Hamlet's Mill can be read as an extended improvisation on some astonishing essays by Simone Weil (see her Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks). Despite the profound ambiguities & historical-cultural distortions of her (very Jewish) anti-Jewish bias, Weil is worlds apart from some of the New-Age gematriastic numerological-astrological-gnostical book-biz blah-blah around these topics. Basically, she bears witness to the harmony of Hellenic-Hebraic understanding (the traditional evidence of "psychic wholeness" in "the West"): science/art, knowledge/soul, transcendence/suffering. Though she distances herself from her Jewish roots, she never disavows the "need for roots": nor the centrality of suffering & love - suffering for proud "knowledge" (grace redeeming fallen gnosis).

(This is, as we know from the Romantics, Dante, & others, a traditional role for poets, too: saving the appearances, synthesizing reason & love.)

The HM authors (Santillana & Dechend) acknowledge her as one, of just 2 authors, who has a clue.

Have been reading (or struggling to read) Plato's Timaeus, which is really a companion volume to Hamlet's Mill, mentioned here recently. Written in 300 something B.C., it holds, delicately, a borderland between myth & science, poetry & reason... wonderful to hear the ironic paragraph of this person, living almost 2500 years ago, when he differentiates between his own cosmology (built on astronomy & a fairly reasonable defense of the "argument-from-design" : ie. there are living things & dead things; things either move themselves or are moved passively by some other force; living things, as opposed to dead matter, are self-motivated (they move around by their own will); the freedom of self-movement is "life" or "soul"; since the most complex things in the universe have life or soul, then the self-movement of the universe must be propelled by Soul! I love it) & the traditional "gods" of myth - those same gods & myth-stories which Santillana & Dechend (Hamlet's M.) pretty convincingly (to me, anyway) explain, are also symbolic formulations for star-observations & time-measurements - only from an earlier era!

Anyway, all this seems pretty distant from some of the daylight proper concerns of poetry, which have to do with social justice and human values & how these must be defended NOW...

Struggling in my own way to move along, sometimes going forward in writing you have to go backward, to things you've left behind & forgotten. I tend to write a lot, & then find old ms. lying around... this sequence from a couple years ago sort of startled me with its own star-obsessions... so I'm going to post some of it, though some of you may have seen it before on a list-serve, sorry. It's a sequence called Shakespeare's Head, which is a building in Providence, & as you can tell, it's also a sequel to an early sequence (called India Point, another Providence locale).

from Shakespeare's Head

 
1

 
Snow muffles Providence in soft light.
Orpheus-Hobo shuffles through the streets
beneath immaculate rooftops, slanted
toward the drifting sky.  He is late

 
for the wedding.  In his pocket, a gold band
lifted from the sidewalk (in Fox Point,
on Washington's birthday).  In his heart
an image of a toy city - Atlantis, Golden Land.

 
He'll hold it toward you, shivering -
America in miniature, a tiny Ironsides
reflected in a bourbon bottle - shades
passing through fixed stare (his offering).

 
So needy excess issues (crystalline)
just as fireworks spring a constellation.

 
                 *

 
There is no better world for contemplation.
No butter-word for such a battered nation.

 
Only extravagant hobo longing
reaches past fright-monuments
and furniture of Nineveh (arrogant
roar, ablaze with dominion, fading);

 
only the eyes of Jonah will behold
a green star hanging over gardens
buried in slanting dunes, oblivion
(...distant, pining, as of old).

 
The bottle toy will sleep in his hand
until a starry shade stoops down again
to shape a nest for Everyman - and
bring a skyborne Jubilee to land.

 
               12.6.02

Happy Flag Day

Rain falling in Providence. Time on my hands tonight.

Read an article somewhere stating that the ancients (BC, roughly) had a different spatial concept of time. The future was behind them, physically, spatially; in front of them was the past, shining, complete; the future accumulated as they walked into the past, followed the patterns laid down.

If we think of new developments in poetry in this ancient sense, what do we see? The brilliance of the great Moderns, the second thoughts of those who followed.

I can't think of the Moderns except in the context of civilizational crisis. Poetry = seismic reading; response to disequilibrium. (Psychological, as I wrote somewhere in the archives : poetry a reaction, an antidote, to tremors of adolescence.) It was WW I (& decadence preceding) that spurred Pound & Eliot to look over the shoulders of the Victorians, to the whole sweep of the past. Longfellow & Tennyson & Browning did same; but they didn't , as the Moderns did, unite an obsessive grasping after classical models, with a stylistic extremity, which overthrew any simple or assumed continuity with same. This was a purely 20th-cent phenomenon.

What this meant for US poetry, though, was defined by a particular decision : were you an American, or an expatriate? Stevens & Williams on one side, Pound & Eliot on the other. There were political underpinnings : an American was a democrat; an expat was a monarchist or aristocrat. Never mind for a moment the complications : Eliot's intuitive grasp of the middle, Pound's intuitive awareness of the low, Williams's status (like Dante, in an odd way) as immigrant-outsider, Stevens's very American macho businessman snobbery (the independent CEO, no academic "bought man"). These are side issues to the pivotal question : does US democracy inaugurate a verifiable new civilization, a new reality, a Novus Ordo Seclorum (fun to read Rabid's de Tocqueville quotes)?

Reading Rykwert on break. More interesting stuff from Aristotle & Plato's Sophist.

Thinks the term poiesis might have changed in late 7th cent. BC when poets started charging for their services & refining their techne (the main purpose being to create a monument to fame more lasting than marble - not their own fame, but their patron's - cf. Pindar). Poiesis before meant "making" more generally.

Distinctions between acquisitive techne - hunting, fishing, fighting - and productive techne - agriculture, shipbuilding, architecture, etc. Also distinctions between productive mimesis (the carpenter builds this table based on the concept "table") and imitative mimesis (the painter paints a copy of carpenter's "this" table).

acquisitive techne = rhetoric, sophism ?
productive techne = poiesis ?

(tendencies or sharp distinctions?)