the otherness of the poem

RIVER-VEIN

The turning year brings its anniversaries.

Sunken ships in the harbor.

My fleeting image of an arbor

green on the slope at Golden Gate – Julie’s

last day (her father Jim’s birthday).

Today the sun glistens

as if through Temple linens;

pearl beyond price, merciful Gateway...

The otherness of the poem is merely

the cosine of a conversation,

Cuz.  Light trinity of sun-

moon-star, embedded in clay lips (dearly).

As America is balanced in the scales

by a feather from Byzantium,

so a Pipestone eagle-drum

summons a kingdom borne on wing-sails.

Covenantal arc of steel

at navel of the earth;

gangway to spoke-berth

coralized beyond our iron wheel.

& from a pearl-eye in the mandorla

light beams to every hamlet-

brig across the planet –

melting the blood-red wax of Danelaw

& Washington, pouring dark wine

into each muddy river-vein,

lofting all-human

fellowship again (curving J-spiral sign).

12.7.19

bridges of Hennepin County

PROOF-STONE

So many bridges flung across this river

like stitches on a wound –

their heavy iron-concrete bond

knitting a wintry Twin Cities together.

One thing is welded to another,

like the almond in a Venn

design – Cahokian

canoe of koinonia? – out of mother-

clay, spun wide... like risen bread,

or galaxies of diamond fire.

So lights flash over limestone

mire, through night-black thunderhead.

& Hobo, hunched beside the riverbank

is like the shadow of Henry

as Henry is of lowly

Galilean king (his incognito prank)

– as are we all, in that high diagram

checkering light across a dome

in old Egyptian Byzantium

(proof-stone of perpendicular wisdom).

Like Hagia Sophia with a million eyes...

rimming the twin-bent boughs

of swelling arcs (in Voronezh)

where East & West, mud-rings & skies

are melded in your almond lips’ ellipse

& God & Imago

& world & Churnagogue

are sanctified, sealed with a kiss

of peace (pax, agape – Wakan Tanka);

where Rio del Espiritu Santo

whispers I love you so

& Hobo walks with sister Joan (Columbia).

12.3.19

Byzantium or high Armenia

SPRUNG RITE

Light snow cascades into December dusk.

Each flake a brief memento

of infinity.  Drifting so

far... from a distant world.  Ask

& it shall be given unto you,

intones the snowy-mantled

priest (Byzantium,

or high Armenia).  So the seed grew

amid its granary of full, deep faith.

Here in Minneapolis,

first snow is ceremonious.

A sanctification for the dying earth,

a last light blessing to the forehead

of a fading year.  I think

of Roger, leaning at the brink

of the Terrace... one hand lifted

floating over Providence spread out below

& miming his canoe’s prow –

an equilibrium of high & low,

of holy & mundane (Jonah-Hobo).

& Henry, tilting on the pivot-point

of Berryman’s rail (Washington)

is rescued from oblivion

by a mustard seed of restoration... faint

hexagon of gold sky-fire, transfiguring

the babble of his broken tongue

to chaste vision – sprung

rite from Ravenna (almond wing).

12.1.19

etched in vernacular

BEEHIVE WITNESS

Dante’s rambles round the tamarack swamps

outside Ravenna.  Beached

hulks of Byzantium reach

toward the sea.  Inside, smoke-lamps

phosphoresce hieratic grandeur

(kind bovine gaze of Empress,

Emperor).  Alighieri’s

impressed – ecco l’ora serale

in those green sheepfold meadows

where Time does not run.

He pursues his martyrion –

Crusader grandfather, circle of Mars.

He etches in vernacular his answer

out of deep parish history

to the welded Roman panoply

(Arcadian melody, Virgilian whisper).

I am a scribe who when Love speaks

hastens after, hearkening

noting everything down.

I haven’t heard from Bea in weeks.

I remember lips set with a grim reproof.

Down at the borderland

(Texas to Samarkand) –

Coatlicue, Tezcalipoca... beetling roof

of squalling Raven years.  Esta

su iglesia, Henrique?

