Orlando Furioso is rooted in & awash in games & play. Mazzotta goes into the Renaissance sensibility, in Shakespeare & Cervantes too, & many others. He quotes this beautiful passage from Plato's Laws:

"Though human affairs are not worthy of great seriousness it is yet necessary to be serious; happiness is another thing. I say that a man must be serious with the serious, and not the other way about. God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness, but man is made God's plaything and that is the best part of him. Therefore every man and every woman should live life accordingly, and play the noblest game, and be of another mind from what they are at present. For they deem war a serious thing, though in war there is neither play nor culture worthy the name, which are the things we deem most serious.
"Hence all must live in peace as well as they possibly can. What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man may be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win the contest."

(Thinking of Vallejo's poem about his brother who died in childhood : they play hide and seek, and he doesn't come back.)

I'd be surprised if many blog-readers are bothering to follow the obscure dull intricacies of these posts of late.

Reading G. Mazzotta (Cosmopoiesis) on Ariosto. The Stoic philosophy of the passions (via Seneca) which informs Orlando Furioso (contra Machiavelli). Love & poetry are among the "furies", passions, which drive people crazy.

In the very beginning of Stubborn Grew, "Henry" is in the backyard, reading Ariosto, listening to a bluejay yodeling. This is where the narrative journey starts.

Would be curious if Ariosto provides the (self-)criticism - the distance - which I need to escape the solipsistic labyrinth of my own (romantic) poetizing.

Henry Furioso

Would like to follow up some of the comments of last few days.

In Stubborn Grew, and the 3 books of The Rose (all of which make up Forth of July), I tried to make such a frame. Part of that totalizing epic impulse. & not something I learned from Northrop Frye or other scholars, some abstract idea of genre - but an impulse going back to the Shakespeare thing, a need to articulate experience in a holistic way.

(My apologies to those of you for whom I may be sort of repeating myself, again.)

I wanted to "finish", to my own satisfaction, what seems like the unfinished business of the "long poem" in America.

In effect, this poem takes a very long psychic-poetic trip. The poet, the "speaker", wavers between autobiography, and history, and "pure" poetry, and parody, and lyric singing, and romance, and symbolic narratives, and documentary, and collage...

however, whatever the literary-emblematic, symbolic, political-historical ramifications of it all, the sum toto, when I reflect on it now, seems like self-portraiture. This may be due, largely, to the emphasis on memory (reverie) as the basic source of inspiration, the instigator.

I tried in several ways to "generalize" the poem's subjectivity. But this is a very problematic and paradoxical region of art-making. In some ways the subjectivity of the creative artist is exactly what the artist is about - the substance of art's message. The very ability to "muse" & write is dependent on the personal & private to a great extent.

I'm reading another (short) book by Giuseppe Mazzotta - Cosmopoiesis - on aspects of "world-making" in Renaissance literature. He writes in the intro about the traditional distinctions between Medieval and Renaissance : the former is theological, the latter is humanist; the former is vita contemplativa, the latter is vita activa.

I feel sort of on the cusp of this divide (as I guess everyone is, really). The poet-as-poet experiences originality - world-making, life-made-anew - in a very concrete way. But the fragile symbiosis of subjective & objective, person & world, is hard (if even possible at all) to "fix".

Reality is mysteriously in flux, in process - a theologian (on a good day) might describe this as an aspect of the divine gift of human freedom, power, & self-determination. Artists understand this - experience this - as the sudden coalescence of their imaginative projects.

In my "posthumous" creative life of the last 5 years or so, I seem to be struggling to find a mode of expression which is more objective, less autobiographical, less caught up with my interior psychodrama.

Or at least find a way to make that personal experience more informed by the objective present.

Forth of July is full of obscure symbolic structures & meanings. The 3rd volume, July, tried to go in two directions at once : to break out of the nostalgic-memorial element of the previous volume (Grassblade Light), and at the same time to create a more autonomous artistic structure (ie. Forth of July issues in, seeks its own telos, in July.)

I started writing it on July 15th - traditionally, "St. Henry's Day" - the day in 1199 when the Crusaders formally invested the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. I aimed to end it between March 15th - the Ides of March - and April 14th - around Easter/Lincoln's assassination/Vallejo's death.

There were a lot of ideas circling around in my head about these symbolic dates. The notion of "Henry going to Jerusalem", for one (a reference to Henry the IV's ironic speech to Prince Hal in the "Jerusalem Chamber" in Shakespeare's H. IV).

