Correspondences                                                          Page 54

In the journey through fire and darkness both the transcendent God and the

transcendent self disappear. "Simple sight" remains and can expand into vision,

"Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte" ("Correspondances").  “Vast as the

night and as the light" Words like "transcendent", and "spiritual" may need to

be put back into the earth so they can again take root in the soil and grow into

a "great tree" whose root is "eternity" deep in "the world's womb" ("Night").

We may apply to phrases such as transcendence and immanence", "spiritual

and material", the words Taylor uses finitude and infinitude: they "enact a

ceaseless play in which each becomes itself through the other." 69

 

Judith Wrights poetry creates moments where distinctions between

transcendent and immanent, infinite and finite are not considered.  Ordinary

events are seen with an immediacy that is able to speak their richness and

wonder, their pain and horror and also their interplay, their interrelatedness.

 

In "Bora Ring" the reader comes into a place in the bush, where the grass the

trees, the sounds, the spirit of the Ring, correspond to the extermination of a

people and its culture "Naming The Stars" (C.P. p.203) sees flowers

transplanted into the sky, "low to high", to become "nights far-off suns" that,

“like us, are caught in time and cause". Earth is connected to the universe as

one little star that watches and greets the others:

 

Earth watches through our eyes, and as we stare

she greets, by us, her far companions there,

On her dark breast we spring like points of light

and set her language on the map of night

 

 

69 Erring, p. 114

 

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