like that chaste vision

SERPENT-SPINE

Those Tuscan hills he hymned of, once

in rainy Voronezh.

Winter sunshine flashes

over the Mississippi’s muted bronze.

The exile hums of exiles, like a goldfinch

memorizes Europe;

watch her spectrum envelope

a furious alchemy of wingstrokes (inch

by inch).  So the flappable epileptic

witnesses drab depredations

from his almond branch –

Pope, Emperor… a sick

republic, riven by self-seeking men;

yet the silver line of the river

reminds him of forever

after (law of Righteous One).

Roger, with left hand floating

over the empty void

of a Providence hillside,

preaches the liberty of everything

like that chaste vision Nikolai proclaimed

(equalized humble

multitudes of tumble-

down small shining blooms) – & Osip framed;

& the river, like a serpent-spine

glints across graphite winter –

pencil from the hinter-

lands, crust of salty bread & wine.

2.8.20

the melodeon of civil peace

GREEN PALM

This silver light-pull on the black pathway

like a miniature dragon or

sperm whale (grey Minotaur

immured in Ocean labyrinth)... Ariadne

dropped it here for me, maybe

(bowline from safety net

strung beneath Golden Gate,

or strand of hair turned silvery

along the wheel of time & gravity).

In him the root of the matter,

wrote Cotton Mather –

he meant that turbulent sectary,

mild Roger Williams.  An apple root

it was, the legend holds;

clasped in earth-folds,

his buried limbs became sweet fruit

(at Prospect Terrace, where his bones

were laid).  Sweet peace,

he called it; a release

into that harmony among distinctions

Roger christened Providence, & we

e pluribus unum –

a spiritual freedom

planted in magnanimity;

a willingness to mingle tares

& wheat, so infant conscience

tried by experience

find its own starry stairs

              *

& not by force, but gentleness

its ripening prepare

to climb past nightmare

to the melodeon of civil peace.

So gather up stray iris-strands,

Henry.  That self-same

moonlit trail (slim

path between wrath & Rhode Island’s

liberté) was Alighieri’s narrow way

between Imperium,

Ecclesia... low hum

of Jonah-Beatrice (out of the grey

cloud-surf of Ocean River).

Garden & wilderness,

Solomon’s shepherdess...

airy Sophia in Hopkins windhover...

O delicate light-threads, pendentive

on twin pillars, anges

d’orange...  Who arranges

your catenary smiles?  You dive

with her dive, you rise with her rise,

surfacing... Hail, Jonah!

Out of the whale, Jeanne-

Arc!  The mercy in your eyes

– wonder in ours!  A gold mandorla

where the twin points meet –

meld into one – & greet

the Union with green palm... Alleluiah!

6.9.17

convex grassland cave-complex

PINK TUGBOAT

I retrace my steps again

along the River Road

past Granddad’s solid old

brick fortress.  A trumpet vine

shines orange & green, climbing

a mud-brown corner into

August light.  I’ll go

down to that riverbank now, rhyming

with Nile & Jordan, Voronezh, Po –

a stream that crosses borders,

winding atlatl corridors

so sinuous & serpentine, into

the gray matière, the mutter-mouth...

sea-grotto of an Ocean

State (salt origin

of shanty-song).  From north to south

diagonal, my yellow gyroscope

leans, vaulting on thread

from Gate of the Dead

(whose soft, dense orange-&-azure rope-

ladder lifts up the gravity of stolid

steel & staggered stone)

to Magdalenian

interior... & cartwheels there – Bride

of convex grassland cave-complex –

Cahokia coyote-

gal, whose Galilee

glee-zone (primordial) sketches a hex-

                  *

agon – galactic rumble-stir

of light-warp milky skein

or reign of windy Wayne,

pouring a Who-He? mirror-

ray into the rainbow trine

of spray-tossed clement

Clementine.  Cement

shoes will not keep her in the brine

of Poseidon forever – see her shadow

stride the surface now!

With pink tugboat in tow

paintered to Ariadne’s golden bow

– refracted ball of lambswool, bent

through Roger Williams’ granite

lintel – Dante’s bright

brooder-line.  The Great Commandment

coming down from Manitou

like light... it is

not liable to conquest –

conscience is free, a gift to you

who seek for Me.  A wheeling sword

glinted above a garden;

a ring of apple trees, hidden

in shade of Sant’Apollinaire.  Word

melody   green hummingbird vine

Guillaume’s trompette marine

a secret acorn   Queen

of Royal Oak   (she is a 5   & 29)

8.17.16

Yesterday, by surface mail in the actual world, I received a note from Kenneth Warren (editor of House Organ) about In RI (I'd sent him a copy). Kenneth was so enthusiastic that I had to go back & read the poem again myself. Surprised to find how topical/political it is. A blast against fundamentalism.