She’ll be coming like Elijah,

not Europa, now (beehive witness).

6.24.19

woodcut by Mary Ravlin Gould

Idea of Order at Port-au-Prince

PIED-DU-ROI

The mysteries of the tree of life

wafted in pine-scent,

loon-call.  Where she went?

My tiny Haitian house (Hiram Abiff?)

flattened into iron, painted

sea-coral (for joy).

That illegible toy

Advent ball of light – Levite,

anointed by black sun (yellow-

black Torah).  Sister-

dove?  Little tree

of Jessie, O (hidden willow-

canoe of Providence).  Chip

off the sloop Francesca

(pale arte povera,

woven from raven-ink on quipu

stone).  These are the quadrants

of my quatrain train

with a hey, ho, the wind

& the rain (Earth birth-bangs, pants).

You will carry Ariadne’s Crown,

Cordelia – innocence

to crystalline prescience

at perihelion of night (black noon).

Palladium of cornbelt Maggy –

out of Byzantium

into some quonset dome

of little Rhody (heart’s domain).

12.30.18

something not rotten

BENT WOOD

Two lean ancient red pines

standing blue-green beside

Grandpa’s old house, abide

fanfares of trumpet-vines

(pure orange bugling).  Something

not rotten in the state

of Norway, loco Hamlet –

needles for constant farthering,

an evergreen encounter with the Pole.

A fado rudder for America...

mercurial Columbia

glows with her dusky song, high, whole –

hidden in clouds of starry Eire

that slake eddies of fear

into limey atmosphere

like elfin emeralds from the mire.

These curves along Rhode Island Way!

Hieratical Byzantium

leans down beside a tomb

hunched in Ravenna tamaracks – Dante

& Roger shaking hands (the ghost

of Beatrice will not bow

before the imperial scow,

nor heed the plutocratic boast

of idle punts).  Just a bivalve ark

(tender ellipse of fatherhood)

redeems the bent wood

Caesar to seahorse – shark to lark.

9.14.16

granite made of air

MOSAIC INTERIOR

Hobo sets his sights on Ocean Sky

the cloud-boats drifting

stately, aquamarine

high-masted spinnakers go by

The rusty syntax of the railroad bridge –

necklace for a queen

Romano-Byzantine.

Galla Placidia, maybe... blown to the edge

of warlord chaos, courtier intrigue;

guarding son & heir

with the pale gold hair

(who will not see the Soo Line zigzag

into the forest, north of here).

The mosaic interior

night-blue with stars –

her mausoleum, like an eggshell ear.

Sea-light filters through pinholes

of gold.  The grey matière

a granite made of air

hides pigeons, ring-dove souls

within its manifold (octahedral

catacomb).  Even

Hobo finds his kin again;

the smile of cousin Jeanne will roll

a tensile thread out of the maze

of time & circumstance –

her light ghost dance

where mountains bloom (sheep graze).

7.7.16

Defense of a Diagram (2)

"What is your definition of poetry?" barked the Soviet apparatchik/journalist.  Osip Mandelstam straightened up, took a deep breath - & declared : "The poet's sense of being right."

Blogging is a notoriously loose-flappy kind of prose.  (Nevertheless, I like it.)  My previous post under this heading was not put together very well, and probably did my own grandiloquent poema something of a disservice.

I spoke of the argument, the theme, as the spine or bone-structure of a literary work.  Proposed that every poem makes some kind of argument - exists within some frame of (Einsteinian-relativistic) world-lines and logical architecture.

Works of visual art or music impinge on our sense of things with an unspoken or implicit language of signs.  Imaginative literature (poetry) does something analogous by way of symbolic analogies.  The testimony is direct, perhaps, but it is also more than that.  The story echoes with meaningful imagery, the way a symphony shimmers with overtones.

I suggested that underlying Ravenna Diagram - the long ongoing poem in the mode of Pound's Dantesque Cantos, or Olson's Williamsish Maximus, or Zukofsky's Poundian "A" - lies a foundational argument, rooted in a specific worldview.

