A bit of Providence, from Prospect Terrace
Showing posts with label Providence2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Providence2. Show all posts
8.01.2015
Walk through the painting
Been very busy of late over there in yon Illustrated Stubborn Grew. Have to be - I'll be leaving town soon. I'm revisiting old Providence by way of an old poem.
7.11.2015
Jesus Thoughts in Elkhart
I'm passing through Elkhart once again, writing this from motel. This is Amish country. The Elkhart visitor center is across the street; they have an exhibit of quilts there. Turns out both quilts & quilt gardens are a tradition in Elkhart county. (There is something quilt-like about Ravenna Diagram, which I will have to investigate. Quilts are mosaics and lattices of sorts. Lattice within lattices, if you think of the cloth fibers.)
Being quaintly or unusually Christian is as American as hot dogs. I was raised in the Episcopal Church, but my spiritual history is as distinct as anybody else's in the great awakening around these parts.
Sometimes driving the Buick across these vast farmlands I try to focus my thoughts, turn off the radio. Open up to possible new vistas of the old, or old vistas of the new.
It's not easy to say anything new about Jesus Christ. He has been pretty well covered by professional preachers, theologians, memoirists & historians. The great spectrum of denominational & devotional Christian life, going back 2000+ years, has its own very deep traditions of scriptural interpretation, preaching, devotion, & shared ways of living. Then of course there is the Jewish tradition, going back at least another 1000 years, on which all this Christianity is founded. So it takes some moxie, some chutzpah, to try to say something new about Jesus. What's more, words can only go so far in the plain detached public sphere, dislocated from any solid participative readership, any engaged reception. It's one thing to listen to a sermon or an evangelical homily (you can find a lot of these - some very complex - on the radio around these parts) within a context of prior belief or experience. It's another to come at a blog post, out of the blue.
What's more, I'm not sure I actually have anything new to say about Jesus. But we will try.
An author has a worldview, a way of looking at things. She tries to bring it across to the reader. In the process, she has an implicit sense of the reader's reaction to whatever she writes. This sense of a response conditions what is actually written - it's a sort of inherent dialectic. You are there as a kind of potential interlocutor. I have to try to convince you of what I think I see. It's an effort of persuasion.
So I was driving along in the Buick yesterday, somewhere in Pennsylvania. I was thinking as I often do in a vague way about the political meaning of kingship (having been reading a biography of Richard III, the one they found under the parking lot). The monarch is a representative of tribal or collective leadership, among other things. Humans live in groups : the king is an invention put together in response to a social problem - how to live together amicably in a group.
The idea of the Messiah of Israel had a royal, a political dimension. In one sense the Messiah was a cultural response to the fact that Israel was often a people in bondage to more powerful, and foreign, peoples. The Messiah would be a "son of King David", who would restore the nation.
But there was more to the messianic idea in Israel. At its root was a forecast that the Messiah to come would be "a prophet like Moses". Moses was more than a king for Israel. He was the ultimate "founding father", in a sense. He was the prophet who bound Israel in its covenant with the Most High God - he was the servant of Yahweh, who stood before Him & spoke with Him. This is a religious, priestly dimension, a category separate from kingship per se. For Israel, in a sense, Yahweh is the ultimate King : Israel's kings are Yahweh's chosen servants.
Now it is with this sketch in the background that we call to mind the specific mission & message of Jesus. The leadership role assumed by Jesus was mocked as "royal" by the Romans (at least as depicted in the Gospels), and then, later, royal regalia & symbolism have been heaped upon him in the centuries of Christian tradition which followed. Jesus is called "king of kings". But it's important to keep in mind the distinction between "messiah" and king. Jesus was attempting to do & say something on a distinctly different scale.
The difference - the fork in the path - which Jesus' message instigated has both spiritual & political consequences. How so? What is the crux of this message? Let's cut to the chase, Henry.
I remembered driving along today an old study I read once, title I can't recall - about the themes of justice and mercy in the medieval English poem Piers Plowman. The author detailed the medieval understanding of a sharp divide between earth and heaven, time & eternity. Good deeds are not rewarded on earth; they are stored up for honor in heaven. This is partly why people are instructed to give alms in secret. It's not about vanity & worldly renown; it's not about the earthly self at all. It redounds to the benefit of the eternal soul.
Let's say there are three central branches to the tree of Jesus' worldview : the living God; God's creation; and the eternal soul. The Incarnation and the Resurrection are in a sense corollaries or consequences of two most basic things : God's power to create the cosmos, reality as we know it; and the fact that the soul is eternal and thus has the potential to "live" again, in any form or body or time or place which the Creator chooses.
Jesus is saying something even more radical & astounding. He saying that he & the Creator are united, that they share one Spirit. The personal Creator is "father" to Jesus as "son". Comprehended from a certain angle, this is an astonishing proclamation of joy. There is nothing to compare to the joy expressed here. Jesus is saying he will live again, "with all the company of heaven" - among the ever-living spirits in God's company - & return again in the flesh to earth. & he is suggesting that anyone who sees & understands this way of seeing things will also recognize their own ever-living soul, their own spiritual connection with that "company of heaven".
This is mind-boggling in a way - it's so upsetting to our everyday sense of mundane reality, the humdrum roll-along of time to old age & obliteration. The "logical", "scientific" mind tends to reject such spiritual visions.
