We look back, we reminisce, and in the process we shape, suppress, edit, & deform everything. For the sake of an idea or an argument, we oversimplify. But it's unavoidable - and sometimes it's useful. Sometimes a confusing series of events long ago can be summarized, characterized... maybe illuminated.
*
What is the ground of civilization? What makes for a peaceful, free, happy & just world? Good will toward others. The ability to transmit as much goodness & kindness to others as we would like to receive ourselves. The sense of universal justice. The recognition of the dignity of persons. The sense of responsibility toward nature & the sustaining earth.
The words alone sound Pollyanna-ish - a wishful, sentimental pablum. But that's how it is sometimes with words. One way to think of the poetic notion of "incarnational speech", or the idea of "the Word made Flesh", is with a moral recognition of the limitations of mere words. "Words made flesh" are words materialized in deeds, in action. So we have the saying "a man/woman of his/her word". To "keep your word" is to acknowledge the responsibility for the promise of a commitment. A covenant of words "underwritten" by deeds.
*
In ordinary & contemporary everyday life - and setting aside for a moment those times of real suffering and crisis - we are made constantly aware of the friction and trade-offs and anxieties and irritations involved in our interactions with others. Other drivers, other shoppers, other co-workers, other neighbors... the little frictions & frayings which result from opposing territorial rights. "It's my turn to go at the stop sign." Road rage, etc. The spirit of community, the sense of fellow-feeling, the willingness to be flexible, to give way, to respect others.... how fragile these things sometimes seem in a competitive world of demanding, self-interested, sometimes arrogant & selfish people...
These bourgeois realities of wear & tear have their parallels in the macrocosm of politics. We live in a country split between two major parties, whose central dividing line appears to be a dispute over the boundaries of private and public interest. Republicans stand for liberty and small government. Democrats stand for equality and big government. On this disagreement over the proper territories of the private & the public, the individual & the collective, property rights & social rights, the whole country seems to be slowly grinding to a paralyzed standstill, or stand-off.
Mine & yours. Ours & theirs. The two parties divide the country by way of a mimesis, a magnified mirror of ourselves : ourselves at an intersection, having lost our temper. Angry, stupid, self-righteous grumps, unwilling to give an inch. My way or the highway... my way or the highway...
& it's all about the common good. Except the two parties agree to disagree, since it means so much for their fundraising & public relations.
*
Jesus in the Gospels somewhere says you have to choose. "No man can have two masters : you must serve God or Mammon (riches, wealth)."
Doctrinaire dogmatists of various stripes have often interpreted this in ways that serve their own absolutist political aims. We see the same thing in the propaganda wars between extreme enthusiasts of both Left & Right. Left dogmatists idealize the State, the Collective, the Common Good. Right dogmatists extol Liberty, Property, & Privacy.
I'm a conservative liberal, a liberal conservative. I hold with the "incarnational" idea that mere words & theoretical formulae with regard to political principles have to be tested & confirmed in actual, working, unspoken, normal, active life. (I won't call this pragmatism, however, because I think that word is often used as a cover for expediency.)
It's possible to imagine a humane community of persons who, in their own ways, set aside pure selfishness (Mammon) on behalf of better, more altruistic goals (the social pursuit of happiness, for example).
Call it a global civil society. When people are just - when they rise above their own narrow self-interest on behalf of love, charity & the common good - they work together to solve common problems. The common good does not necessarily entail or require the surrender of property rights. Collectivism, in general, does not serve human happiness any more than private greed does. They both (in opposing ways) detract from human rights & dignity. But we all need to seek the right balance of public & private : both in our personal lives & in society at large.
Many ideological enthusiasts will certainly describe this as a lamentable form of sentimental delusion. Maybe. I just call it "the pursuit of happiness."
In fact the two faces of private greed & collective statism - let's call them Mammon & Cyclops - coincide in the Janus-face of Theft (like the two thieves hanging on either side of the crucified Son of Man). "Behold, I am coming like a thief." The current government of China, for example, has masterfully welded private greed & authoritarian collectivism into a seamless whole. Meanwhile, of course, we in the U.S. have our own thriving cults of Mammon & Ideology, with all their down-home refinements of hypocrisy & fraud. (Mark Twain & Herman Melville anatomized our special talents in this area 150 years ago.) This is the world of force, not consent. The Iron Age, not the Golden. The Tower of Babel, not the Kingdom of God.
*
French thinker Jacques Rancière has an eloquent, subtle essay on the poetry of Mandelstam in his book Chair des mots (Flesh of Words). He interprets poems from Tristia (& others) within a political-historical context, the movement from 19th-cent. republicanism & romanticism (Wordsworth), to the revolutionary 20th century. It's about the impasse of lyric poetry in general & Mandelstam's particular (& in Tristia, definitely elegiac) "resolution" (comprehension) of this impasse. I think Rancière offers only a "partial" Mandelstam in this essay, which seems suffused (the essay) with a fairly pessimistic consciousness. (Understandable, really, when you acknowledge 20th-cent. history.)
But his reading brings out elements of Mandelstam's own "program" (which R. describes as more idealistic than the poetry itself) : the Acmeist concepts of "domestic hellenism", which he traces back in part to M.'s allegiance to the Russian language itself, and its roots in Eastern Orthodoxy. Some of these threads emerge in M.'s short (truncated) essay "Pushkin & Scriabin" : the freedom of the poetic word runs parallel to human cultural freedom generally, which is, in its "Western" manifestation, underwritten by the Redemption. The free gift of love of the "Word made Flesh" sets art free (along with everything else) - to play "hide & seek with the Father" (but see Robert Paul's great, & rather darker, neo-Freudian interpretation of all this in his book Moses & Civilization).
Maybe you can see how this particular shaping of a sense of Mandelstam's "incarnational" poetics has echoes, parallels, with the general "liberal conservative" political stance I've been sketching out here. This was all laid out in the first (biographical) chapters of Clarence Brown's early study (Mandelstam) : the Acmeists emerged from the last vestiges of an "ordinary", church-going, pre-Revolutionary Russian middle class.
Maybe some things come back around again...
*
When we reminisce about our own remote past, we select, we over-simplify. 40 years ago I went through a psychological crisis which brought on, or was triggered by, a sort of upwelling of uncanniness & inexplicable, irrational experiences. I've written about it several times before. I think a sort of "rational" way of analyzing that crisis would be to think of it as an adolescent vocational impasse. I was a poet, of all things - a poet in America - & I couldn't handle it.
As a result I had an "encounter" with the Bible & Shakespeare. You could say I was thrown back on the literary foundations of Western culture - I had to reiterate them, recapitulate them in terms of my own breakdown. Somehow I kept my head about water - but it changed me. The ground had shifted : you could say I became intellectually committed to the notion of a spiritual Presence or subjectivity. Thus words to the wise like "No one can serve two masters - you must serve either God or Mammon" (along with the rest of the Bible) seemed to manifest a real "living" imprint : a personal charisma.
My "encounter" with Mandelstam a few years later had nothing irrational or uncanny about it. I didn't feel Mandelstam's personal "spirit" drawing near. Instead, his life & words seemed to help me actualize or realize or amend the original break between everyday reality and religious enthusiasm. Because, perhaps, for me it all began - the crisis itself - in a specifically literary context. It was a problem for a poet, a problem of poetry. It was a local iteration of the story - of the Word made Flesh...
Showing posts with label Mandelstam7. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mandelstam7. Show all posts
5.23.2014
12.19.2013
The Arrogance of the Poet
"The arrogance of the poet." Has a ring to it. Also a history. I think of the arrogant William Blake's remark, that Milton was "of the Devil's Party without knowing it." In other words, Milton, in Paradise Lost, expressed, perhaps unwittingly, some admiration and sympathy for the arrogant Satan he imagined. Not that I agree with Blake's assessment : I think Milton was completely ironic about his angelic anti-hero. But this is a recurrent motif in the operatics of poetry. What's at the root of it?
I remember the legend (apocryphal?) of Chaucer, toward the end of his life, renouncing all his poetical works as worldly vanity. A sort of flipside image of the traditional cultural authority awarded to poets & poetry : Chaucer's work may have been vanity, but it was also exalted as the incomparable mirror of its local world & time.
I often think in this regard of these lines of Ed Dorn :
To a poet all authority
except his own
is an expression of Evil
and it is all external authority
that he expiates
this is the culmination of his traits.
Which seems an elegant encapsulization of the arrogance in question. It's close to Emerson, & Stevens, & Coleridge, & Whitman - the idea of the poet's Adamic imagination : a primal, primary, "original" power to envision the true "order of things", and put it into words : utterly "new" words.
This is the intellectual arrogance which that proud & powerful poet T.S. Eliot strove so mightily to curb, exorcise, & transmute into spiritual humility. We are weak mortals, sinful creatures - actually blinded by our spiritual pride, the idolatries lurking 'neath our mighty visions. Thus spake Thomas Stearns.
The poets' characteristic bent goes back, I guess, all the way to prehistory. The shaman, the seer, the oracle... the chanted evocations & summons of archaic ritual & magic... the cosmologies, genealogies of the gods, tales of the tribes... the ancient poets "speak" the logos of the universe in a manner analogous to the I-am-what-I-am of Genesis, who spoke & it was made.
In this arena, there is obviously an erotic, ecstatic dimension, vaunted for example by Nietzsche : the tension between the wise claritas of Apollo and the fertile eros of Dionysus. Here Orpheus & the poets are the original rock stars - lords of the bacchanal, the goat-gods, leaders of the sacred dance... all pretty clearly related to the famous-liminal social status of the poet (since the goat-dance is a reminder of the goatishness of Milton's proud Satan).
Are we getting any closer to the mystery here? Don't ask me, this is just my blog. We're looking at shards in a dusty kaleidoscope. Let me apply some personal allegory. Around age 16, I fell for the arrogance of poetry with all my heart. I felt it in the New York School poets (the Big Red Book anthology, and others). I had taken to it even earlier, in that wonderful, playful 60s anthology for schoolchildren (A Gift of Watermelon Pickle). Poetry creates a powerful, mesmerizing, occult force-field... out of the purest, wildest, most liberated & crazy free speech. This I suppose was a basic attitude of those times, of the generation just before mine, and of my own (I turned 18 in 1970).
& in my mild-mannered way, I lived it. For my requisite high school senior "Chapel speech" I wrote and recited a mini-epic poem. For my college application essays I sent... poems (& somehow got into Brown U). In college I skipped most classes other than Shakespeare & Creative Writing. By the beginning of my senior year I went through a full-blown Robert-Lowellish manic breakdown, complete with personal visitations by the ghost of Shakespeare & the Holy Ghost. I dropped out of Brown, bummed around, worked (very) odd jobs, applied for a lead guitar slot with the Rolling Stones. Came back to Brown & graduated 3 years later by the skin of my sheepskin. Meanwhile I filled crates of spiral notebooks with poems, thoughts, plays, & so on. I married the daughter of a poet & became a VISTA volunteer (until Reagan came along). My last real job, before retiring (to the library), was "professional resume writer". I have been an arrogant poet from day one. My only humility in this regard was the knowledge that I could never combine being a poet and teaching literature, or writing. But of course that humility too was just an expression of my arrogance.
& so how does the allegory of my life illustrate our topic here? I think the poet cuts a figure in the world which is determined by his or her vocation. & what is the substance of that calling? For me it resides in this stance of undetermined freedom & originality. The sacred Word emerges from nowhere, because it is everywhere : the divine Word is a creative act - the original creative act - of the One who uttered it. The poet in this sense is a sort of limited & faulty imago of her Onlie Begetter. Limited & faulty, in that we are a work-in-progress, or a work-in-mystery : that is, we see this divinity only through a glass darkly. We are copies of an original - an original which I am happy to identify with the historical & trans-historical Jesus, with the Trinity. (This confidence, I am lucky to say, may help protect me from the flipside of that glory - the verso to which all vainglorious poets are susceptible : that dead-end, sulfur-stinking, foolish pride, which arrogates the ultimate originality to my Self alone.)
We take joy in the freedom of the poet & of poetry, because that playful freedom reflects (if only very partially) the dignity of our human status as creatures of a Creator. Osip Mandelstam meditated on this in his unfinished essay "Pushkin & Scriabin", where he writes that the Redemption - that historical event - liberated Western art. How? In the proclamation that the whole world had been saved, the redemption set Art itself free from any kind of determinism : the artist was now free to "play" like a sheep in the fields of the Lord, to play, as Mandelstam puts it, "hide-&-seek with the Father".
But there is something humble, not arrogant, about a sheep. So here maybe we have a reiteration, in another key, of the old Greek dichotomy between Apollo & Dionysus. Here Christ is both the host at the wine-fest, the Dionysian leader of the dance, as well as the pivot of divine Sophia, Holy Wisdom - the Apollinian moderation & measure of the cosmic Logos. That arrogant inspired humble saint Simone Weil wrote tellingly of this process of mediation, how in this mode Jerusalem & Athens embrace, Love and Knowledge are joined as one.
Arrogant young Dionysius, ca. 1975. (Shortly after Chris Kraemer took this photo in NY, I flew to London, to talk with Keith Richard about music & religion.)
I remember the legend (apocryphal?) of Chaucer, toward the end of his life, renouncing all his poetical works as worldly vanity. A sort of flipside image of the traditional cultural authority awarded to poets & poetry : Chaucer's work may have been vanity, but it was also exalted as the incomparable mirror of its local world & time.
I often think in this regard of these lines of Ed Dorn :
To a poet all authority
except his own
is an expression of Evil
and it is all external authority
that he expiates
this is the culmination of his traits.
Which seems an elegant encapsulization of the arrogance in question. It's close to Emerson, & Stevens, & Coleridge, & Whitman - the idea of the poet's Adamic imagination : a primal, primary, "original" power to envision the true "order of things", and put it into words : utterly "new" words.
This is the intellectual arrogance which that proud & powerful poet T.S. Eliot strove so mightily to curb, exorcise, & transmute into spiritual humility. We are weak mortals, sinful creatures - actually blinded by our spiritual pride, the idolatries lurking 'neath our mighty visions. Thus spake Thomas Stearns.
