Is poetry Metaphysics? Third Lesson (Metaphysics of Flesh)

 

Se guardo il cielo nuvole e azzurro
Fra gli alberi che al vento cambian
L' azzurro e le nubi e le forme vedo

Si piegan nei rami di foglie verdi.
Il cielo anche si sposta in alto
Perché vive se lo guardi - mai fermo.

Come il mare mai riposa ora e poi.
È pace o dolore che lo muove?
Or si vuota or si piena - mai calmo.

Ma di giù mi sento con te - lassù
Non perso ma a casa arrivato quasi
In forma d' amore chi cerco sei tu.
"If I gaze at the sky, clouds and blue,
Among the trees that shift in the wind,
The blue and the clouds and their shapes I see.
They bend in the branches of green leaves.
The sky, too, moves upward,
For it lives if you watch it—never still.
Like the sea that never rests, now and then.
Is it peace or pain that stirs it?
Now it empties, now it fills—never calm.
But from below, I feel with you—up there,
Not lost, but almost arrived at home,
In the form of love, the one I seek is you"


What does this poem hide?
It hides life’s unfolding in its self-understanding.
The phenomenon of clouding over, the ever-changing forms of the sky, lets the poet understand his existence.
In life’s ordinary, the poet feels the extraordinary beyond the expressible.
Lifting his eyes to the sky, he waits for resurrection and elevation.
In that moment, his eyes seek love up there—love and peace, which are lacking in his ordinary life.
The sky’s ceaseless motion mirrors the poet’s hope for transcendence—a movement toward the divine that echoes the act of merely believing, which once the mundus credidit:
Incredibile est Christum resurrexisse in carne et in caelum ascendisse cum carne; incredibile est mundum rem tam incredibilem credidisse
"It is incredible that Christ rose again in the flesh and ascended into heaven with the flesh; it is incredible that the world believed something so incredible"
(Saint Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XXII, 5)
The sky’s boundless flux prompts the poet to ponder the origins of existence, echoing Thomas Mann’s question in Joseph und Seine Brüder:
Wo liegen die Anfangsgründe der menschlichen Gesittung?
"Where do the fundamental origins of human civilisation lie?"
The poet is led to believe what was believed centuries ago. Once a fact has been believed, it remains believed in the memory of the bodies and minds of the following generations.
Here emerges a metaphysics of flesh.
Body and flesh have been put aside by Catholicism through an ideal of monastic life devoted to the Spirit and negation of the body.
But the body will be resurrected with its flesh, bones, and blood, not as a pure spirit without flesh.