serene Cosmopolis

CHASTE VISION

Imagination of the common good

gleams in the mind’s eye –

a gift from on high

to children of the neighborhood.

I remember Ellen Ryan, from Bridgeport

out of Holy Cross,

smoking under the asbestos

of the Henry Sharpe complex (fort)

off 95 – splitting Providence

just as in Bridgeport,

where her father (Mort,

the cop) & mother (Mary, since

deceased) instilled their sober sense

of ultimate innocence –

outwitting insolence

by grace (elusive fauna of experience).

Sheepish cabal of VISTA volunteers!

Bussed into Washington

to lobby Congressman

Boro Dolpawa (he’s “all ears”).

Chaste vision of the commonweal.

My strength in weakness

is perfected (witness,

black lamb rust-red wool).

Beyond transparent vanishings

serene Cosmopolis...

bright realm of kindness

radiating equilibrium (eternal things).

11.15.18

An Ordinary Evening in Minneapolis

After weeks of late winter & spring away from home & away from my books & the library, spending time with my parents at the nursing home, one day last week I had a sudden desire to travel to Wallace Stevens Land.  I was apprised of a good local bookstore during the AWP invasion, James & Mary Laurie Books, & went back there & got a copy of Stevens' collected writings, and The Dome & the Rock, by James Baird (a study of Stevens' architectonic tectonics).

Wallace Stevens... what can one say.  The man is a great artist and American genius, & as representative of the "modern" as Dante is of the "medieval" or Shakespeare the Renaissance or Milton the Reformation.  Representative, that is, as a kind of quintessence or benchmark or perihelion of achievement.  Refinement, acumen, absolute originality, conscious artistry taken to the limit.  & mostly just an utter wonder to read, sparkling with vitality & intellectual force.

That (inadequately) being said, Stevens is a constant challenge to my own way of thinking.  This is part of the bracing experience of the encounter - the sense that deep down I have these qualifications which at the same time I have difficulty shaping into a proper argument.  There seem to be so many pitfalls involved in challenging a poet's basic "worldview" - it seems unfair & liable to blinders & mis-reading.

Stevens himself, unsurprisingly, encapsulated my problem for me.  As he put it in one of his Adagia : "Life is an affair of people, not of places.  But for me life is an affair of places and that is just the trouble."  Baird's study fully amplifies what an "affair of places" - of topos, of landscape, of habitations - actually meant for Stevens.  He argues that Stevens' entire oeuvre is an "amassing harmony" of coordinated elements, one Grand Poem whose form is a mighty arc, a dome built on rock - the rock of the absolute self, a post-Emersonian Adamic American imagination.  The central (& here, American) self - not king, not emperor, not God, but Man as master of reality - is the sole source of true & vital perception.  It is a sort of post-romantic Renaissance Romanticism - a disenchanted naturalism (reality) brought to life again by the human spirit (imagination).

But there's no need here to clamber down into a sort of academic gully.  The encounter with Stevens occurs, as he constructs it, only on a plane of pure poetry.  It is a master building of the absolute spirit of the unique builder - it does not stand for, symbolize, myths & paradigms, but is rather their source.

What I find challenging about all this is that my own "sense of reality" seems to be constructed intellectually (reasonably or not) on an entirely different foundation.  Stevens seems to be part of the central Emersonian spine of American thought & poetry, the tone of "self-reliance", which challenges all past tradition as out of date - because it is recognized as essentially a (continually-obsolescent) myth-making process.  The Christian tradition is a burden and oppression on the free mind & spirit of the present, the American here & now.  When Frost, for example, blends his narratives into an arc of Christian interpretations, he is folding himself under another master, he is choosing to renounce the absolute Kantian-Romantic freedom of the human mind, that categorical enlightened Subjectivity which makes the exterior world what it will.  This is the "modern" (Cogito ergo sum).

But my own mind & imagination have always seemed to trend in a counter-direction.  Stevens' imaginative "dome" is like the under-layer or the photo-negative of the freedom & exaltation of the believing Spirit.  & "life is an affair of people" is a very apt summation of the ground of this other way of seeing.  The Emersonian drive for the spirit's autonomy seems to stumble on the question of "other people" : the nature of the relation (the ratio, the Logos) we call Love.  If the "affair of persons" is a matter of intersecting arcs (rather than sole solar domes) then suddenly we have the potential to imagine "the person" as extending into infinite mystery, and of reality as a whole grounded in this very personal threshold.

