Black holes have rings of light straw hair

SCRIMSHAW TRINKET

                    It’s the past that tells us who we are.  Without it

                    we lose our identity.  –  Stephen Hawking

A raven carried heaven-manna

out of the ark to lonesome

Jonah – him just come

from under the whale-rib (manna

overboard) stranded on sand

off Galilee, RI –

& it made him cry.

Those crispy cackles he couldn’t

understand – like low gull-talk

sent through a black-

hole paradox;

light straw climbed an orange rock

from the event horizon up to

null infinity –

it was all catenary,

looped in one wave-smile... – who?

Gravity? – or Grace?  Eurydice,

maybe.  (It was her cave.)

Spoiled meat you crave

is portioned by division – say,

two doves for every plowman’s mule.

Queequeg in his casket

(like a scrimshaw trinket)

penned our sempiternal Rule –

each rustic Penny in the well of night

was tender out of love.

Her vernal sparkle-trove

is polyglot – Euphrasia (eyebright).

6.8.16

Monk's Mound (Illinois)

the order of the day

LITTLE MOTH

Jesus likely would not recognize

what we have made of him –

exemplar (in rite & hymn)

of royal prehistoric Zeus

or Pharaoh-gilded rain.  Human

mind climbs out of beast.

Not long ago, the feast

was drunken heads – the scar remain.

The ink dries on a twisted pattern.

Tyrant’s father-hamlet,

laden sack – fried omelet-

omen (under midnight sun).

A raven zigzags over Noah’s

bow (yew, cypress,

acacia).  Her nest

will not be found on land, selah.

Someone, singing a see-saw

in Galilee.  Sea-

shanty (shanti, shanti)

maybe.  Malcolm?  Simone?  Naw...

maybe.  Light metamorphosis

the order of the day.

Pines, tamarack (way

back beyond Ravenna, Beatrice)...

A little moth molts molten gold

out of black stone,

southwest (of high Zion).

Wings ray to Nazir tinder... (fold).

2.19.16

Papa touches down

MAZY SIMONE

Equinox : a bridge between seasons.

Nay, no night-mare;

articulate as horsehair

& as serviceable.  Musique de balance,

équilibre – night & day,

reason & faith.  Of summer,

d’automne... (mordant humor,

luminous grief)... Hey-hey,

giddy-up, Old Paint!  We galumphin’ to see

the Pope touch down, in D.C.!

Strait o’ Columba, maybe –

where turtles kick through tough gray

curves – like a mess o’ limbic pigeons

decorating limestone

from the air.  Everyone

behold her, now – mazy Simone’s

the River Queen.  Like Ariadne

with her golden seine,

or murmurous Magdalen

of sunburnt feet, she will meander

underneath each Maximus

(from Po to Eridanus,

Neva-Neva to the rusty

Don)... O Theseus, she’s mulish US!

Chart the way-way back now, Mary.

Through this labyrinth

of dinosaurs, a kitten’s

coracle will bless – make merry.

9.22.15

Simone & Maximus & me

The French writer/philosopher/mystic Simone Weil appealed to me in the mid-1980s (still does).  Ascetic worker/dreamer; deep Biblical exegete.  I remember walking down to Seward's Folly bookshop, at the Fox Point end of Brook St., & asking Mr. Seward, the freewheeling eccentric bookseller & former Connecticut goat farmer, to look for a scarce book by her.  Seward threw up his hands.  "Simone Weil!  I adore that woman - but sometimes I want to grab her by the shoulders & give her a good shake!"

I can't remember much of what I read back then.  But I have a vague idea regarding some of her commentaries on the growth of the human soul.  How at a certain point the natural energies of the human person (like vegetation that runs out of water) wear themselves out; through mistakes & sufferings, the natural person reaches a psychic & physical limit.  Then only an infusion of supernatural grace can save the soul.

It meant something to me; I could identify with it.  I'd been there.

This is all by way of a lead-in to a second writer who (like Osip Mandelstam) has meant a lot to me, periodically, intermittently, over the years : the Byzantine theologian (& ordinary monk, & martyr) Maximus the Confessor.  I'm back again reading him, & about him (Microcosm & Mediator, by Lars Thunberg, is a magisterial study, a terrific book; Cosmic Liturgy, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, is another one).