Poems make arguments within an ecosystem of clashing worldviews, ideological systems which talk past each other.  They can be acts of intellectual resistance, as well as free-standing creative constructs.

Dante's life, whether he knows it or not, is drawing to a close along with his poem, in the quiet backwater of Ravenna.  He looks up at the mosaics of San Vitale or Sant' Apollinare, and infuses the Paradiso with their imagery.

Pound, in another age, jaunting around Italy, becomes enamored of Sigismondo Malatesta, the noble warlord, who stole statuary from Ravenna in order to construct his Tempio, dedicated to Isotta (with whom he was besotted).  He constructs a quasi-Dantean architecture for the Cantos, based on a set of horizontal friezes or frescoes in the Tempio.

Dante's Paradiso concludes with a visionary contemplation of the Trinity, symbolized as 3 interlocking rainbows in the heavens.  The poet concludes humbly : he says the logic of their facets eludes his mind, reducing him to baby-talk.  This is how the poem ends - with a vision of supernal cosmic Love, beyond rational explication or human comprehension.

So when I say that Ravenna Diagram is grounded in a poetic argument regarding the nature of the Trinity, and that the poem is set within a matrix of evocations and allusions to Dante's Ravenna... well, perhaps you can see where this is leading.

The Trinitarian ontology or worldview, emanating historically from the theology of the Greek fathers and early Christian Orthodoxy, could be seen as an intellectual extrapolation or superstructure, grounded in the collective spiritual experience of the early Church.

Dante wrote a thousand years later, from the center of the medieval Scholastic flowering (Thomas Aquinas et al.).  Yet fundamental questions about the destiny of individuals, and of the human race as a whole - about the progressive direction of history toward some kind of theological manifestation or end-time - were neither set aside nor resolved.

The questions facing St. Maximus the Confessor, in the age of the early Church convocations, creeds, and collective self-definitions, were even more basic.  The obsession of the Byzantine civilization revolved around the status and character of the Three Persons of the Trinity.  In the process of resolving these issues and defending Orthodox doctrine, Maximus developed a very acute and creative anthropology (drawing in part on the Byzantine absorption of Aristotle and Classical philosophy in general). Maximus's intellectual formulations have been deeply studied by scholars like Hans Urs von Balthasar and Lars Thunberg (wonderful books, highly recommended).

I seem to have gotten away from the topic at hand, and dribbled into obscure volumes of forgotten lore.  But not really.  This is background.

The anthropological lens developed by Maximus provides a means of interpreting the process of human history as a whole.  And this, as Pound asserted, is what epic (or his epic, anyway) is about : "a poem including history".

Imagine seeing the "historical Jesus" within such an interpretive framework.  Imagine a poem which grapples with the recognition that Christian theology - especially in its relationship with Judaism - has its own lacunae : perhaps will experience in the future a total renovation or re-configuration of its meanings.  Not on behalf of some demythologizing critique, but rather out of the cumulative experience of history itself, which sheds new light on old words and deeds.

Think of a poem which sets up dramatic historical juxtapositions, on behalf of a dramatic theory of history (see Urs von Balthasar on this, too).  Thus : we don't yet really know the "historical Jesus" in the fulness of historical actuality.  Imagine a mythopoiesis of history (as with Olson's or Williams' localism, for example, or - perhaps more important - a feminist interpretation of the Gospels) which sets up a dialectic in juxtaposition to the abstract formulae of theological statements.

Add to this the dramatic dimension of the enunciation of the poem itself : impossible project which only magnifies the historical here & now of the poet's own time.  But this absurdity & impossibility opens up creative (theological) possibilities, too : Jesus himself was called the Nazir, the holy man, the singer, the poet (in the line of poet-king David).

This is just a sample of the arcane shrubbery forming the backdrop of an "argument" for the said murk-in-progress (Ravenna Diagram)...