Which is a view of things, by the way, which seems to correspond to some elements of traditional Judeo-Christian faith.  I think Stevens understood all this : & further exploration of his poetry will no doubt reveal (& probably has already) such undercurrents.

I like to think of my own attitude as oriented somewhere between Eliot & Stevens & Crane : accepting Eliot's "historical sense" & reverence for tradition, without falling for his reactionary & doctrinaire pessimism.  Thinking of poetry as involved in the creative re-imagining of old sacred meanings - so as to see them in the present in a changed light, a different relevance.*

But let's conclude this boring lecture & get back to Stevens now.  "The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself."

*p.s. reminder to self : it was the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam who enabled this attitude for me.  Mandelstam's own utterly nonpareil poesie der poesie is yet comparable with Stevens.  The neo-classicism and traditional Judeo-Christian grounding of Mandelstam's & Gumilev's Acmeism resonates with Eliot.  & yet Mandelstam's Dante - in his famous essay "Conversation about Dante" - is not Eliot's paragon of the medieval mind, but rather a kind of playful "futurist" - a voice from an earth to come.  Thus Mandelstam allowed me to find a way between the antipodes of American modernist poetry, and has been a taproot for my own branching these past 35 years.

Re-reading Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks. Brilliant, radiant intellect. One of the most profound books I know. The essay on Pythagoreanism. The equations or affinities she develops between mathematical and religious concepts. Comparable notions of suffering, kenosis and mediation. The concept of number and the (trinitarian) nature of God. French clarity, & some other kind of depth and passion... this book is one of the cornerstones of civilization.

(BTW see Charles Simic's little poem in this week's New Yorker. This is a poem about kenosis.)

On a different topic : strong sense, walking around this morning, of poetry as evocative dream. When the imagination is stirred by the evocation of a feeling-scene... remote, rare, elusive, subjective, personal. Rilke comes to mind. The legend of the poet wrapped up in song-feeling-memory. Distance, absence. Adolescence. Hard for me to describe this clearly. Attendant sense of a kind of betrayal or desolation of this reality, in the constant internet chit-chat (my own, especially) about "poetry".

*

(Maybe this isn't a completely different topic. There's a passage in Weil where she briefly analyzes the concept of the Trinity, and the idea of God as Subject, the one whose name is "I am"... & how it could be that God is wholly Love and Goodness, and also the active Subject, enveloping & encompassing all subjectivity... she identifies this with early Greek philosophers - e.g. Philolaus's terse saying about the One, whose first creation is Unity, the name of which is Hestia, or the hearth-fire... Weil outlines how this agrees with the idea of the Trinity...)

In the realm of poetry (& maybe other realms) I find it difficult to balance and reconcile truth & beauty, the didactic & the aesthetic, the legislative/executive & the playful/imaginative, the prophetic & the poetic...

Look at people like Pound, Olson... ambitious-serious "alpha male" epic types. Avatars of the will-to-order, the will to govern, to dominate, to rule. (Yeats's "king of cats".) Though I don't consider myself very alpha, I feel I've muddled along in some similar deep swamps. Hence my affection for figures closer to the "artist" side of this line (Hart Crane, Stevens). Forth of July is really a playful jab toward the crystallization of a "national epic", drawing on contrary models (like Crane, Berryman, Mandelstam, etc.). [ (Will anybody ever notice what I've been doing here?) ]

from one perspective, the sane & ethical approach, as an artist, would be to maintain a strict detachment, to offer an impersonal mirror... from another perspective this seems impossible, an illusion : we are already caught up and involved emotionally & intellectually with the "materials"...

the whole issue of the poet as "unacknowledged legislator" stems from the fact that all our communal social constructs are rooted, at least to some degree, in the imagination itself... or is this an attitude (for an artist anyway) of foolish, over-reaching pride? Is the substance of reality firm & structured & prior to our conceptions about it?

(Another aspect of this is that much social, didactic, political poetry is not really very poetic. It's prose dressed up as poetry. Of course it can be very effective just like that. But it doesn't re-imagine, re-create the cosmos, the way the great epics do. It lacks the orphic fictional-poetic power of Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare... - the regal sceptre of the imagination - Mandelstam's "baton". I suppose the sceptre has been passed to the novelists, the scientists, the philosophers, the "critical theorists"...)

Old puzzles... this crux perhaps marks the difference between the medieval, the Renaissance & the modern mentalities...

