ineffable seraph of the boomerang

BOOMERANG-SPUN

Love is the curving frame of things,

the flexible woven logos

of the safety net – bamboo’s

swerving embrace the sculptor brings

to public squares in São Paulo

(Alison Grace Martin).

Thus, in Pushkin & Scriabin

Mandelstam spoke of an eternal ritorno

fresco’d in the alcove of Redemption –

earth already redeemed

& art set free, beamed

through spirit-webs (boomerang-spun)

                       *

until the world becomes a nest or den

prefigured in those icons

limned for all seasons (our

pre-existent & imaginary friend

who nevertheless walks upright, smiles

& calls us by our name).

The rays through the cranium,

holes in the hands... Earth’s exiles

sense the time-scent of eternal ends.

& so the sign of humble dignity’s

grandfathered to eternity –

the nest feathered with wings, my friends.

10.17.19

a flower for Bloomsday

CIRQUE MATRIX

Gray Hobo-bird faces a problem :

how to save his own long

featherweight fern song?

How to rewind a strung-out poem?

Effigies & icons flashing by

like ripples in his eye –

Burchfield, El Anatsui...

Hartley, Martin, Klimt... Johnny

Jasper... fond winter raven-

oeuil of Master Bruegel...

Pompey, in the empty well

of Yahweh, was befuddled – No One

There.  The clear plein air of Quaker

meeting house, of Shaker

chair.  The carpenter’s

simplicity of Philadelphian law-

oracles.  We hold these truths...

But Hobo’s murmuring his

Nil Reed Candace house;

his prairie wind blows wild (Ruth’s

trail through mazy corn, tracking

Boaz from Goshen-land).

With poem-in-a-can

in hand (his pemmican) & Red Wing

Thunderbird-Woodpecker perched

atop his hat, he moseys,

slouching, sea to sea;

aboard his polar bear canoe (birch-

                 *

light) he circulates a mystery –

where be this Henry Church

round whom leaf-sundials march?

Planted in Resurrection Cemetery?

Or hidden in a holm oak tree?

The painted whisper gallery

enshades invisibility.

Will he sleepwalk forever, Poetry?

The milkweed monarch fans meekness.

This moth is camouflaged

brown dust.  The sagebrush

rolls through red deserts, the cedars

pine for Juniper (slate-blue).

Time’s broom sweeps clean

but tiny seeds remain.

A microcosmic mustard-yellow

gyroscope (spun in Ravenna

backwater) balances

Galilee on Providence;

the bicycle with one duo-antenna

twirls its silver spokes into

a rose-wheel window.

Where did Harry go,

Hobo?  He’s hidden in Otranto

glass.  He’s riding Pegasus

into a cirque matrix –

cartwheeling carny tricks

as Henry Flower Wilderness.

6.16.17

ineffable mosaic sky

CLOUD-FEATHERS

The air so brilliant & clear today

beside the Bronze Age river.

The railroad bridge hovers

over its reflection – a light play

of diagonals, like water-spiders

on a pond, or cloud-feathers

above the Jordan, tethered

to a steadfast figure (Jasper’s

orant mariner, circumferencing

gray sea with shady palm).

That chanting shepherd, calm

beneath an indigo wheel of blazing

stars... one cheerful face beaming

from the medallion

in Classe (Apollinarian)

under darkened wooden ceiling

of abandoned ship, beached in pine-

swamp, at Ravenna’s edge.

Mere icons of a human pledge

so simple, local, omni-Byzantine –

ineffable mosaic sky

where Love bends waves

to lift us from our graves

into a metamorphosis   kind Aye

above halo of tears   you streak

with serpentine arches

agios   agios   agios

one river-rainbow   in an eagle’s beak

7.29.16

Icon Man

Note to reader : some of these poems are pretty darn obscure.  If you peruse this blog's web version (as opposed to mobile-phone version), you will find links, at the bottom of the page, to subject entries (labels) - which might be helpful in tracking down my footprints, or other footprints.  This holds true for all the Ravenna Diagram posts on this here blog.

