night sea journey

SALT-SPARK

                          I mean the bedrock of our freedom – a bedrock of our

                          freedom is the right to worship freely. – G.W. Bush, 2.27.17

A light snow fell the first of March.

Ash Wednesday,

Will Blackstone would say.

Antithesis to Caesar’s march,

this errant solitaire into Rhode Island.

Where his friend Rog Williams

established bedrock freedoms,

planting Providence to stand

all time to come.  Like some great cedar

rooted in the granite eye

of personal soul liberty –

Milk River journey (if you dare).

Dark night of Jonah’s foundering.

Black scar of raven-

knife, Earth’s oven-

kiln.  Poe’s ghastly pondering...

Job’s pain.  Pound’s acid bath of hate.

So take this flake of ash.

Solder hexagonal gash

ice red across your brow, ingrate.

Within the creaking iron rose mandala

where Time slowly, slowly

runs to stillness.  Sea-

rose, sea-bell... whispers, ephphatha.

When the Eternal comes, emerging

from Leviathan

like an infant infantryman.

Unknown soldier, Everyhen, merging

                    *

with your sunken sun... a crown surging

from Lake Vermilion

– soul-memoire’s pain

et vin (violet lilac, ever-urging).

So the shy brown hermit lends his Lent

for ghost dance baptism

to Roger’s freedom-rhythm.

Chaste kamen of Magdalen, arc-bent

in parallax beneath the surface –

retinal curve of stone

lifted, of death undone

by innocence... & you will trace

the light thread-path, proportional –

like hazel-wand, or Blue

Morpho – wing true

monarch (black-yellow jag, regal)

from Providence to Mexico.

Across the night sea

gulf, Psyche, Persephone –

along an agate spiral go

into your copper spring turned green.

Slow wheel in clay...

a simple Lincoln penny,

twirling planet on a mast of pine –

the fiery root – Cautantowwit

& Manitou – the Spirit

blazing perfect light –

salt-spark of snow – sun-chariot.

3.1.17

Evocative river

ROGER WILLIAMS

                                    Eternity, O Eternity!  That is our business.

Evocative river, measuring

my time.  If I follow

upstream, to the shallow

infant burble of your beginning

– that rush of spring across bright

limestone, agate, flint –

I might catch a glint

of prism-diamond, rainbow sunlight

out of the meteor from whence

we flew.  I studied greatness

as a bookworm boy; was

wowed by those Prince Valiants

& Teddy Heroes who prevail

(magnanimous & brave)

in moldy Grendel-cave

& gory field (at bookshelf scale);

but not until childhood had passed

did someone jump from stone

canoe, whose doings shone

so implicate with goodness (massed

coordinate with commonweal)

as to rekindle in my mind

each uncreated end

within this flow, earthbound & actual –

as in an icon of the central soul.

Heart-pivot of earth-

planet – integral hearth –

blazing spark in a great oak-bole

                       *

of clay spheres darting from the fiery

kiln (original

Joie, ineffable).

Star of perfection (seal of history).

Heroes in graven books (sustained

by hungry scrivener-ravens).

Yet the remotest heaven’s

slope will be surveyed, garnered, gleaned

by unknown compadres (anonymous,

unheralded).  Servants

beyond themselves – tense

strings, bowed into major chords.

Two things of opposite nature seem

to depend on one another...

the bond of troth, of lover

& belov’d.  Roger’s granite door-beam

on the hillside sinks back into dusky

Rhodus billows.  Nigh

the steadfast stream, two shy

ephebes lay out a picnic blanky;

an early butterfly, black-gold,

skims toward the shore. 

You have hearkened to lore

of skalds who came before – old

poets’ conversation, overheard;

now the river moves

in your own heart – Love’s

glittering pulse, encouraging word.

