Stay, Momentary Confusion

Taking off where I left off a few hours ago, to retrieve Sophie from school...

We were mumbling something about critical detachment, about memory.  "Tradition" in poetry.

Tradition : bit of a taboo expression, eh?  Reactionary, neo-conservative, T.S.-Eliotos antique odor there.

Of course 20th-cent. Modernists revolutionized the whole notion - backward & forward, left & right.  But that was already a long time ago.

When I think about poetic tradition, I see something essentially unavoidable, like "family".  But this tradition is very much not a symptom of some filial-Oedipal-patriarchal-economic sense of duty.  It is instead something organic, almost biological.

Watch how young poets struggle to launch collectives, find affinities, soul-mates, define themselves, test themselves against be-laureled paragons, aspire to famousness, & so on.  What doesn't so much interest me here are motivating ambitions & rivalries.  Rather the curious thing is the anxiety, the helplessness, of poets - confronted by the fact that poetry is this livid knot of incomprehensible, uncontrollable, inexplicable lumpish living somethung, which nobody know how to explain, correct, control, or abolish.  Is like the inheritance of some arcane glob of biological (living) what-not, handed down from generation unto generation - the voodoo box of elegant poison Grandpa bequeathed us, whose Grandpa left to him, & so on, with an unreadable curse scribbled on the lid : Take Good Care of Me, Never Abandon Me, or You Gonna Die.

What are all these MFA programs for, if not that?  What are all these mags about?  These awards, these citations, this enormous prestidigitation of prestige?  These quotations in stone?  These honored dead, these beloved unread classics?  Touchstones?  Operatic ecstasies?

The point of the sword is immediacy.  Poetry doesn't need explaining : it's like a powerful speech, it justifies itself in the persuasive dominance of its message.

All the talent of Madison Avenue is compacted here in this syllable of recorded charisma.

But actually, I don't believe all that.  It's like the poetic version of a simplified, bowdlerized, philistine "American Dream" : the past is pointless; everything of value is about me, here, now.  Poetry is the anti-tradition. (Here we get down to the marrow of the dumbed-down American myth.)

Great!  Cool!  Make America Drool Again!  Great Gatsby!

Sounds pretty psychological, actually.  Frazer, Sacred Wood & all.  Siege Perilous.  The double-bind of succession, father & son.  Elongate twilight of Freud's sacrificial totem, across the "grey matter" of poetry itself.  (So maybe it is a symptom, after all?)

The Great Game.

But you mentioned game... (unicorns?)... so let's reiterate : I had this hunch or notion this afternoon about "detachment".

If we think about what we love, about what's beautiful... it occurs to me that the beautiful is always overdetermined : is "meta", one way or another.  What's beautiful entails, and emanates from, reflection (in both the physical & the intellectual sense).

Memory suffuses the object with feeling, identification.  What we love involves reverberations, echoes (mnemonic stimulae).

So, curiously, detachment - the distancing, the psychic freedom from passionate, emotional absorption - allows memory to evoke beautiful response, because it is fused with the recognition of tragic reality (the actual distance of the past, the ineluctable remoteness of lost time).

The plangent feeling of the truth, the power of the documentary.  Classic-Romantic.  (Italian Neo-Realism?  & then - Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  Deserto Rosso.)

The hour draws on... my deep-seated hunches & haunches gettin' tired here, blog.  For Augustine (& for Nicolas Cusanus) time is purely psychological.  Bracketed by the soul.  Begins & ends there.  This is a liberating concept, on the one hand - & also an abyss.

But for Augustine (following Virgil) poetry (music) was the very strong magic of ordered time.  The enchantment of syllables, framing, architecturally grounding, the sacred ineffable Now (planted, as Joyce put it, on that very void).

Proust also, echoing Augustine.  Re-echoing the poets (in prose).

The frame supports the picture (Rothko colors dream into infinity).  The beautiful an echo, a reflection.  Sketch, abstract, icon, exemplum, imago - of the immaculate supra-beautiful.

So where does this leave poetry?  Tradition?

Sounds very Symboliste.  But remember : poetry is this intractable breathing spiritual animal - a stubborn problem, a dilemma - a sort of spiritual refugee, a crisis (like Roma in Roma).

Nobody can work it out in advance.  But I do believe it might be possible to re-think poetry (with a capital P) somewhat as the pre-Revolutionary, post-Revolutionary Russian Acmeists did (Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam).  With a sort of Cusanian (conjunctio oppositorum) passionate detachment, or critical engagement.

The paradigmatic or characteristic quality of contemporary cultural reality is immediacy.  All the Faustian technological forces are concentrated on disseminating the charismatic (marketable) product.  Of course there's a large element of risk involved, but this is of the essence of productive enterprise.  Success is the by-word; our future well-being depends on the happy financial outcome.

By the way, I'm not against free markets, or anti-capitalist.  I just believe there exists a scale of values which must mediate the struggle for economic domination, on behalf of equality, liberty, human rights, the common good, the safety net, the peaceable kingdom.  There are things more important than luxury, status, charisma and sway.  There is freedom.  There is equality.  There is justice.

