You have to step with care & consideration among the tender woolly mammoths of traditional religion; you mustn't stub your toe on an elephant heel, or banana peel.

Keith Ward, previously mentioned Anglican [sorry, Roger] author, is pretty good on this, though I have a few reservations, which I won't go into here. See Religion and Revelation.

& there are mysteries, & there are more mysteries, under the almond tree.

Interesting reportage from Dr. Bramhall this morning. It seems like every decade produces new crystallizations, new vocabularies of dogmatism. The desire for certainty, and irresolvable quandaries, resulting in simple formulas.

Keith Ward's books go into these fraught issues of beliefs, traditions, scriptures. Reason & faith, science & religion, spirit & letter. He puts his own Anglican perspective in the context of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Enlightenment rationalism, etc.

Divina Commedia is a didactic poem, according to Dante, concerned with civic morality. Thought of that while reading Keith Ward again on coffee break (Religion and Community). I've mentioned this author before - in my opinion, a great Anglican theologian and philosopher. Tremendous insight, and clarity of presentation, of old and basic issues. Ward was writing about "natural law", and the conjunctions & differences between how a "naturalist" and a "theist" might understand it. (Natural law being an expression of the normative or the common good.) So this made me think of what Dante was doing.

(Ward is so good, in a good old Anglican way, at seeing patterns of mercy, wisdom and humanity - rather than scriptural absolutism (literalism) or dogmatism - within, underneath, or around the edges of ancient tradition.)

Also, was ordering a bunch of Italian books this morning. Just hearing the sound of that language is like sunshine.

The voice of Reason today:

Natural human morality is socially conservative, tribal, hostile to outsiders, and vindictive. The repressive use of religion is a symptom of this condition, not its cause. Yet this symptomatic use is enough to ensure that a recovery of religious practice does not automatically lead to a restoration of a purer moral order, or deliver religion from the hatreds of human life generally. It is almost always mistaken to think that religious revival will produce moral renewal. It is as likely to lead to different forms of supine conformism, attempts to enforce rationally unjustifiable but allegedly ancient or revealed traditions, and repressive hostility to those who differ.

Nevertheless, it is not true, as some secularists claim, that the practice of religion is bound to lead to obscurantism, reaction, and hatred. If the practice of religion needs to be humanized by consideration of what makes for the welfare of human beings, secular morality needs to be motivated by belief in a more than human power which can make moral principles objectively obligatory and ensure that in some way moral commitment will not be ultimately in vain. Unfortunately, the conscious invention of the idea of such a power will not be motivating at all. The French 'religion of Reason' was a dismal failure because everyone knew that it had been invented by intellectuals, and was no more than their projection of human ideals onto the cosmic order. Immanuel Kant's postulates of God and immortality proved to be similarly ineffective. If they are props to an independently established morality, then morality can survive without them. If they are really necessary to moral commitment, then Kant's universal and rational morality is a defective analysis of the nature and basis of autonomous, secular, morality. Pure Reason proves to be little more, in the end, than the fading echo of the voice of a dying God.

What is needed is some personal experience of a power which seems to carry moral authority with it, and which offers hope for the vindication of a moral order in the universe. Such an experience cannot be manufactured, and it cannot be affirmed simply on the basis that it is needed to bolster some independent system of moral truths. Religion is neither a prop to sound morality, nor a guarantee of moral probity. Religion has its own proper validity as the realm of the relationship between humans and an alleged spiritual order which bounds human existence.

- Keith Ward, Religion and Community, pp. 122-123 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)

Roger Williams would say YES.

Have been reading the section on JH Prynne over in Jacket. Such complex careful attention. Despite the sense that late-Empire Larkinaise (Larkin-malaise) is easily transmitted to Brit academic fellers, one can be jealous of the highly-cultivated ears over there. A poetry gains weight & resonance when it finds a shared language for shared experiences. A "landscape", a "season".

Also Keith Ward, Religion and Community.

from the "Ancient Light" chapt. of Stubborn Grew:


The train ride to Oxford was something else.
Profound droning weight of iron travel machine,
farmland English backyard a pale moss green
in the moist December light, your pulse

is calm outside of London, Providence
might be a way of life, a common sphere,
fair, sensible and just - a Hertfordshire
in an ovoid Shakespeare's head, a salience.


