
poems that were truly mine to produce. The narrative this statement hints at
is too long to tell here, but I can at least sketch the story’s contours.
At two different times during my teens, two men—one a complete stranger, the
other a casual friend of the family—each took my body as his playground and
his plaything and abused me sexually. Each man was a predator and each used
my need for a surrogate father to lure me to him. My own father, after my
mother sued him for divorce, left our house when I was three. As he walked
out the door, he said to me that maybe—though of course I took it as a
promise—maybe he’d be coming back. He never did, and, as any three-year-old
would, I blamed myself.

I survived both these traumas, though I lived for many years afterward
behind a veil of guilt and shame, of selfhatred, and the conviction that I
was tainted, deeply and irrevocably, such that I would never again be worthy
of another’s love. In orthodox Judaism, which I took as a teenager to be the
guiding tradition of my life, god is the ultimate father, and because I was
taught it explicitly, I believed that if I could gain this heavenly father’s
approval, make myself good enough in his eyes to earn his love, then I would
be good, and nothing, nothing—no matter what I’d done or had been done to me
in the past—could ever undo that achievement.

So I studied the forms of daily Jewish life and poured as much as I could of
my own living into it. The traditional religious view of the relationship
between body and soul, however, that they are separable and that the full
value of human worth is located primarily in the soul, and not the body,
echoes in many ways the separation of mind from body that is a common
experience of those who have been physically or sexually abused. As a
result, learning to love my yiddishe neshama, my Jewish soul—which, as one
of my rebbes used to say, was a prerequisite of earning god’s love—could not
help but implicitly justify the hatred of my physical existence that I
already felt. Ironically, in other words, my embrace of Judaism actually
compounded the state of selfhating alienation in which I existed.

The first poems in which I named my abuse as abuse, describing in precise
detail the acts and body parts involved, were primarily therapeutic and
correspondingly unsuccessful as art. I remember vividly, however, how
liberating it was not merely to have written them, but to understand that I
had found a language in which they could be written. Suddenly, my body was
more accessible to me, more mine than it had ever been. I felt differently
in my body as well. The world of sensual pleasures opened to me and
deepened, connecting me to my own desires and therefore also to my own sense
of belonging to, of having a rightful claim to a physical presence in, this
world, more powerfully than orthodox Judaism had ever made me feel good.

Indeed, the more fully I experienced myself as inhabiting my body, the more
the project of making myself good in god’s eyes revealed itself as the
strategy it had been all along for not confronting what my abusers had done
to me. Writing those poems, in other words, helped to strip away the layers
of mystification in which my body had been wrapped, uncovering the
mystery—and I mean this word almost in its Christian theological sense:
something that can never be fully understood and that can be apprehended
only through revelation—the mystery of my own embodiment. I no longer cared
whether or not I had a soul that was distinct from my body. More to the
point, the approval of a god for whom the condition of that soul was a
primary concern became for me irrelevant.

Tikkun olam, a concept that is central to Jewish spirituality, means,
literally, the fixing of the world, and it refers to a religious duty Jews
are supposed to consider themselves obligated to perform. In the mystical
tradition, tikkun olam means the task of gathering the fragments of the
shattered divine, the pieces of himself [sic] that god gave up in creating
the world so that the world could live and grow, and using them to
reconstruct the original godhead. On a more mundane level, tikkun olam is
represented by such things as the struggle for social justice. For me,
writing poetry is also a form of tikkun olam. As poet and translator Sam
Hamill has written, “The first duty of the writer is the rectification of
names,” and he quotes Kungfu Tze [Confucius], “All wisdom is rooted in
learning to call things by the right name.” It is in poetry, writing it and
reading it, that I find this wisdom and its corresponding spiritual
practice.


Richard Jeffrey Newman


_________________________
Richard Jeffrey Newman 
Associate Professor, English
Nassau Community College
One Education Drive
Garden City, NY 11530
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F: (516) 572-8134
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