on Holy Saturday

RIVER-TOY

On Holy Saturday, the Great Sabbath

when Jesus murmured, It is finished

& in his grave (like Jonah’s fish)

rested… as in an Ocean River bath…

When 12-yr-old Henry grandly admired

his glue-stiff model (Old Ironsides)

alight with joy, & tired pride…

– as just now Sophie dashed across the yard

to him, 50 years later – to display

the paper flower boat (sky-

blue, & Clizia-giallo) she

runs off to let fly, down the Mississippi…

her tender river-toy… her revery, her rest.

& while Henry gyred – wacky

as Coney Island in Waconia –

like Hermann Gödel, in his final nest

of parenthetical limit (righteous exactitude

of unknowing) – across the path

from Sarah’s parents (math

of relativity – some spousal quark beatitude)…

Where the world ends, & begins again;

at Swan Point, where her mother lies

who died the day his father’s eyes

first opened.  Amid the Great Congregation

of synagogue & church (pain-bearing world)

one pearl-eye opens at the prow

of raven-beak Argo.  Mark thou

how contrapuntal matrices of love enfold.

4.11.20

etched in vernacular

BEEHIVE WITNESS

Dante’s rambles round the tamarack swamps

outside Ravenna.  Beached

hulks of Byzantium reach

toward the sea.  Inside, smoke-lamps

phosphoresce hieratic grandeur

(kind bovine gaze of Empress,

Emperor).  Alighieri’s

impressed – ecco l’ora serale

in those green sheepfold meadows

where Time does not run.

He pursues his martyrion –

Crusader grandfather, circle of Mars.

He etches in vernacular his answer

out of deep parish history

to the welded Roman panoply

(Arcadian melody, Virgilian whisper).

I am a scribe who when Love speaks

hastens after, hearkening

noting everything down.

I haven’t heard from Bea in weeks.

I remember lips set with a grim reproof.

Down at the borderland

(Texas to Samarkand) –

Coatlicue, Tezcalipoca... beetling roof

of squalling Raven years.  Esta

su iglesia, Henrique?

She’ll be coming like Elijah,

not Europa, now (beehive witness).

6.24.19

woodcut by Mary Ravlin Gould

under the sign of the Virgin

WRITING HAND

Herod the Great is out hunting tonight

to make himself great again.

History, all over.  Hen

clucks in pigpen.  Overhead, bright

Star of Stars yet hovers (esoteric,

weightless).  Invisible world

of worlds to come – squirreled

away in a barn (near Bethlehem, Pa).

Maximus, transfixed by history,

his writing hand severed,

still corresponded

with his nephew (far end of Black Sea).

Hen’s fishing for sense, like Hobo

the limp lamprey (curled

on the riverbank).  Churl?

Fisher King?  Overhead – Virgo.

Not the Twins, but something like.

Twin sitters.  Throned

drones, long retired

from hive (72 bricks of...).

Not trying to be obscure here,

that f’sure.  Innocence

dances through the universe

unfathomed on our faithless sphere.

On her Milky Way.  Here Grace Ravlin

sketches a summer evening

at Mt. Vernon – fingering

the treasure map (Pennsylvanian)

                  *

tracing a quiet constellation

echoed on the ground.

Her wisdom is profound

through purity.  Just perfection

mirrored in frame of Providence;

sunlit warmth of hearth

stirring Pig’s Eye from death

to life (St. Paul to Minneapolis).

The artist makes an eye with fingertips

at edge of scabbard.

Ariadne-thread.

Clue to labyrinth.  Slips

into Gloucester (blind man’s buff)

to paint twin boats

nestled in soft coats

of emerald.  Grace is enough.

Ceres, under Sirius... sparrows,

hysterica passio...

madness of Angelo

or any other tyrannos

threatening an alien child

(warped in labyrinth

of jealousy).  Absinthe,

minted at Fort Knox – wild

wrath of slighted boar (the king’s

own Fury).  Here’s the church,

here’s the steeple – open

the door... (where the sea-choir sings).

