grain in the hold in the Boundary Waters

Mary (Elvira) Ravlin Gould, Jan. 2020

BRIGHT ANCHOR

I was wheeling my mother Mary around

the old people’s home yesterday.

We came upon the Ash Wednesday

service, by chance, & rolled on in.

The genial priest lifted up the Book

& prayed for us all

& traced a cross of charcoal

on our brows (despite my mother’s look

of wary puzzlement).  & we rolled on.

Her father was an engineer.

Master of grain elevator

& sewage plant, he built his own

brick house along the Mississippi

back in 1929, or so –

Barnett & Record Co.

John H. Ravlin (everlastingly).

Granddad, your fathers came from Dublin

whirled by coracle & shamrock

to Vermont.  By hard knock

grace & cornucopia, they ventured in

to the interior.  You heard violins

of Verdi… Elvira

(some serene Barber adagio)

& in great lofty mountainous grain bins

of full, deep faith, one mustard seed

of your stern secret mother

glints – compassionate anchor

for Milky Way (ark’s cornerstone, indeed).

2.27.20

John H. Ravlin in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (1940s)

the water-works in New Orleans

CROW-TRACKS

Old Hobo by the river again,

old mule, old Lear, old man.

Ponders the coiled span,

the tension in the plot called Heaven

Versus America.  Indifferent violence,

violent indifference...

What took you into silence,

Julie, at your blossoming – hence

into the shark’s eye of the Bay.

Like an arching jaguar-lunge

of International Orange

claw-marked with irreversible tragedy

your Bridge – hypnotic Taj Mahal

whose lambent shadow hums

of nut-brown kingdoms,

steep ravines for Solomon, Sheba...

The span tracks a continuum

he scans with tentative

crow-tracks.  To live

or die.  From the will’s ultimatum

of despair, your cul-de-sac of self-

slaughter – to the other pole

of faith, serene & whole;

with Stravinsky’s branded Sylph

leaping her epileptic scapegoat pyre

(in Paris, on May 29th)

– O Juliet, my May-month

sister-dove!... my black North Star

       *

– his limping meditation takes him far

upstream, & down.  The dream-

songe, rivery-rêve, beams

her constancy, an equilibrium (wave-mère).

Her source, an Okean of galaxies,

a murmuring Milky Way –

your sempiternal Day

that never dies, your tree of many Jessies...

open your eyes, Hobo, & see!

This kingdom of canoeing

almonds pours – outpacing

Death with fins of Galilee-Ferrari!

Her mickle water-sprite keeps murmuring

like your sibling ghost,

shady elfin host

who climbs from a mandorla, humming

beside you (ahead of you, within you);

& like Latrobe the architect

following his own son to inspect

the water-works in New Orleans, renew

yourself – restore yourself, American! –

in that strange French-Spanish-

Cherokee dreamland.  Swish

go the eucalypus paddles... the plan

of Heaven is a restoration, so –

not slavery, but liberty –

your soul’s birthday.

Love Kingdom’s galaxies begin to glow.

6.24.19

Reasoning about the existence of God tonight ?

Back in my Caesar salad days, I used to ham it up on the old blog almost every waking slumber.  My forte (whether by music, poetry or pure verbiage) having always been improv - "uniquely suited" (as they say) to extensive bloggification on all matters pertinent and impertinent - I was having a field day every night.

Oh well, enough about that.  I've been reading - trying to read - an extremely dense and philosophically technical book by Denys Turner, titled Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge UP, 2004).  It's one heck of a meatloaf.

Turner is defending against an old traditional challenge to St. Thomas Aquinas.  He's too rational, he's too philosophical : and as such, he veers too far toward the "natural", the secular, the humanist, the agnostickal, the pantheist, etc.  Turner is also challenging those contemporary theologians who have basically surrendered any rational argument for theism, on behalf of an interpretation of "negative theology", apophaticism, & so forth, which disallows rational argument on behalf of mystical (post-rational?) faith.

I'm not doing Turner justice, and am bowdlerizing & totally messing up what this extremely logically assiduous scholar engage is trying to say.  Nevertheless, I'm on his side.

After working through, very carefully, the alternative mentalities of Kant, Bertrand Russell ("the world is just a fact") and a few other prominent agnostics, Turner comes around to defending, very obliquely, very elegantly, the logic of Aquinas, regarding the one most basic & most profound children's question at the heart of philosophy and religion : Why is there anything, rather than nothing?

Sit back and think about it, quietly, for a while.  La vida es sueno.

There is no simple "positively theological" answer to this basic question, as Turner makes clear.  Negative theology, "apophaticism", is inherent in our reasoning itself : because we know we cannot explain how God has produced this intricate dream-cosmos.  The question ends in wonder.