3.29.16

The Venn diagram of Ra

It is the ever-never-changing same,
An appearance of Again, the diva-dame.
- Wallace Stevens

We look around and we see pairs of things - night & day, winter & summer, man & woman, life & death.  It's as if Nature is posing a geometry problem : draw a line C from point A to point B.  Find the inter-mediator, the golden mean.  Build a bridge across that chasm.

We want to make whole what seems to be divided.  It's a psychic necessity.  Sometimes our solutions are very simplistic, and instigate more fractures than before.  Sometimes our answers are very elegant & abstruse elisions - yet despite the sophisticated technology, we end up sliding into the next ditch.

I've been working on a poem-project in which the two parts of the binary, the two points of the calipers, are spread so wide that I can often seem to lose my way - but it also allows for a lot of creative mulling & curious detours.

I knew from the beginning the poem was involved with geometry.  I usually do with this kind of thing.  I start getting unaccountably intrigued by certain numbers & their divisors, how these numbers might be fleshed out in stanzaic and other patterns.  It's a kind of numerology.

The poem is anchored in a Venn diagram - the overlap of two congruent circles, each circumference passing through the other's center.  A pun is a sort of imperfect Venn diagram - the overlap of two meanings in one sound.  The name of the poem is Ravenna Diagram (you see what I mean).

I seem to have many thematic motives (over)determining this basic layout.  One of the main motives has something to do with the traditional Orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation.   Here three Persons overlap as one God.  In the Incarnation we have, very roughly speaking, a Venn diagram of the unity of human & divine.

It occurred to me this afternoon that another facet or motive of this design has to do with Time.

A poet, or any writer, always writes from where they are.  They express their place & time - their "Now".  But a poem or any fiction can project another "Now" as well.  Proust dwells on this mystery with magisterial complexity in his great novel (In Search of Lost Time).

For the ancient Christians, I think, Time was duplex, dimensional.  There is ordinary time, the successions & cycles of clock time - & then there is God's time, Eternity.

History, for them, involved the terrific drama of the intersection of these two dimensions - played out as the destiny of Humankind on earth.  There is a subtle concept called in Greek pleroma - the "fulness of time".  This can refer, apparently, both to the "climax" of the plot of sacred history - God's actual historical presence on earth - and to a sense of time as a kind of ripening of eternity within clock-time (these two notions are obviously close kin).

With Ravenna Diagram I have these two "historical" points of the calipers, a pair of points in spacetime.  There is the "Now" of the author, the poet, me - speaking out of my own experience & character, my place in time & space.  Then there is a second "Now" : that of the historical Jesus, the person who actually lived in Galilee and Judea 2000 years ago.  & then there is a kind of aesthetic middle term - a third "Now" in spacetime : the Italian town of Ravenna, where Dante is buried, where he finished his Paradiso - & where towering, awesome mosaics, representations of Orthodox Christianity, glimmer in their cave-cathedrals (some of these glittering icons found their way into Dante's poema as well).

Jesus tells a parable somewhere - & I forget the exact details - but he concludes with a riddle about time.  Something about a man inviting all his friends to a wedding banquet, but everyone makes excuses.  So he flings open the door & invites all comers.  However, some people show up not clothed properly for a wedding - they are tossed out.  Jesus says something like, "the Kingdom of Heaven is like this too.  So when the Eternal comes upon you, make sure you are prepared."

I've probably botched & oversimplified this parable.  But what interests me is this phrase about "when the Eternal comes".  It seems to goad the listener toward attempting to grasp a certain sense of the layers of time.

We live in a doctrinaire & factional era.  Our "side" is always ready to pin a simplistic label on the other "side".  They are deluded idiots.  Fundamentalists are convinced that old books are roadmaps through life's foggy ambiguities.  Secularists are convinced that religious believers are basically mystified by myth.

I think there might be a kind of philosophical, reasonable aspect to this religious concept of a duplex Time - spiritual and material, temporal and eternal.  The stereotype of puritanical Christianity, clinging to the spiritual at the expense of physical pleasure, is a very old cliche - with some basis in history (think of the desert monks renouncing the world).

