in the days of Ivan the Terrible

AYE-AYE

In the days of Ivan the Terrible

Sultan fought Emperor

& culture fought culture.

Faith was fervor, & power, trouble.

Lately we don’t have that problem.

Everyone agrees the state

is not about the potentate

& not about God.  It is a system.

It is a system of checks & balances

blah blah yes yes… but where,

where is the heart?  It’s there,

Hieronymo Geronimo (maybe in Providence).

I remember that whiff of salt air

off the silhouette of Roger.

A flow from Berkeley’s wager…

how Jonah might be the universal tar.

Each one of us within that law

equal as feather of Maat

or smoke of Cautantowwit

(bright sunset glow of wonder & awe).

Henry Hurricane sleeps in his dream

somewhere in Minneapolis.

Maybe taking a piss

in a treepot, on Nicollet (off the beam).

His circus is circumference.

& maybe we are Hagia

Sophia with a million…

aye.  Aye-aye, captain.  Silentium.

3.9.20

equality knocks

FLIGHT-PATH

The heavy freight cars clinky-clunk

across the iron bridge.

The fright none can abridge,

tribes’ crimes, no matter how deep-sunk

beneath Big Muddy waters of oblivion...

a heap of birds, still footloose,

shoeless (moccasins,

not lady-slips) – each alien citizen

from Cloud Man Village (in mirrors

near Mirror Lakes).  The DNA

gets even with Edina,

Adam – eidolons of Mendelssohn longeurs

gone wilder now, gone weedy, native.

Your nimble paeans, flying

yeast to west, are tying

knots of soul pain into silos – jive

dives backwards (ortus/porta) –

Heidi skips Handel

by hand – O almond

rod of generations!  Your vice-versa

treads of controversy flipper

the dial upon a human

(orant) golden mean.

Gaunt sundance of elderberry skipper

deep within the pilot-whale

of Jealousy – hurt pride

taken for cane-ride

through hell-hole, pole to pole

                 *

until you turn a new triangle –

in Bermuda, Berkeley –

by the Western Sea,

where Empire meets the salty shingle.

Reverse the langish!  Scrape the jam

off the doors!  Behold

What-th’Dicken’s-Son would fold

into an origami florilegium!

Cloud Man Village lasted one decade

in Minneapolis, where we

ten-thousand-century

people have planted roots – jewelweed

4th of July parade, indeed!

– a Black Elk hexagon

or hazel moth, gone

in the wrinkle of a wavy diamond.

Systole, diastole... orange arcs

repeat heartbeats,

where azure shelters fleets

of sails... flight-path of firefly sparks.

In Cloud Man Village, where the theft

& violence are felt,

are lifted with a grain of salt

to taste the bread of silo pain – deft

metamorphosis of Yahweh wrath

to steady charity –

calm spun-gold chariot,

cedar Melchizedek love-bath.

9.22.17

invisible, indivisible

Have been reading a couple books by Borden P. Bowne lately (Metaphysics, and Personalism).  Bowne was a professor of philosophy at Boston University a little over 100 years ago.  Involved (I believe) with the philosophical circle known as "Boston Personalism".  Apparently the group and the school of thought influenced the young Martin Luther King.

Not easy reading for me.  I'm not well-versed in philosophy.  The mind tends to wander.  But Bowne's perspective seems to chime with my own vague hunches about the nature of things.  I've always thought of poetry as a counter-force against positivism, materialism, determinism - the supposedly "objective" dehumanization and disenchantment of reality.

In fact Bowne provides a pretty forceful rational and philosophical defense of theism and "personhood".  I'm a little surprised his writings are not better known today.  He's not merely a Berkeleyan idealist.  Nor is he some kind of American pragmatist.  Rather he finds a middle way between "common sense" pragmatism (ie. all our knowledge ultimately derives from - and involves a rational abstraction from - ordinary experience) and Kantian idealism (ie. human consciousness orders & thereby interprets any and all experience whatsoever - the mind's insight is what we know).

Experience is not merely a phantasm of consciousness (as in Berkeley).  Things are real, things have concrete reality.  But mind is not a "thing" : and mind provides the only continuity, freedom, and truth that we know.  Bowne posits a sharp (a "metaphysical") divide between invisible mind (or soul, or spirit, or personhood) and the phenomenal world of things.  And yet he doesn't presume to define or theorize how "things" came into being.  His Occam's razor shreds (satirically) a lot of pretentious theorizing about "being" and "phenomena" etc.  He posits a strict difference between the finite and the infinite.  And yet he proposes a kinship between limited, finite human mind (consciousness, spirit) and the infinite creative personhood (consciousness, spirit) which must be the creative origin of things.  Nothing else will do.