Which leads Turner, and Aquinas (and me) back to the delicate distinctions of the Chalcedonian creed.  We know God only through her manifestation as the conjunction of differences : the human-divine Person... "without separation, without confusion..."

Love manifest as infinite mystery, gift, harmony... and, in the end (at the center of interplanetary melody) - victory, glory, law, fulfillment, redemption.  Star of Redemption... promised land, "kingdom of heaven".

Don't ask me to explain.  Bird has left the cage.

my circuit is circumference

HONEY-OAK

Sunshine in June – one whole note

melts into the chord

of summer.  In the old

garden of Time, the poet’s boat

extends its shade toward evening twilight.

The golden ratio of the sunflower

stretches to the nth power

(its perihelion); clay speeds to insight,

cartwheeling uphill into angelic life –

that bright-gated City

whose anti-gravity

magnetic North amends all strife.

Through this fan-feathered diapason

of a planet, the limpid figure

of a limping friend, your

sister-dove (gray pebble, midnight sun);

her hazel eye takes in mortality

as a grave garden absorbs

the one whose goldfinch orb

will bend, in parallax fluidity

as rivers from Paradise stream forth

or a mustard seed

flares – life’s high meed –

a sunny gyroscope (balanced from birth).

So the Messiah-bloom of Israel

like Joachim Fiore,

Henry Flower (ey

hey yo) anchors goodness to the Pole

                 *

Star, steadfast over midnight waters;

so Infinite Presence

arcs into salience

turtledoves & fiery matières

de Bretagne (Arthurian hide-&-seek

the Once & Future King

resolves, into a ring

of riven oaks & golden fleece).

The One Who Rose from the Dead

lives in our midst –

Who left his Holy Ghost

as marigold, to blaze undaunted

Hagia Sophia (with a million eyes);

American peacock (turkey?)

or Aramaic poppycock (see

how archaic our ways – how wise!) –

only Phoenix-Turtle comprehends

how from dream-song flame

Reality revolves the same

again... as when a potter bends

her starfish over azure sand

& lofting clay from seabed

into galactic Roundhead

Cavalier (old Charley-Horse le Grand)

curling himself into green honey-oak

until the lightning stroke

flashes – where thunder spoke

the wheel that spun Ezekiel (Rose-Boke).

6.20.17

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.

Walking around Ravenna Diagram

Ravenna Diagram, the project I've been engaged with for the last few years, begins with a poem called "Potter's Whirl".  That poem was set in motion by small ceramic plate my mother made many years ago, featuring a pale pink starfish with a background of stars & rays - sort of a cosmic little dish.

You could say this poem is an introductory pointer toward the shape of Ravenna Diagram as a whole.  The "diagram" in question is actually a kind of Venn diagram, with two interlocking spheres centered, respectively, on the contemporary here & now, and on Dante Alighieri's presence at the end of his life among the Byzantine structures & mosaics of Ravenna (Dante completed his Divina Commedia there, and is buried in Ravenna).

It's meant to be a kind of juxtaposition of Modern & Medieval mind & culture, or a synthesis.  The Venn diagram also points to the underlying worldview of the western Middle Ages : a concept of Incarnation, which is itself a sort of Venn diagram, melding the human and the divine.  In the poem, this worldview or philosophy is represented in part by the figure of Maximus the Confessor, a Byzantine monk whose writings on the Trinity had a deep impact on the thought-world of the 12th-cent. French cathedral-builders, as well as on the Byzantine Orthodox church itself (see Otto von Simson's monograph The Gothic Cathedral for more on this).

I think of my Dante juxtaposition as a sort of 90-degree tweak.  While the Divine Commedia climbs vertically (up & down the ladder from Earth to Heaven), Ravenna Diagram works on the horizontal - set upon the "flat plate" of the American Midwest, & seeking this-world ramifications and consequences of a spiritual worldview (the eschatological meaning of "Providence", for example).

I sense that the poem actually gathers mass & energy in the same way that my mother shaped her plates and bowls from lumps of wet clay turned on a potter's wheel.  The making of ancient, medieval and Renaissance poetry was enmeshed in such "ring structures" - their unity welded by numerologically-concentric rings of design.  This process is something I've been pursuing over several long poems & several decades of work.  The chapters & books of Ravenna Diagram turn on their own centers, which in turn are linked by motifs surfacing in the corresponding or parallel "numbers" (ie. the 14th poem in Book 1 will find echoes in the 14th & nearby poems of Books 2-9+).

