like a dream

BLIND EYE

Like a dream in the womb, in the mind of a maid

before all things were made.

Came naturally, she said

when the foundations of reality were laid.

Providence, burnished by smoky November.

Like a canoe on the edge

of the cataract of knowledge...

at Prospect Terrace.  You remember.

Roger Williams, sturdy son of man.

Dark grayish blue

Hope Diamond, you

whisper (below junk jewelry scams) your plan

for Providence.  Triangulated eye

over the Mammon-pyramid.

Re’s Eye, long hid

in our blind eye – to crucify,

Henry (in RI).  That woman in the wilderness

of last things (Chinese vase

still circuiting her stillness).

French, blue, Jeanne.  Fiery duress...

Only a child’s distress.  Cordelia.

Le coeur de Lear, de l’ear...

Coeur de Lion, here.

Skinny crane-bag (of ocean spray)...

St. Paul’s most blazing eloquence

out of heart’s Pig’s Eye.

South of the city –

Mississippi limestone (fossil evidence).

11.16.18

Dream song of reality

Just read Joshua Rothman's New Yorker profile of philosopher Daniel Dennett, his lifelong pursuit of a materialist, non-religious, un-mystical theory of consciousness.  Dennett steps out as a brilliant, original thinker, with an impressive science background (biology, mostly). And as an admirably enterprising DIY jack-of-all-trades.

I'm neither scientist nor philosopher.  But I have, like many another, puzzled over the question of "mind", this ancient (back to Epicurus, at least) divide between idealism and materialism.

Just a few off-the-cuff reactions to Rothman's Dennett.  He strikes me as a curious, searching person, whose stance toward nature is essentially that of an engineer.  He's interested in the mechanics of process - how things are done.  This is obviously necessary for science, an attentive approach which leads to discovery.  But it seems ironic that Dennett's view of consciousness - as a continuum, shared with other animals and living things - is not that different from the classic "chain of being" perspective of Aquinas (for one example).  That other animals exhibit a "sort of" consciousness (Dennett's term) - an evolutionary preview of the human mind - parallels the chain-of-being picture, only without the traditional hierarchical fence between "Man" & the rest.  For Dennett it's a flow.  & it seems he has focused passionately on explaining (theoretically) the how of it : how our sense of consciousness could arise from purely physical, evolutionary developments.

This is, I would say, the blind spot in Dennett's vision.  There are limits to the mechanical, analytical dissection of reality offered by biology.  Whatever conclusions he can draw from such analysis only serve to justify his prior conviction of the non-existence of an over-arching God, Spirit, or Mind - something which cannot be "proved" by such analysis anyway.

It seems to me that aesthetics & poetry, as well perhaps as some branches of philosophy, can offer a more valid perspective - because they are rooted in a sense of holism, a synthetic sense.

The poet and the artist register the fabric of the dream.  The theologian (or philosopher of God) articulates the analogical/anagogical synthesis.  Materialist attempts to disprove the reality of Mind or Spirit lack the tools to achieve it, first of all - and, secondly, are probably asking the wrong question.

The question, maybe, is not how, but why.  Why does this immense spectacle of the universe exist at all?  "We are such things as dreams are made on..." - but why?

I've always found the theological answer the most satisfactory.  Why the wonder of the cosmos?  The truest answer : it's a gift.  Why human consciousness?  The truest answer is a kind of geometric/analogical one : human consciousness, which governs (imperfectly) life on our planet, demonstrates an analogy - a sort of geometric parallel - with the divine Mind that governs (ineffably) Reality as a whole.  And history is basically a spectacular drama, unfolding the destiny of that governing mind or spirit, working through humanity toward some kind (or kinds) of definitive expression - call it "Providence".

REST NOTE : AN EXPLANICATION (1)

Because it's a quiet day at the library (students gone). Because it's not easy to read (this poem). Because only 12 people a month visit this blog any more - most of them from Mars (because I've lost interest in febrile wrangling?).

Why am I writing this poem, which is so recalcitrant? The sameness of structure & syntax - the vagueness of reference...

Well, I'm just getting into it, myself. But with every step I have to try to increase the resistance.