Yet there is a logic to the ancient & medieval worldview also. I think of it as the logic of creation, or the logic of the beautiful. We see the spiritual greatness of certain men & women, certain culture heroes - & we recognize something beautiful in the lives they have lived, in their spiritual victory over the pettiness & evils of human social life. Then we start to notice the same beauty in the lives of ordinary unsung people too : we see the spiritual in nature, so to speak. The logic of these examples relates back to the argument for creation : that the cosmos is too splendid & marvelous to be meaningless & empty; it has come from nothing out of some kind of powerful creative will-to-be, will-to-love.
But I want to bring this all back to the idea of the Messiah. The Messiah of Israel is distinct from a king; yet the message of Jesus, as messiah, has real political repercussions. The Good News of our eternal soul, and its place in an eternal, heavenly realm, applies to every man and woman on earth. Suddenly our moral, ethical, social existence is not chained to a particular place and time or a particular form of government or economy. Ethics has been universalized. Morality has been universalized. Our own spiritual future has been universalized. We are members of an eternal association, the "company of heaven". As Dante put it in the Divina Commedia (to paraphrase from memory), he looks forward to that day when he will be "citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman".
The notion that I have an eternal soul - that a priestly messiah-figure, one Jesus, has called me to recognize this fact & participate in a newly-visible, eternal community, a universal polity - is the kind of powerful message of hope & liberation capable of shaping a new way of life. As Jesus says in the Gospels, "you must be born again". You who were a child of human parents, here in a particular spot & time on earth, are being invited to become a "child of God".
We have to imagine - to conceptualize - & then to recognize, that Jesus with this message of soul freedom is re-shaping the political & social, as well as the spiritual, identity of every human being on earth. We are getting our eternal life back. This kind of moral liberation has political consequences, historical consequences. It affects persons living under every form of human social regime & political polity.
Roger Williams, the Rhode Island pioneer & radical thinker, called himself a "Seeker". He was trying to understand the right relation between spiritual life and social, political life in the world. & he became a powerful advocate for what he called "soul liberty" or "liberty of conscience". In this way he was a kind of sponsor for all the wild & different experimental Christian sects which sprang up in 18th & 19th century America. But at the base of his own thinking was this old medieval sense of a "realm", a "kingdom", slightly different from this present world. It was the same sense underlying the moral algebra of Piers Plowman : some kind of secret exchange between earth & heaven, time & eternity.
Critics of Christianity have condemned this two-tiered picture of reality as escapist, otherworldly, quietist, detached. But all these critiques are based on a superficial misreading of Jesus' message. The Incarnation is the ultimate expression of the joining, the wedding, of these two dimensions. The "providence" of the plan of Jesus' "heavenly father" is a work involving, first, the liberation of the person, through a recognition of eternal life; and second, the redemption & repair of the whole creation - as a result of the joy instilled by this very liberation. The message of the new Pope Francis (along with the old St. Francis) is certainly in line with this concept. Humankind is called upon to restore the right relation to the beautiful creation.
I've rambled on longer than I wanted to here. But Henry the old Plantagenet feels a deep kinship with the poet's joy of Dante, & the poet's elation in Mandelstam (a Dante reader), & the spiritual cheer & brimming good fellowship I find in that Messiah's words & gestures, this vision of vitality & personhood which has the victory over Time & Death. This Israel is real to me. May it be for you, too, whoever you are - out there beyond Elkhart or in Elkhart, inside or beyond this green wide Amish-land.
Being quaintly or unusually Christian is as American as hot dogs. I was raised in the Episcopal Church, but my spiritual history is as distinct as anybody else's in the great awakening around these parts.
Sometimes driving the Buick across these vast farmlands I try to focus my thoughts, turn off the radio. Open up to possible new vistas of the old, or old vistas of the new.
It's not easy to say anything new about Jesus Christ. He has been pretty well covered by professional preachers, theologians, memoirists & historians. The great spectrum of denominational & devotional Christian life, going back 2000+ years, has its own very deep traditions of scriptural interpretation, preaching, devotion, & shared ways of living. Then of course there is the Jewish tradition, going back at least another 1000 years, on which all this Christianity is founded. So it takes some moxie, some chutzpah, to try to say something new about Jesus. What's more, words can only go so far in the plain detached public sphere, dislocated from any solid participative readership, any engaged reception. It's one thing to listen to a sermon or an evangelical homily (you can find a lot of these - some very complex - on the radio around these parts) within a context of prior belief or experience. It's another to come at a blog post, out of the blue.
What's more, I'm not sure I actually have anything new to say about Jesus. But we will try.
An author has a worldview, a way of looking at things. She tries to bring it across to the reader. In the process, she has an implicit sense of the reader's reaction to whatever she writes. This sense of a response conditions what is actually written - it's a sort of inherent dialectic. You are there as a kind of potential interlocutor. I have to try to convince you of what I think I see. It's an effort of persuasion.
So I was driving along in the Buick yesterday, somewhere in Pennsylvania. I was thinking as I often do in a vague way about the political meaning of kingship (having been reading a biography of Richard III, the one they found under the parking lot). The monarch is a representative of tribal or collective leadership, among other things. Humans live in groups : the king is an invention put together in response to a social problem - how to live together amicably in a group.
The idea of the Messiah of Israel had a royal, a political dimension. In one sense the Messiah was a cultural response to the fact that Israel was often a people in bondage to more powerful, and foreign, peoples. The Messiah would be a "son of King David", who would restore the nation.
