Reply to a question re : Ezra Pound, Hart Crane

Susan Brown, my gentle interlocutor in this ongoing explication of Ravenna Diagram conundra, emailed to ask for more detail on what I meant (in the "Preliminaries") by my statement that in this epic poem (that is, in Ravenna Diagram) I was mounting a challenge to Pound's presentation of history (in his Cantos, his "poem including history"), with help from Hart Crane.  This was my response :

Quick reply, Susan : my sense is that Pound, despite all his Dantesque and Provencal medievalism, his knowledge of medieval scholastic theology, tends to deride and downplay the "Hebraic" dimension of Western culture-history.  There is a strong occultist dimension - the Eleusinian mysteries, Neo-platonism, etc.  Also the very marked Fascist tendencies, the Nietzschean(?) disdain for Jewish and Christian compassion.  Pound is not consistent : my "argument" with him is not very fair.  But it's there.  Pound's "poem including history", in my view, pretty much eviscerates the basic Jewish-Christian foundations of (at least) the Western dimensions of world history.

Another aspect of all this concerns Crane.  Pound (like Eliot in some ways) was a nostalgic expatriate living in Europe.  He was a political authoritarian, a reactionary.  Hart Crane, despite his Platonic-visionary leanings, was devoted to Whitman and the tradition of a mythical, futuristic America (Crane's "Atlantis"), rooted in democratic values.  This is, I know, a great simplification and idealization of Crane.  Crane has a special symbolic place in Ravenna Diagram and in my writing in general, which I won't get into now.  But the STYLE of R.D. owes at least as much to Crane as to Pound.  For I long time I sensed a kind of sonic stylistic affinity between Crane's idiom (his imagery and sound) and Mandelstam's approach to imagery, metaphor & sound.  Which (sort of) became my own approach to imagery & sound.

eye in the level

replica of Roger Williams' compass, pocket sundial

SURVEY LINE

The pilgrim in the wilderness

like young George Washington

will draw a survey line

in order to project his progress

straight ahead, from point to point.

Primordial Providence

the paradisal focus –

your pen’s first instance.  Appoint

your 2nd Adam, then, Most High

to be the gold eye

in the level – bead the way

with your Accordion of earth & sky,

dream-song of host & guest alike.

My Christianity

is primitive, really.

This nazir chanting by the lake

was also Elohim; we sponged the vinegary

wine together, soaked

the dry bread – smoked

the peace pipe in his company.

My Providence is primitive as well.

Young Roger at the river’s

edge, his seekers, strivers –

welcomed, welcoming – a lunar shell

for pattern of a little government

upon her shoulder (Ocean

State).  Mirroring Sine

of Wave... rinsing tomorrow’s present.

9.14.18

musing on time passing

OPEN SEA

Hobo lingers in his old hideout,

musing on Time passing

inexorable, unceasing.

Even that Son of Man, no doubt,

is subject to the steady stream.

That He rose from the dead

after the carmine dogwood

petals bled... is like a dream –

when broken Magdalen beheld

Him, held Him tight

as she lay, hid by night

stone still, in sleep – felled

by the noon nightmare upon the hill.

It is a mystery

too deep for Hobo, or for me.

Jesus submitted to the Father’s will –

not on Golgotha, but with every beat

of that red pulsing wheel

of Ocean River (waxy seal

for human honeycomb – complete

sweet sign of infinite benevolence).

My yellowing maroon

& off-white leaf-pontoon...

my Hobo raft snaking past violence,

my dogwood octagon, shaved off

by Time into a simple

convex fish-vessel...

my melting hexagon, snow-staff

                *

of almond blooms, shading a well

in Palestine... stone skiff

leaping Gennesaret – if

only all these metaphors knot in one spell!

The spiral of a fingerprint

in limestone sea-cave

might unfurl a concave

hour-glass – etch kind intent

in pregnant sheets aslant the wind.

Each step taken, each

wave-slap on the beach

will glance to faceted perfection – find

ripe summa in a planetary plan;

the ants have theirs, Hobo

his role to play – go

find her, who unveils the sun of Man!

Magnanimous dome (Emanu-el’s)

on Morris Avenue,

your turtleshell (blue

arc of sky over her Book of Kells)

circumferences a shady tree

of leafy ladders (Jacob’s,

Jonah’s... Honest Abe’s).

We climb together, you & me,

through thunderclouds of poetry –

counting the heartbeats

as we rise... fleets

thread the Gate, to open sea.

7.10.17

I died 45 years ago

In about an hour's time I turn 65 years old (May 29th).  Hard to believe.  But I'm relatively OK with getting old... I guess.  In part perhaps because I died 45 years ago.  I was mantled with some kind of mysterious psychic death and rebirth, which I've been trying to come to terms with ever since (in my life, my writing).  Uncanny, unheimlich.  Personal un-hinge, you could say.

Ever since (O youth!), at least some fraction of me has been on a spiritual mission - really a stumbling, on-&-off effort to express & explain what happened (as far as I can see).

When you have died 45 years before you turn 65, there are psychological ramifications.  When I was 4 years old I was hospitalized in an iron lung for about a month, with a severe case of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (French polio).  I was immobilized up to my neck.  As a result, I've put a premium on breathing, and also perhaps endured a subliminal sense of paralysis.  & maybe something of this early childhood experience carried over into the later crisis and its aftermath.

