Peripheral coherence

How do we make sense of the multitudes within us and around us? How do we open our awareness to the immensity within which we swim without losing the life raft of coherence upon which our sanity depends?

Denise Levertov described this feeling in her poem, Suspended. “I had grasped God’s garment in the void,” she wrote, “but my hand slipped on the rich silk of it.”

Our cobbled-together human brains can surrender to experience—luxuriate in life’s rich silk, but more often we default to language, our newer skill. The effectiveness of this linguistic default diminishes with increasing complexity: words fail us. We make do with metaphors, which Sallie McFague called “strategies of desperation.” The whole is uncapturable—we glimpse it briefly, from the corner of our eye.

Is this peripheral coherence enough? For Levertov it was, at least some of the time:

The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.