Pound, Pletho, Nicholas Cusanus

Have been reading about late Byzantine culture (1300s, 1400s) & its influence on western Renaissance. Came upon discussion of Byzantine neo-Platonist (& neo-pagan?) Georgius Gemistus, or "Pletho"... & discovered a connection with another neo-pagan, Ezra Pound. History or legend has it that the late Pletho's body was removed from its tomb by his followers & re-buried in Sigismundo Malatesta's "Tempio", in Rimini (a Renaissance architectural testament to pagan revivalism). & it turns out Pletho indeed pops up in various allusions in the Cantos of Pound.

Furthermore, I discovered this morning that there is a connection between Pletho & the Renaissance Catholic philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, whose writings have fascinated me for a long time. Cusa attributed his most famous work, De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance) to a vision he was granted while on a tempestuous sea-voyage from Constantinople back to Italy (as part of a delegation attempting to resolve the endemic conflict between Catholic & Orthodox Christianity). Well... it turns out that Gemistus Pletho was ON THAT SAME SEA-VOYAGE, and may very well have engaged in conversation with Nicholas of Cusa.

One of the deep impulses of my own long-poem efforts has been to shape a response (& challenge) to Pound's great epic (The Cantos) - driven in part by a basic disagreement I have with him over the "shape" of history itself. So this nexus of people & events - Pletho, Malatesta, Nicholas Cusanus, Byzantium, Renaissance - is really grabbing my attention... in that (as some previous blog-posts here detail) Nicholas of Cusa is an historical & philosophical figure who is, for me, a kind of equivalent, maybe, to what Pletho was for Pound...

NICHOLAS OF CUSA, SAILING HOME

Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

He was on board ship, sailing from Byzantium
when the moment of illumination came, a flash
of light that staggered him (as happened to Paul
on the Damascus road): when he understood
there can be no ratio, no means of comparison,
no middle term, between the finite and the infinite.
Thus, since God is infinite, we have no means
of knowing Him (invisible, incommensurate); so,
as Paul says, If any man thinks he knows anything,
he has not yet known as he ought to know.
It follows then, for Nicholas (De Docta Ignorantia)
our proper study is, to understand our ignorance.

I think of him in Constantinople, looking up
into that limpid sphere, that massive cupola,
Hagia Sophia: gazing back at those gigantic eyes:
Christos Pantokrator, hovering there, magnificent
in lapis lazuli, translucent marble. He would
have known that, even then, all-conquering armies
of the Pasha were encroaching on the city gates;
had swept away, already, the last flimsy shreds
of once-almighty Christian Rome – history itself
grown incompatible with that triumphant
image glaring down.

I cannot know You
as You are. But when I think of you
I think of Bruegel panoramas: there’s Mankind
(a little, furry, muddy, peasant thing – yet
at home upon the earth – its caretaker – self-
conscious, quick – inventive builder, gardener –
blind governor – your tarnished mirror);
and, as he painted in The Road to Calvary,
you hide amongst us, suffering servant, near
the center of our troubles: buried in the crowd:
one of the roughs (disguised, in camouflage,
unknown).

The Renaissance philosopher/theologian Nicolas Cusanus wrote of an understanding of the divine as a "conjunction of opposites". He opposed this form of logical contradiction to what he saw as the over-rationalization & superficial verbalizing of late Scholasticism.

In a kind of elaboration on this basic idea, he wrote about humankind's intellectual activity and perception as the construction of a "conjectural world". The reality we see and experience is a fully-human construct, because our perception is filtered through the limitations of human vision & understanding. Our conjectural world is not exactly equivalent to the real or actual world, which is God's Creation.

Our conjectural world and the actual world are united, according to Cusanus, by the revelation of Christ - the Incarnation, the Redemption. The Incarnation itself is understood as a wonder, a logical contradiction, a conjunction of opposites (infinite/finite, spirit/flesh, time/eternity, mortal/immortal...).

I seem to take a perpetual interest in these thinkers who stand at the borderline between humanism and theological vision : Cusanus, George Berkeley, Wallace Stevens... They themselves are fascinated by this oscillation between the "artifice" of our perceptual world and the world as it actually is.