Who are these people - Lazarus, Hobo, Edith, Teddy Roosevelt? Figures, I guess, representing renewal. Renewal in a sort of all-encompassing sense. Renewal as a concept.

Art, well, it seems to be self-reflexive, if that's the right term. Folds back on itself, renews & extends itself through echo-effects. Implication.

So a poetry will try to renew itself by writing about renewal. Lazarus will sing himself out of the grave. With help.

This basic image (Lazarus) is meant to represent aspects of reality in general. "Lazarus", in a sense, puts a person - a particular image of the person - near the center of one's imaginative image of (cosmic) order.

& philosophical consequences result from that ordering choice. What they are I am only beginning to be able to articulate & defend.

*

Besides - does the poem so far really exhibit sameness, etc.? Well, maybe so... I seem to have a taste, a habit, an appetite, for the sound of it - at least for my own way of sounding. Maybe no one else hears it that way.

But, as mentioned, I want to make things difficult for myself, to find the resistance (which is related to reflexivity). So the aim would be to move toward a betterment of style. In some ways the serial mode helps allow for that possibility, along with many more negative outcomes (logorrhea, graphomania...). ("...he that of repetition is most master.")

That's part of the aim, & part of the difficulty. As one can tell from the nervous blur of the openings of Rest Note, I'm anxious about it. I've had too many false starts, & too much resistance (in myself & my life) toward writing anything at all.

OK, now I've probably gone & jinxed myself.

Curious how Anastasios & I sometimes seem to be thinking along parallel tracks. His current post is helpful to me. I obsess about this profound riddle & mystery (the one he describes).

This morning it occurred to me that the only way it makes sense (to me) is as something both 1) real - factual - in some unexplicable way, and 2) symbolic: a theatrical performance.

But Campbell, here, seems to help with the explication part. Myth as reality, in some fashion, anyway (in the Northrop Frye sense, maybe).

Religious or spiritual concepts & vocabulary, aided (in the face of doubt) by the "science" of art & storytelling.

Review in New Yorker of philosopher David Dennett's book on the natural science of religion.

What believers in scientism, like Dennett, forget is that their own belief-systems rest on certain postulates (underlying assumptions). The central postulate of evolutionary theory is that life is the product of an individual & species-based survival mechanism. Dennett goes on to apply such a theory to the origins of religious thinking itself.

But evolutionary theory does not deal with the basic structural elements of the universe - space, time, stars, planets, moons. And it's these elements, perhaps, which were the primary focus of early religious speculation. Where did they come from?

Scientific work stems from free thought - speculation - theory - based strictly on data, facts, whatever is the case. But evolutionists (polemical ones, that is, like Dennett) do not acknowledge similar procedures in religious thinking, which is characterized (objectified) as some kind of evolutionary survival mechanism.

I would suggest, to the contrary, that religious thought is (in part - and only in part : ie., the scientific part) an early form of science, based on observation and reflection about "what is the case" with regard to life and the universe.

Think of it as going on - not as a result of some kind of intellectual hunter-gather mechanism - but during the cave peoples' & archaic citizens' free time : their musing about reality.

Which, needless to say, may still have a lot to offer with regard to what, ultimately, is the case.

Would like to follow up some of the comments of last few days.

In Stubborn Grew, and the 3 books of The Rose (all of which make up Forth of July), I tried to make such a frame. Part of that totalizing epic impulse. & not something I learned from Northrop Frye or other scholars, some abstract idea of genre - but an impulse going back to the Shakespeare thing, a need to articulate experience in a holistic way.

(My apologies to those of you for whom I may be sort of repeating myself, again.)

I wanted to "finish", to my own satisfaction, what seems like the unfinished business of the "long poem" in America.

In effect, this poem takes a very long psychic-poetic trip. The poet, the "speaker", wavers between autobiography, and history, and "pure" poetry, and parody, and lyric singing, and romance, and symbolic narratives, and documentary, and collage...

however, whatever the literary-emblematic, symbolic, political-historical ramifications of it all, the sum toto, when I reflect on it now, seems like self-portraiture. This may be due, largely, to the emphasis on memory (reverie) as the basic source of inspiration, the instigator.