The poets' characteristic bent goes back, I guess, all the way to prehistory. The shaman, the seer, the oracle... the chanted evocations & summons of archaic ritual & magic... the cosmologies, genealogies of the gods, tales of the tribes... the ancient poets "speak" the logos of the universe in a manner analogous to the I-am-what-I-am of Genesis, who spoke & it was made.
In this arena, there is obviously an erotic, ecstatic dimension, vaunted for example by Nietzsche : the tension between the wise claritas of Apollo and the fertile eros of Dionysus. Here Orpheus & the poets are the original rock stars - lords of the bacchanal, the goat-gods, leaders of the sacred dance... all pretty clearly related to the famous-liminal social status of the poet (since the goat-dance is a reminder of the goatishness of Milton's proud Satan).
Are we getting any closer to the mystery here? Don't ask me, this is just my blog. We're looking at shards in a dusty kaleidoscope. Let me apply some personal allegory. Around age 16, I fell for the arrogance of poetry with all my heart. I felt it in the New York School poets (the Big Red Book anthology, and others). I had taken to it even earlier, in that wonderful, playful 60s anthology for schoolchildren (A Gift of Watermelon Pickle). Poetry creates a powerful, mesmerizing, occult force-field... out of the purest, wildest, most liberated & crazy free speech. This I suppose was a basic attitude of those times, of the generation just before mine, and of my own (I turned 18 in 1970).
& in my mild-mannered way, I lived it. For my requisite high school senior "Chapel speech" I wrote and recited a mini-epic poem. For my college application essays I sent... poems (& somehow got into Brown U). In college I skipped most classes other than Shakespeare & Creative Writing. By the beginning of my senior year I went through a full-blown Robert-Lowellish manic breakdown, complete with personal visitations by the ghost of Shakespeare & the Holy Ghost. I dropped out of Brown, bummed around, worked (very) odd jobs, applied for a lead guitar slot with the Rolling Stones. Came back to Brown & graduated 3 years later by the skin of my sheepskin. Meanwhile I filled crates of spiral notebooks with poems, thoughts, plays, & so on. I married the daughter of a poet & became a VISTA volunteer (until Reagan came along). My last real job, before retiring (to the library), was "professional resume writer". I have been an arrogant poet from day one. My only humility in this regard was the knowledge that I could never combine being a poet and teaching literature, or writing. But of course that humility too was just an expression of my arrogance.
& so how does the allegory of my life illustrate our topic here? I think the poet cuts a figure in the world which is determined by his or her vocation. & what is the substance of that calling? For me it resides in this stance of undetermined freedom & originality. The sacred Word emerges from nowhere, because it is everywhere : the divine Word is a creative act - the original creative act - of the One who uttered it. The poet in this sense is a sort of limited & faulty imago of her Onlie Begetter. Limited & faulty, in that we are a work-in-progress, or a work-in-mystery : that is, we see this divinity only through a glass darkly. We are copies of an original - an original which I am happy to identify with the historical & trans-historical Jesus, with the Trinity. (This confidence, I am lucky to say, may help protect me from the flipside of that glory - the verso to which all vainglorious poets are susceptible : that dead-end, sulfur-stinking, foolish pride, which arrogates the ultimate originality to my Self alone.)
We take joy in the freedom of the poet & of poetry, because that playful freedom reflects (if only very partially) the dignity of our human status as creatures of a Creator. Osip Mandelstam meditated on this in his unfinished essay "Pushkin & Scriabin", where he writes that the Redemption - that historical event - liberated Western art. How? In the proclamation that the whole world had been saved, the redemption set Art itself free from any kind of determinism : the artist was now free to "play" like a sheep in the fields of the Lord, to play, as Mandelstam puts it, "hide-&-seek with the Father".
But there is something humble, not arrogant, about a sheep. So here maybe we have a reiteration, in another key, of the old Greek dichotomy between Apollo & Dionysus. Here Christ is both the host at the wine-fest, the Dionysian leader of the dance, as well as the pivot of divine Sophia, Holy Wisdom - the Apollinian moderation & measure of the cosmic Logos. That arrogant inspired humble saint Simone Weil wrote tellingly of this process of mediation, how in this mode Jerusalem & Athens embrace, Love and Knowledge are joined as one.
11.27.2013
Princeton's Osip Mandelstam archive
Check this out.... amazing collection of digitized images of original manuscripts and papers of Osip Mandelshtam, with material also from Nadezhda Mandelstam & others. Includes the "Voronezh Notebooks" ms.... Happy Thanksgiving!
12.05.2012
Jesus Thoughts (25) : thumbprints in sync
We continue to go traipsing along through the unknown remote Henry-field of scrubland interconnections, finding obscure Serengeti serendipities (in sync?) and conceptual rhymes, running into things seemingly by chance (or is it a narrow circle of H-recessive obsessions?). Yesterday I chewed the cud (in Jesus Thoughts #24) about the metaphysical frame-up of History, the intervention of Yahweh into the stream of Earth-time... as an impression of the Creator's inimitable thumbprint upon Nature (Stephen Dedalus's "signatures of things").
& last night I was re-reading Charles Stein's book about Charles Olson & Carl Jung, Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum - which digs deep into Olson's own radical sense of individuation & quidditas ("that which exists through itself is what is called Meaning" & all that). Olson wanted to shake up what he saw as the false consciousness of abstract "Greek" rationalism with a very earth-bound, local, particular kind of mysticism (he wouldn't call it "mysticism") - the Oneness of the "field" of all phenomena reflected in the integrity of the grounded, physical, real things we encounter....
Others (including Stein) have interpreted Olson much more scrupulously than I can here ... & there's much in Olson that gives me pause... yet I was struck reading this last night how closely - in some ways, not in others - Olson's values seem to rhyme with the program of the Russian Acmeists. Gumilev's notion of "chasteness" as a literary value - which he defined as a basic & spiritual respect for the particular dignity of all things as they are - & that such actual things provide the substance, the matter, the themes of Acmeist poetry (as against "Symbolist" otherworldliness).
Of course the Acmeists were also tremendously different from Olson : they had not that radical streak of American Emersonian (Poundian, Wm Carlos Williamsian) do-it-yourselfism - their sense of the spiritual integrity of things is perhaps closer to Joyce's neo-medieval Aquinas-quidditas; they were rooted in Russian Orthodox Christianity, with its contemplative emphasis on the whole as divine Creation... Yet this mystical aspect of Olson - late scribblings about everything having meaning-in-itself because All stems from the Black Chrysanthemum (his "Black Gold Flower" mandala-figure) - is not so different from Dante's final vision of the mystical Rose, the triple wheel of the Trinity... This ancient notion can give one sparks of glee, if you ponder it : that the One is reflected in the "oneness" - the beautiful distinction, the nonpareil wonderful whatness, the splendid unimaginable unique & hilarious actuality of all separate unique things... (in fact it's possible to see an analogy here with the spectacular 4th-of-July dazzle of metamorphosis, Transfiguration - eternal life)... Note this relevant, definitive passage from Mandelstam's essay "Morning of Acmeism", which Christian Wiman chose as the epigraph to his new collection of Mandelstam translations, Stolen Air : "To exist is the artist's greatest pride. He desires no paradise other than being."
Everything is paratactical in Olson, as in Pound - the poet is a bower-bird, joining things by affinity, contiguity, proximity, rather than logic... Speaking of which brings me to the other book I was reading last night - Sacred Fortress, by Otto v. Simson. About the Byzantine mosaics and architecture of Ravenna, which Dante saw. Simson explores the political-historical background to the art of these churches - and also their religious meaning. We can't grasp the artistry of the mosaics without understanding how they were united with, and illustrated, the rites of baptism and Eucharist, the sacramental processions, which happened below them, under the gaze of the icons. Simson goes very deeply into the meanings and messages which both the rites and the icons conveyed. He describes, better than anyone I've ever read, how the communicants, by participating in these sacraments (baptism, eucharist), enter into a symbiosis, first of all, with Christ in his self-sacrifice and martyrdom - in his dying - and at the same time, with Christ in his resurrection : his transfiguration into a heavenly dimension (early rites of baptism involved clothing the baptized in white robes : a representation of this dying-into-new-life most clearly imaged in the Book of Revelation - and in the mosaics of St. Apollinare Nuovo, in Ravenna).
Proximity, contiguity, affinity.... I had just been writing earlier in the day (in the Jesus Talks #23 post) about the divine play of gender roles... and the hieros gamos dimensions of the rites of the church, their sensitivity to a feminine psyche - only to find Simson characterizing the mosaics of the "virgin martyrs" in St. Apollinare, bringing their jewelled crowns of martyrdom to offer to the Bridegroom, in the very same terms I had been using (hieros gamos, etc.). So I felt a slight twinge of synchronicity there....
But I'm really rambling today. The deeper affinity or proximity I want to relate here is this clustering together of Jung's individuation, Olson's "things in themselves", the Acmeist devotion to the "chaste" dignity of things, Joyce's epiphanies... and what I was calling, in JT #24, the thumbprint of the Creator as witnessed by his righteous prophets (John the Baptist...). I'm finding these things all assembling in some kind of creative sandbox playpen...
(thinking of Olson's notes about the "Black Stone" - the "diamond" - the "Black Gold Flower" of his Maximus-vision.... & its echoes or rhymes in my poem Lanthanum - "Blackstone" leading to "St. Maximus the Confessor" by way of the octahedral, baptismal diamond of Black Elk's native American sign (pointing to the six directions)....
Affinities, proximities.... the church as tomb and marriage bed.... Olson & Mandelstam, hard-cut diamond figures, thumb-prints, opposing themselves to the drift of the times...
This coming weekend Sarah & I will be driving down to Princeton NJ, to visit Princeton cemetery, where Sarah's parents are buried. They just finished the memorial stone for both of them (her mother Pat passed away last year in November). They are buried just a few feet from the grave of Kurt Gödel, the great mathematician. Olson, maybe, would have appreciated Gödel, whose "incompleteness theorem" proved that some things in mathematics cannot ever be proved (rationally). I'm not a mathematician, but maybe Gödel in this way made an arc of closure back to the ancient Greeks, who were troubled by the "irrationality" of the diagonal to the square. There is a Jungian aspect of this uncertainty, this mystery, at the core of human reason....
So we'll be visiting a grave, and graves, there, in Princeton, at the dying of the year. I'll be thinking about them... & I'll be thinking about Simson's eloquent evocation of the mystery of death & martyrdom & glory articulated in the early church.... & I'll be thinking about the Princeton Univ. library, nearby - where they house the archive of the papers of Osip Mandelstam....
& last night I was re-reading Charles Stein's book about Charles Olson & Carl Jung, Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum - which digs deep into Olson's own radical sense of individuation & quidditas ("that which exists through itself is what is called Meaning" & all that). Olson wanted to shake up what he saw as the false consciousness of abstract "Greek" rationalism with a very earth-bound, local, particular kind of mysticism (he wouldn't call it "mysticism") - the Oneness of the "field" of all phenomena reflected in the integrity of the grounded, physical, real things we encounter....
Others (including Stein) have interpreted Olson much more scrupulously than I can here ... & there's much in Olson that gives me pause... yet I was struck reading this last night how closely - in some ways, not in others - Olson's values seem to rhyme with the program of the Russian Acmeists. Gumilev's notion of "chasteness" as a literary value - which he defined as a basic & spiritual respect for the particular dignity of all things as they are - & that such actual things provide the substance, the matter, the themes of Acmeist poetry (as against "Symbolist" otherworldliness).
Of course the Acmeists were also tremendously different from Olson : they had not that radical streak of American Emersonian (Poundian, Wm Carlos Williamsian) do-it-yourselfism - their sense of the spiritual integrity of things is perhaps closer to Joyce's neo-medieval Aquinas-quidditas; they were rooted in Russian Orthodox Christianity, with its contemplative emphasis on the whole as divine Creation... Yet this mystical aspect of Olson - late scribblings about everything having meaning-in-itself because All stems from the Black Chrysanthemum (his "Black Gold Flower" mandala-figure) - is not so different from Dante's final vision of the mystical Rose, the triple wheel of the Trinity... This ancient notion can give one sparks of glee, if you ponder it : that the One is reflected in the "oneness" - the beautiful distinction, the nonpareil wonderful whatness, the splendid unimaginable unique & hilarious actuality of all separate unique things... (in fact it's possible to see an analogy here with the spectacular 4th-of-July dazzle of metamorphosis, Transfiguration - eternal life)... Note this relevant, definitive passage from Mandelstam's essay "Morning of Acmeism", which Christian Wiman chose as the epigraph to his new collection of Mandelstam translations, Stolen Air : "To exist is the artist's greatest pride. He desires no paradise other than being."
Everything is paratactical in Olson, as in Pound - the poet is a bower-bird, joining things by affinity, contiguity, proximity, rather than logic... Speaking of which brings me to the other book I was reading last night - Sacred Fortress, by Otto v. Simson. About the Byzantine mosaics and architecture of Ravenna, which Dante saw. Simson explores the political-historical background to the art of these churches - and also their religious meaning. We can't grasp the artistry of the mosaics without understanding how they were united with, and illustrated, the rites of baptism and Eucharist, the sacramental processions, which happened below them, under the gaze of the icons. Simson goes very deeply into the meanings and messages which both the rites and the icons conveyed. He describes, better than anyone I've ever read, how the communicants, by participating in these sacraments (baptism, eucharist), enter into a symbiosis, first of all, with Christ in his self-sacrifice and martyrdom - in his dying - and at the same time, with Christ in his resurrection : his transfiguration into a heavenly dimension (early rites of baptism involved clothing the baptized in white robes : a representation of this dying-into-new-life most clearly imaged in the Book of Revelation - and in the mosaics of St. Apollinare Nuovo, in Ravenna).
Proximity, contiguity, affinity.... I had just been writing earlier in the day (in the Jesus Talks #23 post) about the divine play of gender roles... and the hieros gamos dimensions of the rites of the church, their sensitivity to a feminine psyche - only to find Simson characterizing the mosaics of the "virgin martyrs" in St. Apollinare, bringing their jewelled crowns of martyrdom to offer to the Bridegroom, in the very same terms I had been using (hieros gamos, etc.). So I felt a slight twinge of synchronicity there....