But there was more to the messianic idea in Israel. At its root was a forecast that the Messiah to come would be "a prophet like Moses". Moses was more than a king for Israel. He was the ultimate "founding father", in a sense. He was the prophet who bound Israel in its covenant with the Most High God - he was the servant of Yahweh, who stood before Him & spoke with Him. This is a religious, priestly dimension, a category separate from kingship per se. For Israel, in a sense, Yahweh is the ultimate King : Israel's kings are Yahweh's chosen servants.
Now it is with this sketch in the background that we call to mind the specific mission & message of Jesus. The leadership role assumed by Jesus was mocked as "royal" by the Romans (at least as depicted in the Gospels), and then, later, royal regalia & symbolism have been heaped upon him in the centuries of Christian tradition which followed. Jesus is called "king of kings". But it's important to keep in mind the distinction between "messiah" and king. Jesus was attempting to do & say something on a distinctly different scale.
The difference - the fork in the path - which Jesus' message instigated has both spiritual & political consequences. How so? What is the crux of this message? Let's cut to the chase, Henry.
I remembered driving along today an old study I read once, title I can't recall - about the themes of justice and mercy in the medieval English poem Piers Plowman. The author detailed the medieval understanding of a sharp divide between earth and heaven, time & eternity. Good deeds are not rewarded on earth; they are stored up for honor in heaven. This is partly why people are instructed to give alms in secret. It's not about vanity & worldly renown; it's not about the earthly self at all. It redounds to the benefit of the eternal soul.
Let's say there are three central branches to the tree of Jesus' worldview : the living God; God's creation; and the eternal soul. The Incarnation and the Resurrection are in a sense corollaries or consequences of two most basic things : God's power to create the cosmos, reality as we know it; and the fact that the soul is eternal and thus has the potential to "live" again, in any form or body or time or place which the Creator chooses.
Jesus is saying something even more radical & astounding. He saying that he & the Creator are united, that they share one Spirit. The personal Creator is "father" to Jesus as "son". Comprehended from a certain angle, this is an astonishing proclamation of joy. There is nothing to compare to the joy expressed here. Jesus is saying he will live again, "with all the company of heaven" - among the ever-living spirits in God's company - & return again in the flesh to earth. & he is suggesting that anyone who sees & understands this way of seeing things will also recognize their own ever-living soul, their own spiritual connection with that "company of heaven".
This is mind-boggling in a way - it's so upsetting to our everyday sense of mundane reality, the humdrum roll-along of time to old age & obliteration. The "logical", "scientific" mind tends to reject such spiritual visions.
Yet there is a logic to the ancient & medieval worldview also. I think of it as the logic of creation, or the logic of the beautiful. We see the spiritual greatness of certain men & women, certain culture heroes - & we recognize something beautiful in the lives they have lived, in their spiritual victory over the pettiness & evils of human social life. Then we start to notice the same beauty in the lives of ordinary unsung people too : we see the spiritual in nature, so to speak. The logic of these examples relates back to the argument for creation : that the cosmos is too splendid & marvelous to be meaningless & empty; it has come from nothing out of some kind of powerful creative will-to-be, will-to-love.
But I want to bring this all back to the idea of the Messiah. The Messiah of Israel is distinct from a king; yet the message of Jesus, as messiah, has real political repercussions. The Good News of our eternal soul, and its place in an eternal, heavenly realm, applies to every man and woman on earth. Suddenly our moral, ethical, social existence is not chained to a particular place and time or a particular form of government or economy. Ethics has been universalized. Morality has been universalized. Our own spiritual future has been universalized. We are members of an eternal association, the "company of heaven". As Dante put it in the Divina Commedia (to paraphrase from memory), he looks forward to that day when he will be "citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman".
The notion that I have an eternal soul - that a priestly messiah-figure, one Jesus, has called me to recognize this fact & participate in a newly-visible, eternal community, a universal polity - is the kind of powerful message of hope & liberation capable of shaping a new way of life. As Jesus says in the Gospels, "you must be born again". You who were a child of human parents, here in a particular spot & time on earth, are being invited to become a "child of God".
We have to imagine - to conceptualize - & then to recognize, that Jesus with this message of soul freedom is re-shaping the political & social, as well as the spiritual, identity of every human being on earth. We are getting our eternal life back. This kind of moral liberation has political consequences, historical consequences. It affects persons living under every form of human social regime & political polity.
Roger Williams, the Rhode Island pioneer & radical thinker, called himself a "Seeker". He was trying to understand the right relation between spiritual life and social, political life in the world. & he became a powerful advocate for what he called "soul liberty" or "liberty of conscience". In this way he was a kind of sponsor for all the wild & different experimental Christian sects which sprang up in 18th & 19th century America. But at the base of his own thinking was this old medieval sense of a "realm", a "kingdom", slightly different from this present world. It was the same sense underlying the moral algebra of Piers Plowman : some kind of secret exchange between earth & heaven, time & eternity.
Critics of Christianity have condemned this two-tiered picture of reality as escapist, otherworldly, quietist, detached. But all these critiques are based on a superficial misreading of Jesus' message. The Incarnation is the ultimate expression of the joining, the wedding, of these two dimensions. The "providence" of the plan of Jesus' "heavenly father" is a work involving, first, the liberation of the person, through a recognition of eternal life; and second, the redemption & repair of the whole creation - as a result of the joy instilled by this very liberation. The message of the new Pope Francis (along with the old St. Francis) is certainly in line with this concept. Humankind is called upon to restore the right relation to the beautiful creation.
