what you might believe

kids climbing oaks on Arthur Street, in Mendelssohn, ca. 1958 (by Mary Gould)

PACIFIC SOMERSAULT

Childhood in Mendelssohn... my mother

helped us build an igloo.

Spiral parabola

of ice-blocks, framing up a doma

seamed so fine, snow-translucent –

its arctic arc an image

(Inuit bird-cage)

of the revolving deep blue firmament.

Complex reality’s concave enigma.

Mirror-image of

a winecup-face... dove-

Jonah diving from the ship – Mama!

– spewed out on shore by Moby Dick.

The Q in Queequeg, or

Coatlicue – the semaphore

of Joseph’s coat, turned inside-out (thick

darkness shrouding every mountain-top).

Fine rational weave

of what you might believe,

while dreaming (temple veil, torn up

from bottomlands to Memphis crown).

A knot in the cucumber twine,

Apollinaire in umber vine...

a fishnet made of golden fleece.  One

lifesaver-lead sinkers the weight

of the whole wide prairie –

like Cathedral Mary

or that flute-bone poet-fishbait

                 *

goes by name of Buried-Man’s Henry

– bright grandson of the late

star Morning Star, whose crate

floated Twin Cities to the Gulf (see,

Tommy, how the dead rise from the grave).

All 12 disciples died

by violence.  The Ghost plied

her woodcock back & forth, & wove

Ariadne’s safety-net (one grey thread

bent like accordion file

from Ocean vortex, mile

on mile).  Behold how us dead

rise from fleecy loam – your dream.

We dwell in a matrix-

creation – Beatrice

skips from Florence to the throne (beam,

Natasha, from your vault-chariot)

& Juliet will navigate

the high bar of the Gate

d’Orange (Pacific somersault).

The vertical of Dante’s Pole

balances Henry’s hobo-

equilibrium... so

the message in the oak bole

from the King of starry Heaven

sets a gyroscope

in motion – Henry’s hope

& Giuliana’s love (sweet corny leaven).

6.25.17

South Carolina occasion

Every now & then (occasionally) my infinite knit-parade project (Ravenna Diagram) intersects with current events, and then we have an occasional poem.  This one has to do with the terrible sadness which took place at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.  I am deeply impressed with how that embattled congregation spoke with one voice of courage and forgiveness after what was done there.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

This poem, as with most things I come up with, has its obscurities.  I'm thinking of the "Old Glory" as opposed to the Confederate flag, and of Jasper Johns, who lived in South Carolina (where I once saw an exhibit of his work at the Greenville Art Museum).  Johns layered encaustic over his U.S. flag icons, and shrouded scraps of old newspaper columns and images under the paint.  His figures of hands, circles and seemingly drowning men (see Hart Crane's poetry) connect with the image (in this poem) of a deep whale-hum or humming bird (Jonah means "dove" in Hebrew) - sending a different, more substantial message (of love, not hate).

The poem was composed at my temporary work-station (see photo), on a ridge overlooking the Blackstone/Seekonk River (while my house is being painted).

OLD GLORY

The tiny whiz-bird hums & floats,

hovering over my rose

pontoon, her paradise.

A flint blade chimes bell-notes

out of Grime’s Graves (neolithic).

By the grey Blackstone

Hilario J. Robin

snake-charms knotty hillside oak –

dauntless redbreast, passionate

Guillem d’Orange.  Whose cell

is gathering mass (black

wholeful o’moss) in triplicate

like an Old Glory spun of Greenville

jasper – caustic wax

to burn each switchback’s

cussed fer-de-lance (eternal

jail) into a trillion spangle-tiers

of morning (milky spider-

barn).  Haul it down before

nightfall.  The soul in tatters

seeks a deeper, quieter call –

Jonah’s Pacific hum

from whale profundum – bee-

balm croon for Memphis Emanuel.

Will set you free.  Sweetly now

the offspring of the sun

are fielded, droning, into

one (farfalla-Gaspee... rain bough).

6.23.15

Jesus Thoughts (8) : repentance & belief

Will continue as I can with this line of conjectures, come confusion, rain or shine.  Gentle blog readers might want to start with #1 of these Thoughts - otherwise the drifts might be too high, the cloud banks too dark.  They will be dark enough anyway...