But it's possible to think of the religious emphasis on the spiritual as a pragmatic counterweight to life swallowed up by the chaos & futility of the purely material.  A balancing, not a rejection : a synthesis.

This is how I conceive of Jesus' admonition about "when the Eternal comes".  The Eternal is always there : it's only as we get older that we begin to sense the limits to clock-time - our limits.  An awareness of mortality is a spur to long thoughts.  Then we start to sense the presence of the Eternal.

I noticed this with my father - not only while he was dying, but actually long before.  There was a kind of intellectual detachment.  Not that he didn't enjoy life, or care about others - but there was this sense of limits, the fleetingness.

Such a sense can result in a reshaping of priorities.  "What am I doing with my life?"  People are always ready with quick answers to this one, too - usually addressed to others.  But to grapple with it for oneself is the issue.

When you try to write a poem or fiction with two such compass-points, you are immediately handed a wealth of difficult artistic/philosophical problems.  How do I represent my "Now" - and that other "Now"?  But hopefully I put my trust in the creative process.  The whole impulse of poetry is toward integration & wholeness - to enter the rapture of the mesmerizing song.  My pleroma & that other Eternal might in some sense be one & the same, or at least connected.  After all, some such conundrum was the challenge Beatrice threw down before Dante, too...

Mosaics in Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna

Jesus Thoughts (17) : it tolls for thee

Humankind cannot bear very much reality, wrote T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets.  I doubt he was thinking here of some arcane, ineffable reality.  I suppose he was thinking, ironically, of the ordinary passage of time.  We avoid it.  We can't bear it, the ineluctable wave-force of it.  Great scientists and philosophers have constructed complex theoretical sand castles to evade the power of will be, is, was - all pretty much in vain (check out The Natural Philosophy of Time, by G.J. Whitrow, for an extremely incisive, erudite exploration - full of physics & math equations which I can't follow, but lots of other wonderful things too, in ordinary language).

It's why the Old Testament somewhere (Psalms?) calls out, Lord, teach us to number our days.  It's why those strutting, arrogant Renaissance princes made sure to keep a skull in their private study, for a memento mori.

Passing time.  We avoid the knife-edge of it, the "raven-knife" (Mandelstam), the voron-nozh (in exile, counting slow hours, in Voronezh).  Quoth the Raven...

Old cantankerous literary exiles like me write screeds about it... young poets ignore us (all the time in the world).  Number our days, says the word to the wise.  We don't listen : too much reality.

& if someone comes to us & says : I am the Way, the Truth, the Life....  I am the sheep-door to eternal life.... we show them a short-cut to Golgotha : we don't want to hear about it.  The impertinent suggestion that there are two separate dimensions of reality : earth & heaven, mortal time & eternity... no, no - we can't bear it.  We crush our hands over our ears.  Let me just get back to my favorite pastimes, please!

But then here is another dose of reality : feel it in your bones.  Feel the knife-edge, Now, scraping your skin.  Now.  & meanwhile imagine there is this ineffable realm - some kind of soul-space, some "kingdom of heaven", where this death-bound world is abrogated, changed, redeemed - transfigured.  Like that monarch butterfly, on the milkweed pod, drifting (nonchalant, inexorable) across America, toward death-haunted Mexico... that monarch only recently a silk-bound worm...

When I try to hold this doubleness, these two circles, this Venn diagram, in my mind - time & the Eternal - what comes sharply home to me is the so very strange (weird, uncanny) dramatic quality of our ordinary, mortal existence.  We keep moving, in this play of Time : moving toward our own inevitable Golgotha.  We hold the end of it all in our mind, our limbs, our bones : & we go on walking through the day, each day, as the seconds move along & pass.

We are all on stage in this mortal play together... so John Donne writes, with such eloquence : "No man is an island,  entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were;  any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." (Meditation 17) 

Or Shakespeare' s Prospero (in The Tempest), speaking of actors : 

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. 