I've rambled on longer than I wanted to here. But Henry the old Plantagenet feels a deep kinship with the poet's joy of Dante, & the poet's elation in Mandelstam (a Dante reader), & the spiritual cheer & brimming good fellowship I find in that Messiah's words & gestures, this vision of vitality & personhood which has the victory over Time & Death. This Israel is real to me. May it be for you, too, whoever you are - out there beyond Elkhart or in Elkhart, inside or beyond this green wide Amish-land.
the old Plantagenet pops up in Elkhart again
7.07.2015
so much depends, so many deep ends
Intrepid detective work of William Logan & others unearthed in fine detail the local story behind one of WC Williams' most dependable poems, "The Red Wheelbarrow". Reading this article, I couldn't help but think of all the local minutiae lurking in my own poems, since I may be departing this dear locality for my native Minnesota soon. It will be 45 years since I first showed up in Providence, with bicycle, eyes closed, to go to school (Sept. 1970)...
so much depends
upon
a Rhody Red
Hen
soused with sea
water
beside the Black
Ships
So I'm starting up chapter 4 of the Ravenna Diagram qua-qua train. Along with many another internal reverb, there are things in this excerpt which only make sense if you happened to read the Providence Journal newspaper this week... such as the fact that the 2015 North American Irish Dance Championships were held in Providence this year... or that Glee Gum is just one of Deborah Schimberg's exercises in earthy & empathetic enterprise (we were both in the local agriculture & community greenhouse biz back in 1980 or so - she kept at it).
Sail on, Ocean State -
so much depends
upon
a Rhody Red
Hen
soused with sea
water
beside the Black
Ships
So I'm starting up chapter 4 of the Ravenna Diagram qua-qua train. Along with many another internal reverb, there are things in this excerpt which only make sense if you happened to read the Providence Journal newspaper this week... such as the fact that the 2015 North American Irish Dance Championships were held in Providence this year... or that Glee Gum is just one of Deborah Schimberg's exercises in earthy & empathetic enterprise (we were both in the local agriculture & community greenhouse biz back in 1980 or so - she kept at it).
Sail on, Ocean State -
OCEAN STATE
Bridget flings her emerald
signal flags SE,
NW – kicks her heels
& gyroscopes along a thread
of starfish glisten (penciled
Cornish involution).
You follow her confusion
of species, her grave mongreloid
ellipse, toward the vault of your own
vertigo (in exitu
del mio Gypsy-o) –
the weight of this diamond casket (sun-
burnt charcoal). Mark the black rings
beneath her eyes, ringlets
of raven-hair, her fits
& stirs. How the pain sings
on the way to Mendelssohn, or
Littletree – way back
to the cricket-shack.
Venite, powerful western star...
or is it North, now (dizziness
part of the package)? I’m
packing my leaving rhyme,
my Rhody limes. I guess this is
a goodbye tootle. Ocean state.
Vast in our eye, your
jewelry gum (Glee-ore) –
the giving was the thing, chic mate.
7.6.15
12.12.2012
Jesus Thoughts (26) : fatherhood near & far
Is religion redundant? Is the idea of God a terrible waste of human thought, time & energy? A fantasy, a projection of weak-minded, feeble people - looking for Mommy or Daddy in the sky?
There is so much to do just to keep the world in half-decent working order... food to grow, tools to make, houses and machines to build and maintain, clothes to weave, illness to treat, crime & violence to subdue, poverty & injustice to resist, alleviate...
There are so many subtle, practical decisions to be made inside each active human association, each group out there devoted to carrying out some necessary task...
Where does religion come into play here, if it does at all?
For some reason as I was trying to get to sleep last night I was thinking about my father, some of his ordinary "manly" qualities : his work ethic, self-discipline, responsibility, probity, diligence, sobriety, prudence, devotion, humility, enterprise, stoicism. His "salt of the earth" aspect... thinking of him, in his 80s, sitting at his little card table paying his bills, taking care of other people....happy simply to be able to keep his own free house in order, every day... (and of my mother, who sustained him through many dark hours...)
& thinking of the symbolic image of "the Father" - this activity of providential providing (Robert Frost's line comes to mind, "Provide, provide!"). This image of the sustainer, the solid Rock... one who has been given responsibilities to carry out, and who, in order to do so, must make a habit of self-denial. The guardian, the manager, the caretaker... the servant... (there's another word I'm trying to think of in this regard - ? stewardship).
& the spiritual freedom of the one who acts and serves creatively, energetically, in these ways - freed from his or her own merely egotistical self-indulgences, by way of helping others...
So again, though : where do religion, God, Christianity come in here, if they do? Aren't we talking about ordinary virtues, human qualities of character - making good with the cards one is dealt?
What a hard question to answer! And there is no simple answer. On the one hand, many people are guided and sustained by a moral universe informed by their faith in God. On the other hand, there is no doubt that secular and non-religious people can be just as loving and morally upright as any of their God-fearing neighbors.
I like what I think was Roger Williams' perspective on this questions. I think he might assert two basic things about it. First, he would say that God offers spiritual light, by which we can actually see : and what we are able to see are the manifold goodness and virtue in people everywhere - a whole world of varied tribes & faiths, yet sharing in this universal inheritance from God : the inherent propensity to love and do good. Not that all are good : but that Mankind in general has been given the capability to be and do good. Second, I think he would say that faith in God, and in Jesus Christ, is itself a gift of divine grace to the believer. It is something extra - a dose of spiritual joy direct from God, direct from the kingdom of heaven. Yes, life can be good on earth, for those who love and do well : but what Jesus offers is the "good news" : the message of everlasting life. The essence of this playful extra is intellectual joy - is spiritual glee - is (in Roger's term) soul liberty.