Maybe that's one reason I like the philosophical writings of Nicholas of Cusa so much. For Cusanus, our knowledge reaches its limit in puzzles & paradoxes. God is "the conjunction of opposites". He acknowledges the source of all order & creation in God; at the same time he asserts that all our concepts of God are just that, human constructs, "conjectures", that in fact our whole sensible, knowable reality is a conjectural human construct, an artifice of the mind...

I thought this morning that the resolution of this puzzle or paradox lies in an understanding of the nature of divine love. If "God is Love", as the epistle of John has it, and if Love is a kind of binding embrace of the Other which is at the same time a renunciation, a self-giving to the other, a state of service or servanthood - then it's in the light of this kind of Love that we can imagine another Biblical concept, ie. "perfect freedom".

Imagine a divine nature which wants to create a cosmos of "perfect freedom", because this desire is rooted in love, and love's deepest motive is to "set free". Then this divine nature would of necessity have to withdraw, relinquish control and dominion on some level. Of course this does not necessarily entail indifference (the remote, the clockwork God). "Selfless-love-without-indifference", then, is in itself a kind of incomprehensible paradox. Incomprehensibility, even absurdity, of a kind we meet with in ordinary life (cf. the parable of the Good Samaritan).

I guess I'm simply recycling some old, old via negativa notions going back to Pseudo-Dionysius & Byzantine theology & long before (Plato on love, etc.).

But these notions seem to be essential to any integration of order & freedom, of cosmos & chance, of medieval and renaissance, of theology & humanism. A figure of paradox like Cusanus appears at the cusp of this historic shift (between medieval & modern). He has a mind fascinated with invention and creative freedom. His writings are playful intellectual-philosophical games, conceptual inventions.

But it seems to me the crux of it all is this fusion of the will-to-love ("good will") with the idea of "perfect freedom". Maybe this is the nexus where the gift of artistic detachment & inner freedom rhymes with a more "sober" concept of necessity, reality, history, fact, the moral law, governance, political & juris-prudence, etc.

Had one of those unusual "in dreams begin responsibilities" dreams last night. One of those out-of-left-field dreams, that has you lying there thinking at 3 AM.

Was encountering, and reading poems by, a poet, say in her late 30s or 40s, who was living with her young daughter in a cheap, discount basement apt., someplace up north, like Canada. She was charming, winsome, reddish blonde... the daughter was like a little sprite, an Ariel - kind of moody - she had a special flying car or sled which she would lodge in a hollow tree trunk, her hideout... it had a great name (the sled) which of course I can't remember... (not Rosebud, anyway...)

It was clear that the poet was bohemian, poor, living only for her poetry, a dreamer... her poetry was about her daily life with poetry... sort of a Mandelshtamian "blessed poverty", allowing her to live in & for her imagination alone... the daughter a kind of quintessence of that life... I was reading some of the poems, but can't remember much about them (except that she used the occasional ampersand (&)).

What struck me was the clarity and force of this impression of impractical dedication, the brave "negative capability" she was manifesting, and the vibrant, verdant, vernal feeling of joy - I have a clear image of her smiling sideways glance, and the forest greenery around her daughter's sled hideout - which seemed to emanate from the dream as a whole, & stayed with me after I woke up...

Bachelard or Jung would call this some kind of "anima" dream, I reckon. It was a poetry dream, a dream from poetry.

Vision and synthesis. Again, the notion of poetry as a kind of speaking painting. (Verbal synaesthesia being a hypertrophied symptom of something larger.) Imagination and dream. The project of the poet - to challenge more discursive, abstract, mechanical forms of mimesis - to absorb both dream & reason into singing. The old shamanic/oracular activity, except it loses its utilitarian motives (archaic, magical) in the process of painting the vast image for its own sake. A free-standing model of reality.

Want to follow up a little on yesterday's notes.

If we assert that poetry (and creative artistic work generally) has its roots in some kind of "elsewhere", a place to some extent detached from our will, intellect, & rational calculation - well, this is a big step & has a lot of consequences.

The desire is always to integrate these three - will, intellect and imagination. But cultural history bears a lot of scars, a lot of evidence for the struggle, one way or another. Apollo vs. Dionysus. Ben Jonson (master craftsman) vs. Shakespeare (native genius).

What does it mean that ancient poetry - in its "serious" (not comic, not satiric) modes, anyway - invariably invoked the Muse? The muse is a kind of personification of the imagination's elusive unaccountability.

