One of the special perks of the official Poetic License is the freedom to balance two contradictory ideas without falling off the tightrope, or at least not quite. Sailing with Keats's "negative capability", or Whitman's "I contradict myself..." (however it goes).
My previous entry on this thread (JT #21) was a cautious rumination on the nature of the Trinity, and our names for same - speculations around the idea that God perhaps transcends our gender terms, like "Father" and "Son". As St. Paul put it, "in Christ is neither male nor female..."
Today I'd like to look at this from the opposite angle. If we believe God is (as explored in previous entries here) the substantial, cosmic Personhood - and Persons-in-relation, in comparison with which our own partial sense of personhood is only a foretaste - then, undoubtedly, this divine Person is not only capable of transcending or fusing gender differences, but also capable of representing substantial qualities of each gender as integral aspects of personhood.
Why do I think this is important to remember? Because when I read the Bible - from beginning to end, Old Testament and New - I am struck by the deep and continuous focus on what it means to be a righteous person : the essential theme of human edification. God is good, God is holy, and he exhorts and demands goodness and righteousness from his chosen children.
The fact that this theme is couched in overwhelmingly "masculine" images and episodes of power, leadership, and force - Yahweh is above all other gods, Yahweh will throw down all other gods, Yahweh will punish the wicked kings and nations who oppress the earth : Yahweh will save, lift up, reward the righteous man - is in part due to the dialectical challenge which Hebrew religion was offering to the world-age of political and social violence and oppression in which this testimony appeared (on this, by all means see Herbert Schneidau's classic study : Sacred Discontent).
I link this dimension up with some key statements or parables of Jesus, such as when he states that "from the days of John until now, the kingdom of heaven has come by violence, and men of violence take it by force" : or the parable about the kingdom being likened to "tying up the strong man" who is robbing the house. The whole Biblical ethos can be understood as "tying up the strong man" - reining in the violent appetites & the turn to violence practiced in all cultures - offering a new ethos (humility; kindness; wisdom; peace-making).
The fact that this alternative ethos might be seen as rooted in traditional "feminine" aspects - gentleness, mercy, a nurturing care for the poor and the weak - is worth a very profound exploration. It should be approached with great care and circumspection, however : keeping in mind our tendency to project our own values anachronistically onto other times & places. "Masculine" domination and "feminine" gentleness - in the sphere of theology & the characterization of God - is a very complex & shifting gray area....
Showing posts with label theology2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theology2. Show all posts
11.30.2012
Jesus Thoughts (21) : poet is a troublemaker
I think I've been thinking like a poet since Thanksgiving. Soon I'll go back to vol. 2 of John Meier's great study of the "historical Jesus", A Marginal Jew - and hence maybe I'll hew more closely to the main theme of this thread. But for the time being, some very wayward and somewhat troubling thoughts & cloudy speculations have been rolling in over my mental landscape. The poet is above all committed to the exercise of imagination, Lady Imaginativa - & has to follow where it leads, no matter what.
Poets have a special sense of the power of words, since they are held captive by language : but this awareness can at the same time give poets a sense of the limitations of human speech and writing. There is a solid spine of historical actuality in both the old and new testaments of the Bible : in fact this concrete "chronicle" dimension is a key element of the Bible's fascination. & yet the whole of it is suffused with poetry : moreover, the whole of it is enveloped in layers of tacit meanings - concepts of the sacred and the profane, earth and heaven, which are rooted in a very ancient cultural world. Context is everything. The acts of Jesus as Messiah : the declarations with regard to his mission and the works of God : all this testimony is part of a larger "universe of discourse" or set of cultural perspectives.
So we have to hold two distinct things in mind : first, that there is a real, historical actuality - a "facticity" - which undergirds the testimonies of the Bible; and second, that all the statements and language of Biblical religion call for - require - interpretation. They are not to be absorbed uncritically : rather they are to be understood.
All this may sound fairly obvious. But as I say, I've been thinking like a poet : like a prophet, like a natural-born troublemaker. "The Spirit blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it..." So we have to follow where it leads, because it is indeed (we desperately hope & believe) the "spirit of Truth."
Jesus was a scandalizer; Elijah was a "troubler of Israel"; now I (though not in their league) am thinking like a troublemaker too.