But I'm really rambling today. The deeper affinity or proximity I want to relate here is this clustering together of Jung's individuation, Olson's "things in themselves", the Acmeist devotion to the "chaste" dignity of things, Joyce's epiphanies... and what I was calling, in JT #24, the thumbprint of the Creator as witnessed by his righteous prophets (John the Baptist...). I'm finding these things all assembling in some kind of creative sandbox playpen...
(thinking of Olson's notes about the "Black Stone" - the "diamond" - the "Black Gold Flower" of his Maximus-vision.... & its echoes or rhymes in my poem Lanthanum - "Blackstone" leading to "St. Maximus the Confessor" by way of the octahedral, baptismal diamond of Black Elk's native American sign (pointing to the six directions)....
Affinities, proximities.... the church as tomb and marriage bed.... Olson & Mandelstam, hard-cut diamond figures, thumb-prints, opposing themselves to the drift of the times...
This coming weekend Sarah & I will be driving down to Princeton NJ, to visit Princeton cemetery, where Sarah's parents are buried. They just finished the memorial stone for both of them (her mother Pat passed away last year in November). They are buried just a few feet from the grave of Kurt Gödel, the great mathematician. Olson, maybe, would have appreciated Gödel, whose "incompleteness theorem" proved that some things in mathematics cannot ever be proved (rationally). I'm not a mathematician, but maybe Gödel in this way made an arc of closure back to the ancient Greeks, who were troubled by the "irrationality" of the diagonal to the square. There is a Jungian aspect of this uncertainty, this mystery, at the core of human reason....
So we'll be visiting a grave, and graves, there, in Princeton, at the dying of the year. I'll be thinking about them... & I'll be thinking about Simson's eloquent evocation of the mystery of death & martyrdom & glory articulated in the early church.... & I'll be thinking about the Princeton Univ. library, nearby - where they house the archive of the papers of Osip Mandelstam....
10.21.2011
A Carpenter's embrace
Last week I joined several friends of the late Edwin Honig, along with his sister, Lila, in a memorial tribute to him sponsored by the Brown Univ. writing program (which he was largely responsible for establishing back in the 1960s).
I read the last poem in Edwin's collection Time & Again : poems 1940-1997, a poem titled "Hymn to Her." & I prefaced the poem with some off-the-cuff remarks, things I had been thinking over in preparation for the event. Will try to summarize them here.
I met Edwin in the spring of 1971, when he was a visiting poet in my freshman 'writing" class, held at a young prof's apartment on Medway St. in Providence (I met the late Michael Gizzi in the same class). So I knew Edwin for just 40 years.
One of my favorite poets, Osip Mandelstam, had a talent for pithy aphorisms. When asked by an interviewer for a definition of the "school" of poetry from which he emerged (Acmeism), he said : "nostalgia for world culture." I think this applies very well to Edwin Honig. But with Edwin it wasn't just a matter of longing : he was busy making world culture, contributing to it, as multilingual poet and translator, as learned literary scholar. His cosmopolitanism spanned both time & space.
Edwin's global perspective had a strong impact on me, a young writer coming out of a suburban high school deep in the Midwest. But his cosmopolitanism wasn't just a matter of sophistication, of connections. I think Edwin really sensed, and believed in, and looked to the future for, a real internationalism, a humane culture transcending political, ethnic, linguistic & other boundaries. I think he wrote for this future world culture (which Mandelstam longed for too).
But what is it in particular about poetry which gives it a usefulness in this endeavor? How is it that poetry, like music, can make these crossovers & connections?
I think that poetry, when all is said and done, is human language under the sign of love : or as the Song of Songs puts it, his banner over me was love. Now the word love, in English, is a rather multivalent term... a "many-splendored thing"... So what do we mean by it more specifically, in this context?
Love - eros, agape, caritas - is a mysterious force or "spirit" which is essentially integrative, synthesizing, harmonizing, mediating, healing, and constructive. As St. Paul expresses it (in his most moving paean), "love builds up, it does not tear down." This harmonic, harmonizing force unfolds and reveals the relation between different or opposing things (heart & mind, thought & feeling, you & I, I & Thou...) - brings them into mutuality and shared being. & as anyone who has ever fallen in love can testify, this force of affinity & new relatedness can be immensely powerful, metamorphic, transfiguring : suddenly heart & mind are transposed (translated) into a new & "melodic" reality : & the whole universe seems to be transfigured along with us.
So if we say that poetry is human language under the banner of love, we are adumbrating its essentially harmonic, musical, and experiential quality. Poetry is language directed not so much toward knowledge for its own sake, an objectivity & objectification for purposes of control : rather it is essentially dialogic : it is a sharing of experience & what we know under the sign of wholeness & synthesis (both mind & heart, intellect & sensibility, thought & action).
Lately I've been thinking a lot about TS Eliot's notion of the "dissociation of sensibility" : of how the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century offered an example of some integral vitality which poetry somehow lost soon after. Edwin had an interest in that era, too. Perhaps every literary scholar of the generation coming after Eliot had to take such an interest - but Edwin brought his own special intensity to the reading of Donne, Marvell, along with Shakespeare & Jonson. & there's a metaphysical wit lurking in the last poem in Edwin's collected, which I'm going to read ("Hymn to Her").
Who is the "her" of this poem? A particular woman, perhaps. Maybe also Edwin's mother : note the emphasis on "hard labor" - Edwin was born on Sept 3, 1919 - Labor Day (his mother's own pun). And also, I think, Poetry itself, its "muse". It makes sense to me that Edwin would choose, in his closing poem, to address the theme of "poetry" itself. So the "her" of the title is both woman, or a woman, and poetry.
Now what is a "hymn"? In this case, it's another pun : the hymn is also "him" ("him to her"). A kind of love poem. And the word "hymn" has been connected etymologically, of course, to the Greek god of marriage, Hymenaeus : a hymn, in ancient Greece, was a praise song to this god, sung by the wedding celebrants on their way to or from the wedding chamber.
So we have a kind of witty conjunction of opposites, a metaphysical conceit (in embryo, anyway). We have "him & her" as both persons, and as facets of poetry itself. There are more such oppositions : heaviness & lightness, mistakenness & rightness... (the poem seems especially suffused with Edwin to me : he was a large, imposing personage in many ways, carrying a lot of heavy & painful psychological & intellectual burdens, yet one who never lost his swift lightness of mind & humor...). I love the word "bracing" in this poem. Bracing here has a double sense : as both invigorating, enlivening (awakening), and as supporting, in an architectural sense. (Edwin, whose grandfather was a carpenter in Jerusalem, who worked on the facades of temples there...). Love is the power of harmony, the bond of mutuality which makes civilization, world-renewal. Bracing. "Love builds up..." & embraces.
HYMN TO HER
The load you take
is dense, backbreaking
and mistaken.
It can be otherwise:
and in full light
wholly undertaken,
the load is slim,
and to the one that
takes it, bracing --
owed to none but
for the life
that lifts awakened.
I read the last poem in Edwin's collection Time & Again : poems 1940-1997, a poem titled "Hymn to Her." & I prefaced the poem with some off-the-cuff remarks, things I had been thinking over in preparation for the event. Will try to summarize them here.
I met Edwin in the spring of 1971, when he was a visiting poet in my freshman 'writing" class, held at a young prof's apartment on Medway St. in Providence (I met the late Michael Gizzi in the same class). So I knew Edwin for just 40 years.
One of my favorite poets, Osip Mandelstam, had a talent for pithy aphorisms. When asked by an interviewer for a definition of the "school" of poetry from which he emerged (Acmeism), he said : "nostalgia for world culture." I think this applies very well to Edwin Honig. But with Edwin it wasn't just a matter of longing : he was busy making world culture, contributing to it, as multilingual poet and translator, as learned literary scholar. His cosmopolitanism spanned both time & space.
Edwin's global perspective had a strong impact on me, a young writer coming out of a suburban high school deep in the Midwest. But his cosmopolitanism wasn't just a matter of sophistication, of connections. I think Edwin really sensed, and believed in, and looked to the future for, a real internationalism, a humane culture transcending political, ethnic, linguistic & other boundaries. I think he wrote for this future world culture (which Mandelstam longed for too).
But what is it in particular about poetry which gives it a usefulness in this endeavor? How is it that poetry, like music, can make these crossovers & connections?
I think that poetry, when all is said and done, is human language under the sign of love : or as the Song of Songs puts it, his banner over me was love. Now the word love, in English, is a rather multivalent term... a "many-splendored thing"... So what do we mean by it more specifically, in this context?
Love - eros, agape, caritas - is a mysterious force or "spirit" which is essentially integrative, synthesizing, harmonizing, mediating, healing, and constructive. As St. Paul expresses it (in his most moving paean), "love builds up, it does not tear down." This harmonic, harmonizing force unfolds and reveals the relation between different or opposing things (heart & mind, thought & feeling, you & I, I & Thou...) - brings them into mutuality and shared being. & as anyone who has ever fallen in love can testify, this force of affinity & new relatedness can be immensely powerful, metamorphic, transfiguring : suddenly heart & mind are transposed (translated) into a new & "melodic" reality : & the whole universe seems to be transfigured along with us.
So if we say that poetry is human language under the banner of love, we are adumbrating its essentially harmonic, musical, and experiential quality. Poetry is language directed not so much toward knowledge for its own sake, an objectivity & objectification for purposes of control : rather it is essentially dialogic : it is a sharing of experience & what we know under the sign of wholeness & synthesis (both mind & heart, intellect & sensibility, thought & action).
Lately I've been thinking a lot about TS Eliot's notion of the "dissociation of sensibility" : of how the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century offered an example of some integral vitality which poetry somehow lost soon after. Edwin had an interest in that era, too. Perhaps every literary scholar of the generation coming after Eliot had to take such an interest - but Edwin brought his own special intensity to the reading of Donne, Marvell, along with Shakespeare & Jonson. & there's a metaphysical wit lurking in the last poem in Edwin's collected, which I'm going to read ("Hymn to Her").
Who is the "her" of this poem? A particular woman, perhaps. Maybe also Edwin's mother : note the emphasis on "hard labor" - Edwin was born on Sept 3, 1919 - Labor Day (his mother's own pun). And also, I think, Poetry itself, its "muse". It makes sense to me that Edwin would choose, in his closing poem, to address the theme of "poetry" itself. So the "her" of the title is both woman, or a woman, and poetry.
Now what is a "hymn"? In this case, it's another pun : the hymn is also "him" ("him to her"). A kind of love poem. And the word "hymn" has been connected etymologically, of course, to the Greek god of marriage, Hymenaeus : a hymn, in ancient Greece, was a praise song to this god, sung by the wedding celebrants on their way to or from the wedding chamber.
So we have a kind of witty conjunction of opposites, a metaphysical conceit (in embryo, anyway). We have "him & her" as both persons, and as facets of poetry itself. There are more such oppositions : heaviness & lightness, mistakenness & rightness... (the poem seems especially suffused with Edwin to me : he was a large, imposing personage in many ways, carrying a lot of heavy & painful psychological & intellectual burdens, yet one who never lost his swift lightness of mind & humor...). I love the word "bracing" in this poem. Bracing here has a double sense : as both invigorating, enlivening (awakening), and as supporting, in an architectural sense. (Edwin, whose grandfather was a carpenter in Jerusalem, who worked on the facades of temples there...). Love is the power of harmony, the bond of mutuality which makes civilization, world-renewal. Bracing. "Love builds up..." & embraces.
HYMN TO HER
The load you take
is dense, backbreaking
and mistaken.
It can be otherwise:
and in full light
wholly undertaken,
the load is slim,
and to the one that
takes it, bracing --
owed to none but
for the life
that lifts awakened.
5.20.2011
Rapture & Poetry
My time is still unbounded.
And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman's voice.
- Osip Mandelstam, trans. by James Greene
Until today (the day before the predicted Event) I haven't paid any attention to all the yap about The Rapture. It seems to be of more (comic) interest to the irreligious gabbosphere, than to soi-disant "people of faith."
One way to think about some statements of Jesus in the Gospels about the Day of Judgement, and what is called "the Rapture" (ie., to paraphrase : keep watch : no one knows when the end is coming : "on that day, one will be taken, and one will be left behind" etc.), is that they fall within a general Gospel/Biblical emphasis on a distinction between soul & body, spirit & flesh, invisible & visible, heaven & earth, eternity & time. Contrary to prevalent stereotypes - most of them originating with Christian monastics & preachers themselves - this distinction, in both Judaism & Christianity, is just that : a distinction, no more no less. It does not mean a denigration of the earth, the body, the visible, the flesh, etc. All these things from the latter half of the equation are to be accepted with joy & gratitude as gifts of the Creator. What the emphasis on this distinction of Spirit is meant to do is to restore the balance : to bring humanity back to spiritual wholeness & health, in a world overwhelmed by the fleeting & changing things of "this world." Thus the reminder of an End-Time - & the focus on individual alertness & awareness (ie. "let your loins be girded", for "one shall be taken & one left behind") - is again a kind of memento mori, and a reminder of the nearness (though invisible) of the "kingdom of heaven."
This is just one way (a low-key, common-sense way) to approach what is implied by the "Day of Judgement" exhortations in the Gospels. But I want to foreground this distinction (earth/heaven, body/spirit, visible/invisible) as an entry into what follows. I want to talk a little about poetry and "rapture". Osip Mandelstam points toward this theme, in the stanza above - from a late poem, written (not long before his final trip to Siberia & death) after listening (from exile in provincial Voronezh) to a recording of Marian Anderson, singing gospel music on Moscow Radio. Poets - in their visionary, enthusiastic, prophetic, charismatic, shamanic modes - have been associated with "raptures" from the beginning of time (isn't rhapsode a name for "poet" in Greek?). Plato memorably contrasted the "reasonable" discourse of the philosophers with the Muse-inspired, unpredictable flights of poets. The ancient kinship between poem & oracle was a cross-cultural given. What is involved here is the charisma of possession - of the in-coming of the God, the Divine, the Spirit : of a somatic/intellectual experience which transports the poet into a "harmonic" state, resulting in song : the expression, the narration of the holistic, visionary experience itself : Mandelstam's "rapture of the universe." We are reminded here of the apostle Paul's account of his sudden transport to "the third heaven" (ie. above the clouds, and also beyond the stars), where he saw things he could not put into words; and of Dante's journey to Paradise with Beatrice (which explicitly adumbrates Paul's confession). These are what you might call canonical examples in the history of "rapture." They are akin as well to the Gospel episode, when the disciples witness Jesus' Transfiguration - standing on the hill with Elijah and Moses - from earthly man into heavenly being.