My "professional" life in the vocation of poet has been a very strange & frustrating experience.  I think I speak for all poets when I say this (just kidding, sort of).  I'm absolutely sure that 99% of the mistakes along the way - moral, ethical, intellectual, aesthetic, etc. - have been my own.

But there is a kernel of strangeness in this overall experience - not so much strange, as uncanny - which I attribute to objective reality, rather than to my own quirks of psychology & moral turpitude.  This uncanny crux has something to do with Simone Weil's schema of the end of nature & the beginning of grace.

Maximus, I hazard to think, would trace Weil's divide back to the ur-distinction of his own theological vision : the difference between Creator and Creation.  What the worldview of brilliant Maximus does, however - with the suavity of Shakespeare & the incisiveness of Aristotle - is to reconcile this basic difference without blurring the distinction.  That is, he propounds a cosmic landscape, wherein the simple unknowable Oneness of the Creator is reconciled with the multitudinous Manyness of the Creation.  Incarnation is the name of that process by which the Many are harmonized with the One - by which all beings are united in creative Love, without losing their distinct identity & freedom as unique replicas of that original Creator.

I realize how hokey this sounds.  But it has a lot of resonance with the worldview of a poet who inherited - after many long centuries - the Orthodox legacy from Byzantium : Nikolai Gumilev, the founder of the Acmeist movement in Russian poetry, which Mandelstam & Akhmatova brought to full flower.  Gumilev adumbrated an underlying worldview for Acmeist poetics : he called it "chasteness".  It is something maybe akin to Walt Whitman's visionary sense of the "Union" of many equally beautiful things (small & great, humble & vast).  The idea is that poetry's moral purpose has to do with celebrating the "chasteness" - the inherent dignity - of all things on earth : because it (poetry) is a loving response - an echo - of the supernatural good will of their creative Origin.

This is a sort of mystical idea, I guess.  My own life as a poet is rooted, paradoxically, in a spiritual crisis & break from poetry.  I came to the end of my vegetable nature, so to speak (in Weil's sense), at the age of 19.  It was a common thing, & still is : a young person torn apart by the world's chaos, & by his or her own sense of betrayal (self-betrayal, betrayal of others).  The fanatic young enthusiasts of ISIS are not really that different.  They are Simone Weil's déracinés - the spiritually uprooted.  There but for the grace of God go I.

So I worked back slowly into poetry (thanks mostly to Stuart Blazer, John Tagliabue, Edwin Honig & Osip Mandelstam).  We are talking about things that happened 35 years ago, in the late 70s.  But these spiritual experiences marked me.  I have lived on the margins of "professional" poetry ever since.  There are many reasons for this, I admit, not all of them having to do with the present self-mythologizing.  But the central motive, the reason which keeps impelling me to write, is the theological one.  Once you have this salt of the realm of Jesus planted in you, it does not easily fade away.  It's a realm of supernatural joy : an infusion of saving grace : who would want to throw that away?

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.)

In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam repeatedly evokes something she calls "humanism", or "traditional humanism", by which (I think) she means the basic ordinary values underlying normative civil society and social life, basic human kindliness and sense of mutual responsibility, sanity, "piety" in the old sense, natural law, the golden rule, simple good nature, the "love your neighbor" ethic... - which she records being systematically wiped out under Stalin, and which she found in paradoxical places (not so much among the intelligentsia, as among the humblest & poorest workers & displaced peasants, who helped the Mandelstams on their hard road).

It seems to me that - with respect to this sense of "humanism" - M.'s notion of the cultural meaning of Redemption - as sketched in the unfinished essay "Pushkin & Scriabin" - is enormously rich in implications & possibilities.

As I noted before here, his idea that the once-&-for-all Redemption sets culture & art free, for spiritual play - "hide & seek with the Father", as he puts it - could be aligned with a sort of classicism. This is so because any concept of Redemption is underwritten by a certain certainty about the divine purpose : the Redemption is a showing-forth of divine providential wisdom & plan. Such belief in divine plan is not solely Christian, but structures most ancient religious thought & culture. One can see it in the Stoic's acceptance of destiny, the amor fati. One can see it in all kinds of fatalistic determinism, religious & philosophical. One of the hallmarks of "classicism" in art is its expressive awareness & representation of "the way things are", the way things cannot otherwise be.

(Simone Weil wrote some penetrating essays on this topic, which offer an interesting parallel to Mandelstam's orientation. She focused on ancient Greek concepts of beauty, necessity, and mediation - and their analogues in Christian concepts of nature and grace.)