Have been thinking out loud here about the spiritual claims Jesus makes : that he is the Messiah, that with him the gate and the way to God's presence, the kingdom of God, is opened : which is a personal presence.  Which means that the ultimate ground of the cosmos is in some way, somehow, personal - beyond our sharpest consciousness & comprehension of what that might mean (in the abstract, anyway : we might experience it, however, in some kind of unknown spiritual trance or rapture).  In the depths.

But Jesus does more than simply make a claim for his status, for who he is.  His message, his mission, is to invite people to join him there.  The NT repeatedly summarizes the announcement he made as he wandered around Galilee and Judea :  "Repent and believe in the Gospel (the good news)."  

These two go together : repent and believe.  Why?  Well, for one thing, the spiritual pigeon-code, the message, he is delivering, is so earth-shaking, so transformative - such a shock to our ordinary earthbound perceptions and way of thinking, that we have to repent - to turn, to make an inward  moral change - in order to receive it.  it's simultaneously a moral and intellectual change which is demanded here.

If we accept the message, we are no longer grounded in common sense or material calculations : we are suddenly participating in some kind of previously-unknown spiritual community.  We are grounded in a relationship with the creator of the universe : as the NT puts it (I paraphrase from memory), "he gave men the power to become children of God."  Children of God.  It's an assertion which requires an almost incomprehensible revolution of consciousness. 

And it has a moral component.  If God is the pure power of infinite Love and Wisdom - the "whole Good" in a Platonic sense, or the goodness of the whole - then we are called upon to refashion our lives in response to this invitation to infinite love & joy.  We're asked to re-evaluate the partial goods we pursue on earth, in the context of an acknowledgement of a new spiritual dimension : the life of our eternal soul.  Inner and outer correspond to and influence each other, as in the saying "Give, and you shall receive."  What we acknowledge and do with respect to loving our neighbors as ourselves, will have repercussions on our inward state of mind and soul - every day, in every situation.  It really is an invitation to be "born again" into a new way of life, rooted in a spiritual dimension which we have until now shunted to the sidelines (a low priority).

It's an invitation, not a command.  I hold firmly with the notion that Jesus's message was never intended to condemn the world, but to liberate our minds - from an enslavement to anything less than eternal life.  God the father in Jesus's words, is a God of infinite love, mercy and forgiveness.  The renewal of repentance and belief which Jesus outlines is a challenge for every person - not an easy path.  We all have our burdens of inward & outward trouble, suffering and shame - our selfishness, our complacency, our moral obtuseness, our unkindness, our stupidity & rage, our fears, our despair.  "For unless you turn and become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God."  - this is a saying both easy and hard.  But listen to this : "Come unto me, you who are burdened and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.'  My burden is.... light.

I wrote here a few days ago about Beauty and Purpose and other capital-letter topics. The idea (taken from Christine Perkell's study of Virgil) that the poet has a particular social role, as mediator between the Iron & the Golden Age - that is, between necessity and freedom, history and paradise...

Chaucer was doing something like this in the Canterbury Tales & other writings. Poetry here has a social-ethical aspect, interpreting and judging the mores of society.

There has been great resistance, since the end of the Victorian period at least, to the notion of didacticism in poetry. Poetry is either too detached (Symbolism) or revolutionary (Futurism) or autotelic (Modernism) to serve as a medium for ethical counsel or social critique.

It's not hard to think of many exceptions to this rule, of course. 20th-cent. poets from Yeats to our contemporaries have addressed social-political issues. But there is an understandable hesitation, on the poets' part anyway, to assign any ulterior purpose to art. Beauty exists for its own sake; the forms of art are self-generated and self-sustaining, growing out of the inherent dynamism of beauty and invention.

Here's how I resolve this dilemma (this morning, anyway) : the harmonious character of beauty (expressed in art) is indeed self-sustaining & self-contained, like a gyroscope floating on a string - and this is precisely what is "revolutionary" (disturbing to the world's business-as-usual) about it.

The poet as social interpreter, counselor & critic is simply the poet who has become conscious of the exile/dislocation/estrangement which is already rooted and inherent in the relation between beauty and the world's turmoil : and who takes responsibility for the consequences.