I have a feeling Teilhard de Chardin, the 20th-cent. Catholic theologian, might be of interest here (I have an old book of his on my shelf, which I haven't read yet).

The theology of the 2nd Coming or Eschatology... the inkling that if you put together an understanding of the 3rd Person of the Trinity - the Holy Ghost - with the idea of the transpersonal unity of the Church (the "Body of Christ") - & combine these with a sense of the historical destiny of humankind as a species...

I mean I'm imagining far into the future here, and identifying the scriptural image of "the Son of Man" with a Teilhardian concept of "species-Man". Man as Imago of God united with humanity's "conjectural" (constructed) world. The georgic/Virgilian ideal of a renewal or recreation of the earthly Paradise, humanity's ultimate harmonization with the natural world of the earth & the social-political world... The long, slow destiny of Mankind-as-Gardener, who will, as Faulkner said in his Nobel speech, not only survive, but ultimately prevail. I'm always reminded, in this context, of the (quietly hilarious, heartfelt) episode in the Gospels, at Easter, when Mary Magdalen discovers the empty tomb, & sees Jesus standing nearby, & at first mistakes him for the gardener...

(some of this "gardener" impulse surfaces at the very end of Stubborn Grew... the Joycean bit with Anna Akhmatova rambling on pilgrimage toward Oxford to get her honorary degree, cheered on by rural farm-folk...)

I think this kind of visionary impulse underlies three deep & ancient channels of intellectual labor : epic/dramatic poetry, prophetic witness, & philosophy... it underlies Dante's integration of political & theological hope.

Here the historical work of Redemption replaces the cyclical or fatalistic tendency of traditional religion and Stoic philosophy... this-world optimism replaces otherworldly pessimism... Russian Acmeism supercedes Symbolism...

(there is some of this also in the "Joachimite" (Joachim of Fiore - another Joycean figure) undercurrent in that other book, Rest Note...)

Here's an article by Thomas Epstein about Alexander Vvedensky, one of the OBERIU poets. Turns out he was interested in Nicholas Cusanus.

In the realm of poetry (& maybe other realms) I find it difficult to balance and reconcile truth & beauty, the didactic & the aesthetic, the legislative/executive & the playful/imaginative, the prophetic & the poetic...

Look at people like Pound, Olson... ambitious-serious "alpha male" epic types. Avatars of the will-to-order, the will to govern, to dominate, to rule. (Yeats's "king of cats".) Though I don't consider myself very alpha, I feel I've muddled along in some similar deep swamps. Hence my affection for figures closer to the "artist" side of this line (Hart Crane, Stevens). Forth of July is really a playful jab toward the crystallization of a "national epic", drawing on contrary models (like Crane, Berryman, Mandelstam, etc.). [ (Will anybody ever notice what I've been doing here?) ]

from one perspective, the sane & ethical approach, as an artist, would be to maintain a strict detachment, to offer an impersonal mirror... from another perspective this seems impossible, an illusion : we are already caught up and involved emotionally & intellectually with the "materials"...

the whole issue of the poet as "unacknowledged legislator" stems from the fact that all our communal social constructs are rooted, at least to some degree, in the imagination itself... or is this an attitude (for an artist anyway) of foolish, over-reaching pride? Is the substance of reality firm & structured & prior to our conceptions about it?

(Another aspect of this is that much social, didactic, political poetry is not really very poetic. It's prose dressed up as poetry. Of course it can be very effective just like that. But it doesn't re-imagine, re-create the cosmos, the way the great epics do. It lacks the orphic fictional-poetic power of Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare... - the regal sceptre of the imagination - Mandelstam's "baton". I suppose the sceptre has been passed to the novelists, the scientists, the philosophers, the "critical theorists"...)

Old puzzles... this crux perhaps marks the difference between the medieval, the Renaissance & the modern mentalities...