There was the Judaic-Christian concept of "Jubilee", which is a kind of messianic/utopian hopeful idea about world justice & peace. In order to symbolize this element I played a lot of word games - reversing the "shell" of an armored (military) Julius Caesar - world political power - through the "coming-forth" of Juliet, or the ark of Jubilee.

Thus the Christian sacrifice evoked by the sepulchre - & resurrection-hope - is linked in the poem (& to America) via Lincoln/Vallejo.

It all sounds very schematic, but it was shaped through a kind of whacky (psychic) journey to New Orleans - through American history - up & down the Mississippi, via Crane, Melville, Whitman, Twain... (& the mysterious Bluejay - who returns after his disappearance at the end of Stubborn Grew.)

The octagonal shape of Frederick II's Castel del Monte (discussed a few days ago) was modelled (some have argued) on the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, which Frederick may have encountered in the course of negotiating the (peaceful - & very short-lived) return of Jerusalem to Western control. The octagon is also symbolic of the renewal of the world (the "eighth day" of creation).

Anyway, happy Ides of March.

Following Robert Archambeau's "modernity is disinterest" thread. Sceptical about the distinction between Western & Middle Eastern (Islamic) thinking. The idea of some kind of M-E unitary or indivisible mentality sounds suspiciously like earlier Western imaginings of the "noble savage". The Other is always greener on the other side of the fence.

The divisions & splits between (ethical) self and (social) role seem inherent to moral dilemmas of every kind, in every culture. One could just as easily talk about the traditionalist-tribal fathers who kill their own daughters in order to maintain archaic Arab "honor" codes. One can imagine quite a psychic split there between self & social role.

Mazzotta's book on Vico, which I've mentioned previously here, is focused on Vico's challenge to modernity (in the shape of Descartes, Bacon, Machiavelli, Hobbes). The argument of The New Science (to oversimplify) is that poetry, as imaginative (re)making, presents an image of world-renewal, based on wonder & creativity, which is at odds with the disenchanted, utilitarian, and arrogant realpolitik/scientism presented by those avatars of Modern "disinterest" & detachment. At odds with them - but aligned with Dante (Mazzotta's other hero).

Woke up around 2 a.m. last night, was thinking about some comments in the Vico book (by Mazzotta), having to do with memory. Mazzotta writes something about the nature of memory, as the sign of a break or fracture between present & past. Memory registers the separation or distance between them.

This seems fairly obvious, but it got me thinking about my poetry ("memory, mother of the muses"), and about memory and space.

It might have something to do with having lived my adult life half a continent away from where I grew up. My sense of memory is always connected with distance in space as well as time.

I think about Proust's (heroic & mock-heroic) rendering of memory. Not that I'm a Proust expert, but I have the idea that with Proust, the action of memory is a kind of bridging & retrieval, an absorption in a past state, which sort of blossoms on its own.

My own sense of memory's action feels more like a distancing : as if one were closing one's eyes & going up in a balloon, or gaining some kind of bird's eye view of oneself, from far away, in a landscape or vast context (of time/space).

This is all rather vague, & maybe I should try to work up an essay or something. But as these notions were occurring to me last night, I also thought of Jonathan's comment of 11/26 :

"So much of reading poetry--and writing it--is ruminative and fragmented. An anxious, frustrating searching through books and magazines. The attention flags. There is not that unitary 6-hour experience of reading a novel, or the novelist's feeling of writing through a certain portion of the narrative."

I'm not sure what he means by "ruminative" here. But I understand the sense of a kind of jumpy or fragmented response to short poems & etc.

& I'm hoping that my own poetry somewhat works against or counters that kind of experience. I mean that these books & sequences of mine aim for a more sustained impression - of vastness - space & memory.

The first (& one of the only) reviews my poetry has received, was in a Brown U. student newspaper, written by an undergrad about my 1st book, Stone. I don't have it in front of me (this was almost 30 yrs ago), but she started it out with something like : "Henry Gould takes his time. He waits until the poem is ready." What she meant, I think, was that I composed slowly & quietly; the poems are sort of calm, without flash, bells & whistles.

I still like those little comments very much, & I think they relate to what I've tried to do.

[p.s. Vico himself might demur from such an individualistic notion of memory. For him memory & history & anthropology are all combined somehow.]

Still reading G. Mazzotta on Giambattista Vico.

Someone could write something interesting on Chas. Olson & Vico, if they haven't already. Olson would have found him agreeable.

Vico disputed both Plato & Aristotle on the nature of poetry. For V., poetry is essentially history. Memory's recollections, imaginations & inventions are inseparable from the drives & passions of peoples, and writing (poetry) records (or adumbrates) the distance or dissociation which is memory itself.