Probably no critical essay has been dismissed and derided in the last 50 years as has Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent", which includes statements like : "The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." The basis for such dismissals is usually social in nature : American society in particular is more diverse and divided, less certain of its foundations or overall unity, that it was (or at least seemed to be) when Eliot wrote this 80 years ago.

But if we think of Eliot's order of poetic tradition as primarily imaginative, rather than social, or even aesthetic, then his position becomes more persuasive. Starting with Augustine's classic tripartite map of conscious - will, intellect, and imagination - let's say that in art, the imagination moves into a position of priority. The phenomenon of original invention in art - the appearance of a new concept or new vision of relations, which seems to organize all the rest of the artistic material around it - is the fruit, the product, the telos of imaginative activity. What we find beautiful in the products of art then forms or is a part of this pre-existent "ideal order". It is not an order of history or culture so much as an order of originality, an order of beauty.

Which brings me back to the idea of poetry's "otherness". No one can predict the workings of the imagination, of imaginative invention. It is a spark which ignites the whole mind and being of the artist.

One can respond to this phenomenon in diverse ways. There are those who love and serve the imagination; there are others who calculate and strive to force it into channels for their own selfish purposes. The latter route, of course, is ultimately self-defeating. Cultural history is an immense garbage dump of such vain efforts : cultural history is a joke played on us by the Muse.

Many are the critical writings which try to rationalize talent and aesthetic judgement on the basis of social frameworks and determinations. & far be it from me to suggest that poetry exists in a rarified absolute realm, distinct from ordinary social life. It seems perfectly legitimate to explore the socio-historical and generally human context, which illuminates motives and meanings implicit in the artwork itself. But if, in this endeavor, one neglects the original, instinctive spark of imaginative conception - the seed and basis of the whole process - then one has indubitably missed the boat.

I think of Wallace Stevens as pondering along some such path as this...

The mind is creative, the imagination is primordial, originary - since experience is unavoidably subjective : the world we know is the world as we see and experience it.

Thus the vivid, bracing, inventive, concrete perception of poetry offers reality made new - re-shaped anew (or, reality in a new light). Thus the "supreme fiction" displaces the worn-out myths which have congealed into doctrinal belief.

Poetry in this sense is representative of art & artist generally. Which are, in turn, representative of free creative conscious perception generally.

This is very basically the "standard model" of the Artist, since Emerson, the Romantics, etc. And I accept it, I agree with it, for what it's worth : a working credo for the nourishing of creative talents & aims. But it ain't the whole story.

Interesting juxtaposed reading these days : Pope Benedict on St. Bonaventure (Theology of History of St. Bonaventure) on the one hand; a critical study of Finnegans Wake on the other (Joyce, Dante and the poetics of literary relations, by Lucia Boldrini).

I have the feeling Bonaventure would have found FW out of court (even though Joyce is so deeply fascinated with both Christianity and the notion of creative world-making).

Joyce is awfully deep & subtle, but he seems to shape the book in a sort of circular, "Buddhist" (or Hindu) framework : life circles around & around like a river forever & ever. For Bonaventure, the assertion of "the eternity of the world" was one of the primal marks of Aristotle's pagan error. For Bonaventure, the world is a creation, and history has a singular plot (even if B's version of that history has a certain circular quality about it : history is the story of the world being sent forth from God, pivoting on Christ, and returning to God).

I've got my own inklings about this, which I won't go into now...

But getting back to the "Stevens" bit above... I feel more & more on kind of a Nicholas of Cusa/Byzantine tack, with the central notion of the human/divine imago... that is, there are human creators (with maximum freedom) & yet there is also Creation - these 2 perplexibly & unaccountably meshed (like 2 circles) together... & there is the Event at the center...

Christianity : revelation (the event) trumps reason.

Poetry : the actual (drama) trumps abstraction (discourse).

There's a kind of parallel or analogy there... (worked out in History...)

Reading Auerbach on Dante's early poetry (Vita Nuova). "In Dante the esoteric lady of the stil nuovo stands forth clearly for all to see; she becomes a necessary part of the plan of salvation, decreed by Divine Providence. The blessed Beatrice, identified with theological wisdom, is the necessary mediatrix between salvation and man in need of enlightenment..." [p. 62; 1st publ. in 1929]

When poetry (Dante's) requires a personal mediatrix for wisdom, two ideas are implied : first, that all (human) knowledge is "incarnated", or mediated by particular individuals; and second, that theological wisdom is necessarily synthesized by the psyche and the imagination - it's not literal, transparent, absolute, in the way fundamentalists and dogmatists insist it must be.