But there is something else going on with Mandelstam & his neo-classical Acmeism, something which actually opposes fatalism & any kind of indifference. M. likened the poet or artist to the "grateful guest" in the beautiful & tremendous "palace" of the earth, nature, Creation. This is one expression of the specifically Christian grounding of the idea of Providence in the love-relationship between creature & Creator. The artist - & the human being generally - fulfills his or her nature most completely, by embracing this playful relationship of love & trust between the human and the divine. Life here is given complete meaning within the circle defined by the radius of relation between creature & Creator. This is indeed a specifically religious (as well as philosophical) way or means of understanding the nature of the cosmos & our experience of life. (If our ultimate understanding of experience is shaped by a loving relation between creature and Creator - well, there are implications here not only about fate & destiny & plan, but also about (playful) freedom - the spiritual freedom of the children of God, in the Pauline sense.)

My own interest, for a while now, has been to explore how such a worldview can be synthesized with the specific powers & qualities of making my poems, & with poetry in general (how, in this context, the manner & discourse of poetry relates/contrasts to other forms of human expression). Along with recognizing the human (and personal) limitations on any such verbal formulae or "explanations" of experience : since there is always a deeper level, oftentimes shunted aside or avoided - a more acute angle of perception, a blindspot...

Re-reading Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks. Brilliant, radiant intellect. One of the most profound books I know. The essay on Pythagoreanism. The equations or affinities she develops between mathematical and religious concepts. Comparable notions of suffering, kenosis and mediation. The concept of number and the (trinitarian) nature of God. French clarity, & some other kind of depth and passion... this book is one of the cornerstones of civilization.

(BTW see Charles Simic's little poem in this week's New Yorker. This is a poem about kenosis.)

On a different topic : strong sense, walking around this morning, of poetry as evocative dream. When the imagination is stirred by the evocation of a feeling-scene... remote, rare, elusive, subjective, personal. Rilke comes to mind. The legend of the poet wrapped up in song-feeling-memory. Distance, absence. Adolescence. Hard for me to describe this clearly. Attendant sense of a kind of betrayal or desolation of this reality, in the constant internet chit-chat (my own, especially) about "poetry".

*

(Maybe this isn't a completely different topic. There's a passage in Weil where she briefly analyzes the concept of the Trinity, and the idea of God as Subject, the one whose name is "I am"... & how it could be that God is wholly Love and Goodness, and also the active Subject, enveloping & encompassing all subjectivity... she identifies this with early Greek philosophers - e.g. Philolaus's terse saying about the One, whose first creation is Unity, the name of which is Hestia, or the hearth-fire... Weil outlines how this agrees with the idea of the Trinity...)

In a lifelong effort to reconcile Greek philosophy & Christianity (Hellenism & Hebraism), Simone Weil had a lot of deep things to say about the relation between beauty and justice. See her writings on suffering, mediation, geometry...

Jonathan presses me on some seeming contradictions in the good ol' comment box below. I really should go back and read that prose piece by Celan ("Conversation in the Mountains") before saying anything, but, hey, what the heck, this is blogging...

As I recall, Celan's little story of a walk & conversation in the Alps with a mysterious interlocutor is very playful and elliptical. But they circle around some deep questions about the nature of poetry, art and truth - the relations between these three.

& I think (& I could be way wrong) that the story emphasizes a certain coldness and inhumanity involved in the nature of artifice - its creation of models, of simulacra. He's thinking, maybe, about Plato's suspicions (the cave of images, & all that), &/or about the Biblical prohibition of images of God. The problem - which penetrates to language itself, and through all kinds of social/intellectual "constructs" - is that, in the very activity of art-making and symbol-making and image-making, humanity both alienates and reifies life - creates a spurious reality - loses touch with the roots of authentic being - loses its soul...

The poet is involved in a paradoxical activity. Perhaps Celan's concept shows some similarities to Simone Weil's "decreation", and Wallace Stevens' "ignorance" ("you must become an ignorant man", etc.). To the idea that poetry - compared to the other arts - is simple or "poor" art - "abstract", as with a mathematical theorem or a piece of Shaker furniture.

We are talking about a streak of deep iconoclasm in the spirit of poetry.

About the idea that the poet somehow absorbs and perfects all the other arts - absorbs them back into the primordial "word". And in the process, shakes off all the reifications of artifice : reveals the "nakedness" of human (& divine) truths. (Think William Blake.)