I think (here in this Advent season) maybe a new age is dawning. The astrological "age of the Fishes" is passing away; the "age of the Water-Carrier" is coming in. Jesus walked in Galilee, Palestine, Judea 2000 years ago : and it struck me this week that perhaps somehow we have to re-think the symbolism and vocabulary of the Divine Trinity. And I don't say this lightly, without trepidation. In many ways I think I'm close to the mentality of the current Pope! I sympathize with his warnings to the West, his criticism of the spiritual Flatland of secularism - our vain devotion to merely human things, our idolatry of worldly "celebrities" as opposed to the life of the spirit in Christ. I am nostalgic for medieval sensibilities; I wonder at the beauty of Byzantine art. Yet at the same time I wonder if the time is approaching for a massive spiritual sea-change, a re-interpretation (not a rejection) of the ancient doctrines.
I'm pondering the spiritual geometry of Father, Son & Spirit. I'm wondering if there will come a time when the Church no longer recites by rote the gender roles played out in these terms. I would like to be able to conceptualize them in a new way, without rejecting them. I realize many feminist theologians have already explored these issues in great depth (& I should read them!) : but generally I have to reflect & work things out for myself.
I think the fundamental meaning of the Incarnation is that God assumes the actual, fully historical, fully personal humanity of mankind. God is Man in Jesus. Jesus describes this actuality in terms of Fatherhood and Sonship for two main reasons : first, because this relationship illustrates the closest bond of love, merging with Oneness; and second, because, since in this oneness Jesus becomes the Father (God) on earth - he is "one with the Father" - this divine act has ramifications for the destiny of spiritual authority on the earth. In other words, when Jesus says "I and the Father are one", or "no one comes to the Father except by me", he is declaring the will of God to rule (through his spiritual kingdom) in the lives of men and women and kingdoms and societies.
Yet Jesus also declares : "God is Spirit, and those who worship him must do so in spirit and in truth." When I think of the personhood of God - the triune, distinct personhood(s) of the Trinity - I remember the words of St. Paul, that "in Christ there is no male & female". I understand the personhood of God as a category of integral, substantial being, for which our own ordinary experience of persons (our own and others) gives only a limited, imperfect foretaste. The consciousness of personhood, and the personhood of consciousness, is something deep, substantial, integral, and spiritual - involving conscious and unconscious, intellect and dream. And it is something which transcends gender differences. We have all learned over & over the various cultural stereotypes of gender roles, but we should remember that these shift and change across time and different cultures. Strength and courage are not essentially "masculine" : empathy and compassion are not essentially "feminine". The person subsumes and integrates all intellectual and emotional character traits within a more basic wholeness (the person per se).
So where does this leave us with respect to Biblical testimony, the language of Scripture? Well, for one thing, I don't find the third Person of the Trinity - the Holy Ghost - identified anywhere in scripture as "male." The Holy Ghost is Spirit, as the Father is Spirit. When Jesus declares that he "is going to the Father" (after his resurrection and ascension) I think one could read this as saying "I have fulfilled my role in manifesting God's spiritual authority (the Father) on earth."
So I think we could start to imagine this authority, as defined by the terms "kingship of God" or "kingdom of God", as summarized or encapsulated or defined by a verbal formula. This formula, or formulation, though on the surface exhibiting a "gendered" character, is actually just that - a formula, a verbal token for a deeper, unspoken actuality. God is neither solely Father, nor solely Mother, but Spirit. The union and distinction of the Persons of the Trinity - God the Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit - is a kind of symbolic play, representing an underlying fusion/distinction of divine and human which is neither male nor female, but incorporates both. An integral Personhood - and shared Person(s)hood - which we experience as a deepening actuality in our own shared life, as persons of the human race.
I've run on longer than I would have liked - hopefully without too much obscurity and murkiness. My overriding sense is of some kind of coming change - a metamorphoses of religious life in an age to come. Not involving a rejection of the past, but an embrace of the past, with new understanding. We must re-interpret our own sacred testimonies in the light of today : not to corrupt or destroy them, but to enliven them with "new things".
In this regard I was interested to read the recent New Yorker article by Kelefa Sanneh, on the "rock star" megachurch evangelical preacher Ron Bell. Sanneh narrates Bell's dramatic theological struggle with traditional notions of the reality of Hell and divine judgement (and the effect of his changing views on his popularity, in his wildly-fluctuating world of evangelical preacherdom). I haven't read Bell's best-selling book of meditations on this issue, Love Wins : but in some ways the whole controversy strikes me as a non-issue. Why? Because I think if you interpret Scripture carefully on the question of Hell, you will find that we cannot assign any definite characteristics or structure to it (Hell). Listen carefully to what Jesus says to those who do wrong : you are in danger of being cast into "outer darkness". And : to those who claim to follow him but don't obey his will, he warns : on the Last Day, the Son of Man will say to them, "I never knew you." Think of what this means in the context of a spiritual cosmos defined by an integral, spiritual Personhood. Everything we do affects our relationships with others : in the same way it affects our relationship with God. What worse hell could there be, than simply to be rejected by this Person at the end of our time on earth? "I never knew you."