"The giant race of American poets between the two world wars agreed that the great, the permanent, subject of poetry is the ennobling transformation of common existence by the imagination. Their axiom was old enough, in a sense, for they believed also that wherever art rises beyond the motives of religion, politics and vanity, it accomplishes the great purpose."

- Irvin Ehrenpreis, in a review of Donald Justice & others, published anonymously in TLS # 3760 (March 30, 1974). Quoted in Certain Solitudes : on the poetry of Donald Justice (Univ. of AK Press, 1997).

(This seems to me like one of the best, most accurate formulations of "what it's all about" I've ever come across. Even though it reminds me that my own poetry, most of the time, is a murky obscure mixture of religion, politics & vanity - my own private Amazon jungle.)

p.s. Happy Birthday, Walt.

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 thing about imagination & war has, obviously, been with poetry from the beginning. The nobility & vanity of the Homeric heroes. Rilke's poem about the dead cavalryman's beautiful shako.

We want history to conform to a child's dream of heroism. The youthful perception of beauty incorporates all kinds of disparate elements. The focus in the Gospels on the power of childish (imaginative) vision. "They behold their Father's face."

Blake, of course, was into this...

A happy childhood forecasts the doom of the world.

Notes Toward & So On (6)

In this series of somnambulistic early-work channelings, I am not trying to legislate how to make poetry. Rather, I am searching for new frameworks for reading, interpreting, understanding.

In a witty and clever book titled Quantum Poetics, Daniel Albright investigated the science metaphors & worldviews which Pound, Eliot, Yeats & others used to explain what they were doing & how they conceptualized poetry. Particle vs. wave - the oscillation between these two determined the pattern of indeterminacy to follow. I think my musings on the symbol locate me closer to the particle end of that spectrum; Albright notes how Pound & Wyndham Lewis, especially, rejected Einstein (the magician who vaporized matter, space, time) in favor of the earlier philosophy of Leibniz & his concept of the monad : the smallest particle of thought-matter in a vital universe of mutually-mirroring microcosmi. (Oddly enough, Einstein spent his later years taking long walks in Princeton with his friend the math genius Kurt Godel, a confirmed Leibnizian.)

Is poetry a Byzantine mosaic of interpenetrating mutually-reflective correspondences, corresponding in turn to the "signatures" of Nature? Is the text a crystallization of same, a glowing object of infinite labyrinthine riddles (Joyce)?

Or, on the other hand, is language a kind of open, free-play medium for wave-vibrations - reverberations, instantaneous relativity-connections - Whitman's cosmic love-vibe (or Joyce's watery Wake)?

I think I would like to find some synthesis of the two. "Resonant symbol." & I have a hunch this morning that the path in that direction leads through the relationship of word & psyche.

What is an image, after all? A product of a certain faculty of mind - the imagination. Ancient concepts of human consciousness located three distinct areas : Reason (judgement), Imagination (conception), and Memory (knowledge).

John Henry Newman, whose great work Grammar of Assent is something I intend to look at carefully, centered the conceptual activity in something he called the "Illative Sense" - a kind of architectonic capability, fusing all three areas of mind in the work of conceptual modelling.

Language, from the beginning, has been the human conceptual-sense response to unmediated reality (experience). The poem can be seen as an end-product of the shaping activity of the illative sense (imagination, taste/judgement, memory), using that primary human tool of representation. But it more than a record of experience : it is a living image of same. How so?

First of all, words themselves present a fusion of senses (image, sound, & evocation of touch, taste & smell). Secondly, poems exhibit a reflexive or self-reflexive pattern : their sensuous qualities - rhythm, image, sound, word-play - run rings around the reader in a reverberating echo-chamber. Reflexivity is a generator of expansive dynamism, a principle of nature & art exemplified in the famous "golden section" of the Greeks, the fibonacci sequence, etc. (ie. any patterned object which contains a ratio between smaller & larger parts, which equals the ratio between the larger part & the whole).

I wrote earlier in this series about the conceptual complexity of the symbol, which faces in two directions : toward the actual object the words evoke, and toward the universe of correspondences or meanings with which it sets up reverberations. Or, as quoted from Austin Farrer, earlier : "We write in symbol when we wish our words to present, rather than analyse or prove, their subject-matter... Symbol endeavors, as it were, to be that of which it speaks, and imitates reality by the multiplicity of its significance."