I tried in several ways to "generalize" the poem's subjectivity. But this is a very problematic and paradoxical region of art-making. In some ways the subjectivity of the creative artist is exactly what the artist is about - the substance of art's message. The very ability to "muse" & write is dependent on the personal & private to a great extent.

I'm reading another (short) book by Giuseppe Mazzotta - Cosmopoiesis - on aspects of "world-making" in Renaissance literature. He writes in the intro about the traditional distinctions between Medieval and Renaissance : the former is theological, the latter is humanist; the former is vita contemplativa, the latter is vita activa.

I feel sort of on the cusp of this divide (as I guess everyone is, really). The poet-as-poet experiences originality - world-making, life-made-anew - in a very concrete way. But the fragile symbiosis of subjective & objective, person & world, is hard (if even possible at all) to "fix".

Reality is mysteriously in flux, in process - a theologian (on a good day) might describe this as an aspect of the divine gift of human freedom, power, & self-determination. Artists understand this - experience this - as the sudden coalescence of their imaginative projects.

In my "posthumous" creative life of the last 5 years or so, I seem to be struggling to find a mode of expression which is more objective, less autobiographical, less caught up with my interior psychodrama.

Or at least find a way to make that personal experience more informed by the objective present.

Forth of July is full of obscure symbolic structures & meanings. The 3rd volume, July, tried to go in two directions at once : to break out of the nostalgic-memorial element of the previous volume (Grassblade Light), and at the same time to create a more autonomous artistic structure (ie. Forth of July issues in, seeks its own telos, in July.)

I started writing it on July 15th - traditionally, "St. Henry's Day" - the day in 1199 when the Crusaders formally invested the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. I aimed to end it between March 15th - the Ides of March - and April 14th - around Easter/Lincoln's assassination/Vallejo's death.

There were a lot of ideas circling around in my head about these symbolic dates. The notion of "Henry going to Jerusalem", for one (a reference to Henry the IV's ironic speech to Prince Hal in the "Jerusalem Chamber" in Shakespeare's H. IV).

There was the Judaic-Christian concept of "Jubilee", which is a kind of messianic/utopian hopeful idea about world justice & peace. In order to symbolize this element I played a lot of word games - reversing the "shell" of an armored (military) Julius Caesar - world political power - through the "coming-forth" of Juliet, or the ark of Jubilee.

Thus the Christian sacrifice evoked by the sepulchre - & resurrection-hope - is linked in the poem (& to America) via Lincoln/Vallejo.

It all sounds very schematic, but it was shaped through a kind of whacky (psychic) journey to New Orleans - through American history - up & down the Mississippi, via Crane, Melville, Whitman, Twain... (& the mysterious Bluejay - who returns after his disappearance at the end of Stubborn Grew.)

The octagonal shape of Frederick II's Castel del Monte (discussed a few days ago) was modelled (some have argued) on the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, which Frederick may have encountered in the course of negotiating the (peaceful - & very short-lived) return of Jerusalem to Western control. The octagon is also symbolic of the renewal of the world (the "eighth day" of creation).

Anyway, happy Ides of March.

reality is a theater controlled by forces we don't understand.

but the interesting thing is : it's a moral theater (tragedy or comedy).

Maybe I have time to do a little more mental mountain climbing (or digital finger-slalom) this morning.

Continuing with the Turing biography. "turing" makes me think of a lathe; but apparently the family name stemmed from "Turin", Italy. A.T. was certainly an Olympics-class mental climber.

He's in college, & getting into mathematics, & Russell's Paradox ("the set of all sets, which contains itself", etc.). "'Normally,", wrote Russell, 'a class is not a member of itself. Mankind, for example, is not a man.'"

(Aye, there's the rub.)

Georg Cantor's infinity [of infinities] research.

The fractal spiral of self-reflective patterns [the J! the J! the blue J!]. Art's resonant echo-chamber.

But let's get back to poetry. I have a hunch this Russell Paradox can be applied, in some kind of analogy, both to literary style ("what do we do after MODERNISM???"}, and on a more basic level, to the relationship between text (written symbols) and real experience; AND, on a more cryptic level, to certain theological notions.

I won't try to cover all this in one lecture.