Furthermore : why would God ever define Hell as some fixed structure (ala Dante, or the human legal system) when we live on earth in a state of suspense - a constantly changing interaction with our neighbors and with God? A time always open to inward change and repentance - with potential for repaired and renewed relationships.
I think possibly this mode of interpretation offers an (imperfect) example of how (one way, at least) to approach the sacred texts : we cannot take them "literally", beyond the historical record itself : we must read them so as to penetrate the veils of symbolic meaning and ancient worldviews, and discover what truth they bring now, today.
p.s. an afterthought. I don't want to be misunderstood. I may be a monkish old librarian, but I don't want to appear to diminish or deny the real differences between men and women. No doubt our biological inheritance (male or female) involves differences in the way we think, feel and behave - some of them obvious, some of them delightful - part of the dance of polarities, the sexual dance, which is so basic to everything beautiful & joyful, painful & sorrowful in life. Indeed much of the charm and majesty of the Middle Ages, explored famously by Henry Adams in Mont St.-Michel and Chartres, and other books - reflecting the Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary - probably involved in part a feminine cultural counterweight to the masculine brutality of that era. But as Jesus states in the Gospel - "God is Spirit : & those who worship Him do so in spirit and truth." This spiritual dimension is, as St. Paul wrote, "neither male nor female, neither slave nor master, neither Gentile nor Jew" (rough quote from memory). This is the spiritual personhood which we all share alike : it is the actual bond of person to person and person to God, which leads us all together into a "deeper communion".
Poets have a special sense of the power of words, since they are held captive by language : but this awareness can at the same time give poets a sense of the limitations of human speech and writing. There is a solid spine of historical actuality in both the old and new testaments of the Bible : in fact this concrete "chronicle" dimension is a key element of the Bible's fascination. & yet the whole of it is suffused with poetry : moreover, the whole of it is enveloped in layers of tacit meanings - concepts of the sacred and the profane, earth and heaven, which are rooted in a very ancient cultural world. Context is everything. The acts of Jesus as Messiah : the declarations with regard to his mission and the works of God : all this testimony is part of a larger "universe of discourse" or set of cultural perspectives.
So we have to hold two distinct things in mind : first, that there is a real, historical actuality - a "facticity" - which undergirds the testimonies of the Bible; and second, that all the statements and language of Biblical religion call for - require - interpretation. They are not to be absorbed uncritically : rather they are to be understood.
All this may sound fairly obvious. But as I say, I've been thinking like a poet : like a prophet, like a natural-born troublemaker. "The Spirit blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it..." So we have to follow where it leads, because it is indeed (we desperately hope & believe) the "spirit of Truth."
Jesus was a scandalizer; Elijah was a "troubler of Israel"; now I (though not in their league) am thinking like a troublemaker too.
I think (here in this Advent season) maybe a new age is dawning. The astrological "age of the Fishes" is passing away; the "age of the Water-Carrier" is coming in. Jesus walked in Galilee, Palestine, Judea 2000 years ago : and it struck me this week that perhaps somehow we have to re-think the symbolism and vocabulary of the Divine Trinity. And I don't say this lightly, without trepidation. In many ways I think I'm close to the mentality of the current Pope! I sympathize with his warnings to the West, his criticism of the spiritual Flatland of secularism - our vain devotion to merely human things, our idolatry of worldly "celebrities" as opposed to the life of the spirit in Christ. I am nostalgic for medieval sensibilities; I wonder at the beauty of Byzantine art. Yet at the same time I wonder if the time is approaching for a massive spiritual sea-change, a re-interpretation (not a rejection) of the ancient doctrines.
I'm pondering the spiritual geometry of Father, Son & Spirit. I'm wondering if there will come a time when the Church no longer recites by rote the gender roles played out in these terms. I would like to be able to conceptualize them in a new way, without rejecting them. I realize many feminist theologians have already explored these issues in great depth (& I should read them!) : but generally I have to reflect & work things out for myself.
