whispers out of Colchis

painting by Michael Gould (acrylic and Elmer's Glue)

MILKY DOME

Henry hearkened to the dream song hum

along the stairwell of a crane

bone flute.  The black mane

of Mama Miriam Dodona waved to him.

As if a little tree anchored his coracle;

a branch of whispers out of Colchis,

woolen silky-shroud of Maximus –

his golden fleece a minor miracle

where twin wheels mesh to form one

almond (of almonds).  Mighty

mickle canoe, whose Isis-eye

looks from the prow (tease of the sun).

There is a vortex in the Black Sea

where the Great Year pivots –

Hamlet churns through his regrets

there, until Milky Way whorls like a G.

There is a grail of emerald stone

beckons from the bottom

of the sea.  Four rivers stream

out of a matrix there – exalted zone

of moody CHURNAGOGUE – the potter’s

center & circumference;

Ferrara ghetto-sense

mingled with Dante-radiance (all hers).

& the backward Nile flows down to Memphis

where the martyr at the bleak hotel

sipped from her cup, & cancelled Hell –

his milky dome hoisted to foamy wisdom-bliss.

8.8.19

Note on Mandelstam (& "the axis of the earth")

There's a short poem in O. Mandelstam's Second Voronezh Notebook which begins :

"Armed with the eyesight of slender wasps"

(see L. Schnairsohn's translations & commentary). Schnairsohn & others have remarked on the wordplay in this poem, on the etymology of (Russian) os - connecting "wasps", "axis" (of the earth), "Osip" (Mandelstam) and "Iosef" (Stalin). Schnairsohn's version reads, in part :

I don't paint, or sing, or draw
a black–voiced bow; I only pierce
the skin of life, and love
to envy wasps, powerful and sly...

I wish that someday I too could be forced
By a sting of air and summer heat,
To pass over sleep and death, and hear
The axis of the earth, the axis of the earth...

I've found a curious subtext to the speaker's desire to listen to the "axis of the earth" in G. de Santillana & H. von Dechend's unusual book, Hamlet's Mill, where (in appendix #14, pp. 377-383) they explore the Indo-European roots of a complex of words & syllables having to do with manth-, math-, mundus, mundil, mnd, etc. They relate these roots to various mythological & etymological meanings of "axis" or "axis-whirler", the cosmic "churn" which rotates the world-axis...

"Mandelshtam" itself contains echoes of "almond stem" or "almond branch"... but here we have a more archaic (Indo-European) layer of meaning. In the poem, Mandelstam puns repeatedly on his (& Stalin's) first name; yet this unspoken (conceptual) pun lurks there as well, on his patronymic.

Since the 1970s, periodically, I've become fascinated with number symbolism, gematria. The books of John Michell, something of a New Age (& old British) eccentric, on ancient/Egyptian/Pythagorean/Platonic canons of number & "sacred" geometry. (Related somewhat to viewpoint of another eccentric author, Giorgio de Santillana - see his book Hamlet's Mill.)

Much of it needs to be taken with massive grain of salt - in particular, the notions (unsupported by much evidence, if any) of 1) superior ancient civilizations (Atlantis & such), and 2) the extrapolation of Plato's arch-conservative and anti-democratic political tendencies. (Michell's sneers at democracy, & such.)

Yet I am, as I say, recurrently absorbed with such explorations of ancient number symbolism in both Plato & the Bible - the detailed measurements of the Ark, the Temple, the New Jerusalem (Bk of Revelation), the canons of architecture in Greece & other parts of ancient world, the correspondence of harmonic ratios, numbers, names, & themes in archaic literature...

& it shows up in my poetry, especially the long projects... maybe someday these works will be understood as playful percursors of a new/old sort of philosophical & literary culture...

This is something of a Hart Crane theme (cf. "Atlantis" in The Bridge), & a Whitman & Melville stratum... it comes through in sometimes (I think) funny ways in my poems (see for ex. the role of eccentric Minnesota Senator, Shakespeare crank, & Atlantis theorizer, Ignatius Donnelly, in Stubborn Grew... if you click on this link, you see the book cover - that's Ignatius, down in the lower lefthand corner).

(I guess I've blogged on this before...)

Here's Jonathan on the aforementioned latin bit. (& he becomes reader # 8 of Stubborn Grew, the book that changed history (at least until the Johnson-Silliman Pact of 2004, outlined by that Walden guy) - thanks - & congratulations!).

I would never think of Robert Creeley in relation to that notion. Ars et celare artem makes me think, not so much of plainness & simplicity, as of a kind of crafty guile, combined with all sorts of indirections, including perhaps a surface moderation or transparency. But Jonathan's concept may be more accurate.

This gets me to Jordan's aside on "depth". I'll have to think a little more deeply about this. Somewhere in the book Hamlet's Mill, mentioned here a while back, there is something about archaic astronomy-astrology as the search for. . . man, now I can't think of the word! It's not consistency. . . it's not continuity. . . but it's like that. . . it's like a philosophical term for steady duration, a pattern which remains the same. . .

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that it seems to me that hermeneutics or interpretation of art works often involves searching for the deep motive, the wellspring which connects all the dots, the answer to why an artist or writer chose this particular obscure symbol or image or emphasis.

The presence of such a motivating plot or plan is one signature of depth. You could also talk about an artwork's "emotional depth", but such is usually brought, paradoxically, to the surface (the crisis, the denouement). Depth of purpose, on the other hand, often remains hidden & disguised - and the reason for this is because there is the deepest emotional commitment to the deep-ocean argument which actually triggered the work in the first place.

Out of the blog loop (or "bloop") these days. Poem (which I've been excerpting here) somewhat in abeyance, have been working on novel novel idea. Using index cards, it feels right. Also reading a lot of Melville & other boat books.

