now we are six

SOUL LIBERTY

Today be the birthday of granddaughter Sophie

the Bangladeshi-American.

Her Baba became a citizen

in 2017.  They’re just as American as you & me.

We made a covenant of equality

before God, long ago.

African-Americans know

how long it took to become just barely free,

not to say equal before the law

in this blood-soaked country.

It begins with soul liberty –

thumbprint of human dignity.  We saw

how Roger stood alone against the weight

of Boston magistrates,

to separate a faith’s dictates

from common civil rights – & shape a state

of openness, of global mutuality

– planted in equity,

grounded equality –

premonition of a new reality

emerging like a dream rose island

from an imagined Providence

(Roger’s capacious sense

of Edward Coke’s law-learned hand).

Sophie, dancing image of an unseen grace,

child of the universe

sprung up in Minneapolis,

take hold of your inheritance – one hopeful place.

8.21.19

speaking the poetry of dense & difficult

GOLDFINCH APTITUDE

In the late afternoon, old Emperor

Henry the Ghoul lies abed

beneath the wallpaper’s red

roses (spread by his late father

for his mother).  The sun is not a god

nor is his Uncle Ez,

despite the pitchmen on the rez.

Frayed tribes will not succumb; Benito’s rod

is not benign, nor ever shall be.

The motorized dream, from

vortex of survivor-shame

after the panoramic slaughter-sea

of Ypres, Somme, & Meuse-Argonne –

like a neoplatonic fantasy

of utopian autocracy,

with phantom Isis Medusa-icon

wailing like siren out of Empyrean

over the shattered spectacle

of your culture-chronicle,

Ezra – so who shall have the succession?

The special providence of a sparrow...

the goldfinch aptitude

for simple gratitude.

& when the Eternal comes, you will know,

Osip (along the axis of the earth).

The covenant of love

donated from above

for good – so we might share it forth.

4.29.19

ledge of regal limestone

HUMAN PLEDGE

The cool dry tesserae congeal

in Sant’ Apollinaris –

dance, coalesce

into high figures of a royal seal.

Exalted features... recognizable.

Your neighbors (Limentani).

Riding bikes to the sea

to get away from scent of stable

(Mussolini’s racehorses).

That was then; this

is placid Minneapolis.

We’re not like them, of course (off-course).

The constitution of a human pledge

blazons these images

from pencil-boxes... pages

scratched out.  Natasha’s ledge

of regal limestone – living rock,

streaked honey-colored

marble.  Moss-layered

icon, limpid under chopping block.

Our covenants of disputation

rest on implicit ground;

Rhode Island in the round,

an Ocean State of transmutation.

The bond of love is clean as salt,

as plain as day.  We are

redeemed by holy fire.

The one you seek has left the vault.

6.30.18

I'm probably losing people with the murkiness of these last 2 entries (#14 and 15). & my explications don't explick much, either. But #15 is sort of an allegorical sketch or illustration of some underlying elements of #14.

The argument is, to put it very sketchily, that relationship & mutuality are substantial, fundamental, inescapable aspects of existence, reality, however you want to put it. There is the saying of Heraclitus, something to the effect of "living each other's death, dying each other's life." & this mutuality - this reciprocity - has consequences for the way we use language. All kinds of covenants and verbal bonds are examples of situations in which we must come to terms in order to live together.

The example in poem #15 of "drawing straws" in order to choose an individual to bear a certain inescapable burden is just a sketch of one such (implied) situation.

In other words, the world is not simply our (philosophical) oyster, an object made to order for our contemplation. Or, anyway, perhaps it's not only that. We are engaged in an ethical conversation, in which the shared burdens of life are under negotiation and tested - & we are tested, as part of this process.

It's a question of - what is justice?

Just rambling...

When I, hopefully, get to the end of this part of Rest Note (#19), I will add #11-19 to the others over at Alephoebooks. & maybe by the time I get to the Read-Along for these latter sections, some of this will make more sense. & meanwhile, maybe some people are becoming more attuned to my lingo, & can interpret for themselves.

15

 
Hobo on a promontory, talking to the trees.
Hedged in by oaks, on the cliffside - ruby
infant leaves, clinging tenaciously
to the chestnut.  A fleet of tough extremities.

 
He mumbles toward her, as toward the figure
of an absent friend - a representative,
a token of regret.  Tentative
gestures of a shaken leaf accent his verbal

 
burr. We was surrounded, honey - runnin
hard.  Somebody had to jump the wall.
We drawed straws - I tuck the damn fall.
We each made the vow - now come the doin.

 
From the ridge-spine, Providence, like a foggy lake
of shimmery concrete.  The tree-murmur
his covenant now - magnetic susurrus,
uncharted wilderness.  Words left their wake -

 
shorn calibrations, ex-commonwealth;
vectors of prescience; gabled reproof.
9-storied sorties toward that aloof
pride of lions - your bespoken tithe.

 
A trickle of honey, under the locust beans,
in the shade of the heat of the day.  Kingfisher
diving like a naval jay; the sky, cloudier
today; a sober stillness in the evergreens.

 
Hobo turns his face in the breeze of his mind.
In order to lose it there, to loosen it.
Yet the ineradicable echo of the chestnut,
anchoring, remains - the tears in the blind.

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.)

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.