*

A strange dream it is.  Life is a dream (the play, by Calderon).  "A dream within a dream" (Poe).  Time bearing all of us mortals, each bearing a Golgotha within, down the stream, toward... - & in the middle of this dream, say, an image of the Shroud of Turin : that ghostly-pale, naked, prophet-like, bearded carpenter, his eyes closed... or maybe just a "babe in a manger"...

What am I getting at?  We carry this live coal around in our hearts : this flicker of mortal time, this spiritual thing.  "You are the salt of the earth."  And, "You shall all be salted with fire."

Teach us to number our days, the Psalmist says (Psalm 90).  & lift this mortal gravity with a featherweight, or a butterfly wing.  So we can dance a little.  As old man Eliot, Old Possum,  writes : "Where you must move in measure, like a dancer."

"There is indeed a profound connection between the reality of time and the existence of an incalculable element in the universe." (G.J. Whitrow)

from July:

 11

  
 I saw Eternity the other night   said Henry V
 once more   unto the breaching whale
 for often as I stretched my lips toward
 the lucent wave   so small a thing it

  
 is that separates   our loving hearts
 the darkness had materially increased
 hereupon Nu-Nu stirred   within the secret
 unfailingling J.A. J’s omvalejoss   stretched

  
 postpartum   like a red seed   from
 now-now   to yes-yes yesterday
 deep in Maxwell’s stirry equanimity
 a little kip o’thorn goes o’dell   morphed

  
 the length of a tinier tin plank   forth
 Hendrix   (in tune with a low-rent
 transformation)   (turning
 toward the wall and)   walks on through

  
 Lex Luther’s bilking paradox   (using
 simple OM radio junk from the shack-ham)
 he shows if Shakespeare types out Hamlet
 on his tachyon transmitter, Bacon receives

  
 (in sing-sing) the transmission
 at an earlier time (via chronocomputer)
 settin on a photon clock   spacelike
 timelike and   likelike   Sommerfeld’s

  
 first apple-fall of free-falling world lines
 in a lightcone tipped over by Tippecanoe
 Tipler into the river   just a bit   o’Henry-
 phlegm   caught in the throat   (between

  
 wormholes)   (mouth a and b)  like a frog
 couching for flight through a fog or griffin-
 like surfaces (what exotic matter!  Figure
 it out yourself!) an undersod of the rogue

      
                             2.8.2000

Proust. The idea that our only real experience of Time is in the form of personal time. But art's transpersonal effect - leading us out (errantly, erroneously) into the world, and back again into ourselves - draws maker (& reader) toward a hidden self, experiencing"beyond-time".

The only real experience of Time is personal. Corollary : all time, as humanly understood, is Now (the now, that is, of a 5-act play, lasting roughly 3 score years & 10).

But this is not quite right either. Because at the same time we recognize the pastness of the past. Caesar may yet be living his "now" - but for us, his dust stops a bunghole in Neder-nederland.

Hard to grasp how these two dimensions really intertwine.

When I say that we should consider poetry, not so much as always pioneering out new spaces in Time, but rather as bridging two separate regions of time (time-as-movement and eternity) - I'm saying we should take the notion of the soul into consideration.

Once upon a time, "world" and "eternal soul" were measured against each other: this was the basis of both moral freedom and personal integrity.

But that was back when we had persons.

glNotes Toward...


I want to elaborate on yesterday's post. I'd like to try to do this in a way that doesn't wear both of us (you & me, dear reader) out. So I'll try to limit myself to short propositions or statements.

