I hate to generalize about this, but it seems to me that for many poets everything begins in early adolescence. (Maybe it's all a puberty rite.)

In early adolescence there are no sharp borders between poetry and other kinds of writing, or between poetry and experience in general, or between a writer and his or her comrades in writing.

Classicism(?)... we (or I) need a new word for this. Since the Romantic era youth has been lock-kneed, stereotyped, as rebellion. But the passion of young poets for literature has as much to do with a secret affinity for the voice of experience. Classicism should not simply be equated with realism or world-weariness (though these aspects cannot be denied, either). Think rather of the notion of hard-won experience. The voice of character & wisdom - of the veterans of spiritual battles, of living itself.

New forms of such classicism appear in every generation - the enthusiasm of young poets for their own literary discoveries, their delvings into the past, the obscure quaint voices of the ancients (or even just the previous generation) - which turn out to be unexpectedly familiar - clear & pungent.

Keats we think of as a Romantic... but he was also classic in this sense. The classiest of the classic.

back to when I must have lost that book in a field somewhere.

August flowers, going dry & spindly. crickets & cicadas.

evening sneaks up, unnoticed, on the late afternoon.

but I want to go back to when neither I nor War & Peace (over in the hammock, there) were done with yet.

You were a work-in-progress. she, a story you had just begun to read.

longing & suspense.

everyone is too literalist, serious, ponderous, explicit, competitive.

art is not sports. we run too fast & slow for sports - the umpires get befuddled.

I want to go back to my reading habits of, say, age 14-18.

I want to shuffle off the coils of anxiety & trouble, toil & stress. back to when reading & daydreaming were one.

art is not sports, but it's sort of a game - how to express things... pleasing, penetrating...

what I write is not me; furthermore, it's only an approximation. (see Nicholas of Cusa on that)

an equilibrium (the inner Law) lies behind good literature. implicit rightness. le mot juste.

a portion of sanity & civilization. salted with spiritual rigor (the steep).

don't jade your appetite with excess. don't tyrannize your own climate.

don't harp on what you like, because then I won't like it. Just leave the book lying around : maybe I'll pick it up.

Let's say the shadow of secularism is mechanism - materialist, amoral, in a mechanical void. The shadow of theism is totalitarianism - cult of personality combined with mind-control (sounds a lot like a war between them, in the vicinity of Ur of the Chaldees). Let's say the light of secularism is humanism, out of Athens : the notion of the divine as a principle of balance, about which no individual mortal or group can claim to formulate anything absolutely authoritative. Origins of democracy. Let's say the light of theism is a covenantal God of Love, out of Jerusalem : a kind of antithetical trickster-Yahweh, patched together out of Abraham's familial daemon & Moses' slave-liberator God - antithetical because a critical mirror-image of the authoritarian sacred kingship of the Middle East.

Both Greek humanism & Hebrew theism, then, can be said to integrate strictly human power & capability with an intervening divine principle (balance, Nature, justice, on the one hand; creator-Yahweh on the other). Greek tragedy images the choral nature of humanism : not a single voice, but many, in a wheel of nature. Hebrew prophets exemplify the poetic response - the lyric formulation - of the human relationship with divine justice.

If we think of divinity as an unaccountable conjunction of opposing forces - the Person & the Principle, maybe we can begin to grasp this notion of mediation that so fascinated Simone Weil. The Logos-Word-Person mediates between binaries, the many & the one. Weil (& Plato) calls this mediator "Love".

Think of democracy as a means of establishing the principle of balance among opposing interests (demos & oligarchy, private & public) - in other words, as a practical response to crisis, stasis ("conflict" to the Greeks), the dis-ordering of authority. Then think of the Christian Passion narrative in political terms : the crucifixion of a mock-king of Israel between an incited mob, a self-interested oligarchy, and an imperial power. This is a theatrical presentation of the collapse, or carnivalization almost, of political authority. Then think again of the characterization of Hebrew religion as a lyric-prophetic voicing of the human/divine relation ("covenant") : sacred song, song-authority. Then think of some earlier posts in this blog, back in the archives, where I was pondering the psychological impulse behind lyric poetry - as maybe originating in the crisis of late adolescence - the gap between the time of childhood (under parental authority) & adulthood - the time of "hieros gamos", sexuality, marriage. Of poetry as breakdown, epileptic fit, charismatic reaction to the shift of authority. Then think that the ordering principles of both "polis" & "theos" were formulated & systematized by men. Then think of the women - Mary, the Magdalen, Beatrice - waiting in the wings. Then think of the trickster-Yahweh & his Word as the iconoclastic knife-line between collective formulations of justice (words, icons, images) - formulated by men - in love with his equally-unaccountable Bride. Think again of the conjunction of opposites (many & one, image & imageless, male & female, yin & yang, law & liberty, demos & individual, private & public). Then go read a little Nicholas Cusanus (Of Learned Ignorance). Keep thinking.

reading: Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy
Sayyid Qtub, Milestones
(stopped reading Kwinter also)

thinking of novel to be called Chronicle of Jehan.

Thinking there must be more to be thought about origin of poetry at the threshold of adulthood, when childhood is already a memory, & fictions are subject to disenchantment. Moment of premonition. intimations of (im)mortality.

sense that the artist has one song, subject to endless variation. inimitable. not so much a style as a moment of stillness, awareness, premonition. not mechanical surrealism ("fancy"), but still off the edge because emerging from so far down in the brain or heart. hobo song. duende.

song as swelling of the heart & premonition of death. feeling of fate. amor fatum(?) nothing to be done, only celebrate what you sense to the end. Auden's inner landscape that every poet carries around.

ultimate disenchantment. time only a moment & every person a world. the singer standing there singing, while fictions crumble & dissolve.