I've been a poet for all of those 45 years (and longer).  A longtime member of the Dead Poets Society, I guess.  But my membership has been accompanied by few of the standard benefits.  Somehow I write my poems on a different map from that of the mainstream literary traffic highways.  I have trouble connecting there.   The poems exist & flourish, but on a different planet.

I don't blame the world, or the poetry gatekeepers, etc.  I really believe it all stems from the fact that I died 45 years ago.  I'm engaged in a soul-struggle of some kind.  My poems try to straddle a double dimension, & hence are at cross purposes with the purely literary or the purely political or the purely anything.

Yet I try to maintain the integrity of the poem as sufficient creation, as work of art pure & simple.  I believe in that, because I feel it - every time I experience a work of art myself.

Somehow the soul-struggle, the crisis of faith, has to come to expression - yet without succumbing to the desire for an intellectual resolution (a tendentious, rather than free, expression).

This is starting to sound very pretentious.  I'm like the unprofitable servant in the parable (I forget which one) - stuck between two paths (spiritual & worldly).  Neither here nor there.

That's how it is.  I've written a lot of poetry since 45 years ago - & it seems to be whiling away the years in an ineffectual limbo of disregard.  Not needed by anyone.  I can't explain it.  But that might change.

I'm not really worried.  There are larger issues in life.  And it shall come to pass... that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons & your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions... (Joel 2:28)

old poet geezer

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".)

bearing her true report

ROSE TATTOO

This tenderness of moss-green light

in the craggy oaks around

the Witch’s Hat (ground

bass of Sibelius, to finish right).

The hat itself a darker green.

Twilight of thunderstorm –

fork-gyring twister-worm

over holm oak in Oklahoma (lonely

scene, brooding).  That mounded Pan

by Mississippi, in Rez

graveyard... his enormous

Rabbit-corpus.  Heavy Everyman

skittered, skating on ice

unswift as raven-wing

(Po-boy, kow-towing

Whitman’s rust-mold Providence

under the night-shade of Cautantowwit).

Earth shaken by thunder,

horns of Minotaur – 

titanic labyrinth of lies (knit

by yon dull orange cur, on fire).

Outcast beyond these walls

Jerusalem worm-hurls

against the black hole (central pyre

                *

of Man’s propensity to murder)

– bearing her true report

like tattered gun-shot

pennant under murk of war.

These damaged epitaphs of pride

& shame (twin Boanerges

buried for albino

snow-contagion).  No crypt can hide,

no script elide.  Vermilion Thunderbird

wheels down to Red Wing

tallying everything

& reckoning each deadman’s ford –

plumb eye of blistered Galilee,

eye of the hurricane.

Out of the depths, someone

traces an arc of palm, for Henry –

skipping from the sea like royalty

(posthumous Davy for

posterity).  Sea-floor

of grey Jonah.  Ocean-reality.

From Queequeg’s casket, like Osiris-

tomb, the rose tattoo

(framed by two-man canoe

of Manitou) slowly rises –

sweet grail of sunken Paradise.

The maze of Ariadne

beams from Milky Way –

meek penny-glow (seal’s copper glaze).

4.30.17

cradle of rain

RUDE EYE

Grey cradle of April rain.

Your riverine Nazir

or holy fool was here,

rounding his moat with a vision

of metaphysical hope.  Song

like Mendelssohn mandala.

Smallest coign (voilà!)

of the realm – just one among

many, Penny, to kingdom come.

Copper wrung with fire,

like Cassini in pyre

of saturnine canons – Love’s hum

somehow redeeming them, each little

statuette of soul 

freedom (the cosmic equal

sign).  A dab of mud & spittle

might reveal the night garden –

snowflake octavo

revolving over Buffalo

(holm oak to acorn, evergreen);

the whole note of the Nazarene

squared & shaved round

like some lost-&-found

locked-room problem – Tom the Twin

tying twine into a knot-cradle

of human & divine,

of Jew & Syrian

(or Greco-Roman republican).  Ladle

                  *

of Milky Way – the Twin Bear Cube

softly circling,

a tiny light unmoving

(port for Magi-King & rube).

The light strengthens as you climb.

Climb toward the broken

seal, the torn silken

veil, the split seed of our primal crime...

ecclesia & synagogue divided

in the keystone arch

as airy lark from larch

(twin siblings from earth-shaded

sky).  The seed is the salty word.

Out of the undivided

Ocean-Jonah glided

magnanimous eagle-wings – soared

into Benedictine Aesop-cells

from Africa to Memphis,

Iowa to Mississip –

aerie of equality, wells

of everlasting life.  That vermhurl

knot, spliced by an outcast –

Pushkin-slips so fast

the prophet scatters into whorl

of matrix-hurricane.  Rude eye

on Zion, Washington...

Heartbroken Hart (one

eggshell mason’s crooning sigh).

4.27.17

find the unicorn

HUNGRY RAVEN

Fear of another is fear of death.

Instinctual reaction

to deadly situation – a

primitive contagion, or jaguar teeth.

So history’s abacus shuttles

red & black, or blue

& green... just for you,

little black-&-yellow Moth of Battles.