"I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." "No one comes to the Father but by me." So Jesus in the Gospels declares. Does this represent merely an outmoded, superstructural ideology, mythology? A psychological compensatory mechanism? A false consciousness?
Ultimately your answer to these questions depends upon the roots of your worldview. My own answer (today, anyway) draws again on my own understanding, ie. : 1) the cosmos we experience is inextricably bound up with mind and consciousness; 2) meaning and consciousness, in turn, are rooted in identity, in Personhood; 3) there is a substantial, cosmic, shared Personhood, of which our own experience is only partial, only a foretaste. Such basic ideas, for me, provide a kind of intellectual ground for this further, more mysterious perspective : that our life on this planet is a drama, a "miracle play", a divine comedy. It is the play of a Creator who works to restore this particular creation - by coming in person, and asking us to join him in one Spirit (children of God).
We are finally "at home" on earth, and in the universe, when we can hear this "still, small voice" - this speech which emerges from and penetrates through mankind as a whole - this "prophetic" sound of a loving Maker - this Logos, this order - hidden, manifest, living & dying in us and with us.
There is so much to do just to keep the world in half-decent working order... food to grow, tools to make, houses and machines to build and maintain, clothes to weave, illness to treat, crime & violence to subdue, poverty & injustice to resist, alleviate...
There are so many subtle, practical decisions to be made inside each active human association, each group out there devoted to carrying out some necessary task...
Where does religion come into play here, if it does at all?
For some reason as I was trying to get to sleep last night I was thinking about my father, some of his ordinary "manly" qualities : his work ethic, self-discipline, responsibility, probity, diligence, sobriety, prudence, devotion, humility, enterprise, stoicism. His "salt of the earth" aspect... thinking of him, in his 80s, sitting at his little card table paying his bills, taking care of other people....happy simply to be able to keep his own free house in order, every day... (and of my mother, who sustained him through many dark hours...)
& thinking of the symbolic image of "the Father" - this activity of providential providing (Robert Frost's line comes to mind, "Provide, provide!"). This image of the sustainer, the solid Rock... one who has been given responsibilities to carry out, and who, in order to do so, must make a habit of self-denial. The guardian, the manager, the caretaker... the servant... (there's another word I'm trying to think of in this regard - ? stewardship).
& the spiritual freedom of the one who acts and serves creatively, energetically, in these ways - freed from his or her own merely egotistical self-indulgences, by way of helping others...
So again, though : where do religion, God, Christianity come in here, if they do? Aren't we talking about ordinary virtues, human qualities of character - making good with the cards one is dealt?
What a hard question to answer! And there is no simple answer. On the one hand, many people are guided and sustained by a moral universe informed by their faith in God. On the other hand, there is no doubt that secular and non-religious people can be just as loving and morally upright as any of their God-fearing neighbors.
I like what I think was Roger Williams' perspective on this questions. I think he might assert two basic things about it. First, he would say that God offers spiritual light, by which we can actually see : and what we are able to see are the manifold goodness and virtue in people everywhere - a whole world of varied tribes & faiths, yet sharing in this universal inheritance from God : the inherent propensity to love and do good. Not that all are good : but that Mankind in general has been given the capability to be and do good. Second, I think he would say that faith in God, and in Jesus Christ, is itself a gift of divine grace to the believer. It is something extra - a dose of spiritual joy direct from God, direct from the kingdom of heaven. Yes, life can be good on earth, for those who love and do well : but what Jesus offers is the "good news" : the message of everlasting life. The essence of this playful extra is intellectual joy - is spiritual glee - is (in Roger's term) soul liberty.
"I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." "No one comes to the Father but by me." So Jesus in the Gospels declares. Does this represent merely an outmoded, superstructural ideology, mythology? A psychological compensatory mechanism? A false consciousness?
Ultimately your answer to these questions depends upon the roots of your worldview. My own answer (today, anyway) draws again on my own understanding, ie. : 1) the cosmos we experience is inextricably bound up with mind and consciousness; 2) meaning and consciousness, in turn, are rooted in identity, in Personhood; 3) there is a substantial, cosmic, shared Personhood, of which our own experience is only partial, only a foretaste. Such basic ideas, for me, provide a kind of intellectual ground for this further, more mysterious perspective : that our life on this planet is a drama, a "miracle play", a divine comedy. It is the play of a Creator who works to restore this particular creation - by coming in person, and asking us to join him in one Spirit (children of God).
We are finally "at home" on earth, and in the universe, when we can hear this "still, small voice" - this speech which emerges from and penetrates through mankind as a whole - this "prophetic" sound of a loving Maker - this Logos, this order - hidden, manifest, living & dying in us and with us.
9.06.2007
Bumbling around some prose ideas lately, thinking about Borgesian relation between persons and books, re-reading wonderful book-length essay on Proust by Roger Shattuck (Proust's Binoculars) & discussion of dynamic between memory and forgetting (oubli), Rip Van Winkle etc.; walked to local public library branch to drop off some books, standing at the counter a voice says "Henry Gould", I turn and there stands poet Stuart Blazer (author of Ricochet) - whom I haven't seen for a long time, but I mentioned I had noticed him in the newspaper, where he was quoted at a special "Proust day" at the Athenaeum library (Poe's old hangout)... I said, "are you still living in Adamsville?", he said, "Henry, it's been longer than you think... I've been in Portugal for five years..."