MOSAIC SHEPHERD

The knot in the heart is a universal

wedding ring, wherever

you are.  Heavier

than iron, ce diamant mondial

de l’amande.  Bright orange lozenge-

mandorla, shedding leaves

of tears – vicarious

miniature trees (strange

fruit).  Like the shady crossroads

with the Dead End sign –

a little Chinese lantern

(glass by LaFarge).  Six nodes

in one honeycomb eye – melodious

riddle of light & shade.

Henry & John, a cannonade

off Sydney Harbor... looming ficus

guarding Southern Cross.  They sought

a figure for relief –

hoopoe... cloverleaf...

barely-veiled grief.  Stray mote

of dark December.  Henry looks up

through rose window.

A rim around the chi-rho,

hint of shining salt.  Red stop

sign on the dynamo, outlined

in cedar-glow (Mosaic

Shepherd Stands in Lake).

What the heart seek she shall find.

4.5.16

Ravenna Diagram

As testified by both Annie Akhmatovy & Wheelliam Bootler Yeats (not to mention Wally Stuyvens), nobody knows like they do how much poetry depends upon the foul rag-&-bone shop of the dump.  So I confess I am very obscurely fixated on a work of probable horoscopic Masonic garbage (if seemingly very diligently researched) by one David Ovason, titled The Secret Architecture of our Nation's Capital.  Ovason appears to have turned poor Henry Adams on his Educational head.

Adams, scion of the original American Presidential-Egyptian dynasty, built his own historical philosophy on the contrast, the dialectic, between the Virgin & the Dynamo : the feminine-poetic-Christian heritage of the Middle Ages (Chartres, Notre Dame) vs. the technical-scientific Chaos of modern Power (Washington, Chicago...).    Yet according to Ovason, the landscape, architecture & sculpture of Washington, D.C. emanate a controlling hermetic geomantic pattern, overlaid on the nation's capital by the Masons - a radiance of the constellation Virgo, or the Virgin - the Corn Maiden, the Rite of Spring, Pocahontas, the Statue of Liberty... all those images & psychic icons certain ecstatic-Platonic poets (unacknowledged legislators) like Hart Crane articulated and defended as embattled (in prosaic America).  Somehow the Corn Maiden got in on the ground floor of the national grain elevator.

So I wrote in previous blog post about my personal affinity for ut pictura poiesis - the idea that at the heart of poetry is this visionary-shaping painterly dimension.  Poetry, by way of its rhythmic sonic mesmerism, communicates wave-lengths of vivid images - drawn from life and adequately mirroring living (as opposed to absent, detached, prosaic, humdrum, depersonalized) reality.  In the long-poem project Ravenna Diagram, I reckon that, for me, Ravenna represents a kind of civilizational matrix for this particular sense of incarnational iconophilia.  The "venn diagram" of Ravenna Diagram is a visual image of the union of two-in-one, the sacred marriage of spirit & flesh.  As an historical phenomenon : as a pivotal event which frames one's sense of the direction of our future world.

There are lots of things going in today's excerpt, which cluster around these ideas, along with others... I can't go into them all.  The idea of the "lattice" and the "Path P" are allusions to the chi-rho symbol : the pneuma (Spirit) P rising (like the Ghost Dance) over the lattice of the "X"... the "Path P" also refers to "poetry", thinking of Dante, buried in Ravenna - whose masterwork was completed in Ravenna, and which features, at its very end, another venn diagram (Dante's vision of the Trinity as a mysterious set of interlocking rainbow circles).

CLAY LIPS

If I whisper out of this backyard garden

& word went forth from Ramah

Rachel weeps... no more

a cricket shuttles through the iron

lattice – churring chi-rho, chi-rho

a pigeon croons là-bas

là-bas... labarum... abba...

baa... lambs on a radius go

round, skip stones, elliptical

(up to the mountaintop).

Rough clay lips elope

for steppes, ignite pyramidical

lens – Nile coming-forth-of-July

in one almond canoe;

wooden frame for yew

rainbow (adieu beyond river-eye).