These stately river-cottonwoods

flare mossy banners

now; Hobo’s many spanners

choke the bridge-works.  Shaker bloods

from Puget Sound redeem themselves

with help from epileptic

shaman-chants... pep-talk

of buried elderberry souls (elves’

yodels, echoing their green on green).

The Word circles like

a hungry raven – pike

or spearmint (Mermaid Queen).

St. Louie, with his trumpet, now

brings up the nondescript

rear-guard.  The script

calls for Ezekiel, or sunflower –

Iris in the limestone cliff

curls into Unknown

Soldier.  Soddy Brown

they called him (working stiff)

                 *

whose star skims from the evening murk

anonymous Firebird

or twinkling agate-shard

in snarl of spiral Melville shark-

tooth, spouting salty balderdash

crossing the Portland bar

– whose thunder-straits are

worse than Frisco Bay mish-mash.

O the gray shade-vault of chilly Chartres!

The golden limestone cave

framed with architrave

of ancient enmity – Synagogue-martyr!

The fractal fault-line of an old polemic

circulating ossified

eddies of Johnny’s gospel

spleen... (tragic & epidemic

unintended consequences).

O the smiling Word

chants resurrection... heard

in Ramah & Ravenna, Rimini (Ez

kowtowing to voracious Rule).

Crossroad strictly abstract

for everyone – the trick’s

to find the unicorn (a holy fool

who paces like St. Francis through

the prairie steppes).  Someone

calls you... homespun

Natasha, limping toward the sun (ey yo).

4.25.17

crest of Summit Avenue

DIVERS STARS

Brune muscle-bound mansion of J.J. Hill

on the crest of Summit Avenue

surveying the valley where two

rivers join – where the railways spill

from St Paul to Seattle (Great

Northern empire, spread

with iron & steel).  O head

taskmaster, engineer, we celebrate

Twin Cities’ renaissance beneath

your wood-burnt work desk

(Richardsonian Romanesque) &

spiderweb of railroad ties (gold sheath

of Gilded Age gloaming, applied

so lovingly above

the banquet table).  Move

across the river, where they hid

Rez Cemetery on the bluffs.

There Berryman is buried

too (J.J. expired

on a May 29th).  Henry still huffs

& hovers overhead.  Clouds bank

their gray matter in shapes

like dolphins, angels... apes

ape each other, rank on rank

while divers stars shed Ocean light.

From Romanesque to Gothic

unison, one fractured brick

serves as keystone – wound tight

                 *

as Daphne or Coatlicue

rooted in broken clay

await another day

when Churnagogue stirs milky

honey   & Apollinaire

attends his Rite of Spring

uncoiling everything

like smoke from Calumet (a Bear?).

Old poison lingers in the verbal mold.

The Sack-a-Jew sad cruiser way

shone from St. Louis ‘til today –

Lewis & Clark & our New World (behold

the Old).  Shoshone shone her pilot

smile, O Sacajawea.

Solid light, our Bona Dea;

stars’ Primavera (bolting nut

arced out of nought).  She dances there

in place of sacrifice –

her graceful feet efface

the facade over the serpent’s lair;

she is the Jonah from the Ocean depths

who croons grey wavy shapes

for blind eyes   leaps

with a Nazir tambourine   & skips

a cartwheel through the broken glass

spoking a Morning Star

within that tender rose   O far

Pacific angel door   lamb-glowing Mass

3.28.17

love & reason

GREY PEBBLE

Chris the carpenter, who came

to work on the kitchen today

grew up in Kentucky

(Louisville).  Stabled in the same

horse-town as cousin Julie, Uncle

Jim.  Heard the JFK

Inaugural, just yesterday.

Born in ’63.  Like a carbuncle

burst on history, his red hair

oscillated in

the wind (a Bruegel vine

for allegorical enmity).  Who there?

The difference between love & reason.

Conversion of the Jews

(persecution blues).

Crusaders, conjuring their notion

of Coulombe.  It’s about love

of the idea of love.

Been there, dove

that (through bronze dry ice dove).

Stone stumble on itself.

Luminous millwheel

like a cloudy meal...

ornery small emerald elf

in limelight (grey pebble,

desolate Black Sea).

No one care, see.

Is only poetry (silly rebel).

1.20.17

fault-line tattoo

GLASS TEAR

Step by shaky step, lame Hobo

spirals the lead-grey hump,

an awkward salience – dump

or agate-hold?  He doesn’t know.

Like Doc Woodpecker, peppering

the old birchbark, testing

the ribs for air – a ring

of hollow knock-knock, worm-hurling.

The sap running... a red thread

of civet.  Venison

oozing from the cauldron.

There’s no going back to the dead.

In the splendor of the west window

a minute glass tear

bisects its mirror –

eggshell splinter twixt Église & you.

My almond diamond, mutters Hobo.

Ring around the rosy,

let’s all go see

Thunderbird (hear the wind blow).

Notes of a flute, along the river.

Ocarina in the woods.

Hums through stray moods

of autumn... Black Elk (Indian giver).

You trace the zigzag coral coil –

a Queequeg scar, knifed

into casket-crown.  Life-

line for Jonah.  Rachel’s whorl-oueil.

1.19.17

A nighttime sun

If my own experience in poetry is reflected in, or has any bearing on, the common culture of our times, then I would have to insist that the obscure mirror or skeleton key to understanding our times is to be found in that obviously & oddly unfinished fragment of an essay by Osip Mandelstam, "Pushkin & Scriabin".  It was first published outside Russia, long after the poet's death; but scholars believe it was written about a century ago, probably in 1915.

