They builded better than they knew

Have been re-reading the incomparable Architectonics of Humanism, by Lionel March. This is a profound exploration of ancient architectural methods (& their survivals in medieval & Renaissance eras), which involved the synthesis of math & geometry with the gematria, or numerology of words & names (back when ancient Greek & Hebrew alphabets & numerals were one & the same, and every word had a corresponding "number" - the Greeks called it the pythmen).

In a chapter investigating Roman architecture, he analyzes a (conceptual) building model described in Vitruvius - the basilica of Fano, & suggests not only that the full name of "Vitruvius" is encrypted in the dimensions of the building, but that Vitruvius might actually be a nom-de-plume of Roman polymath Varro, whose name is also encrypted, numerically & geometrically, in the design. Furthermore, March finds that the name of Julius Caesar - one of Varro's friends - is also memorialized in key elements of the building's design.

Now this I found especially interesting, because the pythmen, or root number by gematria, of Caesar's name, is the number 528. When I read this I almost fell off my chair. Because I've played a lot of number games, using names & dates etc., in my own poems (in this methods are a throwback to some very old bardic procedures). And the long poem Forth of July - especially the 3rd book, July - is quite involved with this number (528). July was finished on 5.28.2000. 5.28 is the date that William Blackstone, New England pioneer & a sort of "keystone" for the book, was buried on his property in Cumberland RI. July's chapters are also structured as 5 parts of 28 quatrains each. Moreover, one of the key verbal themes/games of the poem is a sort of turning inside-out of "Julius" (Caesar) to "July" (or Juliet, or jewel-eye, or "J", etc.) : which is intended in part to represent a kind of overturning of empire, militarism, "Iron Age" values (Caesar), & their replacement with "Golden Age" (or "Jubilee") values.

What I didn't realize, when I was "building" this poem, that the actual "number" of Caesar's name - & Vitruvius' symbolic building - is also encrypted in my poem...

Can I say anything more about this poem, Fontegaia, without spoiling the fun (if there is any)?

Have been at my idiosyncratic process for so long it's sort of hard to take a step back.

Is it all so dark, abstruse, obscure? Maybe. Maybe requires a lot of scaffolding, instruction manuals...

I follow certain ways of seeing things & thinking about things. I share much of this, I believe (I hope), with other like-minded people. But as a poet, I don't enjoy cliches and shopworn generalizations about deep & mysterious facets of experience. I want to see (& say) things as they are, or as they were "on the 1st day of creation". This is an aspect of the intellectual game of my poems. The serial-continuous-repetitive forms are, I guess, in part anyway, a mode of expressive contemplation or meditation. I want to express the "brow of reality", in my own way.

As you can probably tell, I've come increasingly to see things through some kind of spiritual-theological lens. (Of course, this loses a lot of people, scares them off.) There are a few mental foundations I return to, whenever I try to do one of these self-summaries.

Such as the notion that reality is "personal" in some ultimate sense. That the universe is suspended in some fairly indescribable creative consciousness.

& the idea that human history is subsumed within a (very) dramatic narrative of salvation history, which involves, on its most basic level, a promise or covenant between the Eternal and the mortal, the human; and which promise is fulfilled in the most distinct and "incarnational" fashion, in actual human history.

& the counterbalancing notion that this "salvation drama" has been, from the beginning, in some sense a symbolic intervention - a representative action : the full, mysterious, intricate, various & particular truth(s) of which cannot be concretized in language. Language - even "sacred" language - only acts as sign : pointing, directing us to look & see & understand. Truth itself (going back to the notion of the "personal", subjective quality of creative consciousness) can only be embodied. (Walt Whitman descants on this point over & over again, in great phrases : "The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything." & etc. etc.)

These two counterbalancing notions (actual - yet representative - salvation drama) find their crux, for me anyway, in the Good Friday & Easter events. A representative (unjust) death; a representative resurrection. As the death on the Cross is a figure for the death of Everyman & -woman - for our own particular mortality; and the resurrection is the same, ie., has representative meaning for each of us, personally, subjectively.

(Someone like me might also argue (& in so doing enter perhaps confusing & dangerous theological waters) that the clear recognition of both the actual & representative elements of this drama, is the sign itself of Joachim's & Bonaventure's coming of the "new age" : which was, for them, to be a change & renovation of the world, under the reign of contemplation.)

In my poems these events are encapsulated in the various "plays" I make on the letter "J", the word "Jay"... in one important example, "J" stands for "Jonah", which means "dove" in Hebrew. In this word are meshed both (1)the (comic) story of the runaway prophet in the bowels of the whale (a symbol, for me, of the existential blind travails of Everyman), and (2) the story of Pentecost, of the simultaneous and omnipresent manifestation of the post-resurrection-spirit - the "ghost-dance" presence of God (as dove) in the heart of Everyman. So in "Jonah" you have the melding of both crucifixion (the whale) and resurrection (the dove).