Maybe that's one reason I like the philosophical writings of Nicholas of Cusa so much. For Cusanus, our knowledge reaches its limit in puzzles & paradoxes. God is "the conjunction of opposites". He acknowledges the source of all order & creation in God; at the same time he asserts that all our concepts of God are just that, human constructs, "conjectures", that in fact our whole sensible, knowable reality is a conjectural human construct, an artifice of the mind...

I thought this morning that the resolution of this puzzle or paradox lies in an understanding of the nature of divine love. If "God is Love", as the epistle of John has it, and if Love is a kind of binding embrace of the Other which is at the same time a renunciation, a self-giving to the other, a state of service or servanthood - then it's in the light of this kind of Love that we can imagine another Biblical concept, ie. "perfect freedom".

Imagine a divine nature which wants to create a cosmos of "perfect freedom", because this desire is rooted in love, and love's deepest motive is to "set free". Then this divine nature would of necessity have to withdraw, relinquish control and dominion on some level. Of course this does not necessarily entail indifference (the remote, the clockwork God). "Selfless-love-without-indifference", then, is in itself a kind of incomprehensible paradox. Incomprehensibility, even absurdity, of a kind we meet with in ordinary life (cf. the parable of the Good Samaritan).

I guess I'm simply recycling some old, old via negativa notions going back to Pseudo-Dionysius & Byzantine theology & long before (Plato on love, etc.).

But these notions seem to be essential to any integration of order & freedom, of cosmos & chance, of medieval and renaissance, of theology & humanism. A figure of paradox like Cusanus appears at the cusp of this historic shift (between medieval & modern). He has a mind fascinated with invention and creative freedom. His writings are playful intellectual-philosophical games, conceptual inventions.

But it seems to me the crux of it all is this fusion of the will-to-love ("good will") with the idea of "perfect freedom". Maybe this is the nexus where the gift of artistic detachment & inner freedom rhymes with a more "sober" concept of necessity, reality, history, fact, the moral law, governance, political & juris-prudence, etc.

Roger Williams:

"the essence or being of the immortal, invisible, infinite, eternal, omnipotent and omniscient, and wise, we know no more than a fly knows what a king is."

I'm obsessed - in my own illogical & unsystematic way - with a particular subject : the way(s) in which a person moves from scepticism or agnosticism to belief. This has been one of those fixed points or idees fixes around which my ruminations have oscillated, since the time of this adventure (& before).

A person moving from doubt to belief is like someone moving from thought to action - because a whole way of interpreting reality, along with a potential avalanche of active commitments, stem from that initial step. How this comes about - in what circumstances - can entail, obviously, some very dramatic (life-affirming, or life-threatening) consequences.

The language of belief, without that primary opening or accession, leaves the listener unmoved, untouched, unconvinced (or oppressed by a confidence he or she doesn't share).

I'm interested in the ruminations of Coleridge & Stevens (or Nicolaus Cusanus) on the impact of imaginative (theological) concepts. In their sense of a relation between vision, on the one hand, and human freedom & dignity (autonomy), on the other.

The imagination can become an end in itself; but that's not the same thing as faith. The ruminations about the mystery of belief are only a subset of the ruminations on the mystery of God per se.

"God" is a concept which tends to bring the mind up short - blocked, confused, stymied, befuddled. At least this has been my experience. One has to live with it for a few decades to become slightly more confident in some slight measure of understanding (or the illusion of same).

I've found the notion of analogy or proportion to be very helpful in this pursuit of the illusion of knowledge (cf. Cusanus, On Learned Ignorance). I mean the golden proportion, or "dynamic symmetry" (the fibonacci sequence being one example). To wit: in a shape divided into two parts, the relation of the smaller to the larger part is the same as the relation of the larger part to the whole shape. (As a result, we have a spiral of infinite (proportionate) expansion, or contraction.)

What does this have to do with God? It's connected with the ancient notion of humankind as Imago Dei. The figure that humanity makes on earth - self-conscious, creative, constructive, hopefully merciful & wise - this "abstract image" of Man in general - is "analogous" to the figure of God. As Man is in relation to time and the earth, so God is in relation to eternity and the cosmos.