(Stuart has some poems in this issue of Nedge:)
(Stuart has some poems in this issue of Nedge:)
9.20.2005
you can get a pretty good image of Providence (& a very different one from mine) from Mairead. She hasn't lived here very long, but in a way, she's a native. She reminds me of the community organizers I used to work with, except she keeps odd notes & writes poems.
6.09.2005
Josh with some more interesting thoughts on "post-postmodern pastoral", etc.
Interesting that he starts the genealogy with Pound. You could think of epic, long-poem, and pastoral (the goal of epic?) as sharing a certain space. Pound thought of his long-poem as a "tale of the tribe" (see Michael Bernstein book on this).
When I started exploring this area for myself, back in the early 80s, I was still working as a VISTA volunteer for various community/activist groups in Providence. I had managed a food coop & community gardens, & a CETA project with high school kids, to build a "community solar greenhouse"*. I was finishing a M.A. in community organizing at Beacon College in Boston. This work influenced my literary outlook, too. The notion of a long poem for me had to do with forms of poetry which were able to connect with historical movements & narratives, and with a kind of ideal, at least, of "public speech".
So for me the notion of pastoral had (& still has) a populist-political cast. Just part of the general awareness or desire for a "sustainable" common life, in harmony with the world (with people & nature in general). The relationship between social justice, the common good, and a healthy integration with nature.
In the days of VISTA we had a sense that the right thing for young people to do, before they plunged into the private sector in one way or another, was to work in the public sector - to monitor and rein in private interests on behalf of the common good. We were young & naive enough to imagine we had a pretty clear & reasonable notion of what that common good was, and that there was a kind of heroic grassroots/everyday struggle going on, against business interests & corrupt pols, that grassroots people could get involved with.
Why this was the right thing to do was precisely because the common good, since it is so vast, amorphous, and future-oriented, really has few advocates - unlike the narrow & short-term interests of the private sector. And this amorphous ideal quality was akin to the interests of the poor, who also had few advocates. And young people, because of their relative freedom from narrow obligations, were in a position to be those advocates. There's something beautiful about this notion, almost romantic. During the course of the 80s and 90s, political advocacy expanded, sharpened, and professionalized to a great degree. Lines were drawn more sharply, and soft-romantic idealism was curtailed.
This is how I see (very vaguely, anyway), the process happening over the last few decades. But I think underlying the rather naive and perhaps arrogant worldview of those times (mid to late 70s), there is a kernel of truth, an unresolved goal. How so? Well, politics, social policy, social justice are basically about figuring out how to live together. And there is always going to be a necessary balancing-out, an equilibrium, between particular special/private interests (both economic & political), on the one hand, and government policy regarding the welfare of the whole (the common good), on the other.
If one recognizes that political participation means engaging with the project of fostering that equilibrium - and if one accepts the notion of a kind of social-historical poetry (epic/long-poem/pastoral) - one might see how in different ways these two activities intersect. Because an "achievable" or sustainable pastoral world is obviously a project of social justice, in the most general and inclusive sense (ie., all the multifarious ways people engage in beneficial social activity). So pastoral poetry would necessarily have a political aspect.
Language - and poetry - of course, cannot be channeled or directed from the outside, not by any political strategy, philosophy, or 5-yr plan. The force of language - lyric, dramatic, narrative, didactic, satirical, comic - manifests in autonomous and unpredictable fashion. Setting aside any purely aesthetic argument, poetic language is a manifestation of the freedom of the human spirit. The project of epic/long-poem, however - akin to similar efforts in other modes of literature - is to represent "social wholes" or shared realities; they are narratives which reach for wide public recognition and assent/dissent.
[*in the 2nd collage in Stubborn Grew, there's a little photo of me standing next to that greenhouse. The CETA project which built it was probably one of the more unusual in the history of federal programs. A 6-sided solar greenhouse, about 40 ft long and 20 ft tall, designed so its 6 points would touch the side of a "vesica", the geometrical figure formed by the intersection of two circles; length dimensions were drawn from British author John Michell's various books on ancient "sacred geometry". Constructed by Brown student volunteers & CETA high school kids from Fox Point. One of the Brown students, Mark Van Noppen, went on to become a leading builder of urban rehab housing in Providence.]
Interesting that he starts the genealogy with Pound. You could think of epic, long-poem, and pastoral (the goal of epic?) as sharing a certain space. Pound thought of his long-poem as a "tale of the tribe" (see Michael Bernstein book on this).
When I started exploring this area for myself, back in the early 80s, I was still working as a VISTA volunteer for various community/activist groups in Providence. I had managed a food coop & community gardens, & a CETA project with high school kids, to build a "community solar greenhouse"*. I was finishing a M.A. in community organizing at Beacon College in Boston. This work influenced my literary outlook, too. The notion of a long poem for me had to do with forms of poetry which were able to connect with historical movements & narratives, and with a kind of ideal, at least, of "public speech".
So for me the notion of pastoral had (& still has) a populist-political cast. Just part of the general awareness or desire for a "sustainable" common life, in harmony with the world (with people & nature in general). The relationship between social justice, the common good, and a healthy integration with nature.
In the days of VISTA we had a sense that the right thing for young people to do, before they plunged into the private sector in one way or another, was to work in the public sector - to monitor and rein in private interests on behalf of the common good. We were young & naive enough to imagine we had a pretty clear & reasonable notion of what that common good was, and that there was a kind of heroic grassroots/everyday struggle going on, against business interests & corrupt pols, that grassroots people could get involved with.