12.28.18

Grace Ravlin, Overlooking George Washington's Garden, 1922

goldenrod honeybee

LAMBENT FLUTE

This bumblebee on goldenrod,

hunting the crossroad

at close of summer.  Old

Hobo character – camouflaged

in yellow-black (almost).  Henry’s

obsession with absence.

I’d go the distance

into infinite cornfields, he says.

The river subculture, the dream

of floating back home.

Churnagogue palindrome

or unknown womb... clay baptism.

The cottonwood leaves seem to flow

like golden honey, then –

in Taurida, on the autumn

wind.  Like little heart-ships, so

they swim.  Out of the tight-knit shawl,

out of the everlasting

fire.  None shall be coming

to the Father except by Son, y’all –

by way of Mother.  That absolute

Somebody – a labyrinth

of stars, wherein we are hid

like lightning bugs, or lambent flute

reflections (crane-bone twins).

Flickering far beyond

woodpecker Trebizond,

sleepwalker Knossos – wheeling fins.

8.5.18

Jesus Thoughts (14) : on Resurrection

News that a famous American poet, Jack Gilbert, passed away on Nov. 11th.   A solitary figure, who avoided the limelight, working away on his spare, very free, very moving poems.  He was 87, afflicted with Alzheimer's (as Edwin Honig had been).   But his Collected Poems had just come out, from a major publishing house.  Poetry is all about time & timing.  Now the mourning & celebration sounds are coming from the literary world, & his poems shine brighter than before.  (To tell the truth I've never been very aware of him, or familiar with his work; but I picked up this new volume from the library shelf today, and am realizing I missed a lot there.)

A person dies, but leaves a ghostly trace in the work they have done.  In the case of art, music, poetry, sometimes it bursts into flame repeatedly long after they are gone.

I'm thinking about Jesus, and recalling a certain idea about the Resurrection that struck me a few months ago.  But I'll get to that in a minute.  I'm thinking about the impact Jesus had on those around him : this figure of brilliant charismatic gifts - his magnetism & affection, his healing powers, his teachings, his eloquence, his prophetic utterance.  The electricity that must have surrounded him like a buzzing power field.  And especially his radical, uncompromising claim : to be the expected Messiah : that claim which brought him inexorably into conflict with the established authorities in Jerusalem (and Rome) : which brought him to crucifixion on Golgotha ("the place of a skull").

The Resurrection is a deep-shaded mystery.  But I think we can hypothesize that, whatever "really happened", the way of life which Jesus's friends & followers began after his death amounted to the most serious form of commitment to mourn & remember him.  It may sound heretical or out-of-bounds to compare their response to other cults of martyrdom and mourning (say, for beloved poets, or the martyr-figures or deceased spiritual leaders of other religions) - but I think it's fair to say there are at least some resemblances.  Christianity is in a certain sense the largest, most powerful association of mourning & remembrance the world has ever seen.  Christianity is much more than that : but I want to sketch this scene out as a kind of background to keep in mind.  This religion still registers the visceral shock & grief which Jesus's followers felt, when this incomparably vital, earth-shaking, life-changing presence in their midst was suddenly, violently thrown down.

The Resurrection is a deep well.  I like to think about Mary Magdalen as she is sometimes called, the "first apostle" - since according to the Gospels, she was the first to spread the news that Jesus's tomb was empty - that angels had told her to seek him in Galilee.  (The mysterious Gospel of John has a slightly different version : Mary meets the resurrected Jesus in the garden beside the tomb, & at first mistakes him for "the gardener".  I can't get away from the notion that this lovely, slightly comic scene - straight out of Shakespeare's late romances - has some kind of underlying symbolic meaning.  The gardener - as Adam?  Maybe.)

The message of the early Church is that the resurrected Jesus appeared to them several times; ascended to the Father in heaven; and sent the Holy Ghost : to be within & amongst them all, binding them together as the reborn body of Christ on earth, until he comes again.  I'm convinced of the essential truth of this message, even though the whole process remains a great & alluring enigma, & even though I believe that as regards the Bible, things "literal" must be taken with a grain of salt.  We must "judge for ourselves what is right," as Jesus says to the Pharisees.