On coffee break, I'm reading about Turing, and I'm watching college students go by, umbilically attached to cellphones, I-pods. & I read, "This lack of any simple connection between mathematical symbols and the world of actual objects fascinated Alan." I'm watching the students go by, I'm slurping my coffee, & I'm thinking about the relationship between text and person, and between poetic text and vocal recital, dramatic performance.

I'm thinking about that relationship, because I'm trying to follow up on the previous post, the bit about poetry's serious side opens a space for its aesthetic reception.

This particular intellectual/emotional/spiritual pleasure & value, as we know it anyway, follows specifically from writing & reading, from texts.

But, paradoxically, the benchmarks, the classics, the models which make up the substance of an ongoing tradition in poetry - these originated in periods of revolutionary change : when 1) writing, printing & literacy spread far & wide, and 2) when the vast energies of vernacular languages were absorbed into poetry.

So the classics are packages of newly-grasped forms of energy (reading; new languages).

Our pleasure & learning - through reading & writing - draw on sources which are amalgams of spoken language & new writing tools.

I'm reminded of one of Mandelstam's most striking formulae : "Poetry is a plow which turns up the deep layers of Time, and spreads them on the surface." He's referring to contemporary, Acmeist poetry as he understands it & wants it to be : reaching back into those vital sources, those original amalgams of popular speech and writing technology (Dante, the classic of classic exemplars).

& it's close to Hart Crane's Nietzschean sense of poetry's potential to "reincarnate", to re-capitulate, archaic or eternal times (Marlowe, Pindar...).

"I don't want Ovid in translation; I want the living, breathing Ovid," Mandelstam wrote. (I'm quoting from memory.)

The forms taken suddenly by ancient poetry are springs or sources : fresh, eternal beauty. (This is a sort of classicism, I guess.) Why? Because they embody this symbiosis of text & speech, of symbol & actuality, of poem & person.

Not models or patterns; sources.

Russell's Paradox, which arose in the attempt to conceptualize the basic nature of mathematics, also applies, somehow, every time we read the "imitation of a speech act". It applies, somehow, to our concepts of rationality itself : what is the status of an abstraction, a metaphor, a word? What (if anything) grounds their logical architecture?

& what is "reality", then? Maybe Mankind, for example, is, indeed, a man...

[see, philosophes, the much-debated Aristotelian/Scholastic notion, that there are no universals, only individuals... nominalism loops into Berkeleyan idealism... & back into Peirce's futuristic, "thought-like" realism... & back into poetic quiddity, vivid particularity... ut pictura poiesis... I-am-That-I-Am, I-will-be-what-I-will-be, JHWH...]

and the poem & the person, and the text & the real, and the student & the mp3-player, inhabit this unpredictable borderland, where they flow back & forth...

I'm circling around a holistic conceptualization of art which includes personhood. Getting back to those dilemmas outlined in Carol Christ's book (Victorian & Modernist Poetics).

OK, class dismissed.

glNotes Toward...


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

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

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

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

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

It can be argued that the age of science, enlightenment, & rationalism set poetry free to enter its proper sphere of pure play. & if you accept that play is a central & "serious" human activity, there is some truth to this. But if play/poetry/childhood is framed as part of a duality in which work/seriousness/reality-principle is the more important or essential half, then poetry has been assigned to a play-pen & will be coddled, tolerated, & held in fond contempt.

I would realign these relations, with the claim that science & rationalism cannot, & will never, provide an adequate description of reality. Philosophy reaches a little closer, but its discursive abstractions are still inadequately communicative. Only the arts provide a sufficiently vivid affective-intellectual image of experience & reality. Poetry can span the distance between philosophical concepts on the one hand, and dramatic immediacy & actuality on the other. (Philosophy for its part aspires toward the condition of dialogue & drama.)

I offer these admittedly unoriginal notions to follow up on previous posts. How can poetry assume its full powers, then? I would think one critical measure in this regard would be a poetry's expressive wholeness - its willingness to patiently present & clearly "argue" - or logically defend - its sensuous, affective, or experiential subject-matter & the underlying rhetoric of same. This is what I see, for example, in the tightly-knotted & expressive sentence-structures of Keats' sonnets and odes : these poems display a striking, a startling, fusion of song & statement. Expressive logic or wholeness - as opposed to the poetry of half-statement, deflection, intimation, pose, predetermined attitude, rhetorical inflation-for-effect.