One of the strange effects for me of this process is that the individual units or poems will foreshadow each other in advance.  Here's how it happens.  My general method is to read through the aligned or corresponding "numbers" of the previous books before setting out on the next poem.  Thus if I'm writing # 27 in Book 10, I will read through the previous #27s in Books 1-9, seeking a general orientation.  Then I will proceed to write #27.  The odd thing is this : when I then turn to composing #28, and proceed to read all the previous #28s, I discover that what I'm reading has already been foreshadowed by what I've just written (#27).  It's sort of a double motion, planned/unplanned.

If this sounds convoluted, my apologies : the basic idea is that the large poem is structured on a series of rings, growing slowly outward, like a tree.  It's a massive ceramic plate - shaped by clay lips (a sort of "whisper gallery").  Or a maze, a labyrinth - a slow, spiraling pilgrimage one has to walk.

My constant companion in this seemingly endless project is a shadow of doubt & frustration.  There is no acknowledgement in the literary world for what I'm engaged with here.  The silence is absolute.  It's like I'm traveling in a separate or private universe, on an irrational fool's errand.  There is a vast chasm between creation & publication.  I have no prestige, no powerful advocates.  Ravenna Diagram goes out there on HG Poetics, with occasional forays into literary magazines (for which I'm extremely grateful).

I've written before about the motivations for blogging the poem. Basically I find that the blog is an appropriate way to present a long, serial, diaristic, processual work, which sometimes interacts with signal holidays or public events.  But the disadvantages are many.  Moreover, I have a very old & very bad habit of self-publication - which doesn't sit well with many people, especially prestigious academics, book reviewers & editors.  This greatly limits my access to the larger literary scene.

But I want to suggest that there is another, more fundamental dimension to this poetry thing I am acting out at such great length.  & that is that I am attempting to express a radical worldview, a sort of philosophy with my work.  The intellectual pivot of all these poetic ring structures is a challenge to the modern & postmodern era as a whole (an intellectual challenge).

One might see this coming with a poem structured on a parallel to Dante.  Eliot & Pound, in their own ways, did something similar.   But I'm not at all a neoconservative or revolutionary-authoritarian Modern, as they were.  My intellectual allegiance (if I have to choose models) is closer to Hart Crane & James Joyce.  Or to some of the visionary dimensions in Mandelstam & Yeats.

I believe in a new Age of Faith : but one in which faith itself is understood also in a new way.

Poetry, in my view, is a mode of expressing the vitality, goodness & beauty of Reality as a whole : as an End, as a Creation, as a living, breathing multivalent Sign of a supreme loving Consciousness.  This view need contradict neither human free will nor scientific objective reason (theory & evidence).  But it is rooted in this sense of faith : this joyful apprehension of a benevolent purpose in cosmic nature (call it divine "Providence").

I can only call it Faith, because it is incommensurate with simple verbal arguments or logical verifications.  But I do think this is what Jesus meant when he spoke of "going back to the beginning", or about faith as the root of all active accomplishment, or when he characterized God the Creator as Love.   This faith is really not that different from the "primitive" faith of archaic human cultures - that all goodness descends from the One Great Spirit, from the "Manitou" who is the source of all blessings.  We are talking about the root meaning of the general social-behavioral attitude we call "good faith", "good will".

This way of putting things will strike many as not "new" at all.  I agree : I'm not up to the task here in prose.  Hence the need for poetry.  Ravenna Diagram is circling very slowly around a new sense of "Incarnation" - something emerging presently, out of the here & now, out of the clay of Big Muddy, like an infant emerging from the womb, or Jonah from the whale.  An Incarnation which expresses and confirms (forever) an inherent thankfulness-for-being; a celebration of its own existence, a happy end-in-itself.

The foregoing sketches out a vision - not unrelated to that of the Russian Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilev.  A "chaste" vision, of the inherent beauty & blessedness of all things; of the harmony of the cosmos as one fundamental, & fundamentally victorious, Dream-reality.

Deep lands

Home again in Providence.  Tucked into the old house, with the dogwood & the weedy patio in the backyard, the books upstairs.  I realize after 25 years how much I have become an appendage of this appanage.  I'm part of the local landscape.  May have to leave it soon.

Driving non-mindedly through springtime Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania... wide fields, deep lands, prim farms... trying to keep things going.  The banks of weeds & flocks of trees along the roadside (somebody's Rock Candy Mountain).  The beckoning earth.  (Burchfield's Ohio.)

"Beauty will save the world."  (Dostoevsky)  Reading The Education of Henry Adams.  Adams' quasi-Buddhist passivity.  He understands the futility of late-Darwinian naturalism - yet scrambles around without finding an alternative.

Faith, from the naturalist view, seems an expression of bad faith - a deliberate shuttering of the rational mind.  Mantra for closed eyes.

My whole focus an attempt to justify another view : one which has grown on me over time, prompted by a sort of unconscious prescience, an adolescent St. Vitus' mime of my own future orientation.