I think the fundamental meaning of the Incarnation is that God assumes the actual, fully historical, fully personal humanity of mankind. God is Man in Jesus. Jesus describes this actuality in terms of Fatherhood and Sonship for two main reasons : first, because this relationship illustrates the closest bond of love, merging with Oneness; and second, because, since in this oneness Jesus becomes the Father (God) on earth - he is "one with the Father" - this divine act has ramifications for the destiny of spiritual authority on the earth. In other words, when Jesus says "I and the Father are one", or "no one comes to the Father except by me", he is declaring the will of God to rule (through his spiritual kingdom) in the lives of men and women and kingdoms and societies.
Yet Jesus also declares : "God is Spirit, and those who worship him must do so in spirit and in truth." When I think of the personhood of God - the triune, distinct personhood(s) of the Trinity - I remember the words of St. Paul, that "in Christ there is no male & female". I understand the personhood of God as a category of integral, substantial being, for which our own ordinary experience of persons (our own and others) gives only a limited, imperfect foretaste. The consciousness of personhood, and the personhood of consciousness, is something deep, substantial, integral, and spiritual - involving conscious and unconscious, intellect and dream. And it is something which transcends gender differences. We have all learned over & over the various cultural stereotypes of gender roles, but we should remember that these shift and change across time and different cultures. Strength and courage are not essentially "masculine" : empathy and compassion are not essentially "feminine". The person subsumes and integrates all intellectual and emotional character traits within a more basic wholeness (the person per se).
So where does this leave us with respect to Biblical testimony, the language of Scripture? Well, for one thing, I don't find the third Person of the Trinity - the Holy Ghost - identified anywhere in scripture as "male." The Holy Ghost is Spirit, as the Father is Spirit. When Jesus declares that he "is going to the Father" (after his resurrection and ascension) I think one could read this as saying "I have fulfilled my role in manifesting God's spiritual authority (the Father) on earth."
So I think we could start to imagine this authority, as defined by the terms "kingship of God" or "kingdom of God", as summarized or encapsulated or defined by a verbal formula. This formula, or formulation, though on the surface exhibiting a "gendered" character, is actually just that - a formula, a verbal token for a deeper, unspoken actuality. God is neither solely Father, nor solely Mother, but Spirit. The union and distinction of the Persons of the Trinity - God the Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit - is a kind of symbolic play, representing an underlying fusion/distinction of divine and human which is neither male nor female, but incorporates both. An integral Personhood - and shared Person(s)hood - which we experience as a deepening actuality in our own shared life, as persons of the human race.
I've run on longer than I would have liked - hopefully without too much obscurity and murkiness. My overriding sense is of some kind of coming change - a metamorphoses of religious life in an age to come. Not involving a rejection of the past, but an embrace of the past, with new understanding. We must re-interpret our own sacred testimonies in the light of today : not to corrupt or destroy them, but to enliven them with "new things".
In this regard I was interested to read the recent New Yorker article by Kelefa Sanneh, on the "rock star" megachurch evangelical preacher Ron Bell. Sanneh narrates Bell's dramatic theological struggle with traditional notions of the reality of Hell and divine judgement (and the effect of his changing views on his popularity, in his wildly-fluctuating world of evangelical preacherdom). I haven't read Bell's best-selling book of meditations on this issue, Love Wins : but in some ways the whole controversy strikes me as a non-issue. Why? Because I think if you interpret Scripture carefully on the question of Hell, you will find that we cannot assign any definite characteristics or structure to it (Hell). Listen carefully to what Jesus says to those who do wrong : you are in danger of being cast into "outer darkness". And : to those who claim to follow him but don't obey his will, he warns : on the Last Day, the Son of Man will say to them, "I never knew you." Think of what this means in the context of a spiritual cosmos defined by an integral, spiritual Personhood. Everything we do affects our relationships with others : in the same way it affects our relationship with God. What worse hell could there be, than simply to be rejected by this Person at the end of our time on earth? "I never knew you."
Furthermore : why would God ever define Hell as some fixed structure (ala Dante, or the human legal system) when we live on earth in a state of suspense - a constantly changing interaction with our neighbors and with God? A time always open to inward change and repentance - with potential for repaired and renewed relationships.