Maximus the Confessor

Jesus Thoughts (25) : thumbprints in sync

We continue to go traipsing along through the unknown remote Henry-field of scrubland interconnections, finding obscure Serengeti serendipities (in sync?) and conceptual rhymes, running into things seemingly by chance (or is it a narrow circle of H-recessive obsessions?).  Yesterday I chewed the cud (in Jesus Thoughts #24) about the metaphysical frame-up of History, the intervention of Yahweh into the stream of Earth-time... as an impression of the Creator's inimitable thumbprint upon Nature (Stephen Dedalus's "signatures of things"). 

& last night I was re-reading Charles Stein's book about Charles Olson & Carl Jung, Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum - which digs deep into Olson's own radical sense of individuation & quidditas ("that which exists through itself is what is called Meaning" & all that).  Olson wanted to shake up what he saw as the false consciousness of abstract "Greek" rationalism with a very earth-bound, local, particular kind of mysticism (he wouldn't call it "mysticism") - the Oneness of the "field" of all phenomena reflected in the integrity of the grounded, physical, real things we encounter....

Others (including Stein) have interpreted Olson much more scrupulously than I can here ... & there's much in Olson that gives me pause... yet I was struck reading this last night how closely - in some ways, not in others -  Olson's values seem to rhyme with the program of the Russian Acmeists.  Gumilev's notion of "chasteness" as a literary value - which he defined as a basic & spiritual respect for the particular dignity of all things as they are - & that such actual things provide the substance, the matter, the themes of Acmeist poetry (as against "Symbolist" otherworldliness).

Of course the Acmeists were also tremendously different from Olson : they had not that radical streak of American Emersonian (Poundian, Wm Carlos Williamsian) do-it-yourselfism - their sense of the spiritual integrity of things is perhaps closer to Joyce's neo-medieval Aquinas-quidditas; they were rooted in Russian Orthodox Christianity, with its contemplative emphasis on the whole as divine Creation...  Yet this mystical aspect of Olson - late scribblings about everything having meaning-in-itself because All stems from the Black Chrysanthemum (his "Black Gold Flower" mandala-figure) - is not so different from Dante's final vision of the mystical Rose, the triple wheel of the Trinity...   This ancient notion can give one sparks of glee, if you ponder it : that the One is reflected in the "oneness" - the beautiful distinction, the nonpareil wonderful whatness, the splendid unimaginable unique & hilarious actuality of all separate unique things...  (in fact it's possible to see an analogy here with the spectacular 4th-of-July dazzle of metamorphosis, Transfiguration - eternal life)... Note this relevant, definitive passage from Mandelstam's essay "Morning of Acmeism", which Christian Wiman chose as the epigraph to his new collection of Mandelstam translations, Stolen Air : "To exist is the artist's greatest pride.  He desires no paradise other than being."

Everything is paratactical in Olson, as in Pound - the poet is a bower-bird, joining things by affinity, contiguity, proximity, rather than logic...  Speaking of which brings me to the other book I was reading last night - Sacred Fortress, by Otto v. Simson.  About the Byzantine mosaics and architecture of Ravenna, which Dante saw.  Simson explores the political-historical background to the art of these churches - and also their religious meaning.  We can't grasp the artistry of the mosaics without understanding how they were united with, and illustrated, the rites of baptism and Eucharist, the sacramental processions, which happened below them, under the gaze of the icons.  Simson goes very deeply into the meanings and messages which both the rites and the icons conveyed.  He describes, better than anyone I've ever read, how the communicants, by participating in these sacraments (baptism, eucharist), enter into a symbiosis, first of all, with Christ in his self-sacrifice and martyrdom - in his dying - and at the same time, with Christ in his resurrection : his transfiguration into a heavenly dimension (early rites of baptism involved clothing the baptized in white robes : a representation of this dying-into-new-life most clearly imaged in the Book of Revelation - and in the mosaics of St. Apollinare Nuovo, in Ravenna).