The naturalist reads the universe in a context of shock - the shock of recognition of the unknown.  This is the real psycho-cultural after-effect of the development of modern science.  Thanks to the Hubble Telescope et al., we see the universe more immediately, more concretely - an incalculably immense wasteland of burning stars & circling rocks.

The religionist sees the universe as a metaphor, an allegory, a sign.  This kind of seeing is now judged, by the scientific mind, to be the most egregious & central scandal.  It's a kind of evasion, an idealistic feint - as fiction, myth-making.

The poet (arch-Romantic) believes in a vitalist, personal, Reality.  The poem is a document of this faith : a vivid speech, a living voice evoking a living world of living beings.

I can't convince you of what I believe - I can't even enunciate it.  I'm trying, but I fall short.

"Beauty will save the world."  This is Dostoevsky's version of what was once (back in medieval times) understood as "the economy of salvation".  Divine Providence has a plan for the redemption of the earth.

The story of Christ's death & resurrection is a kind of metaphor.  A mystery play.  A symbol, a sign of the "Son of Man" : that is, a representative image of the destiny of the human race as a whole on earth, and of the fortitude of the individual person enmeshed in same.  We die, yet we live again.  We overcome evil through love.  We redeem the earth.  This is "Man's" project here, "Man's" goal.  Joseph Brodsky : "Man was put on this earth for one purpose : to make civilization."  I would revise this formula, however.  Man was put on this earth to discover the love of God (which is really the same thing).

All these phrases of mine are completely useless.  I can't put into words what I really sense & know.

I helped bury my loving, steadfast father last month.  He went into ashes by Minnehaha Creek.  Yet he lives.  He leaves an outline of the Son of Man, a fulfillment of one local corner of the creation, where he shone like a star.

"Ariel was glad he had written his poems..."

"A Tear is an Intellectual Thing,
& a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King."

Beauty will save the world.  There is a harmony to the whole of life which no artist or scientist has been able to express.  It is "grace", it is "love".  It will overcome evil & will make all things new.

It is personal beyond our understanding of the visible person.  It is whispering to you.

Which reminds me of this little poem I wrote about 30 yrs ago :

from a cave

Such a small voice,
I would not stop to hear;
the sun was going down, and
there were no houses near.

Such a strange voice,
whispering out of the ground -
familiar, though it seemed
unearthly, utterly profound.

Such a sweet voice,
twining my cavern ear;
a vine for water jars, when
all the wedding guests are here.

A sigh is the sword of an angel king

I

Love, love... Valentine's Day.  The main legend (and it is only a legend) of the first St. Valentine portrays someone whom we would call a "prisoner of conscience".  Jailed, and eventually executed, for his religious activities by the Emperor Claudian, the hagiography tells how Valentine sent a note (or notes) to a loved one, signed "your Valentine".

We are quite familiar with prisoners of conscience these days.  Think of the young Iranian poet Hashem Shaabani, recently tortured and hanged for speaking out against abuses of power.  Just one example among thousands.  The globe today, a battlefield of exploitation, fanaticism, brutality and violence.

Sad thoughts on Valentine's Day.

II

I was never much for philosophy.  The teachers, textbooks put me in a drowse.   When you don't really study a subject, it's likely you'll produce banal travesties of ideas which have been stated (or refuted) with greater exactitude and force in years or ages past.  In other words you won't discover or relate anything new.

Have been playing catch-up, a little bit, reading a very absorbing book by Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination.  Explores the changing notions of "imagination" through the history of Western philosophy, from ancient/classical Greek and Jewish thought, through the Middle Ages, into the modern age (Kant, Romanticism, Existentialism... to the present).

My knowledge of German idealist philosophy has not really been knowledge at all, just sketchy third-hand references (say, in texts on Coleridge's philosophical background).  Kearney's book puts aesthetic issues in the larger context. 

Kant was pivotal : the origin of Romanticism.  His theory of the imagination - so radical that he himself drew back from it (in the revised 2nd ed. of Critique of Pure Reason) - shifted the ground in a fundamental way.

Ancient philosophy was rooted in theology.  Plato's idealism was structured around the assertion of a universal Being, a first principle, the cosmic Logos, the source of reality in a divine realm of living Ideas, a transcendental Mind.  In similar (though not congruent) fashion, Jewish monotheism asserted a transcendental, invisible Creator- and Sustainer-God.  The imagination, for both cultures, was corroded by sin and revolt : for Judaism, the heart's turning away from its source led to destruction; for the Greeks, feeble mortals required the aid of a rebellious Titan, Prometheus (avatar and scapegoat for all human capability).