Poetry inhabits this realm of universal spiritual values (see: Mandelstam on Chaadev, Rome, moral freedom).  And by grappling with the chaotic force-fields of articulate speech, it establishes a free space for what the Acmeists termed "the Word as such".

This sounds like a very hi-falutin' bequest.  But it's not, really.  I'm looking at the tradition of the beautiful as a manifestation of the detachment of elegiac (yet strangely hopeful) realism.  Of Blake's metaphysical "innocence and experience".

Social media is bursting with constant, relentless, monotonal cultural aggression, masquerading as sophistication.  The little screen is inundated with seductive, screaming roadsigns.  King Blurb is Trumpet for a Day.

Poetry, on the other hand, resonates with inherent doubleness.  It is not what you think, it is not what you feel.  It is not even what you read.  It is another kind of sign, pointing toward your beating heart.

Listen to it, keeping time... like John Donne's bell.  It tolls for thee.

Martin Luther King's home town

Sarah & I just got back from a 3-day trip to Atlanta, visiting relatives.  Martin Luther King's town, Jimmy Carter's town (even FDR's town, in a way).

Trying to come to grips with the Donald Trump reality.  Perhaps one good thing that might emerge, out of Arturo Ui's resistible rise, would be a reconnection with fundamentals of American democratic government.  As a matter of survival.

My first thought : Trump has one primary, subliminal, unconscious agenda.  Which would be : 1) to corrode institutions of democracy through administrative chaos, the flouting of legal and cultural norms; 2) to impose authoritarian tyranny, in order to bring "order" out of said chaos.

This is the playbook of Hitler and Putin.

Subliminal because Trump gives every sign of being a sleepwalker, a narcissist, a creature of show biz for its (his) own sake, a puppet of impersonal power-surges.  Or perhaps that's just his schtick, and he's a man of infinite guile.  Either way he is not a friend, he is the implacable enemy of liberal democracy.  If it's not his own design, he is subject to the designs of other, similarly dark forces.

How to oppose these forces?

40+ years ago, in 1972-73, I had a vocational crisis, a personal crisis, a nervous breakdown.  I was in college, at Brown University.  I was becoming a poet, and couldn't deal with it.  Moreover, I was morally/psychologically shattered - unable to orient the religious values instilled from childhood, with the 19-yr-old late-60s collegiate artiste I had become.

I survived this impasse.  I dropped out, wandered America and England, came back.  But what finally helped me to integrate the moral and the aesthetic, the spiritual and the poetic, was an encounter with a Russian poet of the early 20th century, Osip Mandelstam.

Mandelstam offered the model of a new synthesis.  I was drawn to the echoes of Rimbaud in his dense, wild, riddling stanzas; yet, by way of his wife Nadezhda's memoirs, and his own critical essays, I absorbed the rational cast of his mind, underlying the lyricism.

Mandelstam, the Acmeist, the Petersburg poet, the student of Gumilev, defended the Enlightenment values of Pushkin, of Chaadev - both rational and liberal, both Classical & Romantic.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [people] are created equal... endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights... among these being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..."

Two centuries of struggle - between the vision of Lincoln, Whitman, and the Founding Fathers, on the one hand, and the forces of greed, fraud, pride, intellectual vanity, ideology, violence, and oppression, on the other - have battered and weakened the power of this egalitarian vision, which lies at the root of Western democratic politics.

What I found in Mandelstam's writings and example was a foundation even deeper - going back, through Christianity, with Christianity, to its origins in Hebraic iconoclasm (Moses' people against the dominion of Pharaoh) - the very same spirit infusing the message of Martin Luther King.

Mandelstam's notion of the Redemption (sketchily outlined in his unfinished essay "Pushkin & Scriabin") parallels themes in his essay on Chaadev.  Both are concerned with human freedom : both come to the same conclusion.  Human (political) freedom is grounded ultimately in a fundamental spiritual (eternal) dimension.  The freedom we look for, hope for, & recognize in our secular systems of government, is an expression of sacred (eternal) soul liberty.

There is a poetic dimension to Enlightenment ideals : Chaadev & Gumilev, Wordsworth & Blake, bore witness to the philosophical concept of the dignity of Man (as imago of God).  Such dignity entails equality, and (inalienable) human rights; the very thing - the notion of a common, universal human Good - that autocrats and plutocrats hate & fear the most (it is their personal nemesis).

Roger Williams - the apostle of soul liberty, the student of Edward Coke (the lawful rights of Englishmen) and forerunner of John Locke (lawful government is popular sovereignty) - understood all these things 100 years before the American Revolution; articulated them in his foundation of the first civil government on the principles of religious tolerance and political democracy (the Colony of Rhode Island).

One of my gr-gr-etc-uncles, Thomas Gould, was a friend of Roger Williams; he rented Roger a portion of Gould Island (in Narragansett Bay) for planting a hay crop.