*

Addendum : of course, Virgil & the other ancient writers didn't leave it at that. That is, the relation between Beauty and the world's trouble (say, History) is not static and a-historical. The key, again as Perkell points out, is this dual notion of beauty (Aristotle), one part of which takes into account the object's purpose or telos. Because humankind also has a telos - a spiritual goal, adumbrated (very basically) by the perennial reality (under many guises) of Beauty/Truth/Goodness - the manifestation of Beauty in art somehow serves that spiritual telos. Suddenly we no longer have a static reality, but a world-in-development, as an expression of essential human aims (philosophers & theologians can argue about the divine vs. human vs. natural origins of those aims).

This gets me, anyway, back to Joachim of Fiore. According to the theologian formerly known as Ratzinger, 13th-cent. Joachim (revised & corrected by Bonaventure) played a pivotal role in a shift in Christian theology - away from Augustine's more static vision of the Two Cities (Earthly & Heavenly, temporal and eternal), toward a kind of quasi-prophetic perspective, which looks to the historical future for a concrete expression of spiritual harmony on earth (call it Peace, or the Kingdom of God, or the Jubilee, etc.).

*

The poet, then, stands midway between Iron and Gold - "representing" (making representations of) Beauty - in Mandelstam's figure, playing the flute, or the fife... showing signs of things to come... "quickening" (Eliot's term) at the sound...

*

An illustration (from the King James Bible, Gospel of Luke, ch. 7):

"24 And when the messengers of John were departed, he began to speak unto the people concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A reed shaken with the wind?

25 But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they which are gorgeously apparelled, and live delicately, are in kings' courts.

26 But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet.

27 This is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.

28 For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.

29 And all the people that heard him, and the publicans, justified God, being baptized with the baptism of John.

30 But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God against themselves, being not baptized of him.

31 And the Lord said, Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this generation? and to what are they like?

32 They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.

33 For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil.

34 The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!

35 But wisdom is justified of all her children."

*

- of the "fife", that is :

32 They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.

There are certain words one ought to use with care, or better yet, not at all. Like "soul".

This mysterious entity... sometimes I think that the gospel sayings about the kingdom of heaven actually refer to the soul itself. Like, "the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure a man buried in a field. Then he went and sold all he had, and bought that field." [quoting from memory]

Or all the precepts about giving up the world and saving one's soul. "What shall a man give for his soul?" etc.

Reading Yourcenar's Abyss got me on this trend of thought (if you can call it that).

This elusive treasure... a person's vital, originary essence... (thus the blind glibness begins...) I wrote here on the blog once, "life is pioneering". Maybe life is the soul's pioneering.

The furtive sense of a perimeter, or the circumference of one's proper being... of being at home there... (or is it all vanity, delusion, complacency? That too.)

Religious faith perhaps is the inward acknowledgement of the soul's origin in some kind of metaphysical gift. "We know that all good and perfect things are from above, from the Father of Lights..." (Epistle of James, roughly, from memory).

Remember all those literary debates over the status of the self in poetry? Even the notion of a "school of quietude" implies various & contrary attitudes toward "the soul", toward individuality. If the soul exists... the architecture of modern notions of personhood would have to be revised.

Yeats, for one, gives the impression of a fiery intelligence - like a visionary semi-angelic being, trapped in a sort of infernal denial at some deep level (amid all the beautiful affirmations). He delves down & back - like Blake - to the creative, titanic origins of reality - occulted in the powers of the human self & soul. But his historical-theosophical-visionary structures (in A Vision, etc.) - those "amazing" gyres - somehow sidestep or seek to replace the Redemption. It's ambiguous, though - very. Yeats was playing with spiritual fire; but I don't want to typecast him according to some kind of dogmatic hypothesis. (how does it go, that ecstatic little poem about blessing & being blessed?)

Spiritual Charity is the real motor of social change. Lovingkindness - unselfish, not proud, not greedy, based on pure natural supernatural affection & devotion - the spiritual force adumbrated most eloquently in Paul's epistle - this is the force behind the betterment of life everywhere on earth, in all its facets and modes.

Because spiritual Charity lends meaning to this familiar Gospel comment : "The greatest among you shall be your servant." That explains everything about both mercy and social justice.

Lookin fo de Day ob Jubilee.

James & John go up to Jesus privately & ask, politely, if they can, in his Kingdom, when it comes, sit at his right hand and his left.

