sleights of memory

MOSAIC SEA

Calm bronze serpent zigzags through

November Indian summer.

The northern light is clear

in smoky autumn – mirrors you.

What you cherish will remain

in sleights of memory.

A wheeled mosaic sea

en masque – galactic Halloween

as out of Egypt swam the sun

of Man (Apollinaire

with calumet, plein air)

& left his tempered wrath, his sunken

jealousy behind (dark backward

bones, full fathom five).

Ikhnaton’s beehive,

a honeyed hexagon – God

being pure agape (Manitou,

magnanimous & kind).

Sleepwalking blind

only the dream revives you –

only a breath of homely air

(smoke lifting gracefully,

light’s equanimity).

Chaste akme of the meteor –

a Lincoln logos, omnipresent;

curving profile of a brow

figuring Noah’s prow –

tender basilica to dancing bent.

11.2.16

What thou lovest well

Have been reading about art lately.  Adrian Stokes, author/artist, fused a psychoanalytic approach (via Melanie Klein) with a deep knowledge of Renaissance sculpture & painting.  (Came to this discovery by way of a stray tweet by Jeremy Noel-Tod, about a Carcanet book he had edited, collected poems by R.F. Langley, a British poet much influenced by Stokes.  All this has been delightful new territory for me.)

It has some relevance to my latest unrealistic writing project, Ravenna Diagram, which has something to do in places with triangulating Venice-Rimini-Ravenna.  Ezra Pound is buried in Venice; Dante is buried in Ravenna; and both Pound & Stokes were fascinated with Rimini. (I guess they also crossed paths at some point.)

So these recent preoccupations of mine coincided with the latest ISIS atrocity in Syria, the murder of Khalid al-Asaad, longtime director of antiquities in Palmyra.

Asaad's devoted life & iconic death reminded me of some remarks by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, about how a person's death somehow sums up and defines their life.  This was certainly true in his own case : Mandelstam died a victim of a personal vendetta by another Osip (his evil twin), Joseph Stalin - after Mandelstam had written a brief satirical poem featuring Stalin as its target.  Not a prudent thing to do in 1930's Russia (nor in today's Russia either, as a matter of fact).  Yet Mandelstam had a commitment to something beyond his personal survival.  As did Khalid al-Asaad.  This is perhaps the "true" form of martyrdom, which, unlike the standard model popular today, does not require the mass murder of innocent bystanders in order to achieve its glorified apotheosis in Paradise.  No, you only have to give up your own life.

Melanie Klein's neo-Freudian psychology focuses on childhood development.  The personality of the  infant & very young child is shaped by a dynamic & dramatic relation with the nurturing & distanced mother : Klein (& Stokes as well) reads deeply into adult experience grounded in this primal & primary & ambivalent/conflicted relationship.

For Stokes, art presents models of human victory & plenitude, through the integrations of these subconscious conflicts by way of the hard-won justification of the beautiful (the work of the artist).

In view of some such angle of vision, the depredations of ISIS against anything that threatens their "control of the narrative" comes across as the panic of the child who has rejected his mother.  Maybe Judaism & paganism & Christianity, the whole Syrian melting-pot out of which Islam emerged in the first place (in about the 7th century) comes across as a subconscious feminine threat, from the vewpoint of fundamentalist (Saudi, Salafist, ISIS) Islam.  I don't know, maybe ISIS is frightened of the Jewish mother against which it has gone to irrevocable war.

Judaism and Christianity have also fostered similar strains of iconoclastic rejection of art and images. After all, one of the Ten Commandments prohibits the making of any "graven images" of Yahweh.  The idols of the pagans, in the eyes of monotheism, are regarded as wooden follies of darkened minds.  Scriptural Puritanism rejected medieval Catholicism on similar grounds.  ISIS simply takes this direction to its "logical" conclusion : all art is verboten, all art is from the "infidel".

I wonder what images they see when they sleep at night, if they are able to sleep at night.  Do they ever see their mothers in their dreams?  Or perhaps they glimpse fleeting snapshots of the mothers of the "kaffir" young women they have enslaved and violated?  Maybe they don't need to sleep.  They can thrive, momentarily, on their canned & indoctrinated daydreams of paradise.  Livin' the propaganda dream, courtesy of their cynical Ba'athist warlords.  (Ba'athism, by the way, modeled its modus operandi on Stalinism.  Stalin was one of Saddam Hussein's heroes.)

My own particular confessional tradition has to do with the Incarnation, the appearance of God as Man, in the body, in one particular place & time - so I am inexorably committed to the idolatry of physical timebound mortal earthly existence & all its consequences.  This does not put me in good stead with the extreme iconoclasts of whatever theological persuasion.  I would rather stand with Khalid al-Asaad, devoted as he was to some local piles of classical statues & pillars & broken ancient ruins.  His devotion & his death reminded me of some lines of another fanatic old codger, Ezra Pound (from Canto LXXXI) :

What thou lovest well remains,

                                                  the rest is dross

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

Whose world, or mine or theirs

                                            or is it of none?

First came the seen, then thus the palpable

        Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,

What thou lovest well is thy true heritage

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

Having sort of a small-scale re-encounter with E. Pound & Cantos. Very mixed feelings. EP had big influence on me in early 80s : the scale, the ambition, the attempt to integrate history with a (secret, arcane) history of poetry, with world culture... On the other hand, Montale called him a "barbarian", which was also true... Bacigalupo calls him a "primitive".