(The analogical image - going back to the Greeks, the Hebrews, & Byzantium all together - underlies much of the musing of Stevens, Coleridge... Mandelstam too. Cusanus played it brilliantly from at least 2 directions - ie. "Between the finite & the infinite there is no proportion..." etc.)

This basic architectonic of theism might possibly open the door to more profound mysteries ("salvation history"). & yet it takes more than a beautiful mathematical proportion to convince a sceptic to believe in the existence of a benevolent Creator. & this question - this uncertainty - this riddle - is precisely where the path of the individual seeker, ruminator, cogitator, meditator, reasoner, intuitor, experiencer - the selva oscura of each personal mind & heart - sets out.

Mandelstam, from his first book (Kamen = "Stone" - trans. by Merwin/Brown):

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.

 
Emperors try to rule that,
priests find excuses for wars,
but the day that place falls empty
houses and altars are trash.

those great & famous lines, from "The Tower"

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

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

For example, here's what I do : I start over. & over. Walking down the road. Another start of something.

In early December, near the end of autumn,
leaves rustle in the twilight along Prospect Street
and dark limbs of the maples shape a twisted
colonnade.  I walk through tender gloom

 
toward home.  Lost in a tumbledown frame
of this fading season, I think of you again -
invisible now, behind a sheet of chilly rain
- silvery rings of hide and seek your game.

[p.s. What was I thinking of? Of a particular person. Also of Nicholas de Cusa's treatise Game of Spheres (De Ludo Globi), in which the spiritual life is figured as a sort of game - trying to reach felicity, at the center of nine concentric circles drawn in the dirt, with a lopsided ball). & of Mandelshtam's comment in one of his essays, that the work of artists after the Redemption is a game of hide and seek with God.]

"Those were times of fracas & uproar," spake Sir Henry, adjusting the corset of his rusted cuirasse.  He leaned against his plastene shield, marked with the scarlet Cross of St. Andrewe and 3 yellow puffballs, insignia of the Fellowship of the Golden Fleas. 

He spake at length, then, in his gruff knightly-hangover voice, of his glory days in battle against Poesie de Langage, and other reprobates and infidels.  "Twas at the dusk of the last millennium, during the reign of King Bill, in the Ville de Buffaloe" quoth he; "many were the scuffles and duels, then; oft'times single-handed, 'gainst all comers, belike.  Methought then, and methinketh now yet, that one signal cardinal sin bore down, with plumbous bars, that dur Langpo :  twas their feigned or attempted extinction of Personality.  For personality, my young lads & damsels, may be likened unto this checker'd insignia, inscribed upon my battered, trusty old shield.  Tis emblematic of one's very Soul:  like that fransiscan brother's - his name escapeth me - Walt, was it? - his grassy handkerchief, designedly drop't by his own winsome Lord.  Or as that other brother - Nicholas, of Cusa fame - quoth:  "All things Giulianize in you, Guliano" - every word of every poem, no less so."

There's something so important in Eliot's notion of "dissociation of sensibility". I'm not exactly sure what it is, yet. The way someone places a historical marker for where it supposedly begins, is basic cultural myth-making, like the Serbian concept of the Field of the Raven.

Eliot puts it after the "metaphysicals" - and links it to a loss of the medieval synthesis. But the medieval synthesis was mythological. He should read Cusanus : a renascent-metaphysic to beat the nostalgia of metaphysical poetry (Donne's elegy for that synthesis basically scripted Eliot's notion). Cusanus "enfolded" the dualities of what was to come (reality/imagination, faith/scepticism, superstition/science, philosophy/praxis) in a creative intellectual synthesis which bears comparison to Leonardo da Vinci's in the realm of art/science.

I would put the "dissociation" much later. Keats & Milton represent still (& marvelously) synthetic unities of reason/imagination. Their poetry combines feeling and argument, image & discourse.

With the progress of science, Enlightenment, humanism, journalism, telecommunications. . . poetry was forced into a corner marked by indirection. American poetry offers the same picture in colonial miniature : a progress of deflection (Keats to imagism = Whitman to imagism).