I'm what they call a Person of the Book, I guess. Not only have I been a bookworm forever, & worked in a library for almost a quarter of a century : my own ponderings & writings are all caught up with metaphysics & religion & scripture. My life took a sharp & fateful turn when I read the Bible at age 19. I was baptized Episcopalian from infancy; at age 50 (old sinner by then) I started finally going back to church.

This is all prelude to saying that there can be people in the world like me who are not part of the global pious-moralist-fundamentalist-superstitious cultural pressure of our era.

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." What is faith? As I understand it, faith is an inner conviction (despite the lack of complete knowledge or information) that something is true. It's a prudent, considered hunch, a choice between possibilities rather than firm facts.

One's view of the substance of experience in its entirety can be focused by such faith-judgements - even if they are understood to be provisional, subject to change.

So my personal poetics or metaphysics or understanding of history or anthropology are all colored by these hunch-beliefs. There is no getting away from it. My artistic development has been shaped by the prior shaping of my worldview.

NONETHELESS. ALL THAT BEING SAID... the fact remains that I am an adopted Rhode Islander (there are two Gould Islands in Narragansett Bay) and a partisan of Roger Williams.

Williams had a concept he called "soul liberty". Which, as I understand it, refers to the free activity of the individual mind in search of grounds for those inner convictions understood as "faith". Williams, simply put, devoted his entire life to the defense of soul liberty. He understood that the inner union between a person and the divine had to be one of true conviction and free choice. Any manifestation of what he (& others) called "enforced religion" was a grotesque 3-pronged insult : an insult to the authentic substance of faith; an insult to intellectual freedom; and an insult to the peace of a (self-governed) community, made up of people holding to diverse beliefs.

This particular conviction of Williams was the historical origin of the separation of church and state as we know it; of the concept of religious tolerance as we know it; and of the oldest surviving secular state in the Western world - Rhode Island.

One of the key elements of Williams' philosophy was an idea related to the medieval concept of natural law (as a young man, Williams was a student-assistant to Edward Coke, the great English barrister, famed for his defense of Parliament and "ancient right" against the encroachments of the Crown). The idea is that humankind, as made in the image of God, displays the God-given, natural capacity to know right from wrong and to achieve self-governance in lawful, peaceful commonwealths. Williams, the friend of Narragansett chiefs, loved to harp on the idea that non-Christian nations (such as the Narragansetts) could be wiser, kinder, gentler, more civilized, more peaceful than many so-called "Christian" nations. (Of course, according to RW, such refined virtuous gentle & civilized pagans would sadly miss out on the Kingdom of God and eternal life, but that was an utterly separate issue.)

This history is part of the "epic theme" I dealt with in my sort of Olsonesque poem In RI. Written back in the early 90s.



(this post was inspired in part by Frederick Wiseman's documentary, shown on PBS last night, about the ordinary workings of the Idaho state legislature... a fine film! Reminded me of my time (back in the early 80s) as a VISTA volunteer, when I worked for community groups as a "legislative analyst" at the RI state house.)

Still reading Perry Miller's Roger Williams. In tandem with this week's New Yorker article, about religious right's pressure on separation of church & state.

Roger would have had a lot to say about that. The aggressive proselytizing, which makes Christianity a cultural binding agent rather than a spiritual shriving & quest. A certain worldliness attaches itself to the million-dollar legal & ad-propaganda campaigns. (Then again, who in this world doesn't exude a certain worldliness? Not many.)

The absurd, tragicomic melodrama of relations between religious practices and the practices of society at large... Williams loved to use the "garden & wilderness" metaphor (the church is the garden, the wilderness is the world). This is a useful distinction, which goes back (you might say) even before Christ, to the rite of baptism - which is the sign of repentance, of turning from the ways of the world to the love of God, of recognizing oneself as a child of God before anything else.

There is always this temptation to impose one's landscape (the garden) on the world; to erase that difficult distinction; to create a kind of Christian-imperial fantasy-culture. Williams, on the other hand, loves to point out that the sign of the true Christian is the lamb : the persecuted, not the persecutor.

The power of rhetoric over free inquiry. The willingness to judge & condemn the opponent, the "enemy", in simplistic terms, ruthless castigations (practiced everywhere now, on every side, on every issue).