Beneath an avalanche of violence

the lattice rusts, the eye

corrodes.  Still clay

will coalesce, in tinder hands;

Giuliana in her mossy coat

& frowning eye signal

another way; lips channel

shapes (mosaic, inchoate)...

Ravenna diagram, vertiginous cross-

road into Washington.

Path P, star-tangled almond

tree – here chariots bloom (manes toss).

6.30.15

Jesus Thoughts (25) : thumbprints in sync

We continue to go traipsing along through the unknown remote Henry-field of scrubland interconnections, finding obscure Serengeti serendipities (in sync?) and conceptual rhymes, running into things seemingly by chance (or is it a narrow circle of H-recessive obsessions?).  Yesterday I chewed the cud (in Jesus Thoughts #24) about the metaphysical frame-up of History, the intervention of Yahweh into the stream of Earth-time... as an impression of the Creator's inimitable thumbprint upon Nature (Stephen Dedalus's "signatures of things"). 

& last night I was re-reading Charles Stein's book about Charles Olson & Carl Jung, Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum - which digs deep into Olson's own radical sense of individuation & quidditas ("that which exists through itself is what is called Meaning" & all that).  Olson wanted to shake up what he saw as the false consciousness of abstract "Greek" rationalism with a very earth-bound, local, particular kind of mysticism (he wouldn't call it "mysticism") - the Oneness of the "field" of all phenomena reflected in the integrity of the grounded, physical, real things we encounter....

Others (including Stein) have interpreted Olson much more scrupulously than I can here ... & there's much in Olson that gives me pause... yet I was struck reading this last night how closely - in some ways, not in others -  Olson's values seem to rhyme with the program of the Russian Acmeists.  Gumilev's notion of "chasteness" as a literary value - which he defined as a basic & spiritual respect for the particular dignity of all things as they are - & that such actual things provide the substance, the matter, the themes of Acmeist poetry (as against "Symbolist" otherworldliness).

Of course the Acmeists were also tremendously different from Olson : they had not that radical streak of American Emersonian (Poundian, Wm Carlos Williamsian) do-it-yourselfism - their sense of the spiritual integrity of things is perhaps closer to Joyce's neo-medieval Aquinas-quidditas; they were rooted in Russian Orthodox Christianity, with its contemplative emphasis on the whole as divine Creation...  Yet this mystical aspect of Olson - late scribblings about everything having meaning-in-itself because All stems from the Black Chrysanthemum (his "Black Gold Flower" mandala-figure) - is not so different from Dante's final vision of the mystical Rose, the triple wheel of the Trinity...   This ancient notion can give one sparks of glee, if you ponder it : that the One is reflected in the "oneness" - the beautiful distinction, the nonpareil wonderful whatness, the splendid unimaginable unique & hilarious actuality of all separate unique things...  (in fact it's possible to see an analogy here with the spectacular 4th-of-July dazzle of metamorphosis, Transfiguration - eternal life)... Note this relevant, definitive passage from Mandelstam's essay "Morning of Acmeism", which Christian Wiman chose as the epigraph to his new collection of Mandelstam translations, Stolen Air : "To exist is the artist's greatest pride.  He desires no paradise other than being."

Everything is paratactical in Olson, as in Pound - the poet is a bower-bird, joining things by affinity, contiguity, proximity, rather than logic...  Speaking of which brings me to the other book I was reading last night - Sacred Fortress, by Otto v. Simson.  About the Byzantine mosaics and architecture of Ravenna, which Dante saw.  Simson explores the political-historical background to the art of these churches - and also their religious meaning.  We can't grasp the artistry of the mosaics without understanding how they were united with, and illustrated, the rites of baptism and Eucharist, the sacramental processions, which happened below them, under the gaze of the icons.  Simson goes very deeply into the meanings and messages which both the rites and the icons conveyed.  He describes, better than anyone I've ever read, how the communicants, by participating in these sacraments (baptism, eucharist), enter into a symbiosis, first of all, with Christ in his self-sacrifice and martyrdom - in his dying - and at the same time, with Christ in his resurrection : his transfiguration into a heavenly dimension (early rites of baptism involved clothing the baptized in white robes : a representation of this dying-into-new-life most clearly imaged in the Book of Revelation - and in the mosaics of St. Apollinare Nuovo, in Ravenna).