The story & para-story (the life, the poem) is stranger than fiction. Much of it just plain mean & hateful : the trajectory of the fanatic ideologue. But then there's his wonderful capacious curiosity & energy... the play with many languages & cultures...

My underlying impulse in writing with him in the background has been to revise, to re-write "historical", "epic" poetry so as to oppose his influence, to "right the ship"... some things in Pound are just a bad cloud over historical memory... & (in this moment of renascent authoritarianism) still dangerous (the amalgam of anti-semitism, fascism, the scorn for democracy, and Confucianism, for example)... there are things in Stubborn Grew, for example, which are a kind of shady parody-mockery of the Cantos, which I admire & dislike in equal measure...

Basically I am disappointed by his haughty arrogance (which he himself acknowledged in glimpses... say in the Pisan Cantos) and his kow-towing to "enlightened" despotism (Mussolini, Hitler, and all those wonderful "rulers")... and secondly - attracted as I am to some of the same philosophical lenses (Dante, some aspects of Neo-Platonism & medieval thought) - I see a very different actuality in the "tale" of world history, & I want to express that alternate view...

Something odd happened during the recent weeks of this re-reading... we have a sort of white & orange cat named Chester; recently we started taking care of a little scrawny feral stray cat, with a sharp face and green eyes, who has become a very affectionate pal to Chester... my wife started calling her "Esmerelda". When we finally caught her & were able to take her to the vet for shots etc., we discovered, lo & behold, Esmerelda was a he... so now Esmerelda is Ezra... (Pound was famously intrigued with the local stray cat population of whatever European city he happened to be wandering through... & the feline element in the Cantos is of course pervasive...). EP was enthralled with Ovid & Metamorphoses... maybe Ezra is Ezra! (But Ezra will never take the place of our beloved Pushkin, who like his namesake died young, & is buried in the backyard...)

Pushkin, that Russian cat

The Cantos
The Bridge
Paterson
The Maximus Poems
"A"

- here's a stack of them. How, how well, do they represent social/city life? How well do they evoke "utopia"? quick notes:

Cantos have a sort of tragic grandeur, as well as a hectic energeia which sometimes captures the quick rough quiddity of experience, the plunging violent unpredictability of urban reality. Also a practiced lyrical-cantando-enchantment, esp. describing nature, feminine allure. Still, as Olson pointed out long ago, the backward-looking antiquarian preciosity, as well as the authoritarian politics, push the Cantos toward a sort of ever-living obsolescence.

The Bridge, in my view anyway, succeeds pretty well in blending lyric proportion, emblematic history, and Gotham immediacy (the Joycean day's dream-journey of the narrator) - so that the reading experience itself reproduces its locale (how shall I put this: when you read The Bridge, you have the pleasant sensation of being-in-NYC-reading-The Bridge. Sort of Borgesian, that way). Its technique, however, is refined and ironic - so that much is left out which its competitors here try to include (there's a study on puns in The Bridge, though, which argues that a lot of that excluded mundaneity comes back in by the back door. Paul Giles, Hart Crane : the contexts of The Bridge). Crane's trans-chronological "Atlantis" is a sort of poetic summation of 1920s "Our America" idealism. Still beautiful & hopeful.

Paterson is best of these in evoking city as a collective-psychic organism, where drab dailiness overlays historical-geological fragments & dreams, an arena of contingencies & possibilities. WCW's sharp eye & humor help, but for me the language is too flat & derivative to be very moving, & his cautious analytical bent doesn't do much for me, though others will savor the stringent-sour critical awareness of this social & egalitarian poet. His empathy often strikes me as tepid & careful, the attitude of the professional medical man (many will disagree). He also tries too hard & too obviously to remodel his models (Eliot, Pound).

Maximus Poems. When Olson tries to improve on his masters - Pound, WCW - he often does so. He's a genius at turning the obscure historical footnote into both vivid fragment and portentous psychic extrusion-symbol. Better than the rest is the feel for working-class poverty, necessity, & odd moments of liberation. Olson really does succeed at turning a literary mask into an emblem of some vast cosmic order. Where he loses me, most of the time, is with his actual language use. The personality that comes across sometimes - overbearing, pompous, pretentious, eccentric, sneering, vulgar - seems like a weird oedipal reaction to Pound & Literature - an effect like a bad habit, rather than a genuine reflection of Olson the better man. But it's off-putting, and for me, gives sign of minor rather than major poetry. Olson was a kind of hero, in a heroic & lonely struggle for origination & powerful mantic speech - but I wonder if he was up to the battle he chose.

"A" - I haven't read this carefully enough to say much. Zukofsky has an incredible ear for rhythm & sound on the syllabic level. Using it, he takes the civic and the utopian experience and - taking direction from Pound & Joyce & going much further - internalizes, subjectifies those experiences. A sort of quasi-Orphic process, I think: reality is completely absorbed into A-Z's limping, limpid, familial-household mumbling. What bothers me about it is precisely what made Z. appeal to the postmoderns : the turn to pure sound, the recherche Mallarmean-Symbolist aestheticism. Its action is almost diametrically reverse to that of The Bridge : whereas the latter incorporates the reader into an imaginary NYC-America, the former absorbs all things - the world, the reader - into Zukofsky-sound.