The first Roger Williams I knew about was the '60s pop musician. I played his fancy version of "Autumn Leaves" as a piano recital. (This was the sheet music:)

There's a sweetness & humanity in Williams' A Key Into the Language of America. The idea is to get people to learn Narragansett so they'll actually go be with them. & in the process discover the wild Indians are at least as kindly & "civilized" as, or more so than, the saintly English. & what that says about church government. See Perry Miller on this.

Williams, Blake, Yeats, Mandelstam.... scholars of the wheel of fire.

"Ye shall all be salted with fire. Salt is good; therefore have salt amongst yourselves, & be at peace with one another."

What does this mean, scholars?

According to Williams, throughout human history there was & will be only one true, real, authoritative social covenant established by God with Man, and that was through Moses; and that covenant was dissolved by the crucifixion & resurrection. [This, it should be understood, is not current standard Christian doctrine, which holds that the covenant has never been abrogated - but rather taken into a new dimension, a new step in the process of divine unfolding.]

Thus all human government - especially theocracy, perhaps - is error-prone, a blind muddling-along, & sometimes utter pretense, fraudulent. This from one credited with establishing the first civil state based on precepts of free speech & complete liberty of conscience.

(Then William Blackstone, ensconced with his moldy manuscripts on Study Hill, looks into his alchemical flask & asks... but how, in fact, was that 1st covenant established? Who laid the cornerstone behind Shakespeare's Head? Where is Atlantis, Hart Crane? The rest is silence.)

Did you follow all that, all that I posted on Friday? The eyes blur over.

It's blurry, I know. The idea is that poetry is a special kind of "embodied" speech, analogous to incarnation. An end in itself, as well as a representation of something else.

& the concept of incarnation stems from a metaphysics, if you will, which includes both divine & human; not one without the other. A religious perspective which includes BOTH divine will and human self-will, human freedom. This is the general idea that underlies Renaissance christian humanism, Dante's polemic for a balance between Pope & Emperor, Roger Williams' demand for liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state.

When I look back at the poem (Stubborn Grew, etc.) I see it as expressing a position in the middle, facing 2 ways: first, by celebrating Roger Williams & echoing Dante in certain ways (the "octagonal" design described on Fri.), it represents this humanist stand for freedom of conscience & the separation of political & religious authority; second - especially in the 3rd book, July - it represents the distance between present-day dispositions of political power ("Julius" - military-state force) and a utopian future ("Jubilee").

I too try to "embody the word", in a poetry way. Here's an inkling of the "number, weight & measure" involved. (I'm sorry to repeat myself again on this blog - but I'm trying to outline a particular personal framework for poetic "embodiment".)

I wrote Forth of July in Rhode Island. The guiding spirit of this place is Roger Williams, founder of Providence; RI is considered the first political entity founded explicitly on the separation of Church & State.

Williams' worldview rhymes (roughly, an off-rhyme) with Dante's perspective, in the Divina Commedia and the essay De Monarchia. Dante believed that the Holy Spirit provided a legitimate role for secular humanity, secular government, in the providential historical process leading toward the renewal of the earth, the "Earthly Paradise", corrupted since the Fall. Rome, and the Holy Roman Emperor, he considered the true authority under which this renovation would occur. At the end of the Commedia, in the Paradiso, in the center of the heavenly Rose, Dante placed an empty throne, destined for the messianic Emperor who would oppose Papal pretentions to secular authority, restoring Italy, the Empire, and thus the whole world - Emperor Henry VII.

As Stubborn Grew/The Rose moves into its central volume, a certain numerical structure crystallizes (and then expands in the following volumes), based on 7/4 (4th of July), 5/28, and 5/29. The central volume (Grassblade Light) consists of 7 chapters (actually 8 panels - the center chapter containing a double panel). Each chapter is made up of 28 poems, each poem containing 28 lines (7 quatrains). At the center of the 28 is a 29th poem with a kind of square structure (16 quatrains total). (This is the template - & though there are slight variations in some chapters, the total line count for each chapt. is almost exactly the same.)

I designed this octagonal structure after the shape of a castle in southern Italy built by that great opponent of the Pope, (Holy Roman) Emperor Frederick II, which has 8 sides, and squarish towers at each angle.

The following volume, July, is designed as a mirror-image to the 1st vol., Stubborn Grew. It comes in 2 halves: the first half consists of 5 chapters, each containing 5 poems of 28 quatrains each. The 2nd half of the book has a very complicated structure (again using poems of 7 quatrains) which I won't get into here.