The unfinished character of this text is like an open invitation -  pregnant with future (exploratory) life.  It's been for me what they used to call a touchstone : a word, a gospel, a message - a voice that keeps coming back, recurrent, at unpredictable intervals.

Mandelstam is writing about Pushkin, and about Scriabin - but the words are prophetic in their weird self-portraiture.  He himself is foreshadowed in Pushkin's & Scriabin's exemplary suffering.  "They served as an example of a collective Russian demise, they died a full death... their personality, while dying, extended itself to a symbol of the whole people, and the sun-heart of the dying remained forever at the zenith of suffering and glory." [tr. Sidney Monas]

This is only in the opening paragraph!

M. sketches out a symbiotic contrast between the two culture heroes, with Scriabin as a sign of Russia's cultural regression from the wholeness and integrity of the "Christian chronology".   Pushkin is the perfect icon of an "encrypted" Christian sacrifice for the whole people; Scriabin is the sign of its dissipation or betrayal.  Yet watch how Mandelstam refuses to descend into some kind of elegiac complaint!  He himself is enmeshed in both Pushkin's chaste clarity (the whole essay is rooted in prior Acmeist insights & formulations of his martyr-friend Nikolai Gumilev) and in the "Hellenic" (revolutionary) frenzy of Scriabin - the Dionysian element of the Greek dyad (Dionysus/Apollo).

But the substantial, the quintessential nectar embedded in this garbled fragment is sketched out in Mandelstam's vision of the relation between Christianity - as the fulness of God's free & loving redemption of the whole cosmos - and the soul and personality of the individual artist.  It is this "logic" of soul freedom and integrity - again, foreshadowed in Pushkin and Gumilev in particular, along with Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Nadezhda Mandelstam, so many others - as actually a result of the divine gift of free grace & redemption - which, for Mandelstam, explains the vitality, wholeness, and integrity of Western art in general.

"Christian art is free.  It is, in the full meaning of the phrase, 'art for art's sake'.  No necessity of any kind, even the highest, clouds its bright inner freedom, for its prototype, that which it imitates, is the very redemption of the world by Christ.  And so, not sacrifice, not redemption in art, but the free and joyful imitation of Christ - that is the keystone of Christian esthetics.  Art cannot be sacrifice, for a sacrifice has already been made; cannot be redemption, for the world along with the artist has already been redeemed."

"What then is left?  A joyful commerce with the divine, like a game played by the Father with his children, a hide-&-seek of the spirit!"

Mandelstam does something here akin to one of his 19th-cent. heroes, Chaadev.  He distinguishes clearly between religion and art, in order to illuminate the actual relationship between the two.

"Nourishing art, giving art of its flesh, offering it in the way of a sturdy metaphysical foundation the most real fact of redemption, Christianity demanded nothing in return."

This is a very fascinating formulation.  But for contemporary Western culture, it sounds like some arcane, indecipherable mathematical equation.  This too, however, is foreshadowed here (Russia has a strange way in general of foreshadowing & echoing cultural phenomena in the West).  Mandelstam talks about the contemporary regression from "the Christian calendar", the sense of history under the sign of a metaphysical Redemption.  There is no spiritual light at the end of the tunnel.  We have forgotten, or forsaken, or bowdlerized, the pure affirmation of the message upon which our culture was built.

"O ye of little faith!  Verily, if you say, lift up this mountain & toss it into the sea, & ye have faith, it shall be done for you!"

What is the meaning here?  It is not to declare that any one of us can perform weird magic tricks at any time of our choosing.  It is to say : The Son of Man is coming with Power, on the clouds of heaven.  The Earth has already been redeemed, by the manifestation - the incarnation - the sacrifice - & the heroic victory - of perfect Love.

This is a kind of pure Christian Classicism.  It can be heard in the taut moral scales of Shakespeare.  It can be heard in the ineffable organ-music of Donne.  It can be heard in the melody of Andrew Marvell.  It can even be heard lifting under the anxious heartbeat of John Keats.

It's that to which Wallace Stevens alluded, perhaps unknowingly, as his desire to celebrate the "normal" (a hard thing to do).

The world is not "normal" now.  The world is undergoing the symphonic stress of global birth-pangs.  Yet the Redemption stretches out the warm spiritual hand of healing, reconciliation, sanity, wholeness, integrity, hope, joy, freedom & love.  The structural harmony of the world is - the Redemption itself.   This metaphysical-historical fact, according to Mandelstam, is the substance of the "poetic license" of artistic freedom & truth.

America has in some respects lost sight of its own cultural inheritance.  The arts, and society as a whole, are overwhelmed with a righteous, judgmental, Puritanical fervor - splintered into multifarious factions, partisans of subcultural identifications.  The soul seeks some kind of moral justification : but it's an anxious, deracinated search, akin to the Dionysian frenzy of Scriabin & the revolutionaries of 1915.  God is playing hide & seek; but no one knows where to look for release... & yet...

"I shall be released."