Bowne is not a tendentious apologist for theism : instead, he slowly explores the origins of determinism, positivism, and materialism in our "common sense" response to the apparent "thickness", the substantiality, of things.  We are sensualists.  We extrapolate from physical, material, bodily experience, and leap to universals and generalizations about how "things must be".  We tend to evade the difficult (and very ancient) question about how anything exists at all - how things happen to be (from nothing).

Again, Bowne doesn't presume to answer this question.  He just finds a rational way to propose that an infinite creative Mind or Spirit is the only plausible source of what we call reality.

Philosophy can get you thinking, musing.  Perhaps we tend to avoid God because she's actually so close to us.  There's no "space" between the roots of our own personhood (our "soul", let's say) and the infinite person - except that dividing line (and it's a thick one) between finite and infinite.  But the primal analogy is there, the imago Dei.  Bowne demonstrates how what we understand by "personality" or personhood is really invisible, immeasurable - our core identity, our rational, emotional, actively volitional personhood, is an invisible intelligence - a soul, a spirit, a heart & mind.  & then Bowne demonstrates how the most rational description of the source or "world-ground" of reality as a whole is none other than some infinite (immeasurable, unlimited) form of this invisible intelligence (heart & mind).

Think of the eloquent poetry of Martin Luther King's analogies (between the spirit of divine Agape and the troubled spirits of an earthly people).

This text from the Book of Joel (2:28) seems apropos : "And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions..."

We're close here to the fusion of a very archaic vision of reality (eg. we are all children & beneficiaries of Manitou, the "Great Spirit"), with the most contemporary understanding of the same.

Maybe we're at the beginning of a new cultural sense, or common understanding, of reality - which is not that different from a very old sense.

None of this "proves" (philosophically) the specifically Christian declaration (the "good news" of "Father & Son & Spirit").  The Christian declaration is more radical than philosophical argument per se can propound : ie. Jesus is the personal manifestation of God.  This is rather an article of faith.  But Bowne is one of those thinkers and writers who provides a general, philosophical framework or ground for an approach to (or rational evaluation of) the obscure "witness" of religious (theological) expression.

(p.s. I know I'm not being completely fair to George Berkeley here.  This is Bowne's critique and distinction, not mine.  Berkeley, to my mind, seems actually very close to Bowne in his "metaphysics".)

slab of puddingstone

ALMOND LEAF

My lovely Providence, a microcosm

in the ruins of modernity.

Gray pebble by the sea,

colonial casque.  Slow periplum

around a clamshell iron rim –

like horseshoe crab

with buttresses, or slab

of puddingstone Bermuda-dream.

Today’s your birthday, spiny Jenny.

Evergreen of grief

& joy – almond leaf

of love’s firm spiral (funny

soul’s integrity).  You showed me

Piero della Francesca –

candid paisan Maria

pendulous with incendiary

monochord (trompette marine).

You showed me Providence

over your mother’s dense

grass gravestone (swan depression).

April is your azimuth;

mine too.  The cave

where Earth’s a voided grave,

where Berryman’s a vernal mouth.

Cicadas of Apollinaire

buzz over Île-de-France.

The veil of Adams’ Isis

tears – Columbia croons everywhere.

1.30.17

Newport, RI (near Berkeley's Seat)

the trumpery of tusked bore

CREOLE GREEN

In my republic of grey matière

all things have dignity –

50 states of Jubilee

emerge from one low rustic star.

The akme of the chaste vision

loops down from innocence;

a catenary salience,

the smile of your companion.

Coke’s helm of liberty-in-law

(old holm oak in the woods)

frames acorn neighborhoods –

spun west from Berkeley’s awe

& Williams’ magnanimity –

raying from Rhodian gate

one starry Ocean State

to Frisco Bay profundity

(Pacific fiat through a lilac door).

Woodblock villains rage

across a cypress stage

the trumpery of tuskèd bore;

rich mythologies advance

boast-predator Power;

a tiny violet flower

planted at the Gate’s entrance

beams back toward Rhodos-Liberty

her creole-green

& blazing copper sheen –

one steadfast statute in the harbor, she.