Proximity, contiguity, affinity....  I had just been writing earlier in the day (in the Jesus Talks #23 post) about the divine play of gender roles... and the hieros gamos dimensions of the rites of the church, their sensitivity to a feminine psyche - only to find Simson characterizing the mosaics of the "virgin martyrs" in St. Apollinare, bringing their jewelled crowns of martyrdom to offer to the Bridegroom, in the very same terms I had been using (hieros gamos, etc.).   So I felt a slight twinge of synchronicity there....

But I'm really rambling today.  The deeper affinity or proximity I want to relate here is this clustering together of Jung's individuation, Olson's "things in themselves", the Acmeist devotion to the "chaste" dignity of things, Joyce's epiphanies...  and what I was calling, in JT #24, the thumbprint of the Creator as witnessed by his righteous prophets (John the Baptist...).  I'm finding these things all assembling in some kind of creative sandbox playpen...

(thinking of Olson's notes about the "Black Stone" - the "diamond" - the "Black Gold Flower" of his Maximus-vision.... & its echoes or rhymes in my poem Lanthanum - "Blackstone" leading to "St. Maximus the Confessor" by way of the octahedral, baptismal diamond of Black Elk's native American sign (pointing to the six directions)....

Affinities, proximities.... the church as tomb and marriage bed.... Olson & Mandelstam, hard-cut diamond figures, thumb-prints, opposing themselves to the drift of the times...

This coming weekend Sarah & I will be driving down to Princeton NJ, to visit Princeton cemetery, where Sarah's parents are buried.  They just finished the memorial stone for both of them (her mother Pat passed away last year in November).  They are buried just a few feet from the grave of Kurt Gödel, the great mathematician.  Olson, maybe, would have appreciated Gödel, whose "incompleteness theorem" proved that some things in mathematics cannot ever be proved (rationally).  I'm not a mathematician, but maybe Gödel in this way made an arc of closure back to the ancient Greeks, who were troubled by the "irrationality" of the diagonal to the square.  There is a Jungian aspect of this uncertainty, this mystery, at the core of human reason....

So we'll be visiting a grave, and graves, there, in Princeton, at the dying of the year.  I'll be thinking about them... & I'll be thinking about Simson's eloquent evocation of the mystery of death & martyrdom & glory articulated in the early church.... & I'll be thinking about the Princeton Univ. library, nearby - where they house the archive of the papers of Osip Mandelstam....

Very absorbed of late in a book about the theology of 7th-cent. Byzantine monk, Maximus the Confessor, by Urs von Balthasar (I love that name). Title translated as Cosmic Liturgy. This reading has a lot to do, actually, with the confidence with which I proclaim the theoretical foundations of AIEE! Poetry.

Balthasar explains how Maximus synthesized Western, philosophical, proto-scientific thought, rooted in Aristotle and the Stoics, with Biblical & Christian theology - which was in the slow process of being formulated at the time, & which reflected some Eastern, Platonic, Gnostic elements which he (Maximus) tried to correct or oppose. (He ended up a martyr in the cause of "Chalcedonian orthodoxy", against a Byzantine theocratic government which was attempting at the time to shore up its military-political defenses by making dubious theological compromises.)

What the heck does this have to do with AIEE!, you ask?

The early & mid-Byzantine/Hellenistic intellectual era was primarily focused on formulating theological explanations & demonstrations - developing a shared understanding - of the mysteries of Christian faith, in particular the conundrum or paradox of the Incarnation - the "God-man". I don't have the capability right now to go into further detail on this, except to say that I find Maximus via Balthasar very, very illuminating. He seems to display a kind of "grounded" thinking - a supreme reasonableness - which helps him, as I say, synthesize the philosophical investigation of "nature" in general, with the logical organization of metaphysical concepts. He's a kind of Thomas Aquinas, yet perhaps with a more-heightened kind of visionary eloquence. A sort of Aquinas-Cusanus, 500 years beforehand.

The universe and history, in Maximus, hinge on the paradox, the conjunction-of-opposites, of the Incarnation. The Aristotelian, necessarily-symbiotic union of body & soul, in the human being, shows a kind of analogy to the unique union of divine & human in Christ. Moreover, the synthesis which we observe throughout nature, between the individual thing and its species, its kind - a synthesis which retains (beautifully) the logical substance, the integrity, of both aspects (individual & species) - "without confusion" - this synthesis is understood, again, as a sign or metaphor for the pivotal God/Man union.