Defense of a Diagram (4)

An explanatory introduction, an apologia for a literary work, is a double-edged sword.  In the process of unveiling an informal "defense" (or preface) for Ravenna Diagram, the side-notes are inevitably extraneous, maybe counter-productive.  For one thing, the poem has to stand on its own two (3, 4) feet.  For another, the explanations fall short of clarity & cogency.  I'm left with a nagging sense of things unsaid, or ill-said.  To render things explicit seems to muddle them at the same time.

Despite my disclaimers, the problem remains that I am offering, as a ground or argument for the poem, a worldview which perhaps 70% or more of contemporary readers will find puzzling, mystifying, off-putting, deluded, or simply wrong.

Yet there's something worthwhile in setting out on a journey against such long odds.  Intriguing, anyway.

Let me elaborate, then, a little more - a mini-defense within my Defense.  I have suggested (with Pound, Hart Crane, et al.) that the American epic is a "poem containing history".  The historian, of necessity, approaches the chaos or illegibility of human history with some kind of epistemological lens or measuring implement.

My particular lens is a form of theological vision.  (Some personal history laid the groundwork for this stance : I've written about it elsewhere on this blog.)  Previous efforts are part of the same song, in different modes.  The most recent poem, Lanthanum, parallels what I'm doing now, with changes.  In Lanthanum the idea was to find a place within American poetry to juxtapose and reconcile the American with the European, the modern with the medieval, T.S. Eliot with Hart Crane.  That poem circles around the Gateway Arch Monument in St. Louis (at the geographical mid-point of the continent, and Eliot's birthplace) - as a national-poetic symbol analogous to Crane's Brooklyn Bridge.

But what was the motive for juxtaposing modern & medieval?  It's basically the same impulse that motivates Ravenna Diagram : a particular way of seeing, an ontology of the nature of things, a model of human destiny on earth.

Roger Williams, the Rhode Island founder and prophet of religious toleration, is a pivotal figure for me, standing at the border between medieval and modern.  His message is still vital.  It provides a key with which to reconcile the sacred and secular, spirituality and civic liberty, the individual and the social, the one and the many.

The "medieval" mode assents to a spiritual concept, the Christian article of faith that Jesus was the living synthesis of human and divine - God and Man in one person.

The "modern" mode recognizes the limitations of theological vocabulary.  It acknowledges that what we mean by the "historical person Jesus Christ" may not (or not easily) be recognizable or acceptable to others, that the process of understanding one another across diverse human cultures and ideologies and experiences and forms of knowledge is ongoing, and utterly complex.

The task for this poet is to express the crux of this dichotomy or interface.  It is also to make claims and propositions about the nature of things - & celebrate the consequences.

A poem including history from a Christian perspective has its modern precursors (Eliot and David Jones among them).  Jones I find particularly appealing for a certain optimistic tenderness, for which one searches in Eliot mostly in vain.  His message is the "good news" : but it involves of necessity a translation or transfiguration of secular history into a pattern of spiritual meaning.  Christ is the pivot of earthly time - the Good Shepherd who lifts the human soul a little bit out of this world, from time to eternity.

Obviously, the notion of a divine manifestation has repercussions for any theory of history.  This is where poetry brings its special visionary powers of enthusiasm to bear.  We could suggest an analogy between the translation from secular to sacred time with the transmutation of prose to poetry.  "If you are willing to accept it."

But I also see a "poem including history" as having special obligations to that very prosaic reality which underlies the mystic icons of spirituality.  It is by way of a nekuia or the kenosis into the depths of the local, the temporary, the accidental, the mortal, that we discover the terms of shared experience - across religious and cultural differences.  This is the only path to shared understanding, a recognition of the kinship of experience, and the universality of truth.  It is only though this journey into the earth of details that new vision, new perspectives on old realities, is made possible.  The ground of actuality beneath "the historical Jesus" is still being excavated.  Our own, contemporary historical and cultural orientations continually react with newness to the unpredictable discoveries of ancient "artifacts".  The old is made new; is seen in a new light.

Again, I don't want to work at cross-purposes and defeat my own aims.  Ravenna Diagram is more than a "Jesus meditation", as anyone can see who bothers to explore it.  It's epic aspirations involve articulating a specifically American poem; this requires voicing a perspective on our land, people and history which echoes back and boomerangs within this larger, more global sketch (the theological framework).  It would be incumbent on anybody writing such a poem to attempt no less, if she wants to be heard, or say something of value to an American audience.  Thus the American literary background is part of the design of Ravenna D.  I am writing within the thematic and modal context of Eliot, Crane, Olson, Pound, and many others, who have traveled these regions before.

& herewith (I hope & believe) concludes my fourfold, flat-footed Defense of a Diagram.

Roger Williams at Prospect Terrace (Providence)

Royal Oak

A few years ago I began digging into various writings on anthropology, from The Golden Bough forward & back.  One of many things which fascinated me was the resemblance between archaic kingship rituals, from around the world, and the rites of Christianity.  It's a strange way of putting it, I know - but in some ways it seems as though the early Christians had struck a taproot leading back into human prehistory.  The story of Christ's "kingdom" (or anti-kingdom) and sacrifice - his giving of his "body & blood" in the Eucharist - was like a reflection of prehistoric human social rituals.  The King always "stood for" the God, or the Source of all goodness : he was the channel of the life-force (anthropologist A.M. Hocart expressed this quasi-governmental role of archaic kingship in his classic study Kings and Councillors).