Proximity, contiguity, affinity....  I had just been writing earlier in the day (in the Jesus Talks #23 post) about the divine play of gender roles... and the hieros gamos dimensions of the rites of the church, their sensitivity to a feminine psyche - only to find Simson characterizing the mosaics of the "virgin martyrs" in St. Apollinare, bringing their jewelled crowns of martyrdom to offer to the Bridegroom, in the very same terms I had been using (hieros gamos, etc.).   So I felt a slight twinge of synchronicity there....

But I'm really rambling today.  The deeper affinity or proximity I want to relate here is this clustering together of Jung's individuation, Olson's "things in themselves", the Acmeist devotion to the "chaste" dignity of things, Joyce's epiphanies...  and what I was calling, in JT #24, the thumbprint of the Creator as witnessed by his righteous prophets (John the Baptist...).  I'm finding these things all assembling in some kind of creative sandbox playpen...

(thinking of Olson's notes about the "Black Stone" - the "diamond" - the "Black Gold Flower" of his Maximus-vision.... & its echoes or rhymes in my poem Lanthanum - "Blackstone" leading to "St. Maximus the Confessor" by way of the octahedral, baptismal diamond of Black Elk's native American sign (pointing to the six directions)....

Affinities, proximities.... the church as tomb and marriage bed.... Olson & Mandelstam, hard-cut diamond figures, thumb-prints, opposing themselves to the drift of the times...

This coming weekend Sarah & I will be driving down to Princeton NJ, to visit Princeton cemetery, where Sarah's parents are buried.  They just finished the memorial stone for both of them (her mother Pat passed away last year in November).  They are buried just a few feet from the grave of Kurt Gödel, the great mathematician.  Olson, maybe, would have appreciated Gödel, whose "incompleteness theorem" proved that some things in mathematics cannot ever be proved (rationally).  I'm not a mathematician, but maybe Gödel in this way made an arc of closure back to the ancient Greeks, who were troubled by the "irrationality" of the diagonal to the square.  There is a Jungian aspect of this uncertainty, this mystery, at the core of human reason....

So we'll be visiting a grave, and graves, there, in Princeton, at the dying of the year.  I'll be thinking about them... & I'll be thinking about Simson's eloquent evocation of the mystery of death & martyrdom & glory articulated in the early church.... & I'll be thinking about the Princeton Univ. library, nearby - where they house the archive of the papers of Osip Mandelstam....

Just one more thought on this for today. This contrast noted earlier between Crane's finish and the others' various ongoing (quasi-narrative, Wordsworthian) agons : how key this is to 20th-cent. aesthetics! (All the debates about "process", the autonomy (or lack thereof) of the art-object, etc.)

And I am reminded again of a remark made to me at a Russ-Amer poetry conference many years ago by Elena Shvarts (we were talking about how the Russians memorized their poems for recital) : "Russian poets compose the poem in their heads, then write it all down. Americans start writing, and it takes them a long time to finish, if they do."

And this notion of finish can perhaps be linked with the notions of the self-sustaining, free-standing image in Crane & Mandelstam et al. Which leads back, ultimately, perhaps, to the Byzantine tradition of the magnetic, charismatic icon.

Sailin' to Byzantium.

Am reading Hermann Broch's novel Death of Virgil. Very absorbing, beautiful writing. Translator seems to be echoing Whitman (a lot of anaphora - repetition of words at beginning of sentence or phrase (along with vast cosmic-natural imagery). Wonder if it's that way in the original).

Started writing a novel myself on Saturday. When I was done (with a couple pages written) I learned that the Pope had died. It's been a strange Easter/Passover time this spring, the past week or so.

I went to church yesterday. It was my turn to read the Prayers. So I included John Paul II in them (I'm Episcopalian).