Again, despite the "reverberations", I am presenting an image of poetry which seems to lean toward the Leibnizian/particle/mosaic end of the spectrum. The completed poem offers a conceptual-sense fusion or unity in dynamism; thus the critic is free to analyze it & explore its constituent parts and implications; the poem is a kind of object, rather than a wave-transmission.

But this is not the end of the story, today or any day. Because I want to go back to that with which I began this post : the notion that the image-symbol is an effect of a faculty of mind (the imagination). Newman's "illative sense" is profoundly, substantially personal, because the mental act of imaginative or conceptual synthesis of experience is just that : a kind of assent to real, as opposed to abstract or notional or merely verbal, experience. & such experience, in Newman's view, can only be personal. What are the consequences of this for our idea of poetry?

Poetry, then, becomes both a record and a communication of real experience (in Newman's sense, real experience can be imaginary : it's an imaginative rendering or conceptualization). The poem is no impersonal object : it bears the fingerprint of an individual (I'm reminded of the Borges poem about how all the texts in his librarian cosmos were really a map of his own face; or the Walt Whitman version of the "disintegrated" cosmic self). Turn over the intricate Byzantine-patterned coin-symbol-object, & you discover the profile of its maker : & the poem is a reverberant wave-pattern, a message, of the poet, from the poet, to you. The Word is a Person. (the langpo is a NY schoolie)

Latest reading : Words and The Word : language, poetics, and biblical interpretation, by Stephen Prickett (English prof. at Australian National University). Cambridge UP, 1986.

This is a really brilliant analysis of the shifting inquiries and debates around the nexus defining poetry, historical philology, biblical translation & interpretation. Starting with Longinus' distinction between sublime & beautiful. Through the poets, philologists, theologians, philosophers of the 18th-20th cent. The book is not an historical survey, but a critical interpretation in its own right. I'm only on the 2nd chapter, but finding it very helpful. Full of good quotes, too.

Touchstone : ...I would the gods had made thee poetical.
Audrey: I do not know what 'poetical' is : is it honest in deed and word? is it a true thing? (As You Like It)

Also an interesting etymological fact : our word "soothing" is a kind of lightweight tangent from its prior meaning : "to soothe" meant to verify or confirm as true. "Sooth" meant true or truth. ie. "forsooth". So "to confirm something as true" gradually blended with "to comfort or soothe".

I could identify with this passage (p. 45) on many levels:

"Coleridge's theory of the imagination stressed that all knowledge was acquired by an active integrating mental process; the passive receptivity assumed by the Lockeian and empiricist notion of the 'tabula rasa' model of the mind was an impossibility. Thus in reading poetry we are not receivers of the word, we are, by definition, participators in it. When Coleridge wrote of the Bible that in it 'there is more that finds me than in all other books put together', he is deliberately using the biblical image of dialogue, the process of call and response that is the hallmark of God's dealings with man from Genesis to Acts, as a metaphor of the process of reading itself."

(But, just to be clear, Prickett is not offering his own argument here : I haven't gotten to that myself yet. He goes on to discuss the influence of Vico, who had a very different estimate of poetry & the poetic. While prudently leaving aside the whole issue of biblical scripture and divine revelation, Vico argued that poetry is an expression of the primitive mind, which projects its own fears & desires into highly-colored imaginative symbols - and then falls down to worship its own creations.)

Going back to comments here of 3.18:

I wonder how the Biblical concept fire - as in, "you shall all be salted with fire"; "I baptize you with water; but one is coming who shall baptize you with spirit & with fire" - compares with the Romantic notion (Coleridge, Blake, maybe Yeats) of vision.

Roger Williams' parochial battles, late in life, with the Quakers & the followers of Anne Hutchinson. He advocated a kind of scriptural realism (Christ's work was a particular historical activity & event) vs. the dangers of spiritual solipsism (pride, vanity), which he believed were lurking in the Quaker's radical antinomian "inner light".

The imagination inhabits a borderland between subjective & objective.

In what way is faith dependent on imagination? A believer would say that faith proceeds from, is a gift from, the Holy Spirit. But there is a sort of co-operation between the mind/imagination and that "inspiration". The imagination as the vital activity of the mind - the "integration" of human capabilities ("personality").

Readings in Maximus (the other Maximus, the Byzantine theologian) - about the "divinisation" of mankind by means of the Spirit.

Maybe the outcome of the co-operation of Spirit & imagination is - fire.

& what is fire? Light, for one thing. The instantaneous recognition of something which represents both the limit and measure of ordinary time/space. That light of which (in the old-fashioned typological sense) physical light is the image.