Vico against poetry as "craft", or as something having to do with philosophy or the critical intelligence. He sounds berry much like a Longinian-sublime Romantic.

cf. Mazzotta p. 150 or so.

Vico's Autobiography opens with a description of how he fell head-first onto a stone floor as a child and was unconscious for some time; how the doctor predicted he would either die or grow up "stolido" (slow, retarded). Instead he became a scholar & intellectual. Mazzotta reads this as a comment on the temptations of determinism in science.

Vico (via Mazzotta) juxtaposes science's lust for power over nature (Bacon's New Atlantis), and its mechanical determinism of causation, with the collective "wisdom" of humanities, jurisprudence, political science. Because political science is not "exact", it has to make room for human freedom & unpredictability, the dynamics of debate & consensus.

His lectures on the role of universities in fostering multi-vocal, encyclopedic conception of knowledge : sometimes countering, analyzing, criticizing (Socratic tradition) established political authority.

The self-conscious historical sense. Poetry, unlike science, does not exert control over nature, but rather, through its linguistic shapes & etymologies, unfolds history (the productions of memory).

But I'm conscious of the disconnections, the inability to engage in dialogue. Rationalist, polemical academics who don't understand or appreciate their own cultures; on the other hand, obscurantist philistines, promoting a new dark age of magic formulae & superstition.

Am reading G. Mazzotta's study of Giambattista Vico, The New Map of the World. Mazzotta emphasizes Vico's alignment with "epic wholeness" & history, vs. "irony", scepticism, & Cartesian (a-historical) subjectivity. Vico was in conflict with the Macchiavellian-Cartesian (political) science of his day.

What does this have to do with you & me.

The baroque interlinked storytelling of the long-poem streak in 20th-cent. literature. Pound, Olson, David Jones, et al. Olson's Herodotus (histor). Geography & change, development. The "middle voice", as Olson has it.

Vico puts imaginative poiesis at the center of human history.

Joyce's fascination with all this.

Enjoyed today's lecture at the Hotel.

I keep thinking of the Middle Ages. Must be the time of year or something. I don't idealize the Middle Ages; I'm just vaguely, sleepily aware of some affinities.

Sienese painting as opposed to Florentine realism.

John writes about change & its dominion... I think about the force of time & seasons - as regulative, urging us back into a round. I think about peasants & farmers & Bruegel & my ancestors. The oxen of Saturn. Reading in Mazzotta's Dante book about the dual character of Saturn - its influence over the sort of dry leaden durability & materialism of workers in the earth, on the one hand, and its mystico-spiritual influence over theologians & poets, on the other (the "Age of Saturn", the Golden Age, the Edenic time of Adam & Eve the gardeners).

Busy plus tired today, plus I just can't decide where to play shuffleboard - near the Ashbery Scenic View, or over by the James Tate Swingset? So more belated Ron Watch for me...

today he's focusing on the discontinuities of experience (a hyper-realist in disguise?). Very disjunctive-elliptical of everything to be so. But some might say discontinuity is the problem set before us, the puzzle to solve by way of knowledge & vision & most of all, poetry. Read Giuseppe Mazzotta (Dante's Vision & the Circle of Knowledge).

Poetry as the trivium & quadrivium activated, synthesized, turned into an ethical topology. Liberal arts - "liberal" meaning they free the mind... for what? Truth, contemplation of the whole, wholeness, unity...

Looking for the ground & the continuum, the form & the telos. Encyclopedic knowledge shaped into harmonic, playful vision - image of grace (Dante).

The play of all plays, the act of all action. The You, the double You, the W.

ie., "zigshaggin yo own sweetblack rizebury W" [or something like that - quote from memory], sez Bluejay.

Reading matter of rabid Bush moron:
Dante, Poet of the Desert, by Giuseppe Mazzotta. I come back to this author's books every few years, one of my favorites. Much about rhetoric & history & theology & what Dante does with them.

Perhaps the red/blue state phenomenon, the right/left, the rep/dem drama, is the result of the difference between rhetoric (the intellectuals) and history (the business class). David Brooks, the middle-of-my-road-anyway pundit for NY Times, wrote an op-ed along these lines a while back.

In the first half of Stubborn Grew, the flow of actual (local) history is narrated by a fictional character (actually, a ghost). In the 2nd half, the obverse is the case. The fictionalized (failed) process of writing an epic/history poem is framed by, inset within, the "documentary"/confessional image of an actual individual (the author).