The Medieval era synthesized the legacy of Athens and Jerusalem, but the basic theocentric cosmic design remained.  The human imagination was a fallible instrument, a likely source of (moral and intellectual) error.

The Renaissance, followed by Reformation and Enlightenment eras, began the transposition from theocentric to anthropocentric worldviews.  Kant revolutionized philosophy by bringing this slow development to a theoretical summation.  The imagination was the vital center of human being, the root of both experience (perception and sensibility) and knowledge (intellect and understanding).  Moreover, the imagination was transcendental : not in a theocentric sense of divine, or heavenly, but in the sense of prior or formative.  Imagination shapes all human knowledge and experience : we, in this sense, make our world.  The "logocentrism" of a prior, exterior cosmos no longer holds : Man is the origin of his/her own reality.

Kant himself drew back from some of the epistemological consequences of his own critique.  But his most radical position was the basis for the entire Romantic movement. Human creative subjectivity was now the world-fashioning source of all experience; the ultimate order was rooted in the human mind.

The history of western philosophy since Kant is a tale of the shattering of Romantic idealism.  Naturalism, Existentialism and the various strains of Postmodernism express the belief that, although God is no longer relevant, and human consciousness is the center of experience (just as Kant asserted), nevertheless, that consciousness is faced with an external actuality, a real world of chance and meaninglessness, which is beyond human comprehension or control.  The mind's constructs are fictions, founded in nothingness (Nietzsche, Sartre).  Creative idealism is not a source of nobility, but rather of moral evasion and betrayal (Kierkegaard, Marcuse).  We may recognize God's presence only in the absurd, by an irrational leap of faith (Kierkegaard, again) - everything else is rationalization, complacency, bad faith.  There is only heroism and fellow-feeling in the stoic acceptance of our mutual fate, in a random, absurd cosmos (Camus).  Symbolism and Modernism attempted to salvage aesthetic experience by constructing an autotelic world of art; but the shadow (or the joke) of the actual world (of injustice, pain and absurdity) always impinged.

This then is my rough, amateurish travesty (courtesy of R. Kearney) of the philosophical background to our own time, the Postmodern era.  Maybe you can characterize Postmodernity as the absorption of both the lessons of 20th-century history, and of existentialist thought.  The autotelic engine of the modernist imagination broke down about 50 years ago.  The strongest intellectual trends which replaced it involve either various modes of historicism or historical materialism, or various forms of neo-Nietzschean thought.  Derridean deconstruction, for example, is a sort of parodic Platonism, a Plato in an inverted mirror.  The cosmic Logos of rationality is inverted by universal non-identity, by a rational structure of irrationalism (very Nietzschean in spirit).  Even the disillusioned heroism of Existentialism is rendered impossible, since the human imagination is no longer merely absurd or futile, it is not itself.

There are also distinct, perhaps more "positive" trends - the paradoxes of Lacanian psychology (desire grounded in the imaginary presence of another) or the tentative affirmations of Levinas (ethics grounded in an unknowable divine Interlocutor).  The landscape is appropriately confusing.  But the history of imagination seems to present a central plot.  The ethical/ontological fences around the imagination - whether Judaic, Platonic, or Christian - were knocked down.  The formative capacities of the rational comprehension of experience are faculties of human subjectivity.  Man assumed many of the ordering functions once assigned to God.  Then, in Acts Two through Four, the authority of that human subjectivity was thoroughly dismantled.  Relativity in all modes reigns supreme (block that metaphor!).

III

Professional philosophes & knowledgeable people must forgive the howlers embedded in the above.  It's my naive subjective take on a wonderful book (Wake of Imagination) which I haven't finished reading.  But what is my response to the basic plot, so rashly hammed together here?

I'm going to improvise.  It's Friday afternoon.  (There will be no rationally-secured syllogisms, unfortunately.)

The mind : is it a lamp or a mirror?  It's a lamp in a mirror (as in a lighthouse).

Kierkegaard's extremity seems rooted in the idea that God is strictly unfathomable, that the paradox of the God-Man is inherently absurd.  More than absurd : it is abjection, it is scandal.  He believes in God, but it requires a leap of faith to even begin to believe.  There is no synthesis of reason and faith.

Yet I can hear the distant trumpets of affirmation in both Kant's optimism and Kierkegaard's pessimism.  Kant affirms mankind's noble freedom and power; Kierkegaard sets a limit to human pride and self-delusion.

Kant's transcendental imagination, capable of fusing sensibility and understanding, and logically prior to experience, is like Aristotle's definition of the soul, but in a modern mode.  Kierkegaard's iconoclastic leap of faith, his anguish reaching out a hand, is an intuition of the ultimate ground beneath the scintillating, shuttling clay of Mind.

