Uncomfortable Dreaming

Serves me right - after my glib gab here yesterday about dreams, la vida es sueno, etc. - that last night I would wake up at 3 a.m. after a dark & troubling dream that stirred my conscience.  Jealousy, violence, remorse... strange symbolism of the heart.

"The heart is desperately corrupt"... says the prophet Jeremiah.

Lay awake thinking about the dream for a long time.

My comments in yesterday's post about holism in literature, philosophy, theology - and about the Union, and the common good, sought through the civic faith of Gorski's "American covenant" - were undercut a little by my own dream last night.  I lay there pondering things about which perhaps the Puritans and Roger Williams also meditated late at night.

The separation of Church & State, or Williams' (& others') distinction between the "two tables" of the Mosaic law (the sacred and the civil codes) perhaps grows logically out of a real, a factual, distinction, between a person's spiritual life - the life of the soul - and the collective social life we organize and share.  Between religion & government; between spirit & flesh.  Perhaps there is this deep and actual dividing line - in the midst of all the seamlessness of vision, the oneness of nature, and the unity of the common good toward which we strive together.

For me the problematics and contradictions of this situation are almost irresolvable and impossible to figure out.  Because, as the animale compagnevole, we obviously do not live our lives alone; we are born into relations with others; our very selves develop in these deep relationships.  Yet many (including Roger Williams, for example) would argue that true religion is about the individual soul's relationship with God.

Perhaps one solution is to suggest that the solitude of our relation to God is also the pivot of our personal liberty, and the foundation of our moral responsibility (freedom and responsibility being the very spine of personal selfhood).

We can understand, in this context, how the absolute transcendence of the Hebrew God stands as the basis, the historical origin, of moral freedom and human equality.  Not that moral freedom and equality did not previously exist in various kinship bands and human cultures beforehand; but the Hebraic covenant so to speak articulated this reality in stone, in the midst of empires and states devoted to sacred kings and unlimited, divine royal power.

But let me return to last night's dream.  The heart is desperately corrupt, the prophet cries.  Between the mind's dutiful bookkeeping and the heart's passions lies a wide dark gulf.  I woke from my disturbing dream with this thought : true religion is the soul's remorseful conscience, seeking the intercession of the Spirit, the mercy of God, because there is no other help.  John the Baptist at the river's edge, for example, demanding only personal simplicity and true repentance.  The universal "high priest" is essentially a healer of souls.

This spiritual dimension is personal.  It is an otherness, distinct from the public, civic, political sphere.  The two dimensions are obviously intertwined in each of our lives, and in all our cultures, societies, nations - yet they are distinct.  The two tables of the Law.  "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's".  Roger Williams, among others, believed in "natural law" - that human beings are naturally endowed with the conscience to determine right and wrong, and the ability to organize themselves in societies dedicated (however imperfectly) to liberty and justice.  The fact that people of all faiths and cultures are so endowed, whatever their denomination or confession,  is the prime basis for religious liberty and political tolerance.

I don't know if I've been able to express myself very clearly or well here this morning.  What struck me as I lay there thinking over the dream was a sense of contrast between our public and politically-charged debates about cultural and religious issues, our disputes over differing group demands, rights, and powers, one the one hand - and the inward spiritual dimension of "true religion" on the other.  Conscience, belief, reasoning, searching hearts, inwardness, and personal acts of repentance, humility and charity : these are religion.  "Do justice, and walk humbly with your God".  It's not about political maneuvering, bickering, and social power.  Those things are part of the civic world, the secular table of the Law.

to imagine governance anew

CURVE-MIRROR

Everything resolves into the question

of good will.  The mystery

of this most simple anti-

gravity (11.32 ft/sec, a-falling down).

Firebranded sign of imago Dei.

So we desire the good –

wholeness (soul food).

The skeleton key of MLK,

the metaphysical hope informing

scapegrace Providence;

little Ocean State’s immense

rose light (perpetually intensifying).

Only a memory of Henry’s youth.

That community-building élan

of the VISTA legion –

to imagine governance anew, in truth

& conspicuous joy (Roger’s liberty

of conscience).  Dante

& his animale compagnevole

on Dante Street (on Federal Hill)… si, si!