But it occurred to me a few months ago that one could think about the meaning of the Resurrection in the following way.  I'm not saying this is orthodox, or even acceptable; maybe it's not even true.  But it's an imaginative approach.  The thought occurred to me that the process of Jesus' death, Resurrection, & sending of the Spirit could be conceptualized as follows : simply, that Jesus died, yes - & is resurrected in us.  This is the ultimate, over-arching power of the Holy Ghost working in us : this is the power that God grants - that "glorious freedom of the children of God" to which St. Paul attests.  To be the Resurrection in our own place & time on earth : to be Christ, here, now - as manifested in our own distinct personhood, our own fate & vocation.

This, I admit, does not jibe perfectly with the doctrine of the Church : that we are waiting for the 2nd coming of Christ - that nothing is fully accomplished until that "end-time" takes place.  But I think, on the other hand, this perspective might possibly give us a glimpse of what it might mean to live in constant gratitude for the simple fact of existence, of being alive.  (This "gratitude-for-existence" is something which Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, and the Acmeist poets, expressed as a basic principle.)  If, having been "born again", we are the resurrection of Jesus - then suddenly "all things are made new" : we have a task to re-present Christ, here, now.  & maybe this would be understood to "fit" the orthodox doctrine after all, in some sense : if we re-examine the pattern of death-resurrection-ascension-glorification, then each of us is at the stage of resurrection - the pre-ascension stage, which still awaits the ultimate "end" of history, the "end of the age".

Somehow I like this notion, anyway, if only perhaps in a poetic sense.  The early Church mourned the living Jesus, who had died, who was gone; we were all, as Paul wrote, "baptized into his death".  Yet at the same time, in the power of the Holy Ghost, we also live out the resurrection : in the most particular local distinct personal & global & contemporary sense of the word (here & now).

There is an saying of that terse, cryptic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus - something like "living each other's death, dying each other's life" (how does it go?) - which encapsulates the unusual schema for resurrection I am sketching here.

Yes, today I feel ready to curl up in dream-song land, negative capability land, give up the "irritable reaching after fact and reason"...

If I come across these days as some kind of Preacher McDunderhead, it has partly to do with the fact that lately I have been on a very local campaign to help the struggling little church across the street from me, and my mind is preoccupied with these questions - how to talk about faith to people on a mental fence...

& of course partly to do with the fact that I am a Preacher McDunderhead...

(that's me on harp at a concert on Redeemer lawn last summer)

Am reading Hermann Broch's novel Death of Virgil. Very absorbing, beautiful writing. Translator seems to be echoing Whitman (a lot of anaphora - repetition of words at beginning of sentence or phrase (along with vast cosmic-natural imagery). Wonder if it's that way in the original).

Started writing a novel myself on Saturday. When I was done (with a couple pages written) I learned that the Pope had died. It's been a strange Easter/Passover time this spring, the past week or so.

I went to church yesterday. It was my turn to read the Prayers. So I included John Paul II in them (I'm Episcopalian).

Odd time in the church year, when you're confronted intellectually with the mystery of the Resurrection. It affects the sermons. It's something that the intellect & common sense cannot accept, that is, on a rational plane.

A season when the gulf between faith & scepticism yawns widest.

Are we confronted here with a primitive remnant, something from a previous phase of the human mind? Or is there an aspect of willed or motivated contradiction at play? That is, with the mystery of the Resurrection, a line of estrangement is drawn between God and the world, between spirit & flesh. A veil, wrapped around a single person, a single individual (Christ). Which in turn "personalizes" the relationship between Spirit & humanity.

From another angle, the Resurrection "naturalizes" - even "historicizes" - a spiritual reality which is familiar & accessible through many religious traditions (orthodox & fringe) : the reality of "cosmic consciousness". The idea that the end of the physical body is not an absolute end : that, in some unknowable dimension, there is no death : that the soul is immortal. "What will be is only a promise." I think of certain Yeats poems.

(Riddle of the icon - the representative figure ("the Son of Man"). A unique person is commissioned to undertake a collective, historical role. Archetype. It's like an Escher drawing - a "figure/ground" problem in continual oscillation or reversal.)