1. A new poetics would have to start with a concept or understanding of what modernism & postmodernism are (or were). Let's think of them in terms of their relation to Time itself. Yesterday we sketched a very simple diagram: modernism was an aesthetic effort to "catch up" with contemporary reality understood as accelerated time: accelerated industry, science, social activity, and especially, communication. One facet of this accelerated communication involved the displacement of poetry by prose (journalism, fiction, scientific discourse). Suddenly romantic-victorian poetic discourse seemed irrelevant to the new realities. Poetic modernism was in part an effort to reassert that relevance by catching-up with contemporary time. Literary postmodernism, on the other hand, exhibited symptoms of uncertainty: once art had caught up with contemporaneity, it was faced with more essential doubts & questions about its nature and purpose.
.
2. Modernism exhibited three basic strategies in its response to modernity. I will use a Russian schema to diagram them:
a) Symbolism. This strand posited a clear split between worldly time/material life, and eternal time/spiritual life. Poetry's strategy was to withdraw from worldly time into a realm of poesie pure - anti-prose, anti-journalism: attaching itself to music (somewhat like a leech) in such a way as to fuse beauty with non-referentiality ("supernal beauty").
b) Futurism. This strand opposed symbolism in dialectic fashion. Modernity and modern time were understood as irresistible force and materialist vitality. "The word itself" would act as a speed-machine or flight-mechanism, imitating technology in order to reproduce, in art, the existent vitality considered as ruling force or the primary order of reality.
c) Acmeism. This strand sought a middle path between the first two. Acmeism recognized essential distinctions between Word and Matter, Word & Time; but rather than surrendering (or transcending) matter & time (as in symbolism), the acmeist believed that poetry could accept, incorporate, celebrate, and finally transfigure time & matter by means of the word. The Word is the binding, illuminating force between two distinct realms - time & eternity. The existence of eternity sets limits on futurist contemporaneity; the mediating role of the word liberates poetry from symbolist otherworldliness. Acmeism is grounded in a Bergsonian concept of reality as itself grounded in a time-transcending spiritual vitalism (consciousness).

3. Elena Glazov-Corrigan (in her book Mandelshtam's Poetics : a challenge to postmodernism - Univ. of Toronto Press) conducted an extensive interpretation of Osip Mandelshtam's theoretical prose. There, over time, Mandelshtam worked out the acmeist credo in terms of more specific poetic practice. I can't reproduce her complete exposition here, but I will note a few of his basic propositions as they relate to poetry and time:
a) Poetic production evolves out of a process of reading, and reading involves forms of subjective time-reversal: the distinct "verbal time" of the poet's model (what is being read) begins to absorb the reader, to take priority over the reader's own time.
b) The poetic word or logos is always dialogic, in that it spans disjunctive times or aspects of time: the model's and the reader's; eternity (or recurrence) and clock time. Mandelshtam's primary example is Dante, whose poetic process M. describes as a continual shuttling - an experimentation - between scripture and physics, between the assertions of faith and the experience of earthly time: essentially, the poetic logos bridges the disjunctive realms of nature and grace. What philosophy & theology propose in speculation, poetry asserts in verbal action: the harmony of poetry exhibits the actuality (the aesthetic "proof") of this bridging process, this dialogue, between two phases of reality.

4. Mandelshtam's poetics is simply the most theoretically elaborate and exemplary version of the modernist stream I am calling acmeism. This approach to poetry is found more generally wherever poets assert the reality of two things: a) an eternal time ("duration", "eternal life") distinct from successive clock time; and b) the capability of the poetic word to represent such duration. The approach can be found strongly in Emily Dickinson, for one example: she is continually meditating on and mimetically "harmonizing" disjunctions/conjunctions between natural, seasonal, human clock-time, on the one hand, and eternal duration on the other; she repeatedly addresses mysterious absent interlocutors in the most forceful, anachronistic way, asserting the capability of the poetic word - as a kind of Bergsonian vital consciousness - to transcend clock time.