Canopic geometry – vanishing point.

The apse at Sant’Apollinare.

One solitary shepherd, & the sky

a coracle of stars around one smile (anoint

her compassionate Pilot over Kings).

In the curve-mirror of the dome

you sense her light.  Calm

Shekinah… mild restoration of all things.

3.12.20

in the dawn mirror

SINGLE SPOKE

These quiet late winter days.  My mother

lies in her small bed.

The past is not restored

but rows to its island across the water.

I see it in the distance, there –

dark rocks, pines wrapped

in mist.  What happened

to those springing years?  Vibrant affair

of VISTA volunteers… Rhode Island

skipping in my early heart.

JFK’s Newport.

A tiny sea-casket of azure, sand

in the dawn mirror of a rose lighthouse

casting Roger’s heart’s eye-

beam – his Providential replica

of conscience-liberty (human Cosmopolis).

You elevate my Minnesota grain

toward your red-violet wine

welding human & divine

on the river’s leaping arch – then

paddle further… through green pillars

from Columbia to Gravesend,

Pocahontas Williams (raven-

haired pilot for milky stars).

Where the Wain of Charles is chartered

to an evergreen holm oak –

your Ocean State a single spoke

spinning my reel & sarabande, wholehearted.

3.10.20

mark how red dust leaps

GATEWAY RING

The trickster-shaman & the prickly prophet

frame a stumbling-block

you can’t dislodge... mock

as you may, puffy lectern-puppet.

It is a fundamental moral world

they dramatize, a place

of breathing flames – their science

is conscience, this life a dream unfurled

on stage (his banner over me was love).

On board a fellowship

from birth, we skip, we slip

& slide toward the deep (sky-alcove,

ocean-sepulchre... Osiris-canoe

full of Isis-candles... grave

of MLK, our architrave).

As if returning to our own soul (true).

In West Branch, Iowa (my grandmother’s

home town) there is a dark

moss-green catafalque

of Isis, adamant earth-mother (who remembers).

& the North Star of the martyrs shines

like a seminal spark

over the Iron Range.  Mark

how red dust leaps into lifelines –

how a merry-go-round of American clay

swings toward the gateway ring

upstream, down.  Shaping

newborn, translated children – maize, hay hey.

7.11.19

articulated bagpipes

CICADA SHELL

Last night, in the final French class

Charles explained to us

that intricate forest

of thousands of skeletal pieces

under the armor of the vast organ

of Notre Dame, somehow

surviving the late inferno –

a delicate spider of sound, within

the cathedral’s gray cicada shell

of feathery stone light.

Now, in my monkish hideout

of twisted cedar, a mid-May swell

of emerald sheen beyond the doorway

stretches toward Iona

or maybe Compostela

or Jerusalem... & scrawny face of Henry

lined like wood by age & foolishness

lifts to spring brightness

one wee dram of hopefulness,

mayhap – someone’s vernal Inverness.

It is the ordinary light of day

flashing through our human

imago, her chaste design –

what we might be, beyond dismay

in the conjunction of clear consciences

set toward a restoration

of the common good.  One

amid many – octave’s consonance.

5.15.19

it begins w'Thou

ROSE ISLAND

If I had a mind like Aristotle

Augustine or Aquinas

able with calm patience

to unfold the metaphysical

origami of the whole

rose-petalled ensemble

of creation, mon semblable...

– shimmering Ocean River, roll!

Everything hinges on a little tree

– willow or almond,

sycamore, elm –

transmuted into living body;

tall ash, strong oak of poetry

spilling Imago Dei

(with verbal carpentry)

into an Argo-trimmed Horus-eye

of Providence.  It begins w’Thou.

Psyche’s agate lamp

winking through the swamp

of live-oak garlands signals true

(one if by land, two if by sea)

– leads on to victory

over my own frailty –

out of buried man, a new Henry!

Where the rose Venn diagram

of departed lips whispers

through golden calipers

a reconciliation of I am

              *

& ever shall be (simple psalm

adrift over clay towers)

cloisters the eye’s powers

in immaculate seaworthy emblem –

mandorla (your birchbark canoe).