Poetry, in my view & practice anyway, offers a means of expressing visions of "how things are", which contrast with the methods & results of standard discursive prose, philosophical reflection, scientific analysis, etc. Poetry, as an art of "embodied" language, offers fundamentally dramatic models of reality; by "performing" language as self-sufficient play and exploration, these models suggest a universe which (somehow) underwrites & shares these same qualities - by rendering it suffused with personality & consciousness (as Whitman, again, pioneered so powerfully). In my understanding, a recognition & growing trust in these aspects of reality might help open the door to the full flowering of the love and confidence which is already hidden (in potentiality, in seed-form) in every person.

Fontegaia, I guess, is a kind of river-trip exploration of these & other realities. Along with previous extended poems (in Forth of July etc.) I try to dramatize & recapitulate these realities in the present, in the lingo of today.... and in so doing, to offer evidence for the idea that Time itself, as we know it anyway, manifests some kind of arcane ring structure - both ever-Now and (historically-chronologically-actually) symbolic - the mystery of which is in a process of continuous unfolding....

Poetry, the "fontegaia", is always happily burbling up from some hidden place at the heart of the person... & if you want to get at the proper & pleasant context of my obscure productions, you will have to follow up the clues hidden in homophonics & puns... there is this "Henry cosmos" (where, as Nicolas of Cusa put it, "the universe giulianizes in you, Giuliano") just as there is a "Maximus" for Olson... & probably the easiest way to approach it is by wearing Dante/Beatrice spectacles... thus the thread of the "J" or the "little tree" which runs from the Island Road sonnets all the way (by way of Bluejay & Juliet) through Forth of July... when (as Guy Raffa put it in his book about Dante, Divine Dialectic) the poet transmutes an "object of desire" into a "spiritual guide"...

so In RI is not only "in Rhode Island", but also a pun for "Henry" and for "in our eye" and a glance at the inscription over the crucifixion... and "Forth of July" is not just the "Fourth of July" holiday but the "(coming-)forth of jewel-eye" or Julie or J... (p.s Providence was once the "jewelry capital of the world" at the center of the lil "isle of roses")... & this "incarnational" muse-music displays a faint echo of Dante, from the bilingual (Eng-Ital) edition of In RI (which opens with a scene of a loved woman "walking to Italian class") all the way to Fontegaia fountain, & the Bonaventure-Joachimist themes which are also to be found in the Paradiso... while it also subsumes (draws into its circle), in its stubborn comical "Henryesque" way, Milton-Shakespeare-Joyce-Crane-Mandelstam-Berryman-Melville-Twain-Montale-Poe-Whitman-Dickinson etc....

& despite the fact that Henry World and Poetry World seem to be alternate realities, which never coincide, time may prove otherwise... happy 4th, everyone...

& so, with this odd couple (#18 and 19), the first part of Rest Note is (draftily) complete. Tomorrow, if all goes well, I will amalgamate #11-19 over at Alephoebooks, & continue with the parallel philological forensic frenzy.

19

 
The rain keeps raining, softly, toward July.
And we were born in rain, and we may die
in rain; this is our rain (mutter of sighs
and tears).  So grumbled Jonah, at the sky.

 
The contrite heart is as a broken swing;
its rickety creaking is a cricket-sound
in lonesome summer.  The iron wound
of spring, uncoiled... you hear it conjuring,

 
cajoling (questioning).  And so set forth
upon July, a pilgrimage of chums - hobos -
toward the source (one lazy Russian O
revolves... some undulating Volga-moth).

 
Suddenly (across red velvet veldt)
an Abyssinian abbess comes to call.
Her abecedarius (of questionable
providence) gesticulate, and felt.

 
The mud-flats of the Amazon form an inverted V.
Teddy could hardly bear it (jagged with rage,
you are half a swingset - mean with extreme
persiflage).  And it was hard to see.

 
Only the treetops fingered royal blue.
There, a jay of the jungle translated :
stale shovels can't bury her; checkmated
tyros swing like hoarse cicada glue.

 
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity,
suborned the rain. Clear at the source,
a subtler sort of V, victorious;
the rest, a snoring Jubilee (Z... Z).

15

 
Hobo on a promontory, talking to the trees.
Hedged in by oaks, on the cliffside - ruby
infant leaves, clinging tenaciously
to the chestnut.  A fleet of tough extremities.

 
He mumbles toward her, as toward the figure
of an absent friend - a representative,
a token of regret.  Tentative
gestures of a shaken leaf accent his verbal

 
burr. We was surrounded, honey - runnin
hard.  Somebody had to jump the wall.
We drawed straws - I tuck the damn fall.
We each made the vow - now come the doin.

 
From the ridge-spine, Providence, like a foggy lake
of shimmery concrete.  The tree-murmur
his covenant now - magnetic susurrus,
uncharted wilderness.  Words left their wake -

 
shorn calibrations, ex-commonwealth;
vectors of prescience; gabled reproof.
9-storied sorties toward that aloof
pride of lions - your bespoken tithe.

 
A trickle of honey, under the locust beans,
in the shade of the heat of the day.  Kingfisher
diving like a naval jay; the sky, cloudier
today; a sober stillness in the evergreens.

 
Hobo turns his face in the breeze of his mind.
In order to lose it there, to loosen it.
Yet the ineradicable echo of the chestnut,
anchoring, remains - the tears in the blind.