Updated HG Poetics layout, with friends & heroes...

Have been reading Marguerite Yourcenar's novel Memoirs of Hadrian - enjoying it as much as The Abyss, which I read a few yrs ago.

this just in : Ramblin' Bramhall uses word "ducats". May have been reading Yourcenar in his subconscious mind.

Finished Yourcenar's The Abyss over the weekend. I can't remember reading a better historical novel. & it's more than an "historical novel".

Set in mid-1500s. Makes you realize very clearly why Pilgrims etc. came over here (& of course everything was sweetness & light, over here! like in Salem!). Pure hell of religious wars, totalitarian empires, persecution of science, free thought... she piles on layer after layer of human folly.

Her gift for depth of detail, characterization. The dialogues read like a very good play.

There are certain words one ought to use with care, or better yet, not at all. Like "soul".

This mysterious entity... sometimes I think that the gospel sayings about the kingdom of heaven actually refer to the soul itself. Like, "the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure a man buried in a field. Then he went and sold all he had, and bought that field." [quoting from memory]

Or all the precepts about giving up the world and saving one's soul. "What shall a man give for his soul?" etc.

Reading Yourcenar's Abyss got me on this trend of thought (if you can call it that).

This elusive treasure... a person's vital, originary essence... (thus the blind glibness begins...) I wrote here on the blog once, "life is pioneering". Maybe life is the soul's pioneering.

The furtive sense of a perimeter, or the circumference of one's proper being... of being at home there... (or is it all vanity, delusion, complacency? That too.)

Religious faith perhaps is the inward acknowledgement of the soul's origin in some kind of metaphysical gift. "We know that all good and perfect things are from above, from the Father of Lights..." (Epistle of James, roughly, from memory).

Remember all those literary debates over the status of the self in poetry? Even the notion of a "school of quietude" implies various & contrary attitudes toward "the soul", toward individuality. If the soul exists... the architecture of modern notions of personhood would have to be revised.

Yeats, for one, gives the impression of a fiery intelligence - like a visionary semi-angelic being, trapped in a sort of infernal denial at some deep level (amid all the beautiful affirmations). He delves down & back - like Blake - to the creative, titanic origins of reality - occulted in the powers of the human self & soul. But his historical-theosophical-visionary structures (in A Vision, etc.) - those "amazing" gyres - somehow sidestep or seek to replace the Redemption. It's ambiguous, though - very. Yeats was playing with spiritual fire; but I don't want to typecast him according to some kind of dogmatic hypothesis. (how does it go, that ecstatic little poem about blessing & being blessed?)

Reading Marguerite Yourcenar's The Abyss. By centering the story on Zeno, an alchemist with a single-minded scientific passion to know & to free himself, who delves into the hermetic secrets of the 4 elements within nature & his own body, Yourcenar gives very rich & vivid shape to a distant time (1500s Europe). The novel somewhat reflects Zeno's own fascination with the human microcosm, becoming a literary microcosm.

Funny how yesterday I was sidelining "hermeticism", since this novel reminded me (this morning) how important the alchemical-hermetic aspect is to the U.S. long poem. Both Paterson ("the giant, Paterson"; "a man = a city") & Maximus are structured largely as literary-alchemical transmutations (the epic questor becomes "Everyman", the image/bearer/creator of a cosmos). I've noticed before an odd thing about alchemical notions (the 4 elements, the transmutation of metals, etc.): once you take note of them in literature, they seem to crop up everywhere. I guess you may say that writing itself can be read alchemically.

Kenneth Warren, in his little mag House Organ, has published a serialized study of Charles Olson & Maximus ("The Emperor's New Code") which is steeped in alchemical-theosophical lore.

(However, let's be clear: alchemy, hermeticism, literary obscurity, trobar clus... these are not all the same thing. In other words I would still disagree with Ron S. when he suggests that a kind of secret writing for adepts represents authorial respect for the intelligence of the reader, or that trobar clus-like poetry is or will be the engine of literary change & advance. Yourcenar (or Nabokov, for another example, or Shakespeare) is a great writer because, among other things, she is master of a clear, precise, and capacious style - capable of absorbing and reflecting realities on many different levels.)