The history of poetry in English since 1800 (after the Romantic-Sentimental revolt against Augustan-Enlightenment uber-rationalism) is a progress of deflection - away from the union of logic & song (thus we have Black Dog Songs, as I described them the other day).

Part of my fascination with Language Poetry in the early 90s (when I became aware of it) was my sense that it represented a literary-historical terminus of this process.

John Latta at the Hotel on Abstract Expressionists, Zukofsky's object-at-rest. I just finished reading N. Cusanus's Compendium, so offer his simple four-foldity :

point / line / plane / solid object
letter / syllable / word / sentence

(& more obscurely : Capability / Equality / Unity / Similarity - which I suppose could be figured as:

Power = point/letter
Equality = line/syllable
Unity = surface/word
Representation = object/sentence

Cusanus writes : any shape - a line, a circle, a sphere - is an image formed of equality.

I hope my friendly Reader will forgive all my impatience & irascibility.

Clearly there's no simple or inherent Problem with "the scene" as such. I'm not a Hater.

Reading Nicolaus Cusanus brings to mind certain things. Such as the incomprehensibility & otherness of God. the coincidentia oppositorum. the "Posse ipsum" (the 'to be able' itself, or the Capability). (which reminded me of the Gospel apothegm about "& you will see the Son of Man coming at the right hand of Power").

His idea that the supreme achievement of vision is to see beyond what vision is, in itself, capable of comprehending. Love draws you into the wild over yonder. (Yet he's a great philosopher because he never gives up trying, beautifully, to the very end, to define more accurately, precisely, elegant too.)

I think of the capability of poetry as a kind of symbolic uniting or unison with "whatness-in-itself," because poetry, more than any other discourse, is united with itself. This, I realize, rhymes with some things in Cusanus.

Why am I prating on in this vein? To defend my agonistic attitude toward any established scene whatsoever, I guess, whether independent social network or professional-mandarin establishment. O joy!

I don't fit in, because thought runs too quickly past its stylization? Oh yeah? Also, because I'm an ignorant klutz, and my poems are inedible. Preposterous coincidentia oppositorum.

Wallace Stevens' poetry is sometimes orotund, coinciding with the general repleteness & rotundity of WS, as in similar modus William Shakespeare offers a mighty graceful Globe;

and as WS oftentimes mentions the poetry to be found in philosophers,

so, I recommend Nicolaus Cusanus, or Nicholas of Cusa, whose interest in roundness surpasseth all others;

quotes to follow -

Therefore the edge of the world is not composed of points, but its edge
 is roundness [rotunditas], which consists in one point. 

 
Roundness cannot be composed out of points for, since a point is indivisible 
and does not have quantity or parts or a front and back or other differences,
it cannot be joined to another point.

 
Only length and width can be seen.  But in roundness nothing is long or wide
or straight.  Roundness is a kind of circumference, a certain convexity led
around from point to point whose top is everywhere.  And its top is the atom,
invisible because of its tininess.

 
The round world is not that roundness itself than which no roundness can be
greater, but that roundness than which nothing can actually be greater.
Absolute roundness is not of the nature of the roundness of the world, but is its
cause and exemplar; the absolute roundness of which the roundness of the world is
the image.  I see the image of eternity in a circle where there is neither a beginning
nor an end since there is no point in which it would be the beginning rather than
the end.  [italics mine]

Listen to this subtlety :

Moreover unity is more perfect and simple to the degree that it is more uniting.
Hence the Trinity, which is one in such a way that it is also in three persons, each of
which is one, is more perfect.  And unity would not be most perfect in any other way.

similarly :

Consequently you must open up the gaze of your mind, and you will see that God
is in all multitude because he is in the number one, and in every magnitude because he
is in the point.  From this it is established that divine simplicity is more subtle than the
number one and the point which gives the unfolding power of multitude and magnitude.
Hence God is a greater enfolding power than that enfolding power of the number one 
or of a point.