Why this was the right thing to do was precisely because the common good, since it is so vast, amorphous, and future-oriented, really has few advocates - unlike the narrow & short-term interests of the private sector. And this amorphous ideal quality was akin to the interests of the poor, who also had few advocates. And young people, because of their relative freedom from narrow obligations, were in a position to be those advocates. There's something beautiful about this notion, almost romantic. During the course of the 80s and 90s, political advocacy expanded, sharpened, and professionalized to a great degree. Lines were drawn more sharply, and soft-romantic idealism was curtailed.
This is how I see (very vaguely, anyway), the process happening over the last few decades. But I think underlying the rather naive and perhaps arrogant worldview of those times (mid to late 70s), there is a kernel of truth, an unresolved goal. How so? Well, politics, social policy, social justice are basically about figuring out how to live together. And there is always going to be a necessary balancing-out, an equilibrium, between particular special/private interests (both economic & political), on the one hand, and government policy regarding the welfare of the whole (the common good), on the other.
If one recognizes that political participation means engaging with the project of fostering that equilibrium - and if one accepts the notion of a kind of social-historical poetry (epic/long-poem/pastoral) - one might see how in different ways these two activities intersect. Because an "achievable" or sustainable pastoral world is obviously a project of social justice, in the most general and inclusive sense (ie., all the multifarious ways people engage in beneficial social activity). So pastoral poetry would necessarily have a political aspect.
Language - and poetry - of course, cannot be channeled or directed from the outside, not by any political strategy, philosophy, or 5-yr plan. The force of language - lyric, dramatic, narrative, didactic, satirical, comic - manifests in autonomous and unpredictable fashion. Setting aside any purely aesthetic argument, poetic language is a manifestation of the freedom of the human spirit. The project of epic/long-poem, however - akin to similar efforts in other modes of literature - is to represent "social wholes" or shared realities; they are narratives which reach for wide public recognition and assent/dissent.
[*in the 2nd collage in Stubborn Grew, there's a little photo of me standing next to that greenhouse. The CETA project which built it was probably one of the more unusual in the history of federal programs. A 6-sided solar greenhouse, about 40 ft long and 20 ft tall, designed so its 6 points would touch the side of a "vesica", the geometrical figure formed by the intersection of two circles; length dimensions were drawn from British author John Michell's various books on ancient "sacred geometry". Constructed by Brown student volunteers & CETA high school kids from Fox Point. One of the Brown students, Mark Van Noppen, went on to become a leading builder of urban rehab housing in Providence.]
3.22.2005
3.11.2005
(Sloop Providence, sailing upstream)
2.17.2005
2.11.2005
If Paris hadn't stolen Edgar Allan Poe, St. Petersburg would have had to invent him. See Mandelshtam's poem in which Poe appears (you'll have to do some research about the "tickling scarf"). Poe spent his dying days chasing after a phantom beloved named Helen Whitman, a Providence poet. I walk by her home on Benefit St. on my lunch break nearly every day.
Are there no grad students in English lit willing to sacrifice their careers for this? No - they haven't read Keats yet.
Are there no grad students in English lit willing to sacrifice their careers for this? No - they haven't read Keats yet.
2.03.2005
9.22.2004
9.17.2004
Days of hectic. Yet must I drone, drone I must.
Reading about Sienese painting, history. Sounds abstruse? Not really. Democracy, civic values, religion, art, Black Death.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescos of Good/Bad Government in Palazzo Pubblico. Probably influence on Bruegel. Exploratory, panoramic improvisation.
Providence I am reading your local papers. Same issues - gov't overburdened with inertia, selfish interests, bureaucracy. Various levels & types of apartheid longstanding ("suburban golf protection racket" as Stubborn puts it). But hopeful civic efforts underway everywhere - creative projects of betterments.
Lorenzetti read Divina Commedia and was one of first - maybe the first pictor of Dante.
*
Walking about today with fleeting quarter-thoughts in between work. Mild, muggy.
Stevens' Adagia - the ones where he holds "poetry" and "poetry of life" in each hand. Maybe no other way to apprehend it??
Poetry is a sense. Not words, really. We have to feel our way into it again, blindly - into the sense of it we had in our youth, man' decades ago.
I mean poetry in its psychological/experiential context. . . what am I saying? When you ponder the vast variety of human capabilities, personality bents, individual experiences - such ground the vast differences in taste, apprehension, appreciation, valuation. & often I think we literary leeches are the most blind - through jaded appetite. We no longer respond as we did, to a new world speaking to us from the page.
But my own argument here excludes the word "we" to some extent (talkin about myself, I guess). Nothing is determined or set in stone in this regard. We may again find ourselves caught up in a new literary charm, a new discovery, a new love.
Poetry is a sense. A sense of reality-as-poetry. A premonition.
I have a literary reputation as odd, eccentric. Also boring, conventional, traditionalist. Actually I am Super-Normal Standard Poet. My literary memory is an echo chamber. I keep alive certain normal ways of speakin'.
Reading about Sienese painting, history. Sounds abstruse? Not really. Democracy, civic values, religion, art, Black Death.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescos of Good/Bad Government in Palazzo Pubblico. Probably influence on Bruegel. Exploratory, panoramic improvisation.