I think possibly this mode of interpretation offers an (imperfect) example of how (one way, at least) to approach the sacred texts : we cannot take them "literally", beyond the historical record itself : we must read them so as to penetrate the veils of symbolic meaning and ancient worldviews, and discover what truth they bring now, today.
p.s. an afterthought. I don't want to be misunderstood. I may be a monkish old librarian, but I don't want to appear to diminish or deny the real differences between men and women. No doubt our biological inheritance (male or female) involves differences in the way we think, feel and behave - some of them obvious, some of them delightful - part of the dance of polarities, the sexual dance, which is so basic to everything beautiful & joyful, painful & sorrowful in life. Indeed much of the charm and majesty of the Middle Ages, explored famously by Henry Adams in Mont St.-Michel and Chartres, and other books - reflecting the Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary - probably involved in part a feminine cultural counterweight to the masculine brutality of that era. But as Jesus states in the Gospel - "God is Spirit : & those who worship Him do so in spirit and truth." This spiritual dimension is, as St. Paul wrote, "neither male nor female, neither slave nor master, neither Gentile nor Jew" (rough quote from memory). This is the spiritual personhood which we all share alike : it is the actual bond of person to person and person to God, which leads us all together into a "deeper communion".
4.15.2011
From the days of John...
From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force. Pondering this passage from the Gospels (here, Matthew 11:12). Jesus is eulogizing John.
"From the days of John until now..." I understand this as making a distinction between two different time-periods, one being under the spiritual "authority" of John & all the prophets (since "John is Elijah who is to come"), and the other under the authority of the Son of Man (Jesus). Two distinct eras of the spirit of God. Now = where the person of Jesus is manifest.
"... & men of violence take it by force." This is a deep & resonant saying. Interpreted & misinterpreted again & again....
How do I read it today? Well, have been reading a fascinating old book (1940s) by Julian Morgenstern, The ark, the ephod and the "tent of meeting". Studying & speculating on the affinities between the ark, the Temple, and very ancient tribal war-gods and their symbols - their temples, their cult objects. The god of the clan & the tribe was above all a divine defender of the tribe : through prayer & supplication & magic & divination, the tribal priest-leader would call upon the god in the ark (or tent, or temple) to come to their aid in battle.
In other words, men projected their sense of actuality, of truth, of fate, onto their own symbol of divine authority & sanction. And these religious projections would in turn be ratified and codified by force, by shamanistic magic. Man's own alienated powers were projected onto their shared symbolic totems.
I don't see this as pure false consciousness & mystification : I see it as archaic humanity's efforts to grasp and control a bewildering and violent & chaotic & dangerous world. At the same time, I think it must be recognized as also a reflection of that violence - it is suffused with force. & I identify this dimension in part with what Jesus is pointing toward in this passage.
We are talking about very basic background or foundations of human civilization, I guess. And there are no hard & fast distinctions or divides - it's more like a moral/ethical continuum. What I mean is there is a gradual change from conceiving the divine solely in terms of power, force & violent control, and conceiving the divine in terms of mercy, mutual understanding, reason, compassion, kindness... peacemaking. & we can see this change emerging in the Decalogue (the 10 Commandments). Necessity is the mother of invention.... & when the Hebrews emerged from servitude in Egypt, it was the legal-political wisdom of Moses which adapted ancient forms of tribal worship, cult & divination toward the beginnings of a notion of the divine as universal moral law.
So when Jesus speaks of "from the days of John", and the "kingdom of God" formerly coming with violence, he is pointing, it seems to me, toward a basic, fundamental re-orientation : a recognition that in God there is no sanction for force & violence : that force & violence and arbitrary rule actually have nothing to do with those ethical strata & dimensions of life which are part of the "kingdom" (love, mercy, kindness, compassion, justice, peace, happiness, hope, joy...). "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God."
This dimension I see as the "underside" of authoritative religion... the Mary-Magdalen-at-the-Sepulchre side... the "poetry" side... & there are a lot of these themes running through my scribblings...
"From the days of John until now..." I understand this as making a distinction between two different time-periods, one being under the spiritual "authority" of John & all the prophets (since "John is Elijah who is to come"), and the other under the authority of the Son of Man (Jesus). Two distinct eras of the spirit of God. Now = where the person of Jesus is manifest.
"... & men of violence take it by force." This is a deep & resonant saying. Interpreted & misinterpreted again & again....
How do I read it today? Well, have been reading a fascinating old book (1940s) by Julian Morgenstern, The ark, the ephod and the "tent of meeting". Studying & speculating on the affinities between the ark, the Temple, and very ancient tribal war-gods and their symbols - their temples, their cult objects. The god of the clan & the tribe was above all a divine defender of the tribe : through prayer & supplication & magic & divination, the tribal priest-leader would call upon the god in the ark (or tent, or temple) to come to their aid in battle.