(cf. Mandelstam's ruminations on poetry as evolutionary "salience", in Journey to Armenia.)

"ovoid"? It struck me yesterday - the distinct oddity of the term for the center of power: "the Oval Office".

*

An egg sprung out of winter Iron Age.

At the other end of Stubborn, there's a Joycean-Chaucerian parade-procession of sorts, Anna Akhmatova on her way to get a prize in Oxford:


Nay, the horses are in final fedders and wee flying.
Through the greenmoss ways by the quiet waters,
by the oxenford, near where Actemydovie totters
along with to sieve her mettle, warning and warming

her loving piece all the way to Petroglad, finally;
and well pick Nuckleheadup along the Wye, playing flowt
and flowering flowcraft, like Jimi Hucktrix and what
Bea J Hen can seagal us a supthere, friendly

among the gould keelover flowerpunters,
those steady-eyed treefellers and form farmers
like granite under the holy rollercoasters,
a sprungfeedle farmcanter. A witbull H-er's

resting on the Blackstone shoulders, his liberty
a done thing everydeeday, as we canterbury
along, long plowman's wake - and a very gradumerry
grape it is, ripe to the buddies, from a little tree -

near the edge of the Terrace
the limbs all black and thorny
the buds, just barely
the green moss

soft, tender
spring whispers
kindness now, and grief. Hers,
yours, ours. . . [etc.]


(p.s. the 3rd vol, July, was finished on 3.5.2000, the anniversary of both Akhmatova's & Stalin's death. Akhmatova crops up in odd places throughout Forth of July.)

Spinoza something of a pantheist, no? Identification of God & (created) Nature. Simultaneous linking of God with Love.

Keith Ward comes out of Aristotle-Aquinas philosophical tradition - but challenges the determinism of causal-logic explanation (this is the cause of that) when it comes to cosmology and reality as a whole. This is very hard for the mind brought up on positivism & scepticism to grasp : the notion that God is self-revealing, that divine revelation is real (though blurred & imperfect) filtered through the lenses of different, yet authentic religious traditions. (Ward doesn't hold that all religions are equal, or that their truths are interchangeable; but he grants insights to each of the major religions which can further enlighten each other).

Granting the possibility of revelation immediately confronts one with the mystery of God's nature per se.

I love Ward's analyses because he emphasizes the link between the actual cosmos and creative (divine) will. There is no causal determinism because the universe we experience is a creation - possibly one of many. Again, hard to grasp, immediately, outside of a considered theological orientation. But I think it is something poets & artists can identify with (a shared "process").

Terrific, fascinating posts on the Zukofsky conference from Josh Corey. Thank you, Josh.

Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza. . . the effort to confront & describe the nature of God per se within the context of the definition of world & nature.

Theologian Keith Ward, as I mentioned a week or so ago, has been a great help to me lately in this area (three books: Religion and Relevation, Religion and Creation, Religion and Community).

Latta-day Proust.

What a mighty vast meme was early 20th-cent. "memory"! The cork-lined French chap made a Mots-Valeurian personal epic out of it.

Out of Baudelaire, Bergson, Nietzsche - "eternal return". The Future is possibility; the Past is fixed; but the Present of writing, through reflection and reiteration, turns the Past once more toward possibility - a spectral revivimummifictation.

Memory functioning like a time-analogy for the spatialization - the multidimensionality - enacted by words on a page (blossoming into imaginative vision & empathy). Bergson's "fan of phenomena" (cf. Mandelstam) enacted (paradigmatically) as the reader opening a book.

Crane's Bridge thusly miniaturized Joyce's Ulysses technique. "America" as a cinematic sleight, an entire history dreamt in a single night in Manhattan.

Eliot's elegant epitome for the whole thing, at the opening of Four Quartets :

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.


(But : see Keith Ward's book, Religion and Creation, for a discerning reconsideration of the whole traditional Platonic eternal "block time" changelessness perspective.)

I guess Jack Kimball was criticizing me (in his post of Fri. 8/6). I could be wrong. It's hard to tell sometimes where he's directing his barbs.