All this is combined with Maximus's Aristotelian-Stoic understanding of the status of the "person". The individual person realizes the general potential of the unique union of body & soul. Generally, there is an emphasis in Maximus on the wholeness & integrity of created Nature - combined with an awareness of its absolute contingency with respect to an absolutely autonomous, incomprehensible Creator. It's the union of absolute otherness with complete humanity - "without confusion" - in the person of Christ (the "orthodox" witness of Maximus) - which is the pivot of history and the Redemption of humankind.

All this sounds like gobbledy-gook & blather, I'm sure - and in no way am I capable of even approaching an adequate precis of Maximus's very scintillating thought... but notions of subjectivity & personhood and individual realization - the uniqueness, the quiddity of individual things within an "organic" whole - have implications for a way of approaching - of writing & understanding - poetry, I think. James Joyce does some very interesting things along a parallel Aquinian-Aristotelian worldview (the extreme & elaborate quidditas of a fictional Bloom in a real Dublin, for example...). Joyce understood this as a kind of "medieval" poetics : but it goes back to Byzantium.

& some of this, I hope, can be seen as a consistent focus in all my henotic Henryesque Henrification projects (Stubborn Grew, for ex., is very Joycean in inspiration.)

I suppose the epitaphic sensibility of Paul Fry et al., and Mandelstam's Acmeist notion of "domestic hellenism", could be seen as contrasting counterparts. Where Fry regards literature as an emanation from our non-human roots, Mandelstam understands poetry as an active labor of humanization. I suppose they're two faces of the same coin (see M's "Pindaric Fragment").

Christ's Promethean "I have come to cast fire upon the earth" gets domesticated beside the primordial Greek-Russian rustic hearth (the kitchen stove, a sacred object in those latitudes). The poet's breath breathes on culture and humanizes it, acknowledging with gratitude the (Acmeist) earthly "mansion" - thereby perhaps helping establish the terms of ethical life, or civilization. Brodsky : "Mankind was put on Earth for one purpose : to make civilization"(rough quote from memory). "In Him was light, and the light was the light of men." Nature and the round of life on earth - framed by wisdom to the seasonal, psychic dimensions of human experience & destiny.

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : Russia (label : subject/Russia).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

byt, Futurism, Glazov-Corrigan, Potebnia, Russian Ark, Russian art, Tom Epstein, translations, Tsvetaeva...

Reading Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky. Here's NY Times review.

Listened to fascinating interview on NPR with Christopher Hitchens, about his recent book God is Not Great. He is a very witty guy. Valuable sacred cow-punching.

Yet for me there are these 2 basic possibilities : either there is "higher consciousness" or not. I go with the former. Even without such things as the "argument for design" etc. You don't need to be a philosopher to recognize the beauty of the universe and the poignancy of life.

It's a profound intellectual (or spiritual) step, to accept the notion of the (granted, mysterious) "personal" quality of the universe : that life is ordered - somehow - around consciousness.

I call it the Byzantium waltz. (An icon represents the divine, and the divine imago, as one.)

This is at the root of my own (somewhat eccentric, I suppose) concept of the normative, the classic, the Acmeist, the Pushkinian, the human, the Hellenic-Hebraic, the Joycean, the Mandelshtam-Celanian, the Dantean-Montalean...

& at the root of my particular distinction between the synthetic song-imagination of poetry, and every other kind of discourse.

... speaking of daughters, today is my daughter Phoebe's birthday.

On this day Constantinople was founded as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. I was born on the day it fell (May 29, in 1453).

Good reading on Sienese art & the cultural-political background - Sienese Painting, by Timothy Hyman. Very helpful to me. (I know I've mentioned this before.)

City-republic vs. politics of Empire, Aristocracy & Church. The comune of "the Nine". Art history from the Sienese vs. the standard Florentine perspective (Vasari).