O light of knowledge

from beyond knowledge,

heart’s mystic bridge mirrored below

at River’s edge!  Whose Jonah lifts

dove-light from deeps,

& as a dolphin leaps

beyond Atlantic hieroglyphs

the figure of an infant Son of Man

bobs in her coracle

newborn – primordial

origin, eye of hurricane!

The free conscience, soul liberty

subsists within your peace

which passeth, Golden Fleece –

lamb of the Lammas loaf, mercy

& flame of lambent fellowship;

stone mosaics in Ravenna

& the tomb of Alighieri

radiate the scent... lambs skip

there, in the cradle of our limbs,

beneath the opening flower

of your glance!  O bower

& rose island – spring of river-hymns!

3.12.19

you cannot buy free soul

FLAT VODKA

The weather is alchemical,

the mix is changeable

& lethal – Lear will fumble

through the hailstorm, inconsolable.

The air is saturate with salt.

Even the snow is bitter

as flat vodka.  Better

to butter up the mayor, Walt –

don’t you think?  I don’t.

His orange head is swollen

full of bloody poll-pollen –

he likely toss you to the Don.

Phosphoric Osip fingers his Commedia

for signs of figlio

della figlia... down Rio

del Espiritu wend lilac, willow, etc...

Dumb Cordelia keeps her counsel.

Won’t corrode the word

filial with a coarse reward.

You cannot buy free soul,

dear heart – & salt is cheap.

Cotton bolls is de termite,

but woe unto de spite-

docta, who sow to weep.

I see a Solominka mincing

on the edge of a knife,

a precipice – fine

Ravel for violin (pining).

11.18.16

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

Babel / Pentecost

The students heading home, it's extra quiet in the library, I have a little more time to babble today.

The winter solstice upon us, snow on the ground, the air bright & milky.  Christmas, New Year.  I sat in the window booth with my coffee mug, watching the Providence scene go by.  Locals I've crossed paths with here since the early 70s... sometimes I recognize them.  I turned 61 last May; my adorable grand-daughter arrived in August, I'm officially a grandpa.  I'm not officially or unofficially any wiser, as far as I can tell.  "Life pierces us with strange relation." 

I look back at youth, and marvel at the vigorous perspicuity of instinct and intuition.  We simply go and do what we will at that age, the happy geniuses of ourselves.  We don't reason excessively about it (though much of that doing involves battles with/against ourselves).  Maybe I should have!

But this ain't what I planned to natter on just now.

Have been stuck & struggling with a poem-scroll I'm calling Ravenna Diagram.  Maybe I had a little insight the other day, when it occurred to me that perhaps I didn't need to scare up more images, or historical material, so much as change/amplify the modes of discourse.  "Modes of discourse" is not the best way of putting it... what I mean is the thematic frameworks, the categories of subject-matter.  This is still garbled, sorry!

I am a stubborn writer in many ways.  I try to adapt and revamp from within.  So, for example, for a long time I've tried to unify actual historical/biographical material by means of obscure allusions and imagery.  I do this on purpose.  It's a kind of "making-strange", I guess : I love it.  The puns, the multivalent words, the alien images.  It somehow helps make the poem a distinctive thing-in-itself.  Gives it heft.

So I'm focused on presenting a real historical argument or message in Ravenna Diagram.  It is analogous to painting a big historical panorama - but using elliptical, obscure means.  A patchwork or mosaic.  At the same time, I'm trying to give the sense of a journal, a journey, a pilgrimage - for that is, really, what these long ongoing poems are about.  They are incremental records of a trip (Whitmanesque notion).

My point here is that is new quasi-insight might help me past an impasse : the daily discouragement and lack of confidence, the loss of purpose.  It's the feeling of pointless irrelevance which attacks me sometimes.  It's the impasse resulting from a desire to communicate yoked to a confusion about the means.  But my insight was this : I have the capacity to address more directly certain philosophical/political/cultural problems, if I can manage to branch out a little from the narrow, iconic-historical symbolism (my usual modus operandi).