Which reminds me of this spring poem, one of Mandelstam's last:

To Natasha Shtempel

 
I
 
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead 
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom 
of her inspiring disability pulls her along, 
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the charity of a concept:
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault, 
and that this is an eternal beginning.

 
II
 
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and to be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.

(Sorry, I don't know who translated this. This poem does strange things to me, like certain passages in Beethoven. It brings tears to my eyes.)

Rev. Jo-Ann Drake made this comment in her sermon this morning:

the actions at the Abu Graibh prison have appalled everyone, with their flouting of basic respect for human diginity; and they are indeed appalling. But last year's photos of Saddam having his tongue & throat inspected - the humiliation of the dictator-prisoner which made the world laugh - from Pres. Bush on down - these images, & the world's response to them, were also appalling, for the same reason.

The Redeemable Players, theater group at my church (Redeemer) across the street, puts on its first production tomorrow night : Les Aveugles (The Blind Men), by Michel de Ghelderode. The one-act brings to life a painting of the same title by Bruegel. Appropriate Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) material. I'm directing.

Directing a short play at church by Michel de Ghelderode, unusual Belgian playwright. The Three Blind Men; based on a Bruegel painting of that name. (If Bruegel interests you, Michael Frayn's Headlong is a pretty good read. Funny.)

Anastasios,

I spent the afternoon on Orthodox Easter raking up 16 bags of leaves from the church yard. Then I finished making some stew & took it over to the monthly discussion pot luck (I live across the street from Church of the Redeemer, a pretty little Episcopal church on Hope St.). Our topic was Reason & Faith - how we reconcile/differentiate/hold them in suspension in our own lives.

Redeemer reminds me of the church I was brought up in in Minneapolis. Old stucco & woodwork, faintly Tudor I guess.

I said that while the relations between Reason & Faith are a hot topic these days, what with all the "clash of cultures", Western democracy & Islam - and it's fascinating in its own right - it seems to me that the role of Christ in the world - his action - occurs on a more basic level, so basic it's below intellectual radar. Christ is "the lamb of God who takes away sin" : essentially a priestly role, a very specific action, which is the forgiveness of sin & thereby the healing & redemption of souls. Just as the soul is found at some core level where intellect, emotion & spirit are fused together in the Self, the Person - so this is where Christ's action takes place. It's deep below or within history, time, argument, debate, etc. It appears, when it appears to consciousness, as an awareness of sin - Joyce's "agenbite of inwit" - the awareness of being in a state of sin in need of redemption. This is why Christ in the Gospels says, "I came not for the righteous, but for sinners". We're talking about a spiritual reality somewhat on a different plane from the intellectual debates about whether God exists etc., the relations between secular & sacred, philosophy & theology, etc. Dante's Divina Commedia illustrates this distinction marvelously. The poet-pilgrim takes an encyclopedic journey through all history & all social roles - but the spiritual states of sin which condemn individuals to hell or assign them to purgatory or deliver them to heaven have nothing to do with their social status or their worldly prestige.

I've been interested in Roger Williams' perspective, as described in some of the biographies. In his letters & writings he argued consistently, as is well known, for the separation of church & state. Less well known perhaps is his background worldview which gave rise to these positions. Williams considered global civil society as ordained, established by God, the Holy Spirit (or "Spirit of Truth"). He liked to remind English folk that the Narragansetts & the Turks & the Chinese & lots of other cultures often showed themselves more civilized, more kindly, more wise than those denizens of "Christian" nations. The knowledge of right and wrong, of justice, of natural law, has been implanted in all people & every culture. Christianity, rightly understood, does not act on this plane : rather, it's an activity of salvation on the plane of the eternal soul, a different dimension from civil society, though its effects (of sin & grace) can be visible there, on a social level. Williams: "Eternity, O Eternity ! That is our Business."

Westerners, as inheritors of this tradition of the separation of church & state, can show bias & complacency toward Islam, for example (ie. as an example of a religion which blurs the separation of religion & politics). But in doing so, secular society divorces itself from an essential aspect of human identity : the soul's thirst for God, which is reflected in all genuine philosophy & religion. Simone Weil, for one, wrote feelingly about this essential thirst.