Duccio's art was the last of the Byzantine & the first of the Italian. Sienese fusion of mystical remoteness and urban street vernacular.

I'd like this Siena to take shape as a metaphor for America (& for Providence, & for experience generally).

Byzantium : Mankind is the imago of God. Siena : art is the imago of humanity. The dialectic of these two positions, played out in the symbolic-psychological sphere of religious ideology (iconolatry, iconoclasm, idolatry)... still with us today. (ie. are the words of "sacred books" to be taken literally or symbolically? Or somewhere in between?)

Red-blue states. Imperial purple. On the nether side of Duccio's Maesta altarpiece, in the scenes of the Passion narrative, Christ's garments are always red & blue (except in the Transfiguration & post-Resurrection scenes, where they are gold).

Mainly, though, I'm absorbed in Urs von Balthasar's excellent book on Maximus the Confessor.

The theology of the Greek Fathers : Maximus, Pseudo-Dionysius...

A curious openness, open-mindedness, there. Along with all the ancient stoic severity & fierce polemics.

With the Moderns (philosophers), the Absolute is often just another terminological card to shuffle, in their endless titanic explanation-of-everything game.

For the old Greeks, the Absolute radiates an aura : obscurity, utter Beyondness (beyond Being, beyond knowledge, beyond human, beyond explanation...), and love, and personhood. The Absolute is a living mystery, Being-beyond-Being.

Those glowing icons.

Being, well-being, eternal being...
becoming, movement, rest...

Here's another very old poem which I've posted before. Written in 1972 or so. Some things never change.

...the letters add to the elegance of a structure, even if
their meaning is hidden from those not familiar with the language.
Here, they tell how a piece of the true Cross was obtained at
Constantinople in 1034 and enshrined in the Chapel, where
each night prayers were to be said until Christ came again.
About half of the Chapel has collapsed, the interior yawning
hollowly in the direction of the Soviet Union.
                              - Horizon Magazine (Winter 1971)

 
                          *

 
the well is always there
a decade of water
just a well
the soldiers pass by
and today the girls are among the clowns
each hiding an arm or wearing a red dance
standing around the well always there

reading more about Maximus. The other Maximus.

Cosmic Liturgy : the universe according to Maximus the Confessor, by Hans Urs von Balthasar

(I love that name. the man was from Basel. it sounds like 2 bears taking a walk in the mountains)

Just one more thought on this for today. This contrast noted earlier between Crane's finish and the others' various ongoing (quasi-narrative, Wordsworthian) agons : how key this is to 20th-cent. aesthetics! (All the debates about "process", the autonomy (or lack thereof) of the art-object, etc.)

And I am reminded again of a remark made to me at a Russ-Amer poetry conference many years ago by Elena Shvarts (we were talking about how the Russians memorized their poems for recital) : "Russian poets compose the poem in their heads, then write it all down. Americans start writing, and it takes them a long time to finish, if they do."

And this notion of finish can perhaps be linked with the notions of the self-sustaining, free-standing image in Crane & Mandelstam et al. Which leads back, ultimately, perhaps, to the Byzantine tradition of the magnetic, charismatic icon.

Sailin' to Byzantium.

Received "Dear John" letters from 2 poetry book contests last week - one on Thurs. the 12th, one on Sat. the 14th. Friday the 13th came in between, as we know. "Hallelujah! I'm a bum."

Ides of August.


When I am old may my sadness gleam.
I was born in Rome; it has come back to me;
My she-wolf was kind in autumn;
August - month of Caesars - smiled on me.

- O. Mandelstam

("may my sadness gleam" : goes back to a line from Pushkin, "my sadness is luminous" : which goes way back, through Orthodox tradition, to Byzantium, and the icon tradition of "luminous sadness" (there was a Greek technical term for this, a rendering of pathos).

At the Byzantine exhibit I learned about "hesychasm" - a movement in the Orthodox Church of that era (12-1400s), which taught communion with God through contemplation. Hesychasm translates as: "quietude".