Many people - maybe everyone, really - have experienced, at one time or another, brushes with the inexplicable : the uncanny, the marvelous, the serendipitous, the wonderful, the mysterious... the spiritual, the numinous, the holy. Encounters or events which one cannot (or will not) reduce to some rational explanation or verbal equivalent. For the rare saints & holy people among us, ordinary life, whatever it brings, is perhaps transformed into the "bread & wine" of spiritual understanding : for the rest of us, most of the time, we're O.K. if we can just stave off trouble & get through another day....
But I've had my share of such rare & extraordinary experiences. Some of them have profoundly shaped the direction my life has taken. As I've written about before - when I was about 20 yrs old (in 1972-3) I underwent a series of seismic psychological events - uncanny, charismatic experiences - which seemed to mingle faith, vision & poetry. As a result I was shaken out of my practical life and rational pursuits : I dropped out of college for three years; I hitchhiked around the country (& England) in a kind of cloud of pondering & meditation on the mystery of things. & in a sense I have never stopped seeking that understanding : in 1973 I was brought up short by a kind of rational enigma, which spurred my curiosity about metaphysical, spiritual things. But I misrepresent what I went through, if I narrate this as merely some sort of gnostic search for occult knowledge. It was really an experience of being moved & changed in the heart of my personality : morally & emotionally as well as intellectually. My life was changed.
One of the consequences of this - & because what I went through was all tangled up in my mind with my sense of myself as a poet, with a literary vocation - was that I was unable to return to academics & the pursuit of a career in a "normal" way. I felt I had been through something which no teacher or classroom could explain to me; moreover, I felt motivated to find a way to express what I was "seeing" & learning directly in poetry. Poetry, vision & experience seemed irreducibly entwined. And I think at least one part of the reason I've worked at a kind of low-level job in a library for 25 years, is that I needed that independence from any kind of "worldly" demands on my ability to express things in poetry. I couldn't teach writing, I couldn't study or pursue an academic degree in a "sensible" way, because the intellectual & vocational responsibilities involved would be more than I could bear. (I realize there might be other, less charitable ways of evaluating such diffidence on my part. I'm sure there are many sides to it - "character issues"... I'm explaining just one of them.)
But setting aside the autobiographical vein : what I mean to suggest is that these extraordinary events - these strange spiritual promptings (nudgings?) - have provided me food for thought now for a long time : a food which has never run out. & over the past few weeks & months I've sensed a sort of integration in my mind, of longstanding notions & new researches - connected with the long poem I've been struggling with (Lanthanum). Integration, synthesis... it's a sense of certain ideas becoming substantial, & harmonized with each other, so that they provide a sort of confirmation, a weight or substance, which I can carry around with me... in a state of mild rapture & joy!
This is really not easy to explain without degrading it in the process. I've been searching for images & rational analogues of something at the root of the poem (Lanthanum), which was an unusual dream I had a few years ago about the Gateway Arch monument, in St. Louis. I've been reading about architecture (Padovan, Proportion; Van der Laan; Smith, The Dome). I've been reading various things on the literature of the Holy Grail (Gemstone of Paradise by Murphy was especially interesting, as was an old book by Helen Adolf, Visio Pacis). I've been reading some theology, especially the Byzantine church father, Maximus the Confessor. I've been reading some physics & cosmology. From these & many other books I've been drawing nourishment, I think, for a sort of productive way of seeing, or way of understanding things in general. & out of all this there was not a single "Eureka!" moment - but a kind of drawn-out, successive, gradual, gradually-expanding & growing & strengrthening E-U-R-E-K-A !-sense... a real "rapture of the universe", as Mandelstam put it.
How can I say it? I can't. I've been trying to say it & express it & sketch it out in the Lanthanum sequence & other poems. But since tomorrow's supposed to be "The Rapture," let me on this special occasion try to articulate my own intellectual joy-glee-rapture as I seem to feel it & see it.
Murphy, in his book on the grail, sets himself the task of explaining why the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (in Parzival) describes the grail as a "stone." He explains how the tomb of Christ was considered to be carved out of stone - to be a rock tomb. He explains that the Church began sanctifying portable eucharistic tables, so that pilgrims & soldiers could receive Communion even away from churches proper. These tables were little boxes or stands, made out of stone & gems, beautifully designed, with small hollow sections - miniature replicas of the Holy Sepulchre - which held the sanctified eucharistic bread (Christ's body). He shows how Wolfram's descriptions of the grail seemed based on such portable eucharistic containers - Murphy even discovers a specific box (in a museum in Bamberg, Germany) which he believes may have served as Wolfram's model.
The implication of these affinities is that the grail is equated with Christ's eucharistic Body : which itself (the eucharist) stems from, is part of, the body of Christ himself (in the Sepulchre, and resurrected on Easter). The Sepulchre today rests under a domed building in Jerusalem. Domical structures (as Smith relates) are a very basic & global figure for the human "home" (being a microcosmic representation - from nomadic tent structures to Hagia Sophia - of the "dome of heaven" arching over the earth). Thus we have the image of the mortal/risen Man/God - Jesus - located in the symbolic "center of the earth" (Jerusalem) - beneath the microcosmic dome-home - & replicated in a portable eucharistic "grail", available to anyone who seeks it.
Thus far we are discoursing on symbolic-religious symbols (which, taken by itself, could be criticized, I suppose, as a species of mystico-antiquarianism). So let me try to explain how I understand a sort of philosophical analogue or parallel to these symbols. And I want also to try to relate all this to poetry.
I think the human mind & imagination have an inborn orientation toward understanding. The discipline of science subjects this drive, this orientation, to the demands of analysis, experiment & proof : but the drive itself - to understand - came first. The mind - the imagination - is synthetic : aiming for wholes, for completeness, for the integration of disparate facts & experiences. The urge to wonder seems primordial to me : and what it answers, what it responds to, is an awareness of the basic difference between nothing and something. The vast universe - something - stands against nothingness, non-existence. I remember pondering these things in adolescence - but it probably starts in childhood : wondering, questioning the origin of life, of the universe.
Further, I think there is a basic consequence of this original human wondering, which is a state of what used to be called "natural piety". It is a deep and mostly-unconscious gratitude for being : an attitude of thanksgiving for the joy of mere existence, of being-alive. Of course, many things (we all know them) work to crumble & debilitate this attitude of gratitude : but this doesn't mean it's not still lurking there, beneath all our fears & disappointments. It is too basic, too primordial, to be destroyed.
Now let me try to pull some of these threads together toward some sort of conclusion. Here's what I say : the true "holy grail" is a kind of portable state of awareness. An awareness of what? A sense of an underlying harmony. What is this harmony? It is a harmony of proportion : a proportion (ratio, logos) between the human & the divine, between humanity & God. In a stance of gratitude. Gratitude stemming from an awareness of the "createdness" of the visible universe : of something born out of nothing. And not only that : but also gratitude stemming from an awareness of this central proportion itself : that human persons - in the "architecture" or "ecology" (the dome) of their lived lives on earth - represent visible images of divine Personhood. The earth, as Mandelstam, put it, is a "mansion" - & we are "God's grateful guests". This is a very basic (& fairly traditional) insight - shared by another Petersburg poet, Gumilev, & by Anna Akhmatova : it was part of the "chaste vision" of the Acmeist poetic project of the early 20th century. On this most simple foundation of gratitude or thanksgiving, the whole normative structure of civilization is seen to be constructed. It is stated most clearly in the Gospels, when Jesus explains that all the law & commandments hang on two basic commands : "To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind & strength, and what is like unto it, to love your neighbor as yourself." This is the core activation of the most basic sense of faith in a divine or metaphysical or dream or dramatic order of cosmic reality : this is the "bread & wine" of the poetic vision of the universe - its "rapture." Under the estrangement of time, and change & mortality, this is the promise of a kind of Easter metamorphosis : a resurrection of the mind & spirit through a mysterious Approach of living Consciousness - the dramatic victory of "sacred history" - its epic plot, you might say - its "divine comedy" : the victory of spirit over matter, of immortality over death. This, you could say, is what Mary Magdalen "saw" when she found Jesus - "the gardener" - near the empty tomb. In another late poem, Mandelstam put this kind of deep rapture into words again, a poem which is one of my all-time favorites (translated here by Richard & Elizabeth McKane). The "clarity of a concept" - this is it.
To Natasha Shtempel
1.
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom
of her inspiring disability pulls her along,
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the clarity of a concept :
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault,
and that this is an eternal beginning.
2.
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.
And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman's voice.
- Osip Mandelstam, trans. by James Greene
Until today (the day before the predicted Event) I haven't paid any attention to all the yap about The Rapture. It seems to be of more (comic) interest to the irreligious gabbosphere, than to soi-disant "people of faith."
One way to think about some statements of Jesus in the Gospels about the Day of Judgement, and what is called "the Rapture" (ie., to paraphrase : keep watch : no one knows when the end is coming : "on that day, one will be taken, and one will be left behind" etc.), is that they fall within a general Gospel/Biblical emphasis on a distinction between soul & body, spirit & flesh, invisible & visible, heaven & earth, eternity & time. Contrary to prevalent stereotypes - most of them originating with Christian monastics & preachers themselves - this distinction, in both Judaism & Christianity, is just that : a distinction, no more no less. It does not mean a denigration of the earth, the body, the visible, the flesh, etc. All these things from the latter half of the equation are to be accepted with joy & gratitude as gifts of the Creator. What the emphasis on this distinction of Spirit is meant to do is to restore the balance : to bring humanity back to spiritual wholeness & health, in a world overwhelmed by the fleeting & changing things of "this world." Thus the reminder of an End-Time - & the focus on individual alertness & awareness (ie. "let your loins be girded", for "one shall be taken & one left behind") - is again a kind of memento mori, and a reminder of the nearness (though invisible) of the "kingdom of heaven."
This is just one way (a low-key, common-sense way) to approach what is implied by the "Day of Judgement" exhortations in the Gospels. But I want to foreground this distinction (earth/heaven, body/spirit, visible/invisible) as an entry into what follows. I want to talk a little about poetry and "rapture". Osip Mandelstam points toward this theme, in the stanza above - from a late poem, written (not long before his final trip to Siberia & death) after listening (from exile in provincial Voronezh) to a recording of Marian Anderson, singing gospel music on Moscow Radio. Poets - in their visionary, enthusiastic, prophetic, charismatic, shamanic modes - have been associated with "raptures" from the beginning of time (isn't rhapsode a name for "poet" in Greek?). Plato memorably contrasted the "reasonable" discourse of the philosophers with the Muse-inspired, unpredictable flights of poets. The ancient kinship between poem & oracle was a cross-cultural given. What is involved here is the charisma of possession - of the in-coming of the God, the Divine, the Spirit : of a somatic/intellectual experience which transports the poet into a "harmonic" state, resulting in song : the expression, the narration of the holistic, visionary experience itself : Mandelstam's "rapture of the universe." We are reminded here of the apostle Paul's account of his sudden transport to "the third heaven" (ie. above the clouds, and also beyond the stars), where he saw things he could not put into words; and of Dante's journey to Paradise with Beatrice (which explicitly adumbrates Paul's confession). These are what you might call canonical examples in the history of "rapture." They are akin as well to the Gospel episode, when the disciples witness Jesus' Transfiguration - standing on the hill with Elijah and Moses - from earthly man into heavenly being.
Many people - maybe everyone, really - have experienced, at one time or another, brushes with the inexplicable : the uncanny, the marvelous, the serendipitous, the wonderful, the mysterious... the spiritual, the numinous, the holy. Encounters or events which one cannot (or will not) reduce to some rational explanation or verbal equivalent. For the rare saints & holy people among us, ordinary life, whatever it brings, is perhaps transformed into the "bread & wine" of spiritual understanding : for the rest of us, most of the time, we're O.K. if we can just stave off trouble & get through another day....
But I've had my share of such rare & extraordinary experiences. Some of them have profoundly shaped the direction my life has taken. As I've written about before - when I was about 20 yrs old (in 1972-3) I underwent a series of seismic psychological events - uncanny, charismatic experiences - which seemed to mingle faith, vision & poetry. As a result I was shaken out of my practical life and rational pursuits : I dropped out of college for three years; I hitchhiked around the country (& England) in a kind of cloud of pondering & meditation on the mystery of things. & in a sense I have never stopped seeking that understanding : in 1973 I was brought up short by a kind of rational enigma, which spurred my curiosity about metaphysical, spiritual things. But I misrepresent what I went through, if I narrate this as merely some sort of gnostic search for occult knowledge. It was really an experience of being moved & changed in the heart of my personality : morally & emotionally as well as intellectually. My life was changed.
One of the consequences of this - & because what I went through was all tangled up in my mind with my sense of myself as a poet, with a literary vocation - was that I was unable to return to academics & the pursuit of a career in a "normal" way. I felt I had been through something which no teacher or classroom could explain to me; moreover, I felt motivated to find a way to express what I was "seeing" & learning directly in poetry. Poetry, vision & experience seemed irreducibly entwined. And I think at least one part of the reason I've worked at a kind of low-level job in a library for 25 years, is that I needed that independence from any kind of "worldly" demands on my ability to express things in poetry. I couldn't teach writing, I couldn't study or pursue an academic degree in a "sensible" way, because the intellectual & vocational responsibilities involved would be more than I could bear. (I realize there might be other, less charitable ways of evaluating such diffidence on my part. I'm sure there are many sides to it - "character issues"... I'm explaining just one of them.)
