dialect of high & low

CLAY NAVEL

Literature might be political.

The dialect of high & low,

the pyramidical Pharaoh

& Erich Auerbach in Istanbul...

slaves muttering (familial)

athwart the exaltations

of regal Lion-Suns

& River-Moons (extra-terrestrial)

their jocular contra-dance lingo.

Dantean, obsolete

vernacular (obsidian);

mosaic featherweight, grave Galileo.

Everything formed from nothing... out

of a pinhole in the universe.

Clay navel – Osiris hearse

called up by current, cattail flute.

Whorls of tree-rings mantle each mortal eye.

Isis in Iowa,

Blackstone of raven-sigh –

Cautantowwit, under the Milky Way.

The tacit origin.  Your motherland,

O King.  Incipient

restoration, air apparent...

transparent equilibrium (beatitude).

Near the steel vault of St. Louis.

In the seine of the fishermen,

over the Mississippi.  Sign

from tree-logs, Jessie Ophelia... always.

6.23.19

Reading Auerbach on Dante's early poetry (Vita Nuova). "In Dante the esoteric lady of the stil nuovo stands forth clearly for all to see; she becomes a necessary part of the plan of salvation, decreed by Divine Providence. The blessed Beatrice, identified with theological wisdom, is the necessary mediatrix between salvation and man in need of enlightenment..." [p. 62; 1st publ. in 1929]

When poetry (Dante's) requires a personal mediatrix for wisdom, two ideas are implied : first, that all (human) knowledge is "incarnated", or mediated by particular individuals; and second, that theological wisdom is necessarily synthesized by the psyche and the imagination - it's not literal, transparent, absolute, in the way fundamentalists and dogmatists insist it must be.

The poem seems to be shifting gears somewhat, so I've taken off a couple sections I just posted... (they may be back).

Reading (again) Erich Auerbach's Dante, Poet of the Secular World. He sets a very high standard (one of the great readers & critics of all time). Still, even after reading Auerbach, I feel OK (for the time being) about this Fonte Gaia poem.

Dante & Henry VII - literary strange attractor localized in Siena.

Reading lately: Matrix of Modernism, Sanford Schwartz. Interesting stuff on early 20th-cent. philosophy. Led me to start reading Auerbach's Mimesis again last night. & what a great read that is. How different cultures picture experience & reality in narrative. Contrast between Biblical & Homeric epic - fascinating stuff ("scar of Ulysses"). "The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending & representing things."

Got me thinking about writing & landscape. The hidden, furtive, shamanistic Yahweh, swathed in darkness & obscurity, background - a way that Hebrews responded to the established Middle Eastern powers all around them. Monotheism & the desert. A people so at one with their extremely simple, barren landscape that they are able to leave almost everything unspoken; implied depths. (ie. in Sacred Discontent, another great book.) The Greeks, in contrast - everything clean, out front, oversimplified. The response of close-knit mountain-steppe tribes scattered into a new terrain (always mapping out where everybody is - keeping everything in sight)? Confident, aristocratic power, masking a hidden fear of dislocation, being lost.

Which in turn got me thinking about Stubborn Grew, Forth of July. Melville influence at time of writing. Sense that the understory, Ur-story of this continent is the encounter with what is alien (wilderness, native tribes). Bluejay the shaman re-designs epic pattern. Poem repeatedly goes "into the interior" in various ways. Dislocating stories & vocabularies by way of blending, syncretism. Ojibwa undercurrent, Chippewa songs. Center of poem titled "Ghost Dance". Framing orphic pattern by way of Northwest Coast Bluejay stories.

Things are old, & poetry is a spiritual force.

Really interesting review by John Updike in this week's New Yorker of a new translation of the 5 Mosaic Books (by Robert Alter), in the course of which Updike talks about his own youthful encounter with the Bible. Also quotes two short passages from Auerbach's Mimesis, which felt (to me) like commentaries on my "Midnight Knock" travail.