rattlesnakes & wild hogs

woodcut by Mary R. Gould

BLANK MIRROR

Hobo & Henry (mirror lakes of ice)

hunker down by the Miss

in apocalyptic freeze.

Global worming – ain’t nice,

offers Hobo.  Henry stands on a log

of spongy cottonwood,

to speechify.  I would

gather everyone in D.C. – slug

it out with themeny!  Hobo : Who he?

King Henny Gowanabe?

Beware Coatlicue,

m’deer!  She got that panoply

um rattlesnakes & wild hogs,

rootin’ all around –

Iagoons, Macboars... ground

Z for Camazone swamp hellhound dogs!

In the blank mirror of unconsciousness

the stone-cold powers

& the lotus-flowers

collide in a collusion...  Heartlessness,

she mutters.  Hobo sunk down.

Cheer up, old boy,

sez Hank.  My Book of J

opines beneath Cordelia’s Crown;

she shone me that Madonna del Parto

flaring like Indian mound –

high Sophie’s dancing ground

(who shall restore our humane Beneficio).

1.30.19

Ancient John Berryman

Immured like a feeble Fisher King, home with the flu, old Henry offers a few stray thoughts.  Have been spending some time with Berryman again, aided by a fine study by Brendan Cooper, Dark Airs : John Berryman and the spiritual politics of Cold War America (Peter Lang, 2009).  Cooper goes a long way toward clearing out some of the commonplace critical pigeonholes, the convenient groupings.  He delves into the political commitments and concerns in Lowell, & especially Berryman, as they shaped them into poetry, & provides evidence that the handy label "Confessional" - with all its negative connotations for scholarship of the last 3 decades, at least - diminishes the real social & political complexity of their work.

So I delved into Berryman's poetry again today, reading Homage to Mistress Bradstreet & some of the shorter poems.

It struck me how this poetry from the 1950s still maintained a living bond with old high modes of poetic diction, stretching back to Shakespeare, & Chaucer, & beyond to Dante, & the ancient poets.  It's high-toned, scholarly, informed, intelligent.  This matter of tone or diction provides the poet with a way to explore cultural, historical & religious phenomena on a sort of "intimate" basis.  The everyday demotic speech of the present confronts a chasm of incomprehension : the tools of articulation are no longer there.

But Berryman is not simply a "traditionalist" or "formalist".  Far from it.  He wallows in archaizing vocabulary : he plays with it, alternately leaning on it directly for effect (as when the rhythm of the Shakespearean pentameter comes to his aid in powerful passages), and making a travesty of it - flipping it around with wisecracks, slang & verbal pratfalls.  It's Berryman's way of actually absorbing, confronting & making something new out of his encounter with the great forerunners, going back to the Bible & maybe beyond (Henry/Gilgamesh?).

Another thing : on this question of "confessionalism".  It seems to me that Berryman, in the Homage and the Dream Songs, is indeed confessional : but maybe in a different sense from that of the critical cliche.  Berryman is confessional in the old medieval sense, of a sinful man facing Eternity, frightened for the future of his soul.  This comes through not just in the late "(re)conversion" poems : I found it so powerful today in the Homage as well.  Berryman's shady, adulterous epithalamion for Anne Bradstreet provides a plot-frame for a painful, terrifying soul-shriving.  Terrifying in at least two senses : first in that Berryman provides no consolation (except perhaps very obliquely, in the moments of praise for the natural grace & beauty of Anne & her children).  Cooper points out the Homage's ironic judgement on the spiritual enthusiasm of the Puritans : they thought they were founding a "city on a hill"; instead they were setting the stage for mid-20th century American version of decadence & systemic violence (Berryman is writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the advent of the atomic bomb, and the Cold War).

Terrifying, secondly, in that the Homage seems to implicate the poet in an irreversible repetition of the "damnation" which threatens.  In these passages it seems to me that Berryman becomes "confessional" in both a personal & a theological sense.  The formality of the poem strains with Berryman's sense of guilt & soul-fear, his anxiety about his eternal soul in the face of his 1) sins and 2) unwillingness to repent.

There are many aspects to Berryman's persona and writing which seem ancient, archaic.  The beard, the bardic grandeur, the Irish, the Yeats, the Shakespeare... but on another level there is this access in his poetry to an older way of being, of understanding.  He's like an Old Testament prophet, castigating his nation while at the same time pouring ashes on his own head.  The fact that he can also convey at the same time a fragile gaiety & antic wit, speaks to his humanity.