10.10.16

Roger Williams Memorial, Prospect Terrace (Providence)

the love that draws the sun & the other galaxies

IRIS-TURTLE

The curve of the river twines the curve

of the path, they skip together

downstream.  Warm autumn weather

clears the mind a little (light mauve

asters nodding under cottonwoods).

The poem’s woven trace

catches the vif, the grace

of movement – Berkeley’s moods

in Paradise (Newport)... his eyes

commingling a million

threads beneath the sun

into a massive sky-warp of surprise –

Daphne’s comb or seaweed wave

of tears (the patient laurel

lifts gnarled arms from Hell

into the marrow of yawning grave).

The living mind, the raven-shadow

of Platonic iris-turtle... Venn

diagram or madrigal (ken

you my mosey-keening yet?) – below

the longing of the galaxies,

their milky sarabande –

a spectrum of star-sand,

poured from hand to hand.  He’s

just daydreaming of Marina now

(sea-daughter, blithe naiad

of Taurida) – be glad

you’ve followed his light-dancing prow.

9.30.16 

not made with hands

RHODOS-COLOSSUS

I’ve spun a zigzag ziggurat

not made with hands, muttered

Oblomov-Hobo – squared

round Galilee with palmy lariat

lime-green & violet.  With Okeanos

built a pineland font,

a Big Rook Candle Mint

that floats majestic Liberty to Rus

by U.S. Forest Service (Lincoln

would).  There’s still life

in a copper penny, if

you’re willing to be leaf – we can.

Disenchanted materialists

unlock a spiny Jenny

idle now for many –

Berkeley’s little tree twists

like Atlantic rotor, like Bermuda

paddleboat... clap hands

& sing, who understands!

A dream – dream-songe (Ojibwa)!

Great Manitou be Hole-in-the-Sky now,

mind – love’s apple-tree

a laurel (Victory).

She beams from the heart of Notre

Dame, my voyageur, extending her

green crystalline moss-

copper palm of sobornost –

Rhodos-Colossus 56 (soul harbor).

9.16.16

Still in early chapters of Moev book on Dante mentioned previously. Also reading Russian novel by Vasily Grossman, Life & Fate. In english.

Moev's book hinges on the argument that Dante's (& medieval) conception of reality differs fundamentally from modern, & we need to try to grasp that conception if we want to make sense of Divina Commedia. His description of the Platonic-Aristotelian-Dantean world-picture reminded me of George Berkeley's writings. Matter is not a "thing". It is substantial, but not in our materialist sense of a solid substratum. Matter is not any where or what : it is an expression of a (dramatic?) concept. The substance of reality originates in the creative act of the divine mind.

We do find this world-view extremely remote, hard to comprehend. Yet some would argue it's closer to the quantum-relativity cosmos of contemporary science, as opposed to traditional-modern materialist notions.

In the chapter of Stubborn Grew called "Once in Paradise", I tried to ground that narrative in something similar, by playing with the story of George Berkeley's 3-yr residence in the "Paradise" section of Newport, Rhode Island, in the early 18th century.

Here are a couple relevant passages :

*

Irish iconoclast, waiting for the money to come through 
under his cardboard loans, waving his good arm 
toward Bermuda; heeling to leeward on charm 
only – the world can understand.  Sand fills his shoe.

 
English, French, European, utilitarian, 
rationing out creation, one coffeespoon, one puff 
of philosophical smoke – and it's enough
for the Modern Diner – these eggs are vegetarian!

 
Queue up for the doubledecker sandwich island,
individuals!  Invisible hands prepare your steaks –
Chicago machine-made diesel-chuckle-X shakes! 
Lock the white sex bullpen – key's in your hand...

 
etc.
Berkeley was a chip off the old wayward block. 
Yahwehward – subject to Johnsonian hard knock. 
Yet stone synecdoche the builders reject

 
becomes a wander in RI.
Chip, chip, chip away... yet chippewater will 
return – a continuous whippoorwill
in marginal field. Aye.

 
16

 
Aloft there on shale shelf, in cave mouth, 
Berkeley's eyes drifted out to sea.
A pair of dicey gypsy barks
gambling on the shepherding waves.

 
You have your materialist peasants 
nattering pedantically along with your 
libertine idle blank-eyed statuettes O 
London – and this jovial pleasant

 
noncholeric collared Irish bookish Dean 
waves the Vico key in your face.  And waits. 
Waits for your double crosscheck, mates –
your doubloon that never comes – keening,

 
why have you forsaken me?  In RI?  Heaven's 
not some dull neuteronian mechanical.
It's providential – and recreational!
A dream, again! – again! – Bermudian!