I haven't expressed myself too clearly.  I guess this is a rant or screed in the manner of Williams' "Fox Digg'd from his Burrow" etc.  But the basic idea is, that the Modern concept of liberal democracy is not at odds with the Reformation notion of soul liberty, nor with the Medieval notion (ala Mandelstam) of the Redemption : these things are rhymes.

God is not mocked.  The splendor & creative power of humankind (imago of Creator) entails her (our) human rights.  Government is the servant of these human rights; otherwise those who claim its authority, actually have none - are frauds, imposters, usurpers, despots, tyrants.  They must be cast down - cast down by the people.

old American poet in Atlanta

Charlie Hebdo, Peter Chaadaev, moral freedom

Two Frenchmen, brothers, apparently with training & inspiration from the Yemen branch of the terrorist network Al Qaeda, murder a group of Paris cartoonists & journalists, for the crime of publishing satirical images denigrating the Prophet.

Obviously the shock waves produce varying responses, of many kinds, on many levels.

A phrase occurred to me today in this regard : "moral freedom".  The phrase comes from an early essay by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, titled "Peter Chaadaev".   This curious short prose work reminds me of some writings of Whitman.  In describing Chaadaev, the 19th-century Russian thinker, Mandelstam seems on the one hand to sketch a version of his own iconoclastic mind & personality, and on the other, to offer a nationalistic icon of the spirit of Russia, situating itself dialectically (as St. Petersburg was perennially called upon to do) between the prestige of Western Europe, and the vast inchoate future of the Russian soul.   Chaadaev is presented as both that rare Russian emigre who returns to the motherland, with a message of intellectual rigor and cultural order - as a "Westernized" Russian, in other words - and as a representative of Russian moral freedom - the "diamond" of a perfected individual soul (in contrast to the enfeebled West, sunk beneath the weight of its own unquestioned tradition).

This Chaadaev is a fish out of water, a free spirit, an exile's exile : his rectitude is inward, spiritual, personal.  His moral freedom seems to stem (via Mandelstam's interpretation) from Orthodox Christianity, with its relative devaluation of "objective history" in favor of inward spiritual unity, perfection, "divinization".

What does all this have to do with Charlie Hebdo?  With events in Paris?

"Moral freedom."  The phrase rings.  Mandelstam says Chaadaev was obsessed with unity : the basic unity of intellectual vocation & moral value.  This was the source of his charisma, his personal integrity.  But where did he discover this unity?

I'm not a Russian scholar.  My guess is, Chaadaev was drawing from the well of traditional Orthodox values.  & what strikes me about Orthodox Christianity is its visionary focus on the unity and divine origin of the whole creation.  Life, with all its suffering & injustice, is beautiful & good because God made it so.  The Acmeist poetic movement, founded by Gumilev, Akhmatova, & Mandelstam, was grounded in this ordinary Orthodox sensibility.  Gumilev called it "chasteness" : an idea not very different from Whitman's notion of cosmic goodness. Each individual thing in nature is inherently valid & beautiful because it has its source in the supernatural Artist.  With this spiritual grounding Chaadaev (& Mandelstam) could represent a version of "moral freedom" : the dignity of humankind (& Russia) without the overpowering weight of Western grandeur & authority.  As Mandelstam wrote :

Let the names of imperial cities
caress the ears with brief meaning.
It's not Rome the city that lives on,
it's man's place in the universe.

But again : where am I going with this?  What has any of this to do with Charlie Hebdo?

My point is this.  So the phrase "moral freedom" - from Mandelstam's Chaadaev - came to mind as I pondered the events in Paris.  Why?  Because both Chaadaev & Mandelstam underline the central, sine qua non place of freedom in any architectonics of civilization.  For them, moral freedom is the primal divine gift.

& what then exactly is "moral freedom"?  It is the recognition that the whole benign cosmic order is balanced on a "givenness" or original context of moral choice.  The universe is designed for Man to choose goodness & righteousness : it is rooted in free will.  The path to Paradise and "divinization" is open to those who accept this free offer.

But if this is the case, then where are the powers of tyranny, force, compulsion, fear?  Where are the gods of domination?  Where are the thought police?  They have no place to stand.  They are vanquished.  They have been defeated by a supernatural power Who authorizes moral freedom : by the law that you must choose the path of righteousness yourself.

I tried to explain this in my letter to the editor published in the NY Times on Monday.  This is a basic theological tradition shared, actually, by both Orthodox East and Catholic/Protestant West.  You cannot impose spiritual values by force.  Why?  Because God ordained Nature for moral freedom : we are free creatures, as God is free : we are made in God's image.

The fanatics of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State want to punish others for disobeying the commands of their God.  In the process they commit murder and other outrages against God's own creatures, & against divine Law.  It may be that they are driven by political pressures and deep grievances : but my point is that their ideology, which provides them with propaganda and "moral" justification, represents the worship of a false god, an idolatry.  If God is neither hateful nor murderous, but instead calls on persons to redeem themselves through love of neighbor, then the propaganda of fundamentalism has no basis in reality.  They need to be saved from their own delusions.  There needs to be a new conversation about the nature of God.