Needless to say, the more I read Berryman, the more I realize this Henry is not that Henry, if you know what I mean.  It's hard to exaggerate the sense of despair and desolation emanating from much of the American literature of the mid-20th century.  Existential angst.  Its keynote seems to be the loss of faith : the death of God.  The inability to reconcile the horror with any kind of theodicy.

Berryman seems to have been torn by agonizing & recurrent crises of faith - the most powerful spiritual experiences coming toward the end of his life.  I've been there, too, in my way... but the pivotal crisis happened when I was young, around age 19.

Along with Brendan Cooper & Berryman himself, I've been reading another book on my sickbed : The Gothic Cathedral, by Otto von Simson.  A beautiful, brilliant work, focusing on the architecture of Chartres Cathedral.

I was intrigued to learn that Suger and the other masters of the early Gothic were part of an intellectual milieu centered on the spiritual vision of St. Bernard, and much influenced by the Neo-Platonic Christianity of the Byzantine mystic known as "Pseudo-Dionysus".  Pseudo-Dionysus got blended with the patron saint of the Il-de-France, St. Denis.  According to Simson, the "Dionysian" theology of progressive emanations of spiritual light was filtered to Paris by way of an old acquaintance of mine, the Byzantine monk, St. Maximus the Confessor.

All this is neither here nor there.  But Simson explains how the anonymous "Master of Chartres" was an artist of genius, transforming the Romanesque into a new aesthetic unity of perfect proportions and overwhelming light.

I can't go into all the insights Simson provides.  He writes about how different the medieval worldview is from our own (his book was published in 1956).  I'm just here to confess how this study helps & reinforces my own viewpoint.  For me, a rational faith in the incarnate Word is possible; in fact, it's the door to all hope for humankind on this planet.  Chartres is simply one of the most powerful architectural expressions of this "rational faith" on earth.

Job's debate with God about suffering, horror and evil goes on.  It has no simple rationalistic verbal or formulaic resolution.  The inward "confession" of the human person cannot be abstracted, turned into a determinism.  & yet as far as the legal argument over the problem of evil, I stand on the following principles :

1)  Human persons have free will; they make choices for good and evil.
2)  God as spirit & creator is not responsible for Man's free-will choices for good or evil.
3) The message of Jesus is that repentance, mercy, forgiveness & transformation are not only possible, they are the power of God at work in Man to save the whole creation, and to save and heal individual persons.

Where Berryman is anguished, I am calm.  It is startling to me that while I was growing up in Minneapolis, John Berryman was living in my parents' and grandparents' old neighborhood, where I live now.  My family & I probably passed him on the street.  I wish I could have held out my little Henry hand to help him.

*

Postscript

I realize my juxtaposition here of "the old high modes" and "everyday demotic speech" lands me plop in the middle of seemingly-outgrown battles over the true progress of American letters.  I come across as would-be mandarin, elitist, aligned with Eurocentric Anglo-centric stuffy traditionalism in poetry.  My comments seem to dismiss what has been a prime element of American literature : the search for an idiom adequate to specifically American speech, and to the vastness of American experience, exemplified by W. C. Williams, Wallace Stevens & so many others.  Instead I appear to have opted for that rather stuffy, contrived mid-century period, when New Critical academics sought to perfect & standardize their pedantic version of T.S. Eliot's "tradition".

But I think Berryman's poetry exemplifies how & why nobody has to align themselves with these critical pigeonholes or literary clans.  His absorption of the disciplines of the "old high style" reveal a debt to Yeats; the desire to emulate and recapitulate the ancient manner stem ultimately from a passion for participation, which moves poets to inhabit & revive the ghosts of ancient texts and long-gone times.

In my view this is of the essence of the poetic vocation; it comes from a power within "song" itself, to enliven and resurrect dead words, dead times, the old poets.  The bard goes into a kind of visionary trance in order to re-encounter these things - the way Homer, or Virgil or Dante all went down into the depths of the afterlife to speak with their ancestors.

So there is always something uncanny, a whiff of archaic mana, when a poet starts to mime the old speech in a new way.  And all I mean to suggest by the above is that Berryman's or any poet's engagement with the "old high forms" - various modes of traditional poetic artifice - opens doors to time and history not otherwise available.  The poetry of American "plain speech"  has indeed made accessible enormous new spaces of artistic perception & grasp of experience; I'm just suggesting that someone like Berryman re-enacts the exploration of past human times.

only Ophelia remained

AGATE LEVIATHAN

A little Hamlet, on remote planet

in Denmark, was troubled

with Mors – he stumbled

as against a stone, to understand it.

