traveling Walter Whitman

ALMOND-SEAL

A luminosity of grays

above the winter river.

Bands of peach, & silver.

A quiet surge past Pig’s Eye,

which became St. Paul.  John

Berryman sleeps on a bluff

nearby.  Once is enough

for everyone (a long time gone).

One casket will suffice.  Paul

was Saul once; an orange

angel flared so strange

his blade curved into burial.

He felt the change upon his skin.

So Queequeg tingled

where the needle angled

in.  The tattoo (Ecuadorian

gold) blood-red – indelible

recapitulation

(via serpentine

Cain-crozier) of Abe-Ape’s edible

ancestry (just incredible).

The primate history

of human mystery

incarnate in a star (blind, Oedipal)

                   *

who fell to earth, not far from here.

& like Walt Whitman, wandered

swamp-deltas... milk-&-honeyed

Hobo meadows... (poplar, cedar)...

all the way to San Francisco.

Golden Gate grandeur

sparkling orange-azure

not one whit less marvelo

than Solomon’s Templo.  Yet neither

will surpass one friar wight

who flutes across deep night

his piccolo arpeggios (Breather-

Bro to Sister Sigh-Nature)

lifting his humble sign’s

Venetian-blind design

beneath that glory-span – sheer

delicatesse of silver threads

raveling safety net

for one slight violet

(shorn, scarred by callous crowds).

She is your Imogen, who keeps

weight balanced on a wire;

fleet-footed candlefire,

light houseboat over frosty deeps,

your witty Sophie – at the wheel

of supernatural law –

sailing toward Awe

full-smile (lips compassing her almond-seal).

1.11.17

This book, by Viola Sachs, should be back in print. It would sell. I keep trying to find an o.p. copy.

The game of creation: The primeval unlettered language of Moby Dick, or, The whale. (Published in Paris in 1982.)

As my faithful true-blue blabbophiles know, I'm struggling to get out of a writing block. Hope I'm not jinxing myself by saying that mathematics might help.

I'm going back to an approach I used in the long poems, only in a somewhat different order of steps.

It's curious how math & geometry infiltrated my writing, since I was never big on it in school.

When you have a set of themes or images or ideas which seem to be hanging around, waiting to be picked up... when you want to synthesize some material... well, sometimes there are geometrical aids-to-composition.

There's a poetry in numbers, & vice versa.

Formal harmonic properties are found in the way different numerical quantities interact. Thus, if you're interested in "part is the sum of its whole" (or vice versa) phenomena, math can help. There are curious & fascinating symmetries involved, when small quantities are mirrored or analogous to quantities on different orders of scale.

So say you have a theme or some subject-matter you want to interweave with something else, which may not appear immediately relevant : you can find ways to echo & balance or contrast things, geometrically.

Add to this the symbolic qualities which are or can be invested in numbers, and you're really getting somewhere. Because you can apply both your own symbolic values to particular numbers, and you can draw on traditional or other applications : you can combine them. Soon your art work will start to resonate with its own obscure & secret interconnections.

& this is all in addition to the rhythmic aspect (metrics).

Painters & architects & musicians, of course, have been doing this for a long time.

Right now I'm messing around with the mysterious number which pervades Finnegans Wake : 1132.

So why am I getting back to this? It's not just that math & geometry can help a writer organize material. Numbers, shape & symmetry can lead you along. The blank space can help you find what you're looking for, even before you knew you were looking.

As I've mentioned before, Alastair Fowler wrote a series of books on this subject, as exemplified in Renaissance poetry.

When I was in Minneapolis last weekend, I went to the Art Institute & saw a special exhibit of this new Illustrated Bible which is being produced by a team of calligraphers in Wales, under the sponsorship of St. John's Univ. (in Collegeville MN). It's a very unusual project combining computer imagery with medieval book-production techniques (calfskin parchment, handmade inks, goose quills...). The pages are huge & the illustrations are beautiful.

On the very first page of Genesis, there is a scribal mistake. It's the only one visible in the entire exhibit. A phrase about God's creation of the "sea-monsters of the deep" was left out; the scribes added it in an elegant parenthesis in the margin.

I jumped when I saw that - was reminded of Viola Sach's monograph on Moby Dick(Game of Creation) : in which she develops a model of the novel's composition based on a sort of gnostic-numerological design of cosmic error (the substance & manifestation of which is "the whale" itself). According to Sachs, Moby Dick, Melville's "counter-Bible", is a labyrinth of intentional mistakes & misplaced attributions about whales & other matters.

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. . . If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.