Am busy these days trying to set up a lecture series for church on some of these basic issues of "worldview". Going to invite various scholars & religious people & atheists etc. "God for Beginners" "Intro to God 101". something like that. & don't worry : there will be a section on civil liberties, freedom of conscience, separation of church & state, etc. This is Rhode Island, after all. If I can figure out how to podcast the lectures, I will.

those great & famous lines, from "The Tower"

And I declare my faith:
I mock Plotinus' thought
And cry in Plato's teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar Paradise.

(this is really aligned right up with Nicolaus Cusanus & dear old Bishop Berkeley)

A source for the tone in the Berkeley poem posted yesterday (& much of Stubborn Grew) is Mandelstam's Complete Poetry (SUNY Press, 1973) trans. by Raffel & Burago. OM often did portrait-poems of historical figures, painters, writers, musicians & friends - somewhat similar to Robert Lowell's verbal icons, but more humorous & affectionate. He connected it to his Acmeist project of "domestic hellenism" - the idea that poetry was part of a larger human-cultural project to "surround life with utensils, with teleological warmth". With his portraits he presented historical figures (Bach, Beethoven) as part of the family.

Berkeley himself can be seen as a forerunner of sorts for the controversial contemporary physics theory known as the Anthropic Principle (which holds, roughly, that the cosmos seems designed in order to support conscious (or human) life). With his notion that existence entails perception, that the tree falling doesn't make a sound - doesn't even exist - unless someone is there to hear it, he's suggesting a purposive cosmos with consciousness at its center. Samuel Johnson mocked Berkeley's idealism ("I know the stone exists without me, because I stubbed my toe on it", or something like that), and the following era belonged to the Samual Johnsons. But 20th-century physics, starting with relativity, threw a spanner in those works.

My internet shadow-boxing with the langpos & postmodernism in the 90s was partly a critique of their critique of autobiographical, confessional, storytelling styles. The postmodern poets questioned, rejected, undermined the ontological status of the person. Words were dislocated from context and composition was disconnected from authorial motivation.

One of the consequences of doing long poems, however, can be (though it doesn't have to be) the building up of foundational layers of context & specificity. Ideally, in Stubborn Grew (& Forth of July as a whole), the interconnections are there to add a weave, a structure of more & more specificity. Thus the epic journey of "Henry" & "Bluejay" in the first half of Stubborn takes place over the space of about 10 city blocks and 300 years of history; the 2nd half takes place in the narrator's head, at a particular coffee shop table on Wickenden St., in the Fox Point neighborhood.

George Berkeley spent a couple years living in the "Paradise" neighborhood of Newport, waiting for the loans and grants to come through for his fantastic, visionary scheme to create a College for the Americas, for anglos & natives alike, in Bermuda. The money never materialized, & eventually he sailed back to England. But while in Newport, he composed some of his major philosophical dialogues. He liked to look out at the Atlantic from a cleft in a large puddingstone outcrop, known to locals as "Berkeley's Seat".


Was Irish philosopher George Berkeley an extreme idealist? A realist? A transcendentalist? He wrote against contemporaneous currents in science & philosophy which posited something abstract called "matter", a kind of substrate of reality upon which fleeting surface "phenomena" enacted their changes. For Berkeley, "esse est percipi", or "what is, is what is perceived". An Anglican bishop as well as philosopher & dabbler in scientific speculation (the benefits of "Tar-Water", etc.), his worldview is grounded in theism & a notion of creation. Thus the holistic Reality which we perceive and experience, is so perceived by a means somehow analogous to the divine Imagination which conceives it, imagines it, dreams it.

Berkeley is one of several local avatars in Stubborn Grew, where along with painter (& fellow "Paradise"-dweller) John LaFarge, he sort of sanctions the fiction-making, the fantastic elements, of this "local history" poem.

from the "Once in Paradise" chapter :

16

Aloft there on shale shelf, in cave mouth,
Berkeley's eyes drifted out to sea.
A pair of dicey gypsy barks
gambling on the shepherding waves.