William Blackstone, RW's friend, Anglican preacher-in-exile, planter of the first known apple orchard in the New World (in Cumberland, RI), & figure in these poems, was buried on his property on 5.28.1675. His property ("Study Hill") was burned to the ground the next day, 5.29 (this was during King Philip's War).

5.29 is my birthday, and RI Statehood Day.

The entire poem (Forth of July) was finished on 5.28.2000, with this line :

"the nef rows, rows... palms, heartbeats, light."

Have been sort of busy/distracted lately, not much bloggin'.

Interesting juxtaposition in this week's New Yorker : excellent review of the "Bush dynasty" books, talks about how George W. views the current situation as a religious war; then in article about contemporary Egypt, quoting confident young Islamist who has the same opinion. Feel like we're regressing to Middle Ages, when there is no distinction between faith and politics, theology and ideology. Where is Roger Williams? Help, Rog!!

latest sketch (from Shakespeare's Head):

16

 
Hobo hides his head in the sumac shade
of deep July.  Way overhead, titanium scouts
penetrate the misty rings of Saturn.  Motes
of moons shepherd the circling parade

 
while Hobo doodles his own star-map, out
beyond Babylon – talking in his sleep beside
the iron railroad tracks, before time was.
Before the golden Cyprus oak was rooted

 
(quercus alnifolia), before Venus turned
and tumbled beneath its limbs, before
the pantheon was knit (the yarns of yore);
when his iron heart (spurned) yearned

 
(magnetic) for the light of those eyes
more gold than golden (slow surprise).

      
                *

   
On a curtain-sleeve (painted in Paradise-
Byzantium) the adamantine letters

   
will not be effaced.  Through shadow
of death and laughter of jackals,
through snarling gods, sheep-killers,
armies of neighbors, they go

   
on shining, they go on shining
through derision, through the dark.
Until that day – Hist! Hark!
I have it! – you grasp their meaning:

   
on that benevolent summer day
in the heart of July, when you know
the bowl cannot be broken:  Love’s vow
rings Time itself with titanic mastery.

         
                                       7.7.04

. . . & the difference between Byzantium & US being, of course, Roger Williams of Rhode Island (theocracy vs. church/state separation). it circles around like that in my poetry (around the snoozing head of Wm. Blackstone).

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.

How to answer the theocrats.

A Christian perspective : God the creator provided humankind (made in God's image) with the capacity for self-governance, conscience, good will. Human will restored from corruption by the intervention of the Word of God (considered as beginning with call to Abraham). Origin of the "law & grace" distinction : when human good will is restored, need for patriarchal, authoritarian, punitive law fades away. Thus Isaiah says "I will write my laws on their own hearts", and the Psalmist describes how as he meditates on the Law in his mind it is sweeter than honey. Democracy has its roots in faith in human nature, & in governance (& self-governance) as a benign, inherent aspect of God-given creation.

Faith in human nature a reflection of understanding of divine nature (mercy, kindness, forgiveness, understanding, love).

Qutb's version of Islam (at least from the magazine summary : I want to look at his writings) seems to imagine a conqueror-God who installs his theocracy on earth. The attributes of this God are said to be compassionate & all-merciful, but the actions seem to reflect authoritarian control, a mistrust or belittling of his creatures, requiring strict & brutal punishments, and an all-seeing totalitarian eye, on the lookout for any non-conformity in thought or deed. "Freedom" in this context is freedom only to obey. But the notion of separation of church & state is predicated on the sense that, while the state & civil authorities may write laws for the protection of civil order, God's greatest spiritual gift is actually liberty of conscience - the capacity of the soul to think, judge, and act independently, as it sees fit. (Reason. Another name for the Holy Spirit is : the Truth.)

Unable to focus on poetry.

Forsythia budding against wall on Prospect St. outside Rochambeau House.

Fascinating NY Times mag article on Sayyid Qutb, Islamic thinker/revolutionary, influence on Al Qaeda et al. According to Qutb one of the roots of Western corruption is separation of religion & state. I live in Providence, home of "separation of church & state" (Roger Williams). Some of my Gould ancestors came here in 1630s, with Anne Hutchinson, driven out by Boston theocracy. Others were Quakers. Gr-gr-etc-grandpa Zaccheus Gould, expelled from his Massachusetts church for "harboring Indians & Quakers" (one was his nephew). When he was finally re-admitted, he sat in his pew with his back to the pulpit.