Closer to our time, Wallace Stevens reaches in this direction, with his fusion of philosophical reflection & rhetorical play. Robert Lowell simultaneously argues & suffers with contemporary history. But these are just 2 examples among many, not meant as representative figures; my purpose is to focus on a way of interpreting poetic value.

I wonder if Wallace Stevens was familiar with Nicolaus Cusanus. There's a paper there for you, kids.

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Stevens' "makings of the sun" & Cusanus' "conjectural", human-hypothetical, world. Probably some differing conclusions, but also some clear affinities of interest & vocabulary.

the thrill at the heart of Wallace Stevens' "first idea" : that's what this art/nature oscillation is all about. . .

At the end of previous post, I contrasted both bohemian poetics & postmodernism with the poetic capacity of the "visionary".

It may be that the meaning of visionary here hinges on a concept of philosophy, and on how we conceive the relation between poetry & philosophy.

Postmodernism generally seems to posit a kind of Dionysian or Nietzschean "irreality" which de-centers both reality itself, and the philosophical language which aims to delineate it.

Olsonian-derived Projectivism seems to represent a genuine effort to "envision" reality in a holistic way, but it's accompanied by a kind of magico-mysterium hierophantic attitude which tends toward elitism & obscurantism.

"New American" poetry generally seems derived from a poetics more than a unified philosophy : a poetics of expressive free engagement rather than traditionalist formalities, codes & idioms.

A "serious" poetics as opposed to a "minor" poetics would maybe be grounded in some form of realism, by which I mean the assumption by both Plato & Aristotle, both the philosopher of formal beauty & the philosopher of natural energeia, that there exists an objective Reality which humans can and should aim to interpret as rightly as possible.

The battles between philosophy & poetry I think about in terms of the Western integration of "Hellenism" & "Hebraism". Hellenism asserts the human capacity to objectify the True & the Real in philosophical/scientific signs. Hebraism emphasizes the underlying & mysterious subjectivity of phenomena, grounded in a Creation which is the artifice of a divine Nature which is itself imaged in human beings (as the "faces" or facets of a geometrical figure approach the continuum of the circle). This subjectivity I align with the poetic (as differentiated from the discursive-philosophic) tradition of the Psalmist & the prophets. Poetry asserts a certain vividness of expression which is more truly mimetic of the ultimate Reality than discursive reasoning can achieve. So these two are always in creative rivalry, the one tending toward irrational magic & superstition, the other tending toward dry & dehumanized rationalism.

The new poetry will not just comment, luxuriate or complain. It will have thought through the problems of existence, and will play the whole 88 keys, from the most lofty to the most basic practical & moral dilemmas. It will relate & integrate them all in a new light.

It will not flatter your vanity or soothe your nerves or feed you candy or agree with your notions or pretend to be what it's not. It will offer a form of reality for your interpretation. Its inherent truth will challenge, encourage, inspire, delight & rebuke. It will give you new ideas as it interprets the world.

. . . But whence cometh this bicameral poetics? I don't think it's simply self-interested polemics. The deeper fault line probably goes back to John Donne's era. When God was no longer understood as Love & Knowledge together, the split between Love & Knowledge, Faith & Science, began. A gradual breakdown of the idealist concept of Nature & the Good, so that the beginning of the 20th century witnessed the final flip-over, the revolutionary displacement of Apollonian by Dionysian humanity : "love" understood philosophically & psychologically as only a veil for subconscious desire, the ideal countered by the anti-ideal, the "knowing", the disenchanted.

The effect of these thought-movements on art was of course manifold : art's basic drive to depict or reflect was no longer guided by an accepted or singular logos or mythology; it began to depict chaos & disorder. The "order" imposed by Modernism is an order of the autonomous artifact.

Such order based on the thing-in-itself sets up a fundamental division between artifact and communication. Perhaps it is this basic division - between the urge to "make" a wholistic thing/machine/poem on the one hand, and the urge to communicate fact, truth, values, on the other - which is reflected in the partisanship of "mainstream" & "experimental".