It's as if the Biblical testimony - itself stretching back into earliest Judaism, offering a cosmological picture of the source of life - was reflected in a kind of "royal seal" or template : a gold coin with two sides, showing Past and Future...

MOSES-KAYAK

The soul’s a kind of mirror, they

used to say – the old

mystical sheepfold;

you’ll find it on baptism day

refracted in an oval, seen

through water.  Incidental

angels rim the cave-wall

(all elongate, string-bean

apparitions, seraphim)

till harvest ripens

& a scythe descends

dividing wheat from empty flim-

flam... everlasting Judgement

Day.  That Galilean

gospeller, Samoan

wrestler, flipped oval Testament

into tight spring – a seventh wave

reversed the Jordan-flow,

the eye of Moses-kayak now

recursive back to Adam’s grave

(SW of Lake Victoria,

no doubt).  My Mirror Lakes

were Mendelssohn out-takes,

rehearsals for a Globe-historia –

the young king, hidden in an oak tree

still, waits for his mother’s

signal – climbs from a mummer’s

moth-shroud – floats to the Sea...

9.18.15

Descendant of the Royal oak at Boscobel House (courtesy of Wikipedia)

The Venn diagram of Ra

It is the ever-never-changing same,
An appearance of Again, the diva-dame.
- Wallace Stevens

We look around and we see pairs of things - night & day, winter & summer, man & woman, life & death.  It's as if Nature is posing a geometry problem : draw a line C from point A to point B.  Find the inter-mediator, the golden mean.  Build a bridge across that chasm.

We want to make whole what seems to be divided.  It's a psychic necessity.  Sometimes our solutions are very simplistic, and instigate more fractures than before.  Sometimes our answers are very elegant & abstruse elisions - yet despite the sophisticated technology, we end up sliding into the next ditch.

I've been working on a poem-project in which the two parts of the binary, the two points of the calipers, are spread so wide that I can often seem to lose my way - but it also allows for a lot of creative mulling & curious detours.

I knew from the beginning the poem was involved with geometry.  I usually do with this kind of thing.  I start getting unaccountably intrigued by certain numbers & their divisors, how these numbers might be fleshed out in stanzaic and other patterns.  It's a kind of numerology.

The poem is anchored in a Venn diagram - the overlap of two congruent circles, each circumference passing through the other's center.  A pun is a sort of imperfect Venn diagram - the overlap of two meanings in one sound.  The name of the poem is Ravenna Diagram (you see what I mean).

I seem to have many thematic motives (over)determining this basic layout.  One of the main motives has something to do with the traditional Orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation.   Here three Persons overlap as one God.  In the Incarnation we have, very roughly speaking, a Venn diagram of the unity of human & divine.

It occurred to me this afternoon that another facet or motive of this design has to do with Time.

A poet, or any writer, always writes from where they are.  They express their place & time - their "Now".  But a poem or any fiction can project another "Now" as well.  Proust dwells on this mystery with magisterial complexity in his great novel (In Search of Lost Time).

For the ancient Christians, I think, Time was duplex, dimensional.  There is ordinary time, the successions & cycles of clock time - & then there is God's time, Eternity.

History, for them, involved the terrific drama of the intersection of these two dimensions - played out as the destiny of Humankind on earth.  There is a subtle concept called in Greek pleroma - the "fulness of time".  This can refer, apparently, both to the "climax" of the plot of sacred history - God's actual historical presence on earth - and to a sense of time as a kind of ripening of eternity within clock-time (these two notions are obviously close kin).

With Ravenna Diagram I have these two "historical" points of the calipers, a pair of points in spacetime.  There is the "Now" of the author, the poet, me - speaking out of my own experience & character, my place in time & space.  Then there is a second "Now" : that of the historical Jesus, the person who actually lived in Galilee and Judea 2000 years ago.  & then there is a kind of aesthetic middle term - a third "Now" in spacetime : the Italian town of Ravenna, where Dante is buried, where he finished his Paradiso - & where towering, awesome mosaics, representations of Orthodox Christianity, glimmer in their cave-cathedrals (some of these glittering icons found their way into Dante's poema as well).

Jesus tells a parable somewhere - & I forget the exact details - but he concludes with a riddle about time.  Something about a man inviting all his friends to a wedding banquet, but everyone makes excuses.  So he flings open the door & invites all comers.  However, some people show up not clothed properly for a wedding - they are tossed out.  Jesus says something like, "the Kingdom of Heaven is like this too.  So when the Eternal comes upon you, make sure you are prepared."

I've probably botched & oversimplified this parable.  But what interests me is this phrase about "when the Eternal comes".  It seems to goad the listener toward attempting to grasp a certain sense of the layers of time.

We live in a doctrinaire & factional era.  Our "side" is always ready to pin a simplistic label on the other "side".  They are deluded idiots.  Fundamentalists are convinced that old books are roadmaps through life's foggy ambiguities.  Secularists are convinced that religious believers are basically mystified by myth.

I think there might be a kind of philosophical, reasonable aspect to this religious concept of a duplex Time - spiritual and material, temporal and eternal.  The stereotype of puritanical Christianity, clinging to the spiritual at the expense of physical pleasure, is a very old cliche - with some basis in history (think of the desert monks renouncing the world).