That ultimate ground (or firmament) is Love.  Under the aegis of love, we can comprehend the conjunction of logical opposites, the "absurd" incarnation of the God-Man.  And here is when we need to remember : the imagination is only a faculty, a power, a capability, of a more fundamental entity : the Person.  The imagination is not yet the "form of forms" - the person comprehends this form in an integral totality.

It is this assertion, combined with a recognition of the historical actuality of Jesus, the God-Man, which allows us to build a synthesis of experiential reality on solid ground.  How so?

The mind is both mirror and lamp.  We must apply the lamp, in order to see ourselves (less darkly) in the mirror.  What does Jesus himself, that historical individual, say about God?  Jesus suffuses the "concept" of God in personhood, relationship, love.  We cannot see God, we cannot understand divine infinity : yet, using the lamp, we can form a conjecture, construct an hypothesis.  This is beyond Kierkegaard's absurd leap in the dark.  Yet it's not merely abstract philosophizing.  We acknowledge the irreducible historical actuality of the particular human person; at the same time, we hypothesize the benevolent personal nature of the divine source of all experience.

Christianity proposes a Trinity.  In the Gospels, Jesus is "anointed" Son of God under the auspices of the Holy Spirit (in the form of a dove, the ancient symbol of love).  Jesus, in his "official" role as Messiah and Son of God, posits a Father-Son relation of absolute authority.  But the Holy Spirit is a legitimate third Person in this design.  The Holy Ghost is designated as "the Spirit of Truth" in the Gospel of John.  And the Truth is made known to us only gradually.  What if we think of the "monarchical" design of monotheism as an imaginative projection, a partial figuration of something more complex?

I speculate that Judaism developed in a dialectical opposition to ancient monarchy (Egyptian, Babylonian).  The kingship of Yahweh is an anti-kingship.  The "royalty" of Jesus is another twist in the pattern.  Jesus is the anti-king : the servant of servants : the humble, the rejected one.  Jesus is the human being who overcomes all the violent powers of worldly kingdoms.  He is killed - and rises from the dead.  He is the ultimate sign of life defeating death : of the actual Power lurking in the human soul (and in the human imagination).  Everyman as spiritual hero : God as the author of divine tragicomedy.

How can God be personal?  Observe the vast dark cosmos of galaxies.  How can God be personal?  Use your imagination.

We think we know what "persons" are, don't we?  We depend on them : they are the most integral entities we know (starting with our own subjectivity, and that of all those persons who affect our lives).  Yet we see as in a glass, darkly.

Kant's imagination is transcendental, a priori, like Aristotle's soul.  Yet I'm saying the imagination is a faculty of a more integral entity (the Person, the "incarnate" soul).  Why is the soul incarnate?  Why do persons exist?  Because our life, our world, is caught up in a kind of obscure drama.

Imagination : Persons :: Faith : God

This is an imperfect diagram.  What I'm trying to suggest is that, just as the imagination is a transcendental faculty of persons, who are embodied, individual, existential actors - so faith is a transcendental act of such integral persons.  It's transcendental, in that this act of choice, of commitment to a hunch, cannot really be explained.  Not merely an absurd leap, however - but a reasonable hypothesis, grounded in gathered evidence, synthesized by the imagination's own sensibility & understanding.

Paul Fry's Defense of Poetry really is a defense of poetry, mainly (for me) for its sensitive readings of Wordsworth, Keats & other Romantics. (& he's got me going back to Bachelard, & Wordsworth, & looking for Allen Grossman.) Fry's argument can be understood as an elaboration of Keats's "negative capability" : poetry provides a rest from the "irritable reaching after fact & reason". He quotes Blanchot, who writes that he reads literature to find rest in actuality, the thingness of ordinary things - beyond meaning, beyond reference, beyond interpretation.

His argument is also, it seems, rooted in a disenchanted naturalism. The basic ground of reality is the nonhuman, the inanimate - King Death being the much-evaded terminus, the inanimate to which all dust returns. For Fry the Romantics, especially Wordsworth, are naturalists avant la lettre, or in spite of themselves.

At one point though, in a sort of aside, Fry mentions Blake, as something of an exception to the rule. & I find myself closer to Blake's supernaturalism than anyone else's naturalism.

Naturalism, as a literary atmosphere, succeeded Romanticism, under the pressure of 19th-cent. science, politics, and war. (Symbolism and modernism succeeded naturalism, but only within the restricted sphere of their aesthetic self-enclosure.) Simply put, poetry's role was sidelined and trivialized - penned up in the realm of "culture" and "feeling".

Basically, Science took the place of Religion, and everything else lined up appropriately.