I haven't put this too well, and it isn't what I meant to talk about.  But it is somewhat related.  This notion of combining and coordinating and harmonizing different modes and levels of discourse and subject-matter is not just a private writerly problem.  In fact the compositional problem is merely a minor analogue to one of the basic problems facing the world at large.  Let's call it the Babel problem.

The Babel problem is not the fact that the peoples of the world speak different languages.  It's that the human family cannot even agree on the grounds of reasoning together.  Our modes of discourse are at odds : our philosophical/ideological priorities are at war with each other.

If, for example, I want to speak on a theological level - about, say, the character and "personality" of God, or about the premise of transfiguration and eternal life - I am confronted immediately by skepticism grounded not in theology but in ethics or politics.  Thus I am opposed (in my own inner debates, as well as in dialogue with others) by arguments like : "How can you take seriously these vaporous notions, these purely speculative claims, when we are confronted every day with massive injustice, oppression, suffering and violence?"  So here we have a conflict between disjunctive terms, of subject-matter at cross-purposes.  We can't even approach serious disagreements within these intellectual frameworks - say, the contradictory worldviews of various religious faiths - because those frameworks themselves are tangled up with more immediate political disputes and world power-struggles and rivalries.  Religious concepts and language are applied, not in order to open channels between the human and the divine, or to liberate and help people in their troubles, but in order to form more cohesive factions (us versus them), or to solidify political/economic oppression by means of manipulative slogans.  The games of group identification and mob control are the prime instruments of this planet's exploiters and oppressors.  They say to themselves : Let us trouble the community, let us disrupt civil society, let us set our group against theirs, let us point the finger, preach enmity and war : and we will thereby gain wealth and power. 

Thus the Babel of a world stymied by violence and exploitation struggles to remain in place.  We can't agree on topics for discussion, much less on any conclusions.  In this situation it seems important to keep in mind the underlying global unity of the human race.  Which reminds me of a certain saying in the New Testament.  I can't even recall the proper context (such a proper babbler am I!), but it goes something like this : "I say unto you, every sin shall be forgiven, except the sin against the Holy Spirit.  This cannot be forgiven."  What does Jesus mean here?  Here's my take on it.  The Holy Spirit is elsewhere called the Spirit of Truth, the Advocate.  I think Jesus is emphasizing that, underneath all the contingent differences, Goodness and Truth are one.  They are one for all mankind.  Thus when someone calls goodness evil, or causes suffering in the name of God, they are betraying Truth itself.  Cloaked in the mantle of goodness, they tyrannize over others.  The sin against the truth cannot be forgiven because the lie itself must first be broken and dissolved.  Only once this has happened, & only then, perhaps, may the personal consequences for the sinful soul be addressed.

I could be totally off on this reading, I admit : I'm just babbling here.  Thinking that the human species as a whole is endowed with conscience, the knowledge of right and wrong (if that conscience has not been eroded or mangled).  Meanwhile, simultaneously, our narrow hearts and minds eagerly grab onto answers and solutions : code words and simplistic dogmas, organizing principles which are mere myths, mere tools of oppression.  Narrow-minded bigotries, selfish and proud chauvinisms, politic greed.  Partisan rancor.  Guile & bile.

So the Gospel story of Pentecost - when the Holy Spirit descended as tongues of flame, and everyone suddenly understood each others' languages - seems symbolic of a new order of agreement.  An untangling - by means of universal truth - of the discords of warring discourses.

So now I'm sputtering out of time & steam here.  To sum up : I've been looking at this parallel between the confusions within an ongoing poem, and the Babel-anarchies of human discord.  I haven't even gotten to the theme that lurks behind these ruminations : the seasonal marvel of Christmas and Epiphany.  Poetry, at the root, is about metamorphosis and wonder : it is a celebration, a song of rapture.  Whence comes this rapture?  The glimpse of an infinite, ongoing, eternal, indestructible, everlasting human resurrection - a breaking-in of cosmic Love - beyond all our doubts and dreams.  A Christmas miracle, right in front of us all. La vida es sueno (sings the poet)...