Odd time in the church year, when you're confronted intellectually with the mystery of the Resurrection. It affects the sermons. It's something that the intellect & common sense cannot accept, that is, on a rational plane.

A season when the gulf between faith & scepticism yawns widest.

Are we confronted here with a primitive remnant, something from a previous phase of the human mind? Or is there an aspect of willed or motivated contradiction at play? That is, with the mystery of the Resurrection, a line of estrangement is drawn between God and the world, between spirit & flesh. A veil, wrapped around a single person, a single individual (Christ). Which in turn "personalizes" the relationship between Spirit & humanity.

From another angle, the Resurrection "naturalizes" - even "historicizes" - a spiritual reality which is familiar & accessible through many religious traditions (orthodox & fringe) : the reality of "cosmic consciousness". The idea that the end of the physical body is not an absolute end : that, in some unknowable dimension, there is no death : that the soul is immortal. "What will be is only a promise." I think of certain Yeats poems.

(Riddle of the icon - the representative figure ("the Son of Man"). A unique person is commissioned to undertake a collective, historical role. Archetype. It's like an Escher drawing - a "figure/ground" problem in continual oscillation or reversal.)

Which reminds me of this spring poem, one of Mandelstam's last:

To Natasha Shtempel

 
I
 
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead 
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom 
of her inspiring disability pulls her along, 
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the charity of a concept:
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault, 
and that this is an eternal beginning.

 
II
 
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and to be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.

(Sorry, I don't know who translated this. This poem does strange things to me, like certain passages in Beethoven. It brings tears to my eyes.)

Watched the video of the great great Tarkovsky film, Andrei Rublev, the story of an icon painter. Good follow-up to Byzantium show at the Met. Tarkovsky is a cross between Brecht & an Orthodox monk. The film is so Russian, so stringent, such a hymn to the salt of the earth, spiritual asceticism & faith, earthly suffering & fatalistic gloom, Dostoyevskian passionate sobornost (fellowship). You are not in Hollywood in this film, you are in 15th-century Rus.

I have a little souvenir icon (glued on particle board, the kind of thing you might find in a museum gift shop), which Elena Shvarts sent me once. She said it's St. Michael (& that "he will protect me"), but the image is clearly derived from the great byzantine Angel Gabriel icon, which the Met is using on its catalogue cover (shown at the link below).

(Now I see it is Michael, though. He's holding a sword, rather than a red wand (as in the Gabriel icon), and "Archangel Michael" is written in cyrillic over the top. But the figure is definitely derived from the earlier icon.)

Saw the great Byzantium exhibition at the Met. Spent 4 hours there Saturday; had to go back Sunday (so much to see I got too tired before the end on Sat).

Don't feel up to commenting... anything I say will leave a hundred other things out.

Found the icons-within-icons room VERY interesting.

Also the strong contrast between the Byzantine art and the northern European painting (van Eyck, van der Weyden), despite the fact that the northerners were influenced by art works brought from Constantinople by the Crusaders (during their rule in Byzantium - the Latin Kingdom, 1200s). The Byzantine icons overwhelm you with their emotional immediacy; the Flemish masters distance the image somewhat, by means of, paradoxically, their realism. Van der Weyden's "St. Luke Painting the Virgin Mary" seems pivotal in marking that difference. It takes the earliest tradition (St. Luke himself was credited with the earliest drawings of the Virgin), and combines it with elements of realism, naturalism (such as the landscape in the background with tiny figures irrelevant to the religious image, ie. the man taking a leak against a wall; or the fact that the figure of St. Luke is a self-portrait of Van der Weyden) & reflexivity (there's a painting-within-the-painting: the sketch in Luke's hand).

I wrote a poem about this painting, posted here a couple weeks ago; it was great to see it in the Met show.

Many of the icons are beautiful in the extreme. Painted on chipped wood, like a form of folk art; amazing colors. Stunning miniature mosaics. Tremendous imagery (especially astonishing Russian icon of "Man of Sorrows" in black & white).