Pebbles flung from anxious Hell

pinged against his helmet;

a pearl-toothed kismet

glimmered from the poisoned well.

It was a union greatly to be wished.

Its whorl unfathomable

shone... like Luna in a fable,

agate Leviathan (unfished).

A curse enclosed it, like a shell;

a nightmare of the sea –

a beast called Jealousy

clutched, rang it like a bell

from bottomlands.  It was his grail.

The angry Minotaur

grunted through Knossos-tar

in the crusted mirror – you must fail.

Denmark was full of hardened criminals.

Only Ophelia remained

to pluck the sweet Beltane

of innocence (from sordid halls).

Hamlet stepped up, to meet his fate.

He smiled into the teeth

of Sheol – sensed beneath

basalt of gladness, past debate.

11.24.16 

Jesus Thoughts (27) : massacre of innocence

The holiday-season tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut must give any scribe pause.  Especially someone writing a blog-diary called "Jesus Thoughts."  I began this thread around Halloween, going into the Advent season leading up to Christmas.  Now the news is filled with the funerals of little children, and with journalists floating Job's old question, what kind of God permits such evil, such grief?

As it happens, I've started reading another book by Carl Jung, called Aion.  I have very mixed feelings about Jung, as noted before - my final personal judgement is still out.  He begins this book by arguing that psychology can offer a path by which modern humanity can comprehend certain realities symbolized in traditional Christian faith and ritual - eucharist, heavenly beings, redemption, etc. - which in the course of 20 centuries, he says, have lost their meaning for everyday modern life; we no longer understand them, they do not touch us or help us.  Jung is writing around the time of WW 2, when it seemed that all vestiges of "Christian Europe" had been scattered, reversed - and modernity exhibited a truly "anti-christian" spirit (epitomized by totalitarian fanaticism and global violence).

Jung sometimes seems more of a pagan or Gnostic than Christian, but maybe his heart was in the right place.  In any case he posits a kind of Gnostic dualism of good and evil at the roots of reality, in which the spirit and doctrine of Christ would inevitably be confronted by its deflected, repressed opposite - absolute evil, the anti-Christ.  He sees this as working out historically in the culture of the West.  Fundamentally he understands this as a problem of the human psyche : how to acknowledge and integrate the shadow, the dark side, of human nature, into a more complete psychic and ontological wholeness (Jung's "Self")?

I think the fundamental problem I have with all of this is that, in the process of exploring the dark side of the human psyche, Jung reifies spiritual reality within his own architecture of fixed categories (animus, anima, shadow, self, quaternion, mandala, etc.) - resulting in a kind of timeless psychic domain which seems to bear more resemblance to Greek mythology or to alchemy than to the (perhaps more simple) truth of the Gospels.

I'm not ready to deny that there is a dimension of psychological truth in Jung's doctrine.  His idea that a basic quaternion - a 4-sided, cruciform geometry, which resolves the 3-sided Trinity by way of a 4th point (the personal, the individual, the singular, the excess, the shadow) - appeals to me, to a certain degree.

But I want something more.  I want a wholeness which is not simply a metaphysical or psychological construct "beyond good and evil."  I want a wholeness rooted in the fusion of divine and human consciousness : the fusion represented by the formula Jesus, Son of God.

It seems Jung's mistake might be that, in the labor of constructing his intellectual edifice, he loses sight of the primary reality : a divine and benevolent Mind-Person - a Creator-Spirit - from which we have come, and in whom we dwell (as "images" of same).  This primary reality is personal and relational : the geometry of such inter-personal affinity, sympathy, and fusion is the very ground of our existence.

One is called into a personal relation with the conscious Source of all goodness - and draws life and truth from this deepening bond. This is the communal "Body of Christ" we share.

So to return to where we began today : how can religion, Christianity, personal "spirituality" respond to, give an answer for, the enormity of evil which just happened in Connecticut?  Jung tries to re-interpret religious symbols from 2000 years ago in order to re-imagine their relevance.  But after immersing myself in John Meier's reconstruction of the historical Jesus, A Marginal Jew (see previous posts), I want to try to imagine the reverse : not "how do we interpret Jesus for today?", but rather : "how would Jesus respond to the Newtown tragedy?"

Obviously, neither I nor anyone else can "imagine" accurately, in its fulness and variety, how Jesus might respond.  But I will hazard an imperfect hypothesis.