Providence I am reading your local papers. Same issues - gov't overburdened with inertia, selfish interests, bureaucracy. Various levels & types of apartheid longstanding ("suburban golf protection racket" as Stubborn puts it). But hopeful civic efforts underway everywhere - creative projects of betterments.
Lorenzetti read Divina Commedia and was one of first - maybe the first pictor of Dante.
*
Walking about today with fleeting quarter-thoughts in between work. Mild, muggy.
Stevens' Adagia - the ones where he holds "poetry" and "poetry of life" in each hand. Maybe no other way to apprehend it??
Poetry is a sense. Not words, really. We have to feel our way into it again, blindly - into the sense of it we had in our youth, man' decades ago.
I mean poetry in its psychological/experiential context. . . what am I saying? When you ponder the vast variety of human capabilities, personality bents, individual experiences - such ground the vast differences in taste, apprehension, appreciation, valuation. & often I think we literary leeches are the most blind - through jaded appetite. We no longer respond as we did, to a new world speaking to us from the page.
But my own argument here excludes the word "we" to some extent (talkin about myself, I guess). Nothing is determined or set in stone in this regard. We may again find ourselves caught up in a new literary charm, a new discovery, a new love.
Poetry is a sense. A sense of reality-as-poetry. A premonition.
I have a literary reputation as odd, eccentric. Also boring, conventional, traditionalist. Actually I am Super-Normal Standard Poet. My literary memory is an echo chamber. I keep alive certain normal ways of speakin'.
9.15.2004
This just in (Pravda) : Allen Bramhall reading Stubborn Grew
Allen - word of advice from the Author Position. Do not begin to feel that reading it is work, or that you are guilty, inadequate. I Author have ofttimes done my Readers (& Author-Self) a disservice by harping on the deep complexity and High Postoffice-Modern Seriousness-Quality of my Work.
Remember : the Poem was written by a (drunken/sleeping) snail (Dung-Beetle) trying to munch his way into Providence. It should be read in that Spirit as well. It was written for fun, fun, fun and is meant to be fun, fun, fun - a true Leisure Time Activity brought to you by Prof. Leisure Time himself.
I have found that the best way to read my Work is in the Tub, out loud, while your Significant Author pours buckets of warm Water over your head. This tends to bring out the real "Ocean State" flavor (or material status) of the Verse.
Allen - word of advice from the Author Position. Do not begin to feel that reading it is work, or that you are guilty, inadequate. I Author have ofttimes done my Readers (& Author-Self) a disservice by harping on the deep complexity and High Postoffice-Modern Seriousness-Quality of my Work.
Remember : the Poem was written by a (drunken/sleeping) snail (Dung-Beetle) trying to munch his way into Providence. It should be read in that Spirit as well. It was written for fun, fun, fun and is meant to be fun, fun, fun - a true Leisure Time Activity brought to you by Prof. Leisure Time himself.
I have found that the best way to read my Work is in the Tub, out loud, while your Significant Author pours buckets of warm Water over your head. This tends to bring out the real "Ocean State" flavor (or material status) of the Verse.
3.16.2004
I finish the architecture poem about the synagogue. I open the paper (Providence Journal), and there's a big photo of a cantor & a choir, singing, under a dome. It's the Temple Emanu-El Choral Club, doing a benefit for South Prov. Neighborhood Ministries. Headline : "With One Voice".
The thing is, does anybody know how to read this kind of poem? I don't care. I actually know how good it is.
The thing is, does anybody know how to read this kind of poem? I don't care. I actually know how good it is.
3.01.2004
2.26.2004
Article in Providence Journal relating local clergy & rabbi responses to Gibson film. The minister, countering rabbi's wish for more emphasis on Jesus' teachings & good works, says that the important thing is the "theological statement". Quoting Isaiah ("by his stripes we are healed") he offers the standard atonement version ("it was God's will that Jesus suffer & die. That's why he was born," etc.).
The language of theology is not simple or reducible to sound bites. But this narrow "atonement" perspective troubles me. If the suffering & death were all part of God's Plan, then human free will, & the human choice to commit sin & evil, are thereby negated. This is a murky kind of absolution, a sloughing of responsibility in the name of divinely-ordained fate.
I don't think it was ever God's will that Jesus be crucified, just as it was never God's will that Cain or anyone after him commit murder. Rather, Jesus may have willingly undergone the ultimate assault of human evil (murder, represented by the Roman crucifix), trusting in God's will nevertheless, in spite of all and in the face of the end.
No, I think God's will was that Christ, enduring, defeat death and evil, a victory represented in the Resurrection. God did not design the universe as a total scapegoat process, or mechanism, in which the death of one liberates the rest of us. It's the spirit that liberates, and we are called upon to "work out our salvation" in that light.
The language of theology is not simple or reducible to sound bites. But this narrow "atonement" perspective troubles me. If the suffering & death were all part of God's Plan, then human free will, & the human choice to commit sin & evil, are thereby negated. This is a murky kind of absolution, a sloughing of responsibility in the name of divinely-ordained fate.
I don't think it was ever God's will that Jesus be crucified, just as it was never God's will that Cain or anyone after him commit murder. Rather, Jesus may have willingly undergone the ultimate assault of human evil (murder, represented by the Roman crucifix), trusting in God's will nevertheless, in spite of all and in the face of the end.
No, I think God's will was that Christ, enduring, defeat death and evil, a victory represented in the Resurrection. God did not design the universe as a total scapegoat process, or mechanism, in which the death of one liberates the rest of us. It's the spirit that liberates, and we are called upon to "work out our salvation" in that light.
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