This is the deep paradoxical coil wherein poetry both perfects and inverts prose, art, etc. Radical truth-speaking at the source of the charming masquerade of rhetoric, artfulness and ornamentation.

... & so the mysterious Xmas guest Gabriel Gudding heads back (in his little blue car) into the flat deep skyland of the midwest. It was great to see him, compagnevolo of him to come calling. Usually we seem to agree to disagree. I too adore Simone Weil - but not for her rejections...

... bringing me to the diagram with which I began the previous post.

What might a "neo-medieval" reading of Stubborn Grew/The Rose (Forth of July) involve?

ut pictura poiesis. Most of my long poems have paintings all through them. (My mother is an artist - I grew up with the smell of turpentine & canvases.)

Think of poetry as occupying a middle ground between painting and the unrepresentable (God's name, Simone Weil's "decreation"). Ekphrasis : in two directions at once.

Chinese characters/brush strokes.

Stubborn begins and ends with "J". (Bluejay : the bird, the man; Juliet, Jonah ["dove", sister-dove], Julie, July, Jubilee, Jerusalem...)

"J", the letter, comes from "i", iota, jot, yhod : the smallest letter of the Hebrew script, maybe going back to Egyptian/Phoenician pictograph for "hand" or "arm". In Hebrew, it's the 10th letter, the smallest letter (jot or tittle), a little dot or black wing-stroke or swirl. A J-swirl.

The whole poem can be understood as an ekphrasis-expansion from the letter J. (When I was beginning to write it, I was heavily influenced by a particular Melville study, titled Game of Creation, by Viola Sachs, which goes into the scriptorial letter-symbolism deeply encrypted into Moby Dick.) A Book of J.

This practice is maybe a new-old kind of neo-medieval classicism : in which the individual imagination is not stifled by dogma, but tempered by the necessary impossibility of representing the Invisible, the Unspeakable.

Hamlet's Mill can be read as an extended improvisation on some astonishing essays by Simone Weil (see her Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks). Despite the profound ambiguities & historical-cultural distortions of her (very Jewish) anti-Jewish bias, Weil is worlds apart from some of the New-Age gematriastic numerological-astrological-gnostical book-biz blah-blah around these topics. Basically, she bears witness to the harmony of Hellenic-Hebraic understanding (the traditional evidence of "psychic wholeness" in "the West"): science/art, knowledge/soul, transcendence/suffering. Though she distances herself from her Jewish roots, she never disavows the "need for roots": nor the centrality of suffering & love - suffering for proud "knowledge" (grace redeeming fallen gnosis).

(This is, as we know from the Romantics, Dante, & others, a traditional role for poets, too: saving the appearances, synthesizing reason & love.)

The HM authors (Santillana & Dechend) acknowledge her as one, of just 2 authors, who has a clue.

I suppose the existence of many-in-one is what allows for the possibility of the beautiful.

& if you grant the existence of many-in-one, you necessarily grant the existence of one.

Perhaps the tendency toward the many is creation, while the tendency toward the one is (in Simone Weil's terms) decreation.

But I would say that behind these abstractions there is always. . . someone.

You could start almost anywhere with Simone Weil, Anastasios. Her extremism is seemingly inseparable from her genius, she's one of the most moving & powerful writers I've ever read. There are some essays which are in the form of devotional meditations - I think some are collected in Waiting for God. Also the very curious tract The Need for Roots deals with this question of an inherent thirst for God, in the context of a kind of neo-medieval social vision. My favorite works are the 2-vol. Notebooks, a posthumous collection, a grand mish-mash of theological/scientific/philosophical/gnostic/aesthetic notes & plans for essays, also Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks, where her extensive knowledge of mathematics is brought to bear on some very beautiful theological speculations.

Simone Weil was deeply troubled & divided about established religion. Though a devout Catholic on an intellectual level, she refused to participate in the institution of the Church; though Jewish, her notebooks are filled with antagonism toward Old Testament Hebrew religion (she equates the Hebrews with the Romans as forms of totalitarian society). Perhaps there was an element of self-hatred at work. I'm not that familiar with the details of her biography, except that she died in a London hospital during WW 2, exiled from France, essentially of starvation, in solidarity with the French people. She loved the Greeks & she loved France. And she had a compassionate awareness of, and participation in, human suffering, which radiates through everything she wrote (and did).