I'm obsessed - in my own illogical & unsystematic way - with a particular subject : the way(s) in which a person moves from scepticism or agnosticism to belief. This has been one of those fixed points or idees fixes around which my ruminations have oscillated, since the time of this adventure (& before).

A person moving from doubt to belief is like someone moving from thought to action - because a whole way of interpreting reality, along with a potential avalanche of active commitments, stem from that initial step. How this comes about - in what circumstances - can entail, obviously, some very dramatic (life-affirming, or life-threatening) consequences.

The language of belief, without that primary opening or accession, leaves the listener unmoved, untouched, unconvinced (or oppressed by a confidence he or she doesn't share).

I'm interested in the ruminations of Coleridge & Stevens (or Nicolaus Cusanus) on the impact of imaginative (theological) concepts. In their sense of a relation between vision, on the one hand, and human freedom & dignity (autonomy), on the other.

The imagination can become an end in itself; but that's not the same thing as faith. The ruminations about the mystery of belief are only a subset of the ruminations on the mystery of God per se.

"God" is a concept which tends to bring the mind up short - blocked, confused, stymied, befuddled. At least this has been my experience. One has to live with it for a few decades to become slightly more confident in some slight measure of understanding (or the illusion of same).

I've found the notion of analogy or proportion to be very helpful in this pursuit of the illusion of knowledge (cf. Cusanus, On Learned Ignorance). I mean the golden proportion, or "dynamic symmetry" (the fibonacci sequence being one example). To wit: in a shape divided into two parts, the relation of the smaller to the larger part is the same as the relation of the larger part to the whole shape. (As a result, we have a spiral of infinite (proportionate) expansion, or contraction.)

What does this have to do with God? It's connected with the ancient notion of humankind as Imago Dei. The figure that humanity makes on earth - self-conscious, creative, constructive, hopefully merciful & wise - this "abstract image" of Man in general - is "analogous" to the figure of God. As Man is in relation to time and the earth, so God is in relation to eternity and the cosmos.

(The analogical image - going back to the Greeks, the Hebrews, & Byzantium all together - underlies much of the musing of Stevens, Coleridge... Mandelstam too. Cusanus played it brilliantly from at least 2 directions - ie. "Between the finite & the infinite there is no proportion..." etc.)

This basic architectonic of theism might possibly open the door to more profound mysteries ("salvation history"). & yet it takes more than a beautiful mathematical proportion to convince a sceptic to believe in the existence of a benevolent Creator. & this question - this uncertainty - this riddle - is precisely where the path of the individual seeker, ruminator, cogitator, meditator, reasoner, intuitor, experiencer - the selva oscura of each personal mind & heart - sets out.

Mandelstam, from his first book (Kamen = "Stone" - trans. by Merwin/Brown):

Let the names of imperial cities
caress the ears with brief meaning.
It's not Rome the city that lives on,
it's man's place in the universe.

 
Emperors try to rule that,
priests find excuses for wars,
but the day that place falls empty
houses and altars are trash.

It would be pointless for me to pretend to be cognizant of & attuned to the threads in po-biz & blog chatter these days. I'm involved in a very slow process now of trying to orient my own writing & thinking in different directions. Part of that does involve looking back at the long-poem efforts which absorbed me for several years. I guess much of what I say about Forth of July here sounds about as obscure, eccentric & irrelevant as can be. But for anyone who feels like looking into it, these blog notes might offer glancing openings to it. So I'll try to continue to spend a little time each day reviewing my own efforts, for my own benefit & for possible readers too.

I think of Forth of July as working in part by analogy, a structure of thematic parallels. Thus the notion of resurrection, or retrieving a connection with the dead, translates a concept of poetry itself (as a kind of vital experience of creative awareness or imagination) into a theme or a proto-narrative. The attempt to revive or reshape the American long poem & its meanings mirrors or parallels a theory or concept of the meaning of life & history in general. You could compare the process, oddly enough, to a run for the Presidency, say Howard Dean, for example. A heroic narrative (the outsider challenger, the knight on horseback) becomes a vehicle for the articulation of a perspective on broader questions.

In Forth of July, this theme of resurrection is channeled through the Orpheus story. "Bluejay", the ghostly shaman-spirit guide [Bluejay is the Orpheus-like protagonist in Northwest Coast Native American folktales] , leads "Henry" into the world of the dead. What seems in Stubborn Grew to be an attempt to come to terms with a dying marriage, proves to be, in the central book (Grassblade Light), a different psychic process, of coming to terms with the death by suicide of "Juliet" ("Henry's" cousin, who leapt from the Golden Gate on her father's birthday).