But it's possible to think of the religious emphasis on the spiritual as a pragmatic counterweight to life swallowed up by the chaos & futility of the purely material.  A balancing, not a rejection : a synthesis.

This is how I conceive of Jesus' admonition about "when the Eternal comes".  The Eternal is always there : it's only as we get older that we begin to sense the limits to clock-time - our limits.  An awareness of mortality is a spur to long thoughts.  Then we start to sense the presence of the Eternal.

I noticed this with my father - not only while he was dying, but actually long before.  There was a kind of intellectual detachment.  Not that he didn't enjoy life, or care about others - but there was this sense of limits, the fleetingness.

Such a sense can result in a reshaping of priorities.  "What am I doing with my life?"  People are always ready with quick answers to this one, too - usually addressed to others.  But to grapple with it for oneself is the issue.

When you try to write a poem or fiction with two such compass-points, you are immediately handed a wealth of difficult artistic/philosophical problems.  How do I represent my "Now" - and that other "Now"?  But hopefully I put my trust in the creative process.  The whole impulse of poetry is toward integration & wholeness - to enter the rapture of the mesmerizing song.  My pleroma & that other Eternal might in some sense be one & the same, or at least connected.  After all, some such conundrum was the challenge Beatrice threw down before Dante, too...

Mosaics in Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna

Jesus thoughts

Today I give thanks that I'm not a prominent bishop or theologian, pressed to take "positions" and provide pastoral guidance on every moral issue of the day.  Some of the moral questions of the day seem truly murky to me - but that might just be me.  I'm just glad to be a lowly layperson poet & blogger; I don't have to engage - not "professionally", anyway - in the high profile debates among clergy & theologians & scholars.  I feel sort of the same way about not "teaching" poetry or poetry-writing.  It's a very honorable and important thing to do - to spread the knowledge and appreciation of good writing and literary history - but I'm glad I don't have to do it professionally.  It leaves me some freedom to write whatever I like, however I like - eccentric as it may be sometimes.

Writing this after post here yesterday in praise of a book I'm near finishing, by Anglican theologian N.T. Wright, called Surprised by Hope.  It's a summary (for a general audience) of his interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection.  I'm finding it extremely cogent and fascinating, much in line with my own vague intuitions about these matters.  Wright argues - as I have too, in a way, here on HG Poetics - for the historical concreteness and actuality of the mysterious actions of Jesus, despite the fact that much of that actuality remains shrouded in inexplicable darkness.  He urges a shift away from what he calls a neo-Gnostic attitude (prevalent in some fundamentalist strains of American Protestantism, as well as in mainstream and Catholic medieval traditions) : an otherworldly division between spirit and flesh, between the destiny of "this fallen world" and an individual's eternal soul.  Wright brings back into force the Hebraic and Gospel understanding of the "kingdom of God" as a restitution of divine sovereignty in this world : a "setting right" of the whole cosmos, a true victory over death - starting with the "new creation" of Jesus' bodily return to life (in a new, & different, "spiritual" body - Paul's "glorified body").  This is what he means by theological Hope : that Christ's victory over the cross is meant to transform completely our sense of reality and human history.  By believing, we are not simply "saved" from this planet into some eternal soul realm : we are conjoined to save the whole planet - make the cosmos worthy again of its transcendent, creative origin.

I'm summarizing inadequately what seems to me a very acute and far-ranging presentation, with which I almost completely agree.  So I posted a brief comment about it here yesterday, including links to the book, and a link to Wright's Wikipedia biography.  This was before I actually read the Wikipedia entry.  There I learned that Wright has been described as an advocate of "Christian mortalism" - that is, a theology which dissents from a belief in a sort of "detachable" immortal soul.  Wright argues that a dependence on this kind of spirit-body split goes back, not to the Gospels, but to Plato and the Gnostics, and that this very ancient tendency has led to a sometimes complacent, otherworldly individualism, when it comes to grasping Christ's prophetic message and challenge.  As far as that goes, I think he's correct : but I would never be able to accept something termed "Christian mortalism".  This is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  I think the power and freedom of the human soul depend to some extent on our sense of the soul's cosmic "sovereignty" over time and space. I'm reminded in this context of Vladimir Nabokov's playful parable, in his novel Bend Sinister, of the human soul's inherent dignity - when he has his main character, the old professor Adam Krug - who is embattled and persecuted by an Orwellian parody of a dictatorship - "rescued" from his torment and tormentors by the "transcendent" author of the novel himself.  I'm also reminded of this statement of Jesus, in one of the Gospels, which goes something like : "Fear not those who can harm the body, but not the soul : rather fear Him who can destroy both body and soul in hell!"  This seems to me like a pretty clear distinction between the two dimensions.

I do like and find fascinating Wright's notion that the "kingdom" of God" is not "up there" in the stars somewhere : but is a hidden dimension of our own earthly timespace, which occasionally makes its presence felt on earth (which we experience as divine grace, angelic intervention, miracle, & related phenomena). This is, obviously, very fertile ground for the literary imagination...

But I was also troubled to learn that Wright, as a prominent Anglican bishop (now retired), took part in the Lambeth convocation or conference of a few years back, and argued against the blessing of homosexual unions, and against the ordination of openly gay clergy.  This, to me, is one of those murky areas of social morality where judgement seems very difficult.