Jesus tells them it's not for him to decide. But he says that although in the kingdoms of the world, men seek glory from one another, it won't be so in his kingdom. There, "the greatest amongst you shall be your servant." & he tells them to give alms only in secret, so that "the Father who sees in secret" will reward them.

"Picardy Third" : when a composition in a minor key ends with a shift to a major chord.

The minister yesterday talking about how the Gospel of Mark ends starkly with three women fleeing from the empty tomb, "for they were afraid." Later a more upbeat epilogue was tacked on, with the disciples meeting Jesus in Galilee (as the "young man in white" at the empty tomb predicts they would, earlier in Mark). Said this epilogue acts as a sort of "Picardy Third".

The earlier, very stark & abrupt ending (after the "young man" promises they'd find him in Galilee) sends the reader back to the beginning of that Gospel, to Jesus' origins in Galilee. So in a sense the sharpness of the ending is a literary maneuver, encouraging the reader to re-read : a "circular text" phenomenon.

As I was listening to the sermon I was reminded of John Irwin's Mystery to a Solution (a wonderful book), which discusses how Borges & Poe got around the problem of the ephemeral nature of mystery tales, ie. how do you get people to RE-read a tale that works somewhat mechanically to solve a puzzle? Why would a reader re-read a mystery if they already know the meaning of the "clues"? Very Borgesian, the idea of a circling text, endlessly re-read.

Was also thinking as he spoke of the article in Saturday NY Times by Edward Rothstein, about current interest among some theologians (including the new Archbishop of Canterbury) in the "productive ambiguity" of the resurrection texts. The Big Mystery : where's the Body? "Where the body lies, there the eagles (or vultures) will gather."

That the earliest gospel might work as a "circular" text would seem to be of special interest to writers. If the empty tomb scene is not one of triumphalism but of fear & trembling, & while sending the disciples back to a literal Galilee, sends the reader back to the beginning of the narrative, to a literary Galilee - this would seem to appeal to a certain sense that writers have, of the interpenetration of text & "life". That is, writers would find, or re-discover, the "Resurrected Life" particularly in the written record, the recounting, the news of that life's beginning actions.

But this sense of "re-reading" reality has consequences for our notions of time & history, immanence & transcendence. Eternity & transcendence & resurrection might interpenetrate time & mortality & history in a way analogous to the way we "read" reality in texts : as though everything is there, in front of us, but hidden, until we're able to "read" it right. Reading as perception (listening).

Thus maybe the encyclopedic or didactic aspects of epic (the catalog of ships; Pound's lectures; Dante's or Joyce's grids of correspondences) are secondary to, or subsumed by, a PLOT, a personal story, the shadow of the hero or the anti-hero or the poet. Why? because poetry is a voracious force-field, a conjunction of opposites, a conjunction of word & flesh, knowing & being. This is the telos or aim of its powerful energies : embodiment.

This vortex or vanishing point of poetry, where knowing & being, soul & body meet in the pleroma of the word.

& the epic becomes the "personal epic", the tale of the tribe becomes the mirror of the person, the microcosm, the reader.

What is the paradigm for this literary shape? It is "incarnational". The paradigm is the Gospels, where the telos of history is the Person, and God incarnate returns like Odysseus as the alpha-omega of the entire Scriptural-historical process.

There is a "Biblical" way of thinking about this poetic notion: fulfillment of the Scriptures. "Before Abraham was, I am." One theory about why Jesus was said to be from Nazareth or a "Nazarene", holds that he was a "nazir", or nasr - which could mean both a member of a special sect set aside for holiness (called the nazirites), or a poet, a singer. "The Kingdom of Heaven is in your midst"; "the Kingdom of Heaven has come upon you" - what a Blakean-poetic way of speaking! The Now. I don't want to reduce or exalt Jesus to poet-status though - that would be a big mistake. Only to say perhaps that there is a teleology inherent in poetic language use, tending toward immediacy, the event now, the living presence, the embodied word.

I have played around with this in my poetry, both in Stubborn Grew and its sequels, & in the sonnet sequence Island Road: the notion of "making" the literary name of "Henry," in various places (Shakespeare, Dante, & esp. John Berryman). The notion of embodying, fulfilling the "Henry" scriptures.