You have your materialist peasants
nattering pedantically along with your
libertine idle blank-eyed statuettes O
London - and this jovial pleasant

noncholeric collared Irish bookish Dean
waves the Vico key in your face. And waits.
Waits for your double crosscheck, mates -
your doubloon that never comes - keening,

why have you forsaken me? In RI? Heaven's
not some dull neuteronian mechanical.
It's providential - and recreational!
A dream, again! - again! - Bermudian!

What George might have seen from Berkeley's Rock (Sachuest Point, Atlantic Ocean). 

"Berkeley's Rock", or "Berkeley's Seat". There's a sketch of him sitting in the cleft under the overhang there. 

George Berkeley's house in Newport (ca. 1740s). 

Mike & Jonathan continue good dialogue on fiction/poetry and the relative merits of Yeats & Milton.

Seems to me that Mike's demurrals might apply more aptly to the whole late Romantic/Symbolist poetic ethos, of which Yeats is probably the best exemplar. That is, the supposed weaknesses he sees in Yeats are representative of a larger phenomenon.

The advent of fiction signalled a split between poetry & prose. It's no accident that "Romanticism" referred originally to a return to medieval poetic romances which were analyzed, parodied, mourned & mocked in the greatest "modern" novel, Don Quixote.

Cervantes inaugurated the role of novel as analytical instrument, and with the progress of the social novel, marginalized poets began to see a parallel between the disenchantment of life brought on by science & industrialization and the dominance of "prosaic" values in literature. In a manner somewhat comparable to the development of abstraction in painting, poets began to emphasize their social role as avatars of pure imagination. The fact that, as Mike mentions, Milton had finally to choose between scriptural revelation and the book of nature for a "true" poetic representation of cosmic reality anticipates the Romantic attitude.

The core of the Romantic argument was, that prosaic, analytical description, whether in literature or science, actually fails as mimesis, is somehow untrue to the Real, because dull prose could never represent the ecstatic, mystical wholeness & beauty of Creation : only the inspired imagination could foster the images of innocence, sympathy, synthesis & unity, worthy of that ultimate reality.

Yeats' fascination with George Berkeley (the Irish idealist philosopher), and with the effect of imaginative symbols, are attributes of the "classic" Romantic stance. The Romantic poet registers a protest against the falsity of objective description : "we murder to dissect". This is fundamentally a religious attitude, which asserts the sacredness of reality against the profanation of (a scientific-Faustian) detached objectivity. & in my view this confrontation between poetic imagination and "objectivity", between prose & poetry, is not yet completely played out. Some of Wallace Stevens' gnomic aphorisms (about the "poetry of reality") still speak very tellingly to this issue.

I


 
LOCKE sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.


 
II


 
Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium’s mouth.
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh.

"Paradise comprises about one square mile of Middletown bordered by Second Beach, Paradise Avenue, Green End Avenue, and Third Beach Road."
- James L. Yarnall, John LaFarge in Paradise


from "Once in Paradise" :

16

Aloft there on shale shelf, in cave mouth,
Berkeley's eyes drifted out to sea.
A pair of dicey gypsy barks
gambling on the shepherding waves.

You have your materialist peasants
nattering pedantically along with your
libertine idle blank-eyed statuettes O
London - and this jovial pleasant

noncholeric Irish bookish Dean
waves the Vico key in your face. And waits.
Waits for your double crosscheck, mates -
your doubloon that never comes - keening,

why have your forsaken me? In RI? Heaven's
not some dull neuteronian mechanical.
It's providential - and recreational!
A dream, again! - again! - Bermudian!

Note to Jonathan:

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,
  That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its
              farrow that so solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme.

--William Butler Yeats, "Blood and the Moon"

(Bishop Berkeley lived in Newport, RI for a few years, while planning his Atlantean school in Bermuda; he makes an appearance in the "Once in Paradise" chapter of Stubborn Grew.)

Thinking about the Cantorian infinite-dimensional line, come to think of it, there's quite a bit along those lines in the 3rd chapter of Stubborn Grew ("Once in Paradise"). It's a chapter about painting, perspective, Berkeleyan-Romantic vision, etc. Wish I had the book here, various stanzas. . .

There was a line, so that the generations live.
Source of all the. . .onion domes,
.. . million ghetto'd Romes.
. . . of the infinitive : to give.

*

A point. Then a line to the end of the.
Forms frame for all the others.
The other colors.
De materialibus ad immaterialia.

*

The point is in the line now, Dino.

De-materialize a bus ad?

(I know I'm mixing this up. Will post corrections when I can.)