But let's look over at Pope Benedict's essay (see link below). Faith, according to Paul, is the substance of hope, the evidence of things unseen. In Benedict's reading, then, faith is a spiritual something from outside, which we internalize (or already possess) - and such possession makes possible a kind of intuition of a greater goodness or joy which we cannot see yet, but which we hope for. Because faith is a "substance" we actually possess, it is also the evidence which grounds our hope.

As I see it, this spiritual intuition is still active in the world, and provides a way of seeing &/or understanding reality, which has not been displaced by science. And there's a kind of analogy here with the intuitions, the aesthetic discoveries, which guide artists and poets. (& that's the key to my Byzantium)

For Fry, literature & poetry intuit and represent an austere ground of being, in the non-human, the inanimate, the extreme limit of death. For me, I guess, the labyrinth of the human mind and spirit is yet more subtle. At some unspoken level, we recognize and intuit the formations of life & death together (this is actually close to Fry's reading of Wordsworth) : but death doesn't necessarily have the last word.

(I realize my notes might strike some people as a very aggressive and unpalatable confusion of categories... I'm sorry for that. This is how I organize certain categories of understanding, for myself : but my main interest lies in the actual ("shamanic") praxis of the visionary, synthetic imagination...

- & what the heck : I graduated from Blake School, in Hopkins (MN) !)

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : consciousness (label : subject/consciousness).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)


Related topics (there are many others): icon, Peirce, subjectivity, "J"...

So... I guess when I think about my own long poems & what I have tried to do, I fall somewhere in between the paths laid out by Crane & Eliot -

since I tried to carry on with Crane's affirmative-visionary stance, yet I share, in certain ways, Eliot's faith.

My whole poetry life has oscillated between, & tried to integrate, faith & imagination, faith & poetry - since the days of the "Shakespeare ghost" (1973).

& since it was my response to Mandelstam which set in motion the terms of that synthesis, he has remained the key to the "plot" of my long poems.

So... if somebody ever takes the trouble to read, seriously, Stubborn Grew, and The Rose, & the other things, they will find out what I am talking about. (All handy over there at Lulu !)

It has to do with seeing poetry as one door to inward or spiritual renewal, & the renewal of time & history in that light. & it has to do with an interpretation of faith which is in most ways diametrically opposite the stance taken by Eliot & Tate & the other conservative religionist-poets.

If you look into my long poems, you'll see a "ghost dance", where the impulses & writings of Whitman, Melville, Twain, Poe (& others) are aligned with those of Crane, Mandelstam, Berryman (& others) to represent a sort of symbolic "epic America-Russia" (RUS-US), rooted in Crane's, Melville's & Whitman's awareness and acknowledgement of the American Outcast as the spiritual key to America. Where Eliot & Tate experience their faith as a kind of spiritual hierarchy, separating them from modern life, I understand the Biblical tradition as a prophetic framework, or verbal model, for human equality and mutuality. (Melville's Ecuadorian doubloon nailed to the mast of the Pequod; Mandelstam's "gold coins of humanism".)

But my long poems have yet to be read & taken seriously, I guess. I went into a tunnel for about 8 years in order to prepare for & write them. So that made it more difficult for me to write short poems, or interact, as poet, in the magazine culture.

"Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay." That's how it starts.

The other thing about poets, though, is that they understand (through vocational experience) that you can't just rationalize & "explain" everything (nature, human nature). The subconscious & intuition remain unaccountable : analogous, I suppose, to "leaps" of faith & acts of selfless participation (ie., love). One of the Bible's shorter sentences : "God is Love." (Epistle of John)

Now I wish I hadn't said anything about religion & poetry.

In a certain sense, it seems irrelevant. Poetry absorbs everything & turns it into itself. Response & criticism have to be aesthetic, not burdened with excess mental baggage. [p.s. if you read Alan Bramhall's blog, you eventually notice brief 1-line responses to poets he's heard or read, which are pretty direct & disinterested, not related to any obvious program or philosophy or allegiance. This is refreshing. Yes, full disclosure, I am giving a reading with AB later this month. But I've never met him, I only just happened upon his blog, because Jim Behrle, in the infinite burly depth of his behrlehood, stepped out of mutual poet-catpiss-contests & surprisingly invited me to read in Beantown.]

This whole issue has been an irresolvable knot for me, for a long long time.

Because one aspect of the experience of making poetry has been a certain impulse toward "purity", which seems quasi-religious in itself. The effort of composition has always felt like a refining-away of dead or unoriginal or inauthentic speech (often unsuccessful). Always threatened by distraction or the temptation to cut corners. But even more prevalent is the time spent not writing, because the concept or inspiration or feeling of access was not there.