My ruminations are often belabored, for sure. But I don't think it's impossible to understand what I'm saying. The point about poetic mimesis:

If you believe, or at least accept the possibility, that nature, the universe, reflects some kind of spiritual order, some creative beauty, signs of consciousness - the means or meaning or purpose of which may be far beyond our comprehension - yet nevertheless it seems there - then, among the many possible means of its representation (its mimesis) - scientific discourse, prose argument, etc. - poetry might exhibit some special capabilities. Why? Because its means are "number", vivid (vitalist) imagery, and metaphor. What you might call a structural analogy could be in effect, which relates the beauty-in-itself of poetic language to the beauty-in-itself of creation. ("Number, weight, and measure" - cf. Augustine's classic defense of sacred music - his definition of which included poetry).

The vitalism of poetry is one of its throwback qualities - G. Vico has a lot to say about this. A world ruled by spiritual forces is certainly archaic and unscientific, and a religious perspective for today would have to take this into account (cf. Keith Ward's books, Religion and Revelation and Religion and Creation). One of the big contemporary problems is the way sacred scriptures which are essentially poetic in nature are fronted with doctrinaire, literalist polemics - the new superstition.

Reading Keith Ward's book (Religion & Revelation) mentioned here recently. A lot of food for thought.

A Christian perspective, but develops a concept of revelation which is inclusive without relativism, acknowledges parallels & affinities with other faiths. Fascinating commentary on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism.

Faith can't be simply equated with a body of opinions, information or knowledge, which a person can accumulate and then assent to, and assert to others. If God exists, revelation is a divine self-revelation, meant not to convey information but to enter into a relationship, to change your life.

Thinking (in this space) about my "poetry life" through this book's lens. My relations with "poetry community", so ambiguous, ambivalent, sometimes conflicted & frustrating.

A large part of it is simply my ornery personality. Another aspect, though, has to do with the fact that religion has played such a big role in my life. For some, this is less problematic, since they understand how to keep a seemly distance between creative literary efforts on the one hand, and their faith-commitments on the other.

For me it's been more complicated. My "faith life" has been stormy & dramatic (at least for me). Charismatic events when I was in my early 20s had an irreversible effect on my view of things - and those (personal) experiences were tangled up with poetry and writing. A poet is a communicator, a purveyor of speech & verbalized concepts : with me, literary ambitions and religious commitments have been mixed together, mixed-up & confused sometimes (much times!).

Aside from my personal quirks, though, I think that another factor in the aforementioned ambivalence arose from an inherent dialectic - a contrast - between religious vision and poetics or literature per se. This dialectic was brought to the fore, in my case, by the simple effort to balance or combine the two. Magnified also by something in the genres themselves : the prestige or authority of the epic mode, as "poem containing history". Because Christianity, more so than some other faiths, is rooted in particular historical events (though their "historicity" is highly contended). One doesn't need to be obsessed with "the historical Jesus" to grasp that this particular faith - in which the Divine enters directly into history in order to save humankind and creation itself - and which calls believers into a new spiritual Now - might result in epic shapings quite different from those offered by Pound, Crane, Zukofsky, et al.

My own long poems are probably too wayward to be acceptable as "Christian" works. But the background motivation is there : to re-write the American epic on a very different ground. One way to look at Forth of July is as a "transumption" (sort of a surpassing-through-osmosis, or stealing) of Modernist epic. I "underwrote" Crane, Pound & Joyce in Stubborn Grew: I contextualized them in the plot of a Mardi Gras/Lenten shriving/redemption : and then in the sequels I practiced a kind of ghost dance/resurrection spiritual ecstatics, flying off into deep American vision-space.

To take on the epic this way was a fairly radical gesture, I'd say, within the "progressive" poetry community. Radical in a religious sense, also: for the Christian, "the Word" is not a material-in-itself, an aesthetic commodity, but something else entirely.

I realize that to blend discourses this way, to speak so baldly of faith, is a recipe for alienating others through misunderstanding and settled notions (especially in today's divisive, overheated discourse world). But this is my form of "personism", like it or not.

This book, which I can't put down these days, gets my highest marks. For anyone interested in the nature & interrelationships of the various great religions (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity). Wonderful insights.

Religion and revelation : a theology of revelation in the world's religions, by Keith Ward (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994)