In other words, men projected their sense of actuality, of truth, of fate, onto their own symbol of divine authority & sanction. And these religious projections would in turn be ratified and codified by force, by shamanistic magic. Man's own alienated powers were projected onto their shared symbolic totems.
I don't see this as pure false consciousness & mystification : I see it as archaic humanity's efforts to grasp and control a bewildering and violent & chaotic & dangerous world. At the same time, I think it must be recognized as also a reflection of that violence - it is suffused with force. & I identify this dimension in part with what Jesus is pointing toward in this passage.
We are talking about very basic background or foundations of human civilization, I guess. And there are no hard & fast distinctions or divides - it's more like a moral/ethical continuum. What I mean is there is a gradual change from conceiving the divine solely in terms of power, force & violent control, and conceiving the divine in terms of mercy, mutual understanding, reason, compassion, kindness... peacemaking. & we can see this change emerging in the Decalogue (the 10 Commandments). Necessity is the mother of invention.... & when the Hebrews emerged from servitude in Egypt, it was the legal-political wisdom of Moses which adapted ancient forms of tribal worship, cult & divination toward the beginnings of a notion of the divine as universal moral law.
So when Jesus speaks of "from the days of John", and the "kingdom of God" formerly coming with violence, he is pointing, it seems to me, toward a basic, fundamental re-orientation : a recognition that in God there is no sanction for force & violence : that force & violence and arbitrary rule actually have nothing to do with those ethical strata & dimensions of life which are part of the "kingdom" (love, mercy, kindness, compassion, justice, peace, happiness, hope, joy...). "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God."
This dimension I see as the "underside" of authoritative religion... the Mary-Magdalen-at-the-Sepulchre side... the "poetry" side... & there are a lot of these themes running through my scribblings...
3.10.2011
Proportion & harmony
Have been reading a lot about architecture lately. Might have something to do with the fact that ongoing poem Lanthanum emerged out of an architectural dream I had one night (about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis).
Especially Richard Padovan's great book, Proportion, and another book he translated, by the Dutch monk-architect Hans van der Laan (Architectonic Space).
Padovan bases his book on an interpretation of Wilhelm Worringer's influential 1905 book on aesthetics, Abstraction and Empathy. Very basically, the impulse of "empathy" projects the human into nature, and then models art and architecture on a reflection (an empathetic imitation) of Nature. Whereas the impulse to "abstraction" is more basic & "primitive" : humankind looks out at reality as a threatening chaos, immeasurable, and (abstract) art is a sort of escape/shelter - a means of controlling chaos through imposing order....
anyway, that's just how Padovan gets going, & organizes his review of geometry, proportion, architecture & philosophy in the West over the past 4000 yrs.... it's the opposite of the mystical-magical occult numerological "Golden Section" theorizing which has been popular...
(I'd be curious to know if Wallace Stevens read or was interested in Worringer's monograph. A lot of the modernist artists read it.)
Proportion is the key to form, whether in architecture or aesthetics generally. But do we draw proportion from nature, or impose our own orders? Padovan describes how van der Laan sets out the basic requirements for proportion (the smallest element in an ordered ratio with the whole, and with the other elements), and discovers the "plastic number" - a ratio of 1 : 1.325 (close to 3 : 4), which is proportional through a broad range of whole numbers, & thus handy for the kind of incremental design of basic structures... And this is tied in with van der Laan's very original philosophy of architecture (an "abstract" approach, in Worringer's terms) in which humankind imposes form & creates relational spaces, "homes", within the infinite & measureless continuum of natural space....
I'm finding all this very interesting, anyway, in relation to compositional & thematic aspects of poetry... & I am trying to connect it with other not-so-architectural dimensions of Lanthanum....
like the theological musings on the status or ontology of the human Person.... Maximus, & all that. A trinitarian, incarnational theology sets up a relational situation, a kind of family kinship or resemblance, between God & Man, Father/Son & Spirit.... so to make it possible to unite the notion of "Man is the measure of all things" ("I say unto you, the Son of Man is coming at the right hand of Power"... Jesus says somewhere) - but not in a disproportionate, arrogant stance : rather in proportion with the other Persons of the trinity.... the Image and the Substantial....
More later, maybe. There's a connection in all this with my Mandelstamian & Acmeist leanings. OM's "domestic hellenism" is about the Word as an architectonic that "humanizes" the earth, makes it fit to dwell in.... Gumilev's "chaste vision" is an embodied kind of