Edward J. Butterworth (rotund moniker) has a perfectly succinct essay in the book Nicholas of Cusa in Search of God and Wisdom (Brill, 1991), clarifying these concepts & relating them to the earlier Alan of Lille, who wrote : Deus est spaera intelligibilis, cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam. Moreover, Lille :

The creature is called the center because, as time, compared to eternity, is thought
a fleeting motion, so the creature, compared to God, is a central point.  Therefore, the
immensity of God is said to be the circumference, because it disposes all things in
such a way that it encompasses them and enfolds all things within its immensity.

It's possible to find only word games & rhetorical sleight of hand here. But not if you take into account Cusanus' commitment to the (negative-theological) absolute otherness of God. Mathematical terms are applied to simplicity, while concrete (physical) terms are applied to multiplicity (as in Alan of Lille). Yet otherness and the physical universe are joined, related to one another, by shared geometrical terms & analogies (in a relation of material actuality, on the one hand, and ineffable, invisible & infinite (yet intelligible) perfection, on the other). Alan of Lille's "Intelligible Sphere".

Leading (Butterworth illuminates, partly via Einstein) (& around again) to Cusanus' limpid, rotund contradiction :

Therefore the edge of the world is not composed of points,
but its edge is roundness, which consists in one point.

(All Cusanus quotes from
De Ludo Globi (The Game of Spheres))

what's that Dickinson line? "My circuit is circumference" [?]

What am I reading these days?

books by & about Nicolaus Cusanus
books about history, architecture, etc. of Aleppo (Syria)
books about Hitchcock film, Vertigo

You tell me!

I wonder if Wallace Stevens was familiar with Nicolaus Cusanus. There's a paper there for you, kids.

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Stevens' "makings of the sun" & Cusanus' "conjectural", human-hypothetical, world. Probably some differing conclusions, but also some clear affinities of interest & vocabulary.

Quid aliud, domine, est videre tuum, quando me pietatis oculo respicis, quam a me videre? - Nicolaus Cusanus

[What else, O Lord, is your seeing, when you look upon me with the eye of mercy, than your being seen by me?]

more Dove Street:

3     
                     Omnia enim universalia, generalia atque specialia in  
                     te Iuliano iulianizant  [All universals, generalities, and 
                     specifics julianize in you, Giuliano]      
                                              – Nicolaus Cusanus


 
A faint gray pencil-sketch   my mother made   decades ago
floats in a blue corner:  two redhead brothers   like twins
almost an octave   Guillem & Giacomo   sit   parallel
each sketching (right-handed)   intent   upon   blank white

 
& Gong Xian   abandoned the field   and the fugue of war
(a change of ancient dynasties   Ming for Shang)
trailing retreat   transmuting each desire
(only flickers   of black horsehair)

 
the Yellow Mountain was   left to your imagination
in grey-black flecks   and war and peace   the blank
spaces   the crooked lightning paths   left up to you
(your willing hand   your loving heart   your sight)

 
Leonardo drew (lefty, mancino) the faintest of red lines
beneath the leaning eyes of Mary   bending down
(seraphic)   toward the babe:   his notes
a kind of mirror-writing (all’ebraico)   with “tired hand”

 
And in the wintry womb   the gray-black limbs
iterate (tired, crooked) against the snow   a backward trail
or trial   a coiled, cold metal spring or   trapper’s guile
(elusive prey   grey shadow   fleeting   glimmering)

 
low cooing   from a frozen eave or   looking-glass
intones an octave   twinned in unison   (some mournful-
silver marriage rite):  a thread of golden lightning
through an ocarina   to a painted ear (and scandalized)

 
announces stormy weather   thunderstorms and   thaw
across the mountains   where waterfalls   rush
past banks of cedars, reeds   (your brush with
fate   by horsehair   led you   here)

       
                                   2.20.04

HGpoetics just had its 700,000th visitor! His name is Glubby and he is a 300-yr-old turtle from a small island near the remote island nation of New Zealand! Welcome, Glubby!*


*for the record: hgpoetics utilizes the authorized S-W (sand-wind) Method of calculation developed by Nicolaus Cusanus in 1445 & explained in his treatise De Ludi Glubbi.