But setting aside the autobiographical vein : what I mean to suggest is that these extraordinary events - these strange spiritual promptings (nudgings?) - have provided me food for thought now for a long time : a food which has never run out. & over the past few weeks & months I've sensed a sort of integration in my mind, of longstanding notions & new researches - connected with the long poem I've been struggling with (Lanthanum). Integration, synthesis... it's a sense of certain ideas becoming substantial, & harmonized with each other, so that they provide a sort of confirmation, a weight or substance, which I can carry around with me... in a state of mild rapture & joy!
This is really not easy to explain without degrading it in the process. I've been searching for images & rational analogues of something at the root of the poem (Lanthanum), which was an unusual dream I had a few years ago about the Gateway Arch monument, in St. Louis. I've been reading about architecture (Padovan, Proportion; Van der Laan; Smith, The Dome). I've been reading various things on the literature of the Holy Grail (Gemstone of Paradise by Murphy was especially interesting, as was an old book by Helen Adolf, Visio Pacis). I've been reading some theology, especially the Byzantine church father, Maximus the Confessor. I've been reading some physics & cosmology. From these & many other books I've been drawing nourishment, I think, for a sort of productive way of seeing, or way of understanding things in general. & out of all this there was not a single "Eureka!" moment - but a kind of drawn-out, successive, gradual, gradually-expanding & growing & strengrthening E-U-R-E-K-A !-sense... a real "rapture of the universe", as Mandelstam put it.
How can I say it? I can't. I've been trying to say it & express it & sketch it out in the Lanthanum sequence & other poems. But since tomorrow's supposed to be "The Rapture," let me on this special occasion try to articulate my own intellectual joy-glee-rapture as I seem to feel it & see it.
Murphy, in his book on the grail, sets himself the task of explaining why the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (in Parzival) describes the grail as a "stone." He explains how the tomb of Christ was considered to be carved out of stone - to be a rock tomb. He explains that the Church began sanctifying portable eucharistic tables, so that pilgrims & soldiers could receive Communion even away from churches proper. These tables were little boxes or stands, made out of stone & gems, beautifully designed, with small hollow sections - miniature replicas of the Holy Sepulchre - which held the sanctified eucharistic bread (Christ's body). He shows how Wolfram's descriptions of the grail seemed based on such portable eucharistic containers - Murphy even discovers a specific box (in a museum in Bamberg, Germany) which he believes may have served as Wolfram's model.
The implication of these affinities is that the grail is equated with Christ's eucharistic Body : which itself (the eucharist) stems from, is part of, the body of Christ himself (in the Sepulchre, and resurrected on Easter). The Sepulchre today rests under a domed building in Jerusalem. Domical structures (as Smith relates) are a very basic & global figure for the human "home" (being a microcosmic representation - from nomadic tent structures to Hagia Sophia - of the "dome of heaven" arching over the earth). Thus we have the image of the mortal/risen Man/God - Jesus - located in the symbolic "center of the earth" (Jerusalem) - beneath the microcosmic dome-home - & replicated in a portable eucharistic "grail", available to anyone who seeks it.
Thus far we are discoursing on symbolic-religious symbols (which, taken by itself, could be criticized, I suppose, as a species of mystico-antiquarianism). So let me try to explain how I understand a sort of philosophical analogue or parallel to these symbols. And I want also to try to relate all this to poetry.
I think the human mind & imagination have an inborn orientation toward understanding. The discipline of science subjects this drive, this orientation, to the demands of analysis, experiment & proof : but the drive itself - to understand - came first. The mind - the imagination - is synthetic : aiming for wholes, for completeness, for the integration of disparate facts & experiences. The urge to wonder seems primordial to me : and what it answers, what it responds to, is an awareness of the basic difference between nothing and something. The vast universe - something - stands against nothingness, non-existence. I remember pondering these things in adolescence - but it probably starts in childhood : wondering, questioning the origin of life, of the universe.
Further, I think there is a basic consequence of this original human wondering, which is a state of what used to be called "natural piety". It is a deep and mostly-unconscious gratitude for being : an attitude of thanksgiving for the joy of mere existence, of being-alive. Of course, many things (we all know them) work to crumble & debilitate this attitude of gratitude : but this doesn't mean it's not still lurking there, beneath all our fears & disappointments. It is too basic, too primordial, to be destroyed.
Now let me try to pull some of these threads together toward some sort of conclusion. Here's what I say : the true "holy grail" is a kind of portable state of awareness. An awareness of what? A sense of an underlying harmony. What is this harmony? It is a harmony of proportion : a proportion (ratio, logos) between the human & the divine, between humanity & God. In a stance of gratitude. Gratitude stemming from an awareness of the "createdness" of the visible universe : of something born out of nothing. And not only that : but also gratitude stemming from an awareness of this central proportion itself : that human persons - in the "architecture" or "ecology" (the dome) of their lived lives on earth - represent visible images of divine Personhood. The earth, as Mandelstam, put it, is a "mansion" - & we are "God's grateful guests". This is a very basic (& fairly traditional) insight - shared by another Petersburg poet, Gumilev, & by Anna Akhmatova : it was part of the "chaste vision" of the Acmeist poetic project of the early 20th century. On this most simple foundation of gratitude or thanksgiving, the whole normative structure of civilization is seen to be constructed. It is stated most clearly in the Gospels, when Jesus explains that all the law & commandments hang on two basic commands : "To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind & strength, and what is like unto it, to love your neighbor as yourself." This is the core activation of the most basic sense of faith in a divine or metaphysical or dream or dramatic order of cosmic reality : this is the "bread & wine" of the poetic vision of the universe - its "rapture." Under the estrangement of time, and change & mortality, this is the promise of a kind of Easter metamorphosis : a resurrection of the mind & spirit through a mysterious Approach of living Consciousness - the dramatic victory of "sacred history" - its epic plot, you might say - its "divine comedy" : the victory of spirit over matter, of immortality over death. This, you could say, is what Mary Magdalen "saw" when she found Jesus - "the gardener" - near the empty tomb. In another late poem, Mandelstam put this kind of deep rapture into words again, a poem which is one of my all-time favorites (translated here by Richard & Elizabeth McKane). The "clarity of a concept" - this is it.
To Natasha Shtempel
1.
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom
of her inspiring disability pulls her along,
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the clarity of a concept :
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault,
and that this is an eternal beginning.
2.
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.
12.01.2010
Celan 1 December
Read a few poems by Paul Celan at lunchtime. Experienced that mysterious & very special Celan-effect : the sense that out of extreme frailty come words of great strength & encouragement. Not so much for the poet himself, but for the reader. Reminded me of that phrase in one of the letters of his namesake, the Apostle (himself quoting the prophets somewhere, I guess) : "my strength is perfected in weakness."
So often it seems Celan's addressee is Mandelstam. Not only in the book Die Niemandsrose (which is saturated with Mandelstam). But say for example in this poem from the book that followed, Atemwende - the poem which begins "IM SCHLANGENWAGEN...", which Michael Hamburger translates as follows :
IN THE SNAKE CARRIAGE, past
the white cypress tree,
through the surge
they drove you.
But in you, from
birth,
the other wellspring foamed,
on the black
jet remembrance
dayward you climbed.
I think this poem can be said to be addressed to the victims of Hitler, the victims of the 20th century. But I surmise there's also a specific subtext here, a poem of Mandelstam's (one from Tristia), which begins "Upon a sled laden with straw." The poem sketches a scene of the "young Tsar" being taken away on a sled or wagon, in the midst of his persecutors, to execution.
So often it seems Celan's addressee is Mandelstam. Not only in the book Die Niemandsrose (which is saturated with Mandelstam). But say for example in this poem from the book that followed, Atemwende - the poem which begins "IM SCHLANGENWAGEN...", which Michael Hamburger translates as follows :
IN THE SNAKE CARRIAGE, past
the white cypress tree,
through the surge
they drove you.
But in you, from
birth,
the other wellspring foamed,
on the black
jet remembrance
dayward you climbed.
I think this poem can be said to be addressed to the victims of Hitler, the victims of the 20th century. But I surmise there's also a specific subtext here, a poem of Mandelstam's (one from Tristia), which begins "Upon a sled laden with straw." The poem sketches a scene of the "young Tsar" being taken away on a sled or wagon, in the midst of his persecutors, to execution.
11.19.2010
Metaphysical Acmeism : Man's Place
This terse early poem by Mandelstam expresses a central insight of the Russian Acmeist worldview :
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.
"Man's place in the universe." In my stray thoughts I return to this concept again and again, as if it might conceal a sort of secret key of enlightenment. A touchstone. No, let me be more forthright : I think it does offer such a key. (Roger Williams, in the introduction to his pamphlet A Key into the Language of America, wrote : "A little key may open a box, where lies a bunch of keys...")
How to put this, so as not to spoil & ruin it with Henryesque banality...
I think in order to grasp what I'm trying to explain, one has to spin several conceptual frisbees simultaneously. The first is a notion about the nature of God. We have to accept, provisionally, the axiom that God, though certainly mysterious & unknowable & incomprehensible, must be understood, if understood at all, in terms of mind & consciousness & personhood. We cannot grasp, reasonably & common-sensically, how this can be so : but we must accept the idea that our only pathway to a provisionally-accurate notion of God, is by way of an extrapolation from what we do know about mind & intelligence. The door to understanding the divine goes through our sense of conscious personhood. A phrase from the Gospels comes to mind : Jesus says, "God is Spirit, & those who worship Him must worship him in spirit & truth."
The second notion or axiom which we must provisionally accept, is related to the first : that is, the idea that Man (humankind) is made "in God's image & likeness." If you (conceptually) overlay this second notion across the first, you might catch the image that comes to my mind : that we can glimpse God, the mysterious invisible Original One, the "Ancient of Days," through the human person as we see her (Blake's "human form Divine").
The third (& again, related) notion we have to entertain, provisionally, is sometimes extremely difficult to comprehend, much less accept. It is a specifically Christian notion : the idea of the incarnation of God in Man, in Jesus. What this says to me, among other things, if one can accept it, is that the universal God chooses to make himself a microcosm in the form of a human being, and in this way, join the divine with the human in a new synthesis. When in the Gospels Jesus insists that I am the Way; I and the Father are one; I am the Beginning and the End, etc., I find that one way to understand these claims is that by means of the Incarnation, God has not only created Man in the divine image, but God has in a sense set a permanent seal of absolute fulfillment on the whole order of nature & time & history : has shaped the entire scale of nature around this manifestation of the place of the unique human person within it. So we draw near to God, or God draws near to us, within the framework of the distinct person, the individual, the self... you & me. Through becoming this "microcosm", God has entered the inward marrow of each person, the inward subjective life of each individual self & soul. How? He has, ceremonially, sacrificially, & humbly-regally (as a kind of servant), joined us - become like us. (See Mandelstam's unfinished essay "Pushkin & Scriabin", for his thoughts on how this idea, the Christian notion of Redemption, provided the underlying sanction for the "joyful freedom" of Western art ; Man's playful game of "hide & seek with the Father.")
So keeping these three basic notions or axioms in mind, we go back to Mandelstam's verses :
It's not Rome the city that lives on,
it's man's place in the universe.
Now with this new background, the verses suggest a deeper substance. The dignity and stability of human culture, which Mandelstam & the other Acmeists affirmed, is grounded in something like this threefold background, where through the dignity of the human person shines, as if through a transparent screen, the majesty of the divine. That normative equilibrium which is the aim of civilization, that grounding of human history in hope & renewal, is underwritten by a metaphysical sense of a Providential order, a comprehensive global goal - in order to return to which, mankind must struggle, re-orient, & self-reform.
As I was walking to work this morning, I was pondering these things... some thoughts formulated... it occurred to me that it is a basic wonder & miracle, how out of stellar fire eventually came water, as if out of a cosmic Sahara emerged an oasis. And we humans dwell in the midst of this strange wonder. The Gospels tell of how John the Baptist baptized the people with water, for purification & repentance : an ancient symbol for such; through water of baptism people washed away their evil deeds in repentance & forgiveness, & entered upon a new life, a new relation with God & their fellows. But then, the Gospel say, Jesus came along, saying, "John baptized you with water; but the Son of Man comes baptizing with Spirit & fire." So what does this suggest to me, as I'm walking along to work? That the "fire" with which the Son of Man baptizes is that primal fire out of which the whole creation emerged, the stellar fire, the solar fire. In this case, the actual stellar fire is a kind of parabolic metaphor for the intellectual fire of the divine Word : a fire of light & enlightenment, which opens & burns the mind out of its habits, mythologies & preconceptions - back to the source, the origin of its being : the living intellectual force of a light which makes persons no longer "children of men", but "children of God." Like Jesus, the newly-baptized becomes a fiery microcosm, taking her place in the midst of a cosmos made for her.
This is a beginning, then - a beginning-anew of everything. Further, to be "baptized with Spirit" suggest to me that the one baptized by fire is thus fused & conjoined with everyone else so baptized, so as to share this dignity & enlightenment & freedom which belongs to all the "children of God" (as in the scene of Pentecost, when the Spirit descends on everyone in the room in the form of a flame over their heads, & immediately they understand each other's differing languages...).
I find this scenario, this way of seeing things, rather intellectually stimulating, to say the least. Theology or metaphysics can be exciting, thrilling - though you wouldn't know it from most modern & contemporary depictions of religion over the last 200 years or so. We are steeped in doubt & disillusionment... but not always in the poets. When you read Whitman or Blake or Hopkins or Dickinson or Gumilev or Mandelstam on these ranges of dream & speculation, you find a different tune.
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.
"Man's place in the universe." In my stray thoughts I return to this concept again and again, as if it might conceal a sort of secret key of enlightenment. A touchstone. No, let me be more forthright : I think it does offer such a key. (Roger Williams, in the introduction to his pamphlet A Key into the Language of America, wrote : "A little key may open a box, where lies a bunch of keys...")
How to put this, so as not to spoil & ruin it with Henryesque banality...