5. Once a poetics asserts this more complex or duplex notion of Time, it must of necessity move beyond a simple reproduction of either modernist "catch-up" or postmodernist contemporaneity (stasis). The motive or function or role of poetry moves beyond merely a mimetic representation of contemporary active reality; reality is understood as more than either "contemporary" or "active" (in the futurist sense). Reality itself appears approachable or representable only through a kind of double vision, or dialogic bridging process, which is the harmonic action of the poetic word itself. Thus, "innovation" or "modernization" (in style, in technique, in subject-matter) are revealed as insufficient as a basis for aesthetics, since the duplex reality of time is not exactly subject to the progress or succession of eras or periods. Poetic style, aesthetic technique, will result from the same interrogation, the same experimental bridging process, as was applied by Dante in his time. This humbling of "modernization" will eventuate in a period of literary "catch-up" organized around a completely new frame or time-scale.

A WAITING GAME

 
           Sic tempus, cum sit mensura motus, mensurantis animae est instrumentum. 
           [Thus time, since it is the measure of motion, is an instrument of the
           measuring soul.]  - Nicholas Cusanus
 
 
Each day has its particular gravity
as each time varies with each local place.
Hours gradually slow to an eternity,
sometimes.  Traveling home again, to face
an April rain in Providence, obscurity
of vision seems to gauge a waiting grace.

 
Once Nicholas Cusanus figured grace,
chance and will within the gravity
of a game (De Ludo Globi).  You’d face
a ring of nine concentric spheres: eternity
rolled into an ovoid ball you’d try to place
in the central O.  The game’s obscurity

 
(exactly equal to the general obscurity
of everything) exemplifies the grace
inherent in defeat, since chancy gravity
haywires the ball: no one loses face
who tries their best.  And if eternity
is the reward of a long wait, my place

 
is assured:  master of running-in-place,
rolling these spheres of absolute obscurity
(always slightly imperfect) with the grace
of an also-ran, I know there’s gravity
in the fall of a sparrow. (Look, face
the sky next Monday: almost an eternity

 
of scientific patience may win eternity
of fame (almost), if the rocket can place
those perfect balls of quartz past gravity,
perfectly aligned with IM Pegasi (grace
go with Gravity Probe B!), in the obscurity
of silvery space... where I would hide my face

 
34 years to see the shadow of your face:
veiled double, in the foyer of eternity,
polishing your mirror over a last place
called Providence: circuitous obscurity:
dove-like sister: light, gray-winged grace:
pebble, black hole (waltzing gravity)...

 
and if there’s gravity in the thought of your face,
I’ll find my place on the ninth hole of eternity
nestled in the obscurity of your blind grace.

 
                                  4.13.04 

The Now, the Eternal. A moment of awareness in the past, perhaps in childhood. Something in the present triggers a recollection of that prior awareness. This present puts that moment in a new context of perception. The twinning or overlapping of two moments in time creates a sense of liberation or adds a new dimension to the simple unidirectional passage of time. Theme of Proust, Nabokov, Four Quartets. Dante spoke about the denizens of Inferno being separated forever from the ben del intelletto, the "good of the intellect"; maybe this experience represents an analogous (aesthetic) "good of perception". Prose (or poetry) designed with such hidden overlapping patterns creates a reading experience which re-enacts the same process. We read along in a forward motion but are given pause by these "time-rhymes". Perhaps all art encourages these moments of contemplative stillness.

Thinking of my own long poems : the re-enactment (through writing) of a reading experience - reading Hart Crane or Mandelstam or the Cantos or Finnegans Wake - which in part is what Stubborn Grew is (since the plot of a "search for the lost cat Pushkin" is a kind of thematizing of the Mandelstam-mimicry process) - triggered my own memory-poiesis in its sequels : the spooky coming-forth of cousin Juliet (the "Forth of July").

Speaking of present tense, have been reading an interesting study by Vladimir Alexandrov, called Nabokov's Otherworld. About the nature of VN's "metaphysics" & its influence on his art. Although Alexandrov emphasizes the novelist's originality, he mentions Proust's fiction as showing some similarities in their presentations of time, eternity, nature, the afterlife. That "the present" is not what it seems in an everyday sense, as neither are life nor death, and that art gives an image or a form to a reality of mystery, "simultaneity".