For Jesus, the "kingdom of God" is a living, embodied, communal reality, which the coming of the Messiah has actually brought to earth, brought to historical actuality.  This, I take it, is one of the meanings of his mysterious Gospel saying : "the Law and the prophets were until John; and from the days of John until now, the kingdom of God has suffered violence, and violent men plunder it."  In other words, with the coming of the Son of Man, the eschatological age - the end-time - has irrevocably appeared on earth.  The kingdom of God is at hand, is "in your midst."  And precisely because the kingdom is no longer merely a hope of the future, but is here - is now embodied in Jesus and the people of God - it suffers violence : violent men attack it by force.  The struggle for the redemption of the world is now fully engaged : Jesus has come.

What was the witness to Israel of both John the Baptist and Jesus?  : that divine Judgement is at hand.  Jesus only differed from John in the unaccountable lovingkindness he offered - the healing ministry, the casting out of illness and evil - as signs of the presence of God's reign.

How would Jesus respond to the horrors and sadness of the massacre of innocents?  he would say come closer : come into the reign of God, into the rule of God's love.  Save yourself from the old human habits which open the door to evils such as this.

I think Jesus would look at the town of Newtown as a kind of Everytown, USA.   What happened in Newtown could have happened anywhere in the United States.  There is no special sinfulness to the place where this occurred : yet this violence might be a sign of spiritual sickness which the whole nation (the whole world) - and every person - needs to address.

What are the dimensions of this spiritual illness?  First, an attachment to the self and its pleasures - say, for example, guns, shooting, the collection of weapons of mass killing.  But these are not the only superficial, materialistic and selfish pleasures which corrupt the soul : they are only perhaps the most obviously dangerous (or seem to be, after this tragedy).  John the Baptist and Jesus both consistently preached the necessity for repentance and spiritual change - for turning toward a new communal life in God - if one hopes to see and experience the reign of God's benevolence.

A second dimension is related to the first : in our attachment to our selfish pleasures, our personal self-pleasing, we neglect those deeper values of charity, love and understanding, generosity, and justice - which are at the very root of both Judaism and Christianity.  What does Jesus call the Great, the central Commandment?  "Love God with all your heart; and love your neighbor as yourself."  Judaism (along with many other ancient faiths) emphasizes the great duty to welcome the stranger in our midst : to help the poor, to heal the afflicted.

And who is the stranger in our midst today?  There are many : but certainly one of those strangers was Adam Lanza.  The troubled, the afflicted, the mentally-ill young person.  The loner, the outcast, the self-outcast : like that sufferer in the Gospel, possessed by a demon, who kept hitting himself with stones.  Where were the helpers, the interveners, the welcomers for Adam Lanza - when he needed help?  Why was he living in solitude, at age 20, with his mother - and going to the rifle range?  Obviously it's too early for me to speculate on these matters : but the outlines of this situation are clear not only in the Newtown event but in other such recent tragedies all around the country.  And woe be to us, if we convert this moral crisis into some kind of mere surveillance or punitive control of the afflicted in our midst.  This would be merely the next anti-Christian, anti-Judaic step.  No : we must find ways to love the stranger, and heal the afflicted, and draw the loner into the circle of hope and joy.

We are all selfish; we have all gone astray.... like the wicked of the Old Testament, we are captured in the nets of our own wicked imaginations.  As Jesus said, when someone addressed him as "good rabbi" :  One is good, the Father only.  (This statement, by the way, is a very concise rebuttal of some of Jung's speculations about the "blind idealism" of Christianity).  We need to turn in charity - me, you, every one of us - to those in need, and cease treating life as a free ride for our own complacent hobbies and pastimes.

I think these are some of the things which Jesus might have said about the Newtown tragedy.  But he (along with Martin Luther King) would have summarized by proclaiming, again : the reign of a loving God is here.  God is my father and mother, and yours, too.  All things are possible through faith in God's love.  God is the creative Spirit who has brought all this about - to redeem the world.  Come into the living body of faith, into the community of the kingdom - and together we shall overcome.

Various and sundry people who probably don't visit here much are having an interesting debate on the riots in France.

I don't think you need to reach as far as to Hobbes in order to dispute the romanticization of political violence. It's precisely that romanticizing - indulged in by armchair idealists, stationed at a distance from the events themselves - which crosses the boundary from necessity to disorder.

There is an exact parallel between said romanticization and the rhetorical exaggeration of "state violence".

Injustice in government is evil. Violence is evil. Neither one justifies the other. When injustice convinces people that they have no other recourse but violence toward the achievement of justice, then you have an obvious symptom of social injustice and a need for reform. There is no need to justify violence in order to address the injustice which is at its root.