I think in order to grasp what I'm trying to explain, one has to spin several conceptual frisbees simultaneously. The first is a notion about the nature of God. We have to accept, provisionally, the axiom that God, though certainly mysterious & unknowable & incomprehensible, must be understood, if understood at all, in terms of mind & consciousness & personhood. We cannot grasp, reasonably & common-sensically, how this can be so : but we must accept the idea that our only pathway to a provisionally-accurate notion of God, is by way of an extrapolation from what we do know about mind & intelligence. The door to understanding the divine goes through our sense of conscious personhood. A phrase from the Gospels comes to mind : Jesus says, "God is Spirit, & those who worship Him must worship him in spirit & truth."
The second notion or axiom which we must provisionally accept, is related to the first : that is, the idea that Man (humankind) is made "in God's image & likeness." If you (conceptually) overlay this second notion across the first, you might catch the image that comes to my mind : that we can glimpse God, the mysterious invisible Original One, the "Ancient of Days," through the human person as we see her (Blake's "human form Divine").
The third (& again, related) notion we have to entertain, provisionally, is sometimes extremely difficult to comprehend, much less accept. It is a specifically Christian notion : the idea of the incarnation of God in Man, in Jesus. What this says to me, among other things, if one can accept it, is that the universal God chooses to make himself a microcosm in the form of a human being, and in this way, join the divine with the human in a new synthesis. When in the Gospels Jesus insists that I am the Way; I and the Father are one; I am the Beginning and the End, etc., I find that one way to understand these claims is that by means of the Incarnation, God has not only created Man in the divine image, but God has in a sense set a permanent seal of absolute fulfillment on the whole order of nature & time & history : has shaped the entire scale of nature around this manifestation of the place of the unique human person within it. So we draw near to God, or God draws near to us, within the framework of the distinct person, the individual, the self... you & me. Through becoming this "microcosm", God has entered the inward marrow of each person, the inward subjective life of each individual self & soul. How? He has, ceremonially, sacrificially, & humbly-regally (as a kind of servant), joined us - become like us. (See Mandelstam's unfinished essay "Pushkin & Scriabin", for his thoughts on how this idea, the Christian notion of Redemption, provided the underlying sanction for the "joyful freedom" of Western art ; Man's playful game of "hide & seek with the Father.")
So keeping these three basic notions or axioms in mind, we go back to Mandelstam's verses :
It's not Rome the city that lives on,
it's man's place in the universe.
Now with this new background, the verses suggest a deeper substance. The dignity and stability of human culture, which Mandelstam & the other Acmeists affirmed, is grounded in something like this threefold background, where through the dignity of the human person shines, as if through a transparent screen, the majesty of the divine. That normative equilibrium which is the aim of civilization, that grounding of human history in hope & renewal, is underwritten by a metaphysical sense of a Providential order, a comprehensive global goal - in order to return to which, mankind must struggle, re-orient, & self-reform.
As I was walking to work this morning, I was pondering these things... some thoughts formulated... it occurred to me that it is a basic wonder & miracle, how out of stellar fire eventually came water, as if out of a cosmic Sahara emerged an oasis. And we humans dwell in the midst of this strange wonder. The Gospels tell of how John the Baptist baptized the people with water, for purification & repentance : an ancient symbol for such; through water of baptism people washed away their evil deeds in repentance & forgiveness, & entered upon a new life, a new relation with God & their fellows. But then, the Gospel say, Jesus came along, saying, "John baptized you with water; but the Son of Man comes baptizing with Spirit & fire." So what does this suggest to me, as I'm walking along to work? That the "fire" with which the Son of Man baptizes is that primal fire out of which the whole creation emerged, the stellar fire, the solar fire. In this case, the actual stellar fire is a kind of parabolic metaphor for the intellectual fire of the divine Word : a fire of light & enlightenment, which opens & burns the mind out of its habits, mythologies & preconceptions - back to the source, the origin of its being : the living intellectual force of a light which makes persons no longer "children of men", but "children of God." Like Jesus, the newly-baptized becomes a fiery microcosm, taking her place in the midst of a cosmos made for her.
This is a beginning, then - a beginning-anew of everything. Further, to be "baptized with Spirit" suggest to me that the one baptized by fire is thus fused & conjoined with everyone else so baptized, so as to share this dignity & enlightenment & freedom which belongs to all the "children of God" (as in the scene of Pentecost, when the Spirit descends on everyone in the room in the form of a flame over their heads, & immediately they understand each other's differing languages...).
I find this scenario, this way of seeing things, rather intellectually stimulating, to say the least. Theology or metaphysics can be exciting, thrilling - though you wouldn't know it from most modern & contemporary depictions of religion over the last 200 years or so. We are steeped in doubt & disillusionment... but not always in the poets. When you read Whitman or Blake or Hopkins or Dickinson or Gumilev or Mandelstam on these ranges of dream & speculation, you find a different tune.
9.09.2010
7.23.2010
"As muted organ pipes / Accompany a woman's voice."
When Ezra Pound was locked up in a prison cage, he was given a Bible & an old poetry anthology by a kindly G.I., his guard. Osip Mandelstam's forced exile & final deportation to Siberia, by Stalin, was a hundred times more severe, and infinitely more unjust. He too was short of books (& most other things) in the provincial town of Voronezh. One of the few books he took into exile, & steadfastly carried around with him, was a copy of the Divine Comedy.
On Feb 12, 1937, he wrote the following untitled poem, translated here by James Greene :
I'm plunged into a lions' den, a fort,
And sinking lower, lower, lower,
Under the yeast shower of these sounds:
Stronger than lions, more potent than the Pentateuch.
How near your summons:
Keener than commandments of childbirth, firstlings -,
Like strings of pearls at the bottom of the sea
Or baskets meekly borne by Tahitian women.
Motherland of chastening songs, come close,
The declivities deepening in your voice! - O primal mother,
The shy-sweet faces of our daughters
Aren't worth your little finger.
My time is still unbounded.
And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman's voice.
Nadezhda Mandelstam (in Hope Against Hope, ch. 39) writes that M. had been listening to Marian Anderson, then visiting Moscow, on the radio - singing African-American spirituals, and that this was part of the poem's scenario; but they had recently returned from a visit to another exile, also a professional singer, who was distraught over her husband's sudden arrest and deportation, yet still hoping - desperately - to use her musical talents to earn a living & win her husband's release... & this too was part of the subtext.
Maybe there is yet another dimension in the background. M's devotion to the woman's deep-singing voice echoes Dante's relation to Beatrice. And there is a parallel between M's role as Daniel in the lion's den, sinking lower & lower, led by "chastening" (purgatorial) song, and Dante's redemptive journey through Hell. There is a pivotal, dramatic moment in the Purgatorio, at the conclusion of canto 9. Dante & Virgil have arrived at the very gates of Purgatory. They encounter an angel, who scratches 7 P's (for peccati, sins) across Dante's brow with the tip of his sword; then, using 2 keys given him by St. Peter, the angel opens the great doors so Dante can enter, & leave the Inferno behind. Just then, he hears voices singing on the other side :
Io mi rivolsi attento al primo tuono,
e "Te Deum laudamus" me parea
udire in voce mista al dolce suono.
Tale imagine a punto mi rendea
cio ch'io udiva, qual prender si suole
quando a cantar con organi si stea;
ch'or si or no s'intendon le parole.
[ Hearing that gate resound, I turned, attentive;
I seemed to hear, inside, in words that mingled
with gentle music, "Te Deum laudamus."
And what I heard gave me the very same
impression one is used to getting when
one hears a song accompanied by organ;
and now the words are clear and now are lost.] (trans. Allen Mandelbaum)
Mandelstam's "summons", the commandment of the "chastening song", the Muse & music for whom & by means of which he mingles both the power of Marian Anderson and the suffering of his victimized friend, here aligns Dante's Inferno with the lion's den of Stalin's prison-empire, & points with strange hope toward the way up & out (toward the "rapture of the universe") - as "one hears a song accompanied by organ."
Here, too, was a "true Dantescan voice."
On Feb 12, 1937, he wrote the following untitled poem, translated here by James Greene :
I'm plunged into a lions' den, a fort,
And sinking lower, lower, lower,
Under the yeast shower of these sounds:
Stronger than lions, more potent than the Pentateuch.
How near your summons:
Keener than commandments of childbirth, firstlings -,
Like strings of pearls at the bottom of the sea
Or baskets meekly borne by Tahitian women.
Motherland of chastening songs, come close,
The declivities deepening in your voice! - O primal mother,
The shy-sweet faces of our daughters
Aren't worth your little finger.
My time is still unbounded.
And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman's voice.
Nadezhda Mandelstam (in Hope Against Hope, ch. 39) writes that M. had been listening to Marian Anderson, then visiting Moscow, on the radio - singing African-American spirituals, and that this was part of the poem's scenario; but they had recently returned from a visit to another exile, also a professional singer, who was distraught over her husband's sudden arrest and deportation, yet still hoping - desperately - to use her musical talents to earn a living & win her husband's release... & this too was part of the subtext.
Maybe there is yet another dimension in the background. M's devotion to the woman's deep-singing voice echoes Dante's relation to Beatrice. And there is a parallel between M's role as Daniel in the lion's den, sinking lower & lower, led by "chastening" (purgatorial) song, and Dante's redemptive journey through Hell. There is a pivotal, dramatic moment in the Purgatorio, at the conclusion of canto 9. Dante & Virgil have arrived at the very gates of Purgatory. They encounter an angel, who scratches 7 P's (for peccati, sins) across Dante's brow with the tip of his sword; then, using 2 keys given him by St. Peter, the angel opens the great doors so Dante can enter, & leave the Inferno behind. Just then, he hears voices singing on the other side :
Io mi rivolsi attento al primo tuono,
e "Te Deum laudamus" me parea
udire in voce mista al dolce suono.
Tale imagine a punto mi rendea
cio ch'io udiva, qual prender si suole
quando a cantar con organi si stea;
ch'or si or no s'intendon le parole.
[ Hearing that gate resound, I turned, attentive;
I seemed to hear, inside, in words that mingled
with gentle music, "Te Deum laudamus."
And what I heard gave me the very same
impression one is used to getting when
one hears a song accompanied by organ;
and now the words are clear and now are lost.] (trans. Allen Mandelbaum)
Mandelstam's "summons", the commandment of the "chastening song", the Muse & music for whom & by means of which he mingles both the power of Marian Anderson and the suffering of his victimized friend, here aligns Dante's Inferno with the lion's den of Stalin's prison-empire, & points with strange hope toward the way up & out (toward the "rapture of the universe") - as "one hears a song accompanied by organ."
Here, too, was a "true Dantescan voice."
3.22.2010
The letter in a bottle
Have been reading Paul Celan again, in Michael Hamburger translation. Like his introduction, too. Was led back here again after looking at a couple books by Michael Eskin (on Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandelstam, Celan).
Feel strongly about all the Celan poetry. Even the early poems - with sort of a generic Surrealist/Trakl/Rilke/expressionist flavor (in translation, anyway) - really get to me. The early poems emanate something from adolescence - an atmosphere...
The later poems speak more clearly & simply, even in their difficulties... want to look into some aspects of Jewish messianism... & there is Celan's love for Mandelstam. Eskin quotes a letter saying that with Mandelstam he had a sense of "walking with the truth" (my inexact trans. from memory) as with nothing else - a brotherly feeling, an inspiration... & I know what he's talking about. I went through a very similar life-changing experience with Mandelstam (long before finding Celan).
Mandelstam wrote a famously (in "On the Interlocutor") about poetry as rooted in dialogue - but a conversation with an unknown reader in the future (the reader Celan felt himself to be). He likened the poem to a message in a bottle, tossed in the sea... & whoever finds the message is that unknown friend, that interlocutor...
It's a sort of "poetics" - the sense that the poet (in & through the poem) is speaking directly to you - you - whoever you are - are the destined recipient, who was meant to find it...
& this idea has a personal meaning for me, since my whole vocation in poetry pivots on a strange series of events way back in 1971-72, when I was 19-20 yrs old (which I've sketched out in various places on this blog, but should try to write up more thoroughly someday) - a disorienting psychic "encounter" with Shakespeare, when I had the uncanny experience of suddenly being addressed in person - across time & space - by Shakespeare himself, through his Sonnets - that I was the destined recipient.... an event so strange & actually frightening that I felt compelled to drop poetry altogether, to change my college major (from English to History), & eventually to start reading the Bible, as a sort of counterweight to what seemed to be moral/psychological disintegration - which decision only led me to even more shattering psychological (inner) experiences & uncanny synchronicities... - I became the loco-locus, the psychological carrier, of a sort of symbolic agon between those two primal literary Powers (Shakespeare, Bible)... so that eventually I had to drop out of college completely, for about 3 years, & wander hitchhiking around the US & London with Bible & guitar...
3.03.2010
Gumilev on poetry
Strange how some Petersburgians seem to affect me, recurrently, over stretches of time, creating these turning points. That is, I think about Mandelstam & his work all the time, but then there are these more pivotal occasions... now, reading some of Gumilev's critical writings (in an old Ardis Press bk I had hanging about : Nikolai Gumilev, On Russian Poetry) has set me off again... feel like rethinking, reshaping what I'm trying to do in poetry. Shaking things up a little, if possible. Try new things.
3.02.2010
Justin Doherty on Acmeism
"...there is an unchasteness of attitude in both the doctrine of "Art for life," and that of "Art for art." In the first case, art... has value only to the extent that it serves goals extraneous to it.... In the second case, art becomes effete, grows agonizingly moonlike..." - Nikolai Gumilev, "The Life of Verse" (tr. by D. Lapeza)
For 30 years or so, ever since I happened upon a book of Mandelstam's selected poems in a local bookstore, I've been fascinated with his work & that of other Russians he led me to : Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Gumilev, Brodsky... I think I've delved as deeply into it as someone who works in an academic library, & never gets past the beginner stage of learning Russian, can possibly delve... & then I come upon something new, & I realize how much I haven't really understood. Justin Doherty's excellent book has had this effect : The Acmeist movement in Russian poetry : culture and the word (Oxford UP, 1995).