The central "panel" of Grassblade Light, titled "Ghost Dance", welds together many of the thematic parallels, in a kind of shamanistic resurrection of dead poets & poetry (Hart Crane, John Berryman), the long poem itself, and at the center, Juliet, bringing them all into the spiritual "now" of the "living, breathing" poem.

July, the third book of the poem, in turn, reckons with the illusions & limitations of the romantic-iconic summoning of the dead found in Grassblade, & goes further into a kind of "pure poetry" of America, oddly shedding/transposing some of the personal elements, while discovering & probing still deeper motives for the effort.

Here's a section from the final panel of Grassblade, titled "Rite of Spring":

         6


  
         The garden seethes with rust.
 The king's litter (a dry canopy)
 transported around a pool.  See
 the young maiden dancing,

  
         as she must – arm lifted,
 hand waving forward
 like a figurehead
 for the delicate ship outfitted

  
         to carry her.  And the ship
 carried on a breath of wind
 this way, that – bound
 on azimuthal slope

  
         to the meridian (one
 angled M-turn
 swollen with
         dying men).

  
         Gnomon of your returning
 Magdalen – to a green gar-
 den (time has never been).
 There's no more dying then:

  
         for the slave is free – fear
 swallowed up in victory –
 your vessel a flowering fiery
 myrrh-box adrift on a tear

  
         forever.  Where the dance
 begins and ends.
 No more dying then:
 the garden seethes

  
         with –

 
                                6.4.99

["Rite of Spring", of course, an allusion to the Stravinsky ballet about an iconic dying maiden, a spring sacrifice, folds into the Russian parallels of the poem, its return to its "Russian origins" - the instigation of Mandelstam's work - as well as the "springing" origins of the narrator - since the Rite was first performed on May 29, 1913, and 5.29 is the poet's birthday, and the numerical structure of Grassblade as a whole pivots on the number 29 - 5.29 being both the date of JFK's birth ("return of the American Camelot king") & of "Black Wednesday", the fall of Byzantium, 499 years before the poet's birthday.]

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
                    - Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

Re-reading B.J. Leggett's useful book, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory. Interesting chapter on what Stevens may have been getting at with the title "It Must Be Abstract". How he drew upon I.A. Richards' book Coleridge on Imagination to come to a notion of how the mind - whether in perception ("the poet of reality") or imagination ("the poet of fictions") - always abstracts : that all words are imaginative abstractions, creations of thought. In this way he plays/works with the imagination/reality pairing, without getting stuck (like some of his critics) on one prong or the other.

Mandelstam somewhere: "Love the idea of the thing more than the thing itself."

Byzantine icons, Nicholas Cusanus. "God" being a human concept, a name, for something we cannot really grasp; humankind as imago dei one of its imaginative corollaries, a concept which can come to have meaning both in contemplation & action. Coleridge on the imagination as the expression of the divine "I Am". An imaginative idea of the economy of the earth. "O what a piece of Work is Man!"

Leggett shows curiously how Stevens was also heavily influenced by a biographical study of Giambattista Vico, about the same time Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake.

Jordan writes:

"Poetry in English maybe has a future, but that future will come from solitary hard labor," says Henry. I am guessing he means a hard labor that often appears to be abstracted lazy gazing out the train window.

Productive daydreaming is a different issue, probably the most worthwhile activity in the universe but not what I was talking about.

I don't say Talk is bad; I'm just playing up its difference from Poetry.

The hard labor I have in mind has to do with every good poet's unique understanding of precision.

Architecture is frozen music; poetry is silent music.

"Musicien du silence"

Crane in The Bridge called Dickinson, "Silencer".

The imagination approaches the Real as silence approaches music.

The silence before a poetry reading is only the prologue to poetic silence.

The Talker is a time-thief. Time-theft is white-collar crime, the talker gratified by light sentences & cushy cell. The Poet, sentenced to hard labor, is uneasy about doing time.

The normative = the humane imagination. Sympathy & ethical response in conditions of crisis & ennui & powerlessness. The Just One will suffer calumny, spite, slander, malice, hatred, treachery and violence in order to stand beside the weak & utter the truth. What's that line from the Bhagavad Gita at the end of the Waste Land, Anastasios? "Sympathise - [something] - Control" . . . (I guess it's on your blog)!