Another aspect, for me, is indeed the religious impulse or motivation. One of the recurrent conceptual frames, to which I return again & again in my thinking, is the idea that the mode of poetry is a specific kind of mimesis or picture-making, which models the livingness or the living-order of reality, that is, of a possibly spiritually-sentient or spiritually-meaningful cosmos : Aristotle's "universals" (cf. Poetics). This capability differentiates poetry from other kinds of discourse. & so, thanks to this capability, poetry-making becomes a special mode of witness & interpretation, a special kind of meaning-making.

I realize however that even these momentous capabilities are only one aspect of poetry. Turn the figure around, and you recognize its character as a free, autonomous artistic creation : a product of a play-field, with no necessary mimetic or utilitarian function. (I refer once again to Mandelstam's brilliant resolution of this impasse : where, in one of his essays, he asserts that the freedom of Western art is an outgrowth of the historical event of the Redemption : Christ's world-saving sacrifice allows art to become utterly free of external obligation or constraint; the world is already saved, if you're willing to recognize it : art doesn't need to save it!)

But if you are interested in encountering my particular poetry, then you will want to understand that the general function of mimesis, outlined above, is, in my case, elaborated within a particular orientation : my own set of beliefs, commitments, hunches, experiences & assumptions.

The application of an Orphic framework to Stubborn Grew - by going back to the ur-poet & his descent to the world of the dead - was an attempt at origination or poetic priority : in order to frame the set "poetry" within the field "Henry's worldview". On another level, the Orpheus story just seemed like the most natural narrative embodiment for human (& personal) feelings of love, forlornness, & healing/rebirth. On a third level, it offers possibilities for syncretism (I was interested in the Native American background & presence behind any New World long poem endeavor). "Bluejay", the real bird in my backyard who became a hermetic ghost-guide, is the protagonist of Orpheus-tales from Northwest Coast tribes (as I know I've mentioned oftentimes before.)

Reading Keith Ward's book (Religion & Revelation) mentioned here recently. A lot of food for thought.

A Christian perspective, but develops a concept of revelation which is inclusive without relativism, acknowledges parallels & affinities with other faiths. Fascinating commentary on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism.

Faith can't be simply equated with a body of opinions, information or knowledge, which a person can accumulate and then assent to, and assert to others. If God exists, revelation is a divine self-revelation, meant not to convey information but to enter into a relationship, to change your life.

Thinking (in this space) about my "poetry life" through this book's lens. My relations with "poetry community", so ambiguous, ambivalent, sometimes conflicted & frustrating.

A large part of it is simply my ornery personality. Another aspect, though, has to do with the fact that religion has played such a big role in my life. For some, this is less problematic, since they understand how to keep a seemly distance between creative literary efforts on the one hand, and their faith-commitments on the other.

For me it's been more complicated. My "faith life" has been stormy & dramatic (at least for me). Charismatic events when I was in my early 20s had an irreversible effect on my view of things - and those (personal) experiences were tangled up with poetry and writing. A poet is a communicator, a purveyor of speech & verbalized concepts : with me, literary ambitions and religious commitments have been mixed together, mixed-up & confused sometimes (much times!).

Aside from my personal quirks, though, I think that another factor in the aforementioned ambivalence arose from an inherent dialectic - a contrast - between religious vision and poetics or literature per se. This dialectic was brought to the fore, in my case, by the simple effort to balance or combine the two. Magnified also by something in the genres themselves : the prestige or authority of the epic mode, as "poem containing history". Because Christianity, more so than some other faiths, is rooted in particular historical events (though their "historicity" is highly contended). One doesn't need to be obsessed with "the historical Jesus" to grasp that this particular faith - in which the Divine enters directly into history in order to save humankind and creation itself - and which calls believers into a new spiritual Now - might result in epic shapings quite different from those offered by Pound, Crane, Zukofsky, et al.

My own long poems are probably too wayward to be acceptable as "Christian" works. But the background motivation is there : to re-write the American epic on a very different ground. One way to look at Forth of July is as a "transumption" (sort of a surpassing-through-osmosis, or stealing) of Modernist epic. I "underwrote" Crane, Pound & Joyce in Stubborn Grew: I contextualized them in the plot of a Mardi Gras/Lenten shriving/redemption : and then in the sequels I practiced a kind of ghost dance/resurrection spiritual ecstatics, flying off into deep American vision-space.

To take on the epic this way was a fairly radical gesture, I'd say, within the "progressive" poetry community. Radical in a religious sense, also: for the Christian, "the Word" is not a material-in-itself, an aesthetic commodity, but something else entirely.

I realize that to blend discourses this way, to speak so baldly of faith, is a recipe for alienating others through misunderstanding and settled notions (especially in today's divisive, overheated discourse world). But this is my form of "personism", like it or not.

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.