One of the things this study has done is lift my perspective beyond a focus on Mandelstam, toward the underlying principles of the group of Petersburg poets with whom he affiliated. Acmeism grew out of various practical associations, especially the so-called "Guild of Poets" - who convened regularly in semi-formal meetings to read and discuss each other's work. This friendly proximity helped foster a kind of professional outlook - a "guild" mentality - which in turn helped the poets to establish some common principles, seen as grounding characteristic, universal elements of poetry, and allowing for a degree of critical objectivity.
I can't adequately paraphrase or even summarize Doherty's book. All I can do is try to point toward some of these salient principles. Nikolai Gumilev, one of the founders of the Acmeist group, can be credited with formulating them, while Mandelstam further elaborated their implications. Here's my rough sketch :
1. The Acmeist movement appeared in Petersburg around 1910, as a critique of the then-reigning but waning Petersburg phenomenon, quite accomplished & sophisticated, known as Symbolism. Russian Symbolism took a mystical view of art and poetry, proposing a categorical divide between the material and the noumenal or spiritual worlds; poetry served as a kind of cultic & mystagogic pathway from the debased world of time and the senses, to a supernal spiritual world of Beauty and Eternity. Poetry was equivalent to gnosticism : a way of knowledge. The Acmeists, on the other hand, committed themselves wholeheartedly to the real, visible, ordinary world of living things, time, and space. They firmly rejected Symbolism's otherworldliness, as well as its amalgam of art and cultic spiritualism.
2. A key defining term for Acmeist poetics is : integrity. Gumilev used a special word for this : "chasteness", or "chastity". We can speculate on his motive for this terminology : integrity (which he also used frequently) has primarily either a structural/physical or a moral sense; "chasteness", in Gumilev's usage, involves these aspects, but perhaps also adds an aesthetic element, a sense of beauty. What did the Acmeists mean by this? As a consequence of their rejection of Symbolism, they affirmed the inherent value, the wholeness of things : that is, of natural life, of language (the "Word"), and of poetry itself. "Integrity" meant that all these things had a "right to exist", and, as Gumilev put it, "on a higher level, a right to be of service to others" [inexact quote from memory]. Thus an acceptance and affirmation of life-on-earth displayed an ethical dimension, and under the umbrella of this overall stance of affirmation, a fundamental equilibrium was established, between the freedom of poetry to be itself, of value in itself, on the one hand, and, on the other, the inherent value of life & culture at large. The two realms were distinct, symbiotic & complementary, all at once.
3. Acmeism, from the Greek "akme" - the acme : perfection, fulfillment, flowering, wholeness... these qualities had more than an ideological or quasi-philosophical reference. For Gumilev and his associates, wholeness and fulfillment had a specific meaning for poetics. The approach was basically Aristotelian, with a strong emphasis on poetry's organic (living) wholeness. Gumilev built on Aristotle's sense of the poem as displaying a unity of beginning-middle-end, of proportion of parts & whole; he developed an "anatomy" of the poetic word with analogy to the systems of the living human body. & this focus on the organic qualities of poetic language helps distinguish such language from other kinds of discourse. The Acmeists began to build a series of interlocking "wholes" of this kind, into a synchronic sense of joyful "philology" - the expression of the poetic Word as a shared effort within a single world tradition, an "Hellenic domesticity" (Mandelstam) crossing all barriers of time & space - centered on the human, and human culture - as sanctioned, reflected, guaranteed by the freedom of the "Word".
4. Acmeism also displays a "reflexive" dimension : standing between Russian Symbolism and Futurism, they thematized (in the poetry itself) the special quality of poetic language as self-fulfilling, as of inherent value. The material of poetry was the living Word. Whereas the Symbolists subsumed poetic speech under the "higher" dimension of music, and the Futurists reduced language to the equivalent of a physical material, something to be smashed, split & distorted at will - the Acmeists accepted the simple denotative meaning(s) of the word as the core, the substance of its value. The inherited language of a culture was to be affirmed & loved along with all other things (in Gumilev's "chaste" vision); the shaping power of art worked in tandem with the given world of nature, not in isolation or alienation. To repeat : this clarity & firmness of expression, the recognition of the akme or beauty of the living language as such, became the bond which united the free & independent sphere of poetry with the actual & ethical world at large. Gumilev & the other Acmeists, again, called this state "equilibrium" (or "integrity") : a synthesis of ethics & aesthetics.
These are just a few very basic aspects of the Acmeist movement. What this suggests to me - as it has for years - is that these concepts, & this attitude, have relevance and application for poets today. We can learn from their shared sense of an objective standard - a "judgement about poetry", as Mandelstam put it. We can learn from their affirmation of the (meaningful, beautiful) Word, and the "world of which it was a part" (W. Stevens); we can learn from the complementarity they discover between the equilibrium of the poem and the normative ethos of civilization, the "teleological warmth" of "domestic Hellenism." The Acmeist's "judgement of poetry" is also a judgement of our own poetry, and the poetry being produced around us now...
Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, & their son Lev, ca. 1913
For 30 years or so, ever since I happened upon a book of Mandelstam's selected poems in a local bookstore, I've been fascinated with his work & that of other Russians he led me to : Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Gumilev, Brodsky... I think I've delved as deeply into it as someone who works in an academic library, & never gets past the beginner stage of learning Russian, can possibly delve... & then I come upon something new, & I realize how much I haven't really understood. Justin Doherty's excellent book has had this effect : The Acmeist movement in Russian poetry : culture and the word (Oxford UP, 1995).
One of the things this study has done is lift my perspective beyond a focus on Mandelstam, toward the underlying principles of the group of Petersburg poets with whom he affiliated. Acmeism grew out of various practical associations, especially the so-called "Guild of Poets" - who convened regularly in semi-formal meetings to read and discuss each other's work. This friendly proximity helped foster a kind of professional outlook - a "guild" mentality - which in turn helped the poets to establish some common principles, seen as grounding characteristic, universal elements of poetry, and allowing for a degree of critical objectivity.
I can't adequately paraphrase or even summarize Doherty's book. All I can do is try to point toward some of these salient principles. Nikolai Gumilev, one of the founders of the Acmeist group, can be credited with formulating them, while Mandelstam further elaborated their implications. Here's my rough sketch :
1. The Acmeist movement appeared in Petersburg around 1910, as a critique of the then-reigning but waning Petersburg phenomenon, quite accomplished & sophisticated, known as Symbolism. Russian Symbolism took a mystical view of art and poetry, proposing a categorical divide between the material and the noumenal or spiritual worlds; poetry served as a kind of cultic & mystagogic pathway from the debased world of time and the senses, to a supernal spiritual world of Beauty and Eternity. Poetry was equivalent to gnosticism : a way of knowledge. The Acmeists, on the other hand, committed themselves wholeheartedly to the real, visible, ordinary world of living things, time, and space. They firmly rejected Symbolism's otherworldliness, as well as its amalgam of art and cultic spiritualism.
2. A key defining term for Acmeist poetics is : integrity. Gumilev used a special word for this : "chasteness", or "chastity". We can speculate on his motive for this terminology : integrity (which he also used frequently) has primarily either a structural/physical or a moral sense; "chasteness", in Gumilev's usage, involves these aspects, but perhaps also adds an aesthetic element, a sense of beauty. What did the Acmeists mean by this? As a consequence of their rejection of Symbolism, they affirmed the inherent value, the wholeness of things : that is, of natural life, of language (the "Word"), and of poetry itself. "Integrity" meant that all these things had a "right to exist", and, as Gumilev put it, "on a higher level, a right to be of service to others" [inexact quote from memory]. Thus an acceptance and affirmation of life-on-earth displayed an ethical dimension, and under the umbrella of this overall stance of affirmation, a fundamental equilibrium was established, between the freedom of poetry to be itself, of value in itself, on the one hand, and, on the other, the inherent value of life & culture at large. The two realms were distinct, symbiotic & complementary, all at once.
3. Acmeism, from the Greek "akme" - the acme : perfection, fulfillment, flowering, wholeness... these qualities had more than an ideological or quasi-philosophical reference. For Gumilev and his associates, wholeness and fulfillment had a specific meaning for poetics. The approach was basically Aristotelian, with a strong emphasis on poetry's organic (living) wholeness. Gumilev built on Aristotle's sense of the poem as displaying a unity of beginning-middle-end, of proportion of parts & whole; he developed an "anatomy" of the poetic word with analogy to the systems of the living human body. & this focus on the organic qualities of poetic language helps distinguish such language from other kinds of discourse. The Acmeists began to build a series of interlocking "wholes" of this kind, into a synchronic sense of joyful "philology" - the expression of the poetic Word as a shared effort within a single world tradition, an "Hellenic domesticity" (Mandelstam) crossing all barriers of time & space - centered on the human, and human culture - as sanctioned, reflected, guaranteed by the freedom of the "Word".
4. Acmeism also displays a "reflexive" dimension : standing between Russian Symbolism and Futurism, they thematized (in the poetry itself) the special quality of poetic language as self-fulfilling, as of inherent value. The material of poetry was the living Word. Whereas the Symbolists subsumed poetic speech under the "higher" dimension of music, and the Futurists reduced language to the equivalent of a physical material, something to be smashed, split & distorted at will - the Acmeists accepted the simple denotative meaning(s) of the word as the core, the substance of its value. The inherited language of a culture was to be affirmed & loved along with all other things (in Gumilev's "chaste" vision); the shaping power of art worked in tandem with the given world of nature, not in isolation or alienation. To repeat : this clarity & firmness of expression, the recognition of the akme or beauty of the living language as such, became the bond which united the free & independent sphere of poetry with the actual & ethical world at large. Gumilev & the other Acmeists, again, called this state "equilibrium" (or "integrity") : a synthesis of ethics & aesthetics.
These are just a few very basic aspects of the Acmeist movement. What this suggests to me - as it has for years - is that these concepts, & this attitude, have relevance and application for poets today. We can learn from their shared sense of an objective standard - a "judgement about poetry", as Mandelstam put it. We can learn from their affirmation of the (meaningful, beautiful) Word, and the "world of which it was a part" (W. Stevens); we can learn from the complementarity they discover between the equilibrium of the poem and the normative ethos of civilization, the "teleological warmth" of "domestic Hellenism." The Acmeist's "judgement of poetry" is also a judgement of our own poetry, and the poetry being produced around us now...
Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, & their son Lev, ca. 1913
2.23.2010
Poetry, religion, humanism
My life may manifest a spiritual dimension. It may involve a spiritual search. I may indeed be, off & on, a sort of hermit cum rabbinical student, mulling over obscure passages of ancient texts for secret, personal or contemporary meanings. I may make a confession of faith; in fact, I believe I am a Christian of some sort.
But none of these beliefs or attitudes will alter my firm sense of poetry as something utterly secular - "non-denominational", universal, and perfectly human.
Although I'm not a philosopher, I think there's a philosophical basis for this position, which actually accords with my sense of Christianity. But that's not why I hold this position. Yes, I hold with some kind of quasi-Aristotelian sense of the quiddity, the utter distinctiveness, of individual things; I hold that this applies as well to individual persons; and my understanding of poetry is that it involves the most distinctive, characteristic, imaginative utterances of individual persons, out of their unique times & places.... but the fact that this view accords well (I think) with Christian notions of the person is not why I think of poetry this way. In other words, I don't have to justify my understanding of poetry by an appeal to my religious faith.
Poetry is an expression of primordial human character; of personhood; it is the "voice" of the essential human face. This is why I can support the position of someone like Harold Kaplan (see previous post), a committed "secular humanist" if there ever was one; there is no contradiction. What this shared position does oppose, I think, are some of the trends in art and cultural theory which, while they are "postmodern", were prefigured (as Kaplan demonstrates) in forms of modernist "culture criticism" & literary practice, produced, in different ways, by Eliot & Pound (along with many others).
My sense that poetry is, in a fundamental way, a form of free and undetermined imaginative creation, grounded in a distinct and individual human gesture and stance toward reality, does not sit well with current views that stem from post-structuralism, the New Historicism, etc. These prevailing ideologies influence contemporary poetic style & technique - witness the successive waves of experimentalism which reduces poetry to language, to text, to formulae, to chance operations, to pastiche, to de-personalization, to agit-prop, to "documentary", etc. etc. etc. Even the so-called "hybrid" poetries represent a concession to the prevailing theoretical winds.
Let me quote again from that "humanist" Osip Mandelstam (his essay "Word and Culture") :
"'There are epochs that maintain that they are not concerned with singular human beings, that human beings must be put to use, like bricks, like mortar... Assyrian prisoners swarm like chicks under the feet of a gigantic Tsar; warriors personifying the power of the state inimical to the human being shackled pigmies with long spears, and the Egyptians are dealing with the human mass as if it were building material... But there is another form of social architecture who scale and measure is... man... It doesn't use human beings as building material but builds for them... Mere mechanical grandeur and mere numbers are inimical to humankind We are tempted not by a new social pyramid, but... by the free play of weights and measures, by a human society... in which everything is... individual, and each member is unique and echoes the whole.'"
A totalitarian state is not required in order to apply reductive and determinist theories of existence and human being to the realm of aesthetics. That is exactly the era we have been living through for the last several decades.
In another place, Mandelstam wrote (quoting roughly from memory) : "in such conditions, Man must become the hardest thing in the universe : harder than diamond." In my view it is from this crystalline, ineluctable center of the human heart & mind - from the person - that poetry proceeds.
********
p.s. : & sure, I can be accused of (& dismissed for) my own polemical over-simplifications & reductivity. The self is complex; poetry is social; the self is constituted in relation with others; poetry is fundamentally dialogical; etc. Yes to all that. But I did not say the work of art is simply identified with the self. The art work sustains a dialectical relation with its maker : it is a form of synthesis, of proportion - of balancing opposing forces... shaping a unitive image of resolution. "Out of the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry," wrote Yeats (I'm paraphrasing from memory).
But none of these beliefs or attitudes will alter my firm sense of poetry as something utterly secular - "non-denominational", universal, and perfectly human.