Wrote here a few weeks ago about the book Hamlet's Mill, which explores the links between archaic star-mapping and storytelling (myths). Melville basically replicated this process in his odd puzzle-novel Mardi. All the characters, all the events in the book are personifications of astronomical-astrological readings using the typical star almanacs of the time (an 1845 almanac, to be precise). Mariners were the last great Babylonian star-gazers. This is all brought to light in Maxine Moore's study, That Lonely Game (Missouri UP, 1975). ("That lonely game" is solitaire, or sol-itaire, or writing.)

Hamlet's Mill can be read as an extended improvisation on some astonishing essays by Simone Weil (see her Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks). Despite the profound ambiguities & historical-cultural distortions of her (very Jewish) anti-Jewish bias, Weil is worlds apart from some of the New-Age gematriastic numerological-astrological-gnostical book-biz blah-blah around these topics. Basically, she bears witness to the harmony of Hellenic-Hebraic understanding (the traditional evidence of "psychic wholeness" in "the West"): science/art, knowledge/soul, transcendence/suffering. Though she distances herself from her Jewish roots, she never disavows the "need for roots": nor the centrality of suffering & love - suffering for proud "knowledge" (grace redeeming fallen gnosis).

(This is, as we know from the Romantics, Dante, & others, a traditional role for poets, too: saving the appearances, synthesizing reason & love.)

The HM authors (Santillana & Dechend) acknowledge her as one, of just 2 authors, who has a clue.

Have been reading (or struggling to read) Plato's Timaeus, which is really a companion volume to Hamlet's Mill, mentioned here recently. Written in 300 something B.C., it holds, delicately, a borderland between myth & science, poetry & reason... wonderful to hear the ironic paragraph of this person, living almost 2500 years ago, when he differentiates between his own cosmology (built on astronomy & a fairly reasonable defense of the "argument-from-design" : ie. there are living things & dead things; things either move themselves or are moved passively by some other force; living things, as opposed to dead matter, are self-motivated (they move around by their own will); the freedom of self-movement is "life" or "soul"; since the most complex things in the universe have life or soul, then the self-movement of the universe must be propelled by Soul! I love it) & the traditional "gods" of myth - those same gods & myth-stories which Santillana & Dechend (Hamlet's M.) pretty convincingly (to me, anyway) explain, are also symbolic formulations for star-observations & time-measurements - only from an earlier era!

Anyway, all this seems pretty distant from some of the daylight proper concerns of poetry, which have to do with social justice and human values & how these must be defended NOW...

Struggling in my own way to move along, sometimes going forward in writing you have to go backward, to things you've left behind & forgotten. I tend to write a lot, & then find old ms. lying around... this sequence from a couple years ago sort of startled me with its own star-obsessions... so I'm going to post some of it, though some of you may have seen it before on a list-serve, sorry. It's a sequence called Shakespeare's Head, which is a building in Providence, & as you can tell, it's also a sequel to an early sequence (called India Point, another Providence locale).

from Shakespeare's Head

 
1

 
Snow muffles Providence in soft light.
Orpheus-Hobo shuffles through the streets
beneath immaculate rooftops, slanted
toward the drifting sky.  He is late

 
for the wedding.  In his pocket, a gold band
lifted from the sidewalk (in Fox Point,
on Washington's birthday).  In his heart
an image of a toy city - Atlantis, Golden Land.

 
He'll hold it toward you, shivering -
America in miniature, a tiny Ironsides
reflected in a bourbon bottle - shades
passing through fixed stare (his offering).

 
So needy excess issues (crystalline)
just as fireworks spring a constellation.

 
                 *

 
There is no better world for contemplation.
No butter-word for such a battered nation.

 
Only extravagant hobo longing
reaches past fright-monuments
and furniture of Nineveh (arrogant
roar, ablaze with dominion, fading);

 
only the eyes of Jonah will behold
a green star hanging over gardens
buried in slanting dunes, oblivion
(...distant, pining, as of old).

 
The bottle toy will sleep in his hand
until a starry shade stoops down again
to shape a nest for Everyman - and
bring a skyborne Jubilee to land.

 
               12.6.02

Happy Flag Day

Have been reading Wallace Stevens lately, along with Leggett book previously mentioned (Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory). Also re-reading Hamlet's Mill (Santillana and Dechend), the terrific, crotchety essay on very ancient astronomy & archaic myth. Actually, the last 2 poems I've written (& posted here) reminded me of this book (rather than the other way around). (Some of the "deep-dive" adventures in the latter portion of Forth of July drew extensively on this material.)

Thinking a lot about some of Stevens' obsessions - the symbiosis of imagination & reality, the nature of the human myth-making capacity and its relation to religious belief. Pondering the "culture war" with fundamentalist Islam, & our own homegrown fundamentalisms.

Hamlet's Mill is fascinating by way of the window it opens on culture's deep past, exploring how star-reading was really the first form of literacy, and how myths are not merely projections of human relations, but attempts to comprehend real time measurements, and the meaning of time itself, through long & close observation of constellation/planetary movements. Of course now we understand that the ancient notion of movement was kind of an artificial planetarium (the earth as fixed plane around which stars revolved), but this doesn't diminish the incredible complexity & specificity with which ancient cultures tracked the stars.

I'm finding this archaic science of interest (as you can tell from those 2 poems), 1) because it was a global phenomenon, found in folklore of many many cultures, 2) it provides an interesting way to get behind or beneath mythological-imaginative projections & narratives, the rituals by means of which different cultures identify themselves, and 3) because star-gazing & myth-making were part of the traditional "serious" poet's vocation.

I used the sort of ballad-form refrain style in these 2 poems, not because I felt like imitating Yeats or Villon, but because, basically, it can be effective, I think.