For me, being heterosexual, homosexuality has always been something of a puzzle, an "otherness".  What I do know is that all persons have instinctual sexual drives, and that sexuality is an inalienable dimension of our life in this body.  I also know that marriage, in its true sense, involves a vow of commitment and faithfulness which is made on behalf of the whole person, and the whole life of the persons who make such a vow.  If we believe that homosexuality is some kind of illness - some kind of physical or psychological diversion from the "normal" or "good" path of human sexuality - then I could understand the difficulty that religious authorities would have in consenting to bless or sanction the actions of those exhibiting such "symptoms".   On the other hand, if we consider homosexuality to be a phenomenon on a much wider scale of norms and normality - if we think of it as one among other forms of instinctual sexual drives - then it becomes harder to pass judgement on it as abnormal or morally wrong.  The Catholic Church and the Anglican communion, at present, are striving not to "pass judgement" on the instinctual drives themselves - but only on those who express such drives in action.  For many churches and denominations, sexual activity outside marriage is to be curbed, shunned, even condemned.  Thus, for them, it seems, homosexual activity would be on a par with adultery or pre-marital sex.

Obviously, the churches - despite maintaining a source of spiritual authority and moral exhortation, in the call to people to abjure all kinds of worldiness and idolatry (whether of riches or vanity or worldly honors or materialistic obsessions or sexual hedonism) for the sake of God's cosmic holiness, and one's own spiritual wholeness - the churches are always going to have a few problems imposing their moral strictures on the private lives of ordinary adult human beings.  If the Church is going to insist that those of homosexual inclination forsake all homosexual activity, then, to be fair, the Church is going to have to insist just as strongly on the ban on all sexual activity outside of marriage and procreation.  This is a worthy call to holiness, perhaps; but it will be hard to implement in practical terms.

As I say, these questions are not for me to resolve : I confess the strong sense of not having all the information necessary to make a moral judgement in this area.  But based on the limited sense of things I do have at this time, it seems to be most probable that homosexuality is not so much an illness as a part of a broader spectrum of human sexual orientation.  As such, and keeping in mind my previous description of marriage (as a vow of personal commitment in human wholeness), I have the feeling that the wisest and most charitable course would be to honor and bless those people who, of whatever harmless sexual orientation (& I underscore harmless), desire to make a personal life-commitment to another person whom they love.  This seems to be the dominant position of the American Episcopal church also - the church in which I was baptized and confirmed long ago.  I admit that in the long run I could be very wrong - morally mistaken - on this point; but that is my present belief on this subject - contra Bishop Wright, apparently.

*Late-night-thoughts (postscript) :

The original, apostolic Gospel, as I understand it - going back to John the Baptist - presents conversion as the watershed : to be reborn, to "die to the world, and to live in the Spirit with Christ".  It's a matter of complete moral re-orientation : away from selfish (temporal, earthbound) desire, and toward the realm of God's eternal dimension of love and grace.  Both John the Baptist and Paul the Apostle bore witness that, in this new life of the Spirit, our former worldly arrangements are completely abrogated, transformed; & that, in this situation, it's better simply to wait for the grace of God - to accept patiently (as infants in the new life) whatever present situation in which we find ourselves.  Yet, at the same time, to renounce all allegiance to our former unregenerate ways : to provide no allowance for the world, the flesh, the devil.  In this context - one of ascetic renunciation - the condemnation of homosexual activity is understandable.  Profane, "unnatural" behavior becomes the representative symbol (the scapegoat, in a sense) for all forms of hedonism and lust.  Thus to ask for sacramental sanction for homosexual unions, or to offer episcopal authority to "openly gay" clerics, appears to contradict or offend the foundational principles of the church.

This constellation of spiritual belief and principle seems, on superficial grounds, unanswerable : in such context, the notion of "gay marriage", for example, is already beyond the pale.  Yet there is an answer, a counter-argument.  If indeed there is a diversity of inborn sexual orientation, as an inherent fact of human nature - then Christian baptism, and the new life it represents, should be able to redeem the whole spectrum of biological drives.  In other words, one who is born with a homosexual orientation should be enabled (through the Redemption) to enter this new life, along with any other child of God.  The harmony of the individual conscience with God's will takes many forms, none of which we are authorized to judge (since such grace is ipso facto beyond judgement).  So, if people born homosexual hear the call of baptism and rebirth, and re-order themselves to the commitments of this new life, who are we to pass judgement?  If they choose to enter into a loving, spousal relationship in the light of God's grace, who are we to outlaw them?  If they are called to serve God in his church in a clerical vocation, who are we to deny?  If indeed there are distinct, innate human sexual orientations, which develop in various patterns, then God will certainly find a way to lead them all into the great communion - not separate from the rest, but subject to the same ascetic, spiritual rule and moral judgement as everyone else.

It all comes down to the question of nature.  If Dante is right, and homosexuality is contra naturam - a willful abrogation of God's natural law - then it deserves condemnation.  But, on the other hand, if homosexuality is one ordinary, innate dimension of nature, one variation of a norm (a norm of physical, "fleshly" desire, as opposed to spiritual law) - not a matter of rebellious, quasi-demonic human will - then it  will be transformed and redeemed along with the rest of human nature (the whole sum of human folly).  I don't know the answer to this question (of innate nature).  But this is how I would frame a preliminary (imperfect) response.