Although I'm not a philosopher, I think there's a philosophical basis for this position, which actually accords with my sense of Christianity. But that's not why I hold this position. Yes, I hold with some kind of quasi-Aristotelian sense of the quiddity, the utter distinctiveness, of individual things; I hold that this applies as well to individual persons; and my understanding of poetry is that it involves the most distinctive, characteristic, imaginative utterances of individual persons, out of their unique times & places.... but the fact that this view accords well (I think) with Christian notions of the person is not why I think of poetry this way. In other words, I don't have to justify my understanding of poetry by an appeal to my religious faith.
Poetry is an expression of primordial human character; of personhood; it is the "voice" of the essential human face. This is why I can support the position of someone like Harold Kaplan (see previous post), a committed "secular humanist" if there ever was one; there is no contradiction. What this shared position does oppose, I think, are some of the trends in art and cultural theory which, while they are "postmodern", were prefigured (as Kaplan demonstrates) in forms of modernist "culture criticism" & literary practice, produced, in different ways, by Eliot & Pound (along with many others).
My sense that poetry is, in a fundamental way, a form of free and undetermined imaginative creation, grounded in a distinct and individual human gesture and stance toward reality, does not sit well with current views that stem from post-structuralism, the New Historicism, etc. These prevailing ideologies influence contemporary poetic style & technique - witness the successive waves of experimentalism which reduces poetry to language, to text, to formulae, to chance operations, to pastiche, to de-personalization, to agit-prop, to "documentary", etc. etc. etc. Even the so-called "hybrid" poetries represent a concession to the prevailing theoretical winds.
Let me quote again from that "humanist" Osip Mandelstam (his essay "Word and Culture") :
"'There are epochs that maintain that they are not concerned with singular human beings, that human beings must be put to use, like bricks, like mortar... Assyrian prisoners swarm like chicks under the feet of a gigantic Tsar; warriors personifying the power of the state inimical to the human being shackled pigmies with long spears, and the Egyptians are dealing with the human mass as if it were building material... But there is another form of social architecture who scale and measure is... man... It doesn't use human beings as building material but builds for them... Mere mechanical grandeur and mere numbers are inimical to humankind We are tempted not by a new social pyramid, but... by the free play of weights and measures, by a human society... in which everything is... individual, and each member is unique and echoes the whole.'"
A totalitarian state is not required in order to apply reductive and determinist theories of existence and human being to the realm of aesthetics. That is exactly the era we have been living through for the last several decades.
In another place, Mandelstam wrote (quoting roughly from memory) : "in such conditions, Man must become the hardest thing in the universe : harder than diamond." In my view it is from this crystalline, ineluctable center of the human heart & mind - from the person - that poetry proceeds.
********
p.s. : & sure, I can be accused of (& dismissed for) my own polemical over-simplifications & reductivity. The self is complex; poetry is social; the self is constituted in relation with others; poetry is fundamentally dialogical; etc. Yes to all that. But I did not say the work of art is simply identified with the self. The art work sustains a dialectical relation with its maker : it is a form of synthesis, of proportion - of balancing opposing forces... shaping a unitive image of resolution. "Out of the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry," wrote Yeats (I'm paraphrasing from memory).
2.12.2010
Mandelstam, by way of Michael Eskin
[posted also at Plumbline School]
1
In an appendix to his book Poetic Affairs (on Paul Celan, Durs Grunbein, Joseph Brodsky, and the kinship each poet shares with Osip Mandelstam) Michael Eskin deftly draws together some logical threads of Mandelstam's "Acmeist" poetics :
1. aesthetic : "Mandelstam's notion of the 'living word' ties in with the overall Acmeist endeavor to create 'an organicist poetics... of a biological nature' - a poetics predicated on biology and physiology, on 'the infinite complexity of our inscrutable organism,' and on the basic notion that a 'poem is a living organism'" [Poetic Affairs, p.139]. More than that : "The breathing, moving human body is the ultimate ground of poetry. The 'poetic foot,' Mandelstam notes, is nothing but 'breathing in and breathing out.' The poem is literally animated into existence by 'the breathing of all ages' to the extent that it is the articulation of the breathing, moving bodies of countless poets 'of all ages' [ibid.].
The image of poetry projected here is strikingly reminiscent of the ecstatic "speaking-in-tongues" event on the day of Pentecost, as described in the New Testament : poetry here is akin to the descent of the Holy Ghost, by means of which people from "all lands" begin speaking together, each in their own languages, yet mutually understanding each other.* Poetry is a physiological embodiment, shared "inscrutably" across time & space.
2. ethical : The Acmeist movement developed in the early 20th century as a dialectical response to the otherworldliness of Russian Symbolism. Eskin explains : "'Acmeism is not only a literary phenomenon,' Mandelstam notes in 1922... This new ethical force... consists first and foremost, in the reversal of the Symbolist denigration of the real, phenomenal world of the here and now... Mandelstam emphasizes the world's very reality and materiality as the Acmeists paradigm and horizon...
"A love for the here and now, for 'all manifestations of life... in time and not only in eternity' - a love for this world and this reality, for one's 'own organism,' for one's singularity, cannot fail to bear on sociopolitics. What kind of sociopolitical setup will foster and secure the possibility of this kind of Acmeist existence?... Mandelstam lays out his own sociopolitical vision:
'There are epochs that maintain that they are not concerned with singular human beings, that human beings must be put to use, like bricks, like mortar... Assyrian prisoners swarm like chicks under the feet of a gigantic Tsar; warriors personifying the power of the state inimical to the human being shackled pigmies with long spears, and the Egyptians are dealing with the human mass as if it were building material... But there is another form of social architecture who scale and measure is... man... It doesn't use human beings as building material but builds for them... Mere mechanical grandeur and mere numbers are inimical to humankind We are tempted not by a new social pyramid, but... by the free play of weights and measures, by a human society... in which everything is... individual, and each member is unique and echoes the whole.'" [ibid., pp. 139-140]
Eskin notes how this stance had consequences for Mandelstam's personal fate, & which was echoed by Brodsky in his remark that the poet "is a democrat by definition" (& here we further note the shade of Pushkin, standing behind both Mandelstam & Brodsky).
Finally, Eskin reiterates Mandelstam's supremely dialogical concept of poetry. M's famous essay "On the Interlocutor" likens the poem to a message in a bottle, set afloat on the sea toward an unknown friend/reader in the future; when conjoined with the charismatic ("Pentecostal") sense of poetry outlined above, we understand that each reader, each one of us - when we truly encounter a poem - has become the intended recipient of the message. We are conjoined - in a kinship of friendly dialogue & companionship, across the sea of time & space - with the poet in person.
[*Note : these references to the Pentecost are my own interpolations, not not discussed in Eskin's text.]
2
& how would I relate all this to our Plumbline?
I feel a sense of weight : of the earthly weight of material things, and the weight of lived experience. & I relate this first of all to all those dimensions of poetry which remain unspoken : the submerged portion of the iceberg, so to speak : all the overtones & undertones & inexplicable feeling-tones & hidden meanings & unknowables which help give a poem its resistance, its resonance, its own specific gravity. & further, I relate this to living specificity and particularity, that vividness and local accuracy which are part of the glory of poetry - a synthetic brilliance of referential & evocative vision : faculties of Mandelstam's "infinite complexity of our inscrutable organism." These are dimensions which weight the "middle path" of our plumbline : tied deep down in the heart of faithful utterance, Wallace Stevens' "spirit of poetry" as the "companion of the conscience." & then I think of all this as impelling the poet to strive for a poetry that can speak... like this :
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. (- Wallace Stevens, "Of Modern Poetry")
1
In an appendix to his book Poetic Affairs (on Paul Celan, Durs Grunbein, Joseph Brodsky, and the kinship each poet shares with Osip Mandelstam) Michael Eskin deftly draws together some logical threads of Mandelstam's "Acmeist" poetics :
1. aesthetic : "Mandelstam's notion of the 'living word' ties in with the overall Acmeist endeavor to create 'an organicist poetics... of a biological nature' - a poetics predicated on biology and physiology, on 'the infinite complexity of our inscrutable organism,' and on the basic notion that a 'poem is a living organism'" [Poetic Affairs, p.139]. More than that : "The breathing, moving human body is the ultimate ground of poetry. The 'poetic foot,' Mandelstam notes, is nothing but 'breathing in and breathing out.' The poem is literally animated into existence by 'the breathing of all ages' to the extent that it is the articulation of the breathing, moving bodies of countless poets 'of all ages' [ibid.].
The image of poetry projected here is strikingly reminiscent of the ecstatic "speaking-in-tongues" event on the day of Pentecost, as described in the New Testament : poetry here is akin to the descent of the Holy Ghost, by means of which people from "all lands" begin speaking together, each in their own languages, yet mutually understanding each other.* Poetry is a physiological embodiment, shared "inscrutably" across time & space.
2. ethical : The Acmeist movement developed in the early 20th century as a dialectical response to the otherworldliness of Russian Symbolism. Eskin explains : "'Acmeism is not only a literary phenomenon,' Mandelstam notes in 1922... This new ethical force... consists first and foremost, in the reversal of the Symbolist denigration of the real, phenomenal world of the here and now... Mandelstam emphasizes the world's very reality and materiality as the Acmeists paradigm and horizon...
"A love for the here and now, for 'all manifestations of life... in time and not only in eternity' - a love for this world and this reality, for one's 'own organism,' for one's singularity, cannot fail to bear on sociopolitics. What kind of sociopolitical setup will foster and secure the possibility of this kind of Acmeist existence?... Mandelstam lays out his own sociopolitical vision:
'There are epochs that maintain that they are not concerned with singular human beings, that human beings must be put to use, like bricks, like mortar... Assyrian prisoners swarm like chicks under the feet of a gigantic Tsar; warriors personifying the power of the state inimical to the human being shackled pigmies with long spears, and the Egyptians are dealing with the human mass as if it were building material... But there is another form of social architecture who scale and measure is... man... It doesn't use human beings as building material but builds for them... Mere mechanical grandeur and mere numbers are inimical to humankind We are tempted not by a new social pyramid, but... by the free play of weights and measures, by a human society... in which everything is... individual, and each member is unique and echoes the whole.'" [ibid., pp. 139-140]
Eskin notes how this stance had consequences for Mandelstam's personal fate, & which was echoed by Brodsky in his remark that the poet "is a democrat by definition" (& here we further note the shade of Pushkin, standing behind both Mandelstam & Brodsky).
Finally, Eskin reiterates Mandelstam's supremely dialogical concept of poetry. M's famous essay "On the Interlocutor" likens the poem to a message in a bottle, set afloat on the sea toward an unknown friend/reader in the future; when conjoined with the charismatic ("Pentecostal") sense of poetry outlined above, we understand that each reader, each one of us - when we truly encounter a poem - has become the intended recipient of the message. We are conjoined - in a kinship of friendly dialogue & companionship, across the sea of time & space - with the poet in person.
[*Note : these references to the Pentecost are my own interpolations, not not discussed in Eskin's text.]
2
& how would I relate all this to our Plumbline?
I feel a sense of weight : of the earthly weight of material things, and the weight of lived experience. & I relate this first of all to all those dimensions of poetry which remain unspoken : the submerged portion of the iceberg, so to speak : all the overtones & undertones & inexplicable feeling-tones & hidden meanings & unknowables which help give a poem its resistance, its resonance, its own specific gravity. & further, I relate this to living specificity and particularity, that vividness and local accuracy which are part of the glory of poetry - a synthetic brilliance of referential & evocative vision : faculties of Mandelstam's "infinite complexity of our inscrutable organism." These are dimensions which weight the "middle path" of our plumbline : tied deep down in the heart of faithful utterance, Wallace Stevens' "spirit of poetry" as the "companion of the conscience." & then I think of all this as impelling the poet to strive for a poetry that can speak... like this :
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. (- Wallace Stevens, "Of Modern Poetry")
12.23.2009
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.
"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.
2.20.2009
You get older, you just want to simplify... (when you're not trying to escape). I'm thinking about the "less is more" theory of poetry.
The person standing in front of other people, offering a kind of song... & yet even simpler, more stripped-down. Sometimes "through clenched teeth" (as Montale, I think, put it).
A spoken song, a kind of modulated speaking-chant. It's only words. It's not "an experiment". It's not high-falutin' bells & whistles. It's not "conceptual". It's not a "movement". It's not a speech, it's not a play (though it can be like a soliloquy). It's not a comedy routine. It's not a joke.
Everything is concentrated in the flow of speech, the diction, the statement, the image.
All this seems wonderfully figured in Mandelstam's comparison of poetry to a modest, unremarkable gray pebble - which contains, hidden within, a "terrifying density".
I used to think by this he meant all the baroque architecture of allusion and echoing of past poets & poems, the dense subtlety. That may have been part of it. But I think he was also trying simply to characterize the medium of poetry in general : how (unlike more complex media, like music, painting, architecture) poetry rests on this razor-thin, almost-insensible impression of verbal sound/meaning. Poetry inhabits that very thin ledge between the material (of art) & the intellectual (of thought).
The person standing in front of other people, offering a kind of song... & yet even simpler, more stripped-down. Sometimes "through clenched teeth" (as Montale, I think, put it).
A spoken song, a kind of modulated speaking-chant. It's only words. It's not "an experiment". It's not high-falutin' bells & whistles. It's not "conceptual". It's not a "movement". It's not a speech, it's not a play (though it can be like a soliloquy). It's not a comedy routine. It's not a joke.
Everything is concentrated in the flow of speech, the diction, the statement, the image.
All this seems wonderfully figured in Mandelstam's comparison of poetry to a modest, unremarkable gray pebble - which contains, hidden within, a "terrifying density".
I used to think by this he meant all the baroque architecture of allusion and echoing of past poets & poems, the dense subtlety. That may have been part of it. But I think he was also trying simply to characterize the medium of poetry in general : how (unlike more complex media, like music, painting, architecture) poetry rests on this razor-thin, almost-insensible impression of verbal sound/meaning. Poetry inhabits that very thin ledge between the material (of art) & the intellectual (of thought).
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