(Meanwhile the agon between Apollonian and Dionysian - between a verbalized icon of the Ideal and a representation of the commanding power of Desire - sets up an endless productive/empty tumult, since, ironically, the heart's desire is not satisfied by either of them : neither by a detached verbal formula of the Good, nor a worldview framed by impersonal, deterministic hedonism, ie. fulfillment through sensuality.)

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.

Parallels between writing a poem, having self-consciousness, and Nicolas Cusanus' theory of "learned ignorance".

The idea that, because our ideas about God & Reality are always (even if only slightly) incommensurate with those things in themselves, it follows that we inhabit a human universe, in which all knowledge is metaphorical & creative, human-produced, including our metaphors for God. Absolute knowledge is a delusion; art alone creates an authentic model (because it's only a model), because the model makes allowance for the unknown, because the creative model is an imitation of divine free creation. (The Incarnation is the only "hard evidence" of the specifically human meaning of the universe.)

But one doesn't NEED such justifications (any more than one needs a poem).

Last Sunday was Kurt Godel's birthday (Cantor's successor).
[correction : Monday. April 28. The day I was posting about Faith & Reason to Anastasios. At 1:32 pm, same time as this post. 132 : the number of Stubborn Grew. (Why? Long story. I used to live at 132 6th St. It's the number of a waltz (a 1-3-2. . .). It's the number of Beethoven's most beautiful quartet. It's the number of rooms in the White House. It's the number of acres in N. Main Cemetery. It's the # of square ft in Grace Church, downtown Providence. Add "one" and it's the secretive number of Finnegans Wake (1132).]

Creation like a mobius strip, because:
there exists no set which contains everything (since a subset of this set would be the set itself, and it would take a yet larger set to contain the set which contains everything). Cantor equated this vanishing pt. with God, the Absolute.

Poor Cantor ended his days in an asylum, alternating between the riddle of transfinite numbers, and trying to prove that Bacon was Shakespeare. Maybe he was reading Ignatius Donnelly, who also turned to the Shakespeare puzzle when his career (politician, in this case) was hitting the rocks. Great orgone boxes think alike.

Mysteries of the infinite continua of the line.

((Rudy. Georg Cantor, a persecuted Jewish mathematician, who showed that infinite dimensions were contained in a 1-dimensional line, who was grief-stricken at the early death of an only son, named Rudy :: Leopold Bloom, a persecuted Jewish Irish fictional character, contained within the lines of a microcosmic verbal Dublin, who was grief-stricken at the early death of an only son, named))

Equanimity. Whereas many of the poets seem to feel their job is to express their political position these days. . . aren't a lot of these positions sort of like cultural habits? I mean you're on the "left" or the "right" since you were in diapers, you express "where you come from" etc. Parochialism. What if the job instead is to penetrate into a complex reality, without taking sides so much as to illuminate the dynamics? Not only a political reality but a purely poetic reality at the same time. I feel like a lot of the easy rhetoric actually does a disservice to poetry, all these poets against the war, it's like celebrities against the war, riding on something that doesn't belong to them. Not that they're not citizens : it's that they take their ART for granted, their artist status. Meanwhile poetry has gone off somewhere else.

The Kwinter paragraph (see below) sorta stopped me too, Jordan (post of today), though perhaps for different reasons. I mean it seems very schematic, would have to be fleshed out before I "get" it.

His description of the possible as a kind of diagram of the real - the traditional way we think of an idea or theory becoming a mirror of what we accept as reality - and the shortcomings of this idea : and how he opposes it to this more dynamic or unpredictable concept of how real things happen -

anyway I get the feeling this is an echo of old philosophical debates between immanence & immanentists versus transcendence & transcendentalists. . . Bergson's time-vitalism has had sort of a recurrent vogue for artists. . . for me time has to include both stillness & movement somehow, vitality, change - it's not one OR the other. . . but I will be curious to see how Kwinter develops all this.

John Irwin's book about Borges & Poe (Mystery to a Solution) comes to mind. When is a poem NOW but not simply a flash in the pan? According to Irwin, Poe & Borges figured out how to write mysteries we'd want to come back to and READ AGAIN (even though we already know the answer to the whodunit). Here's a question for poetics : what values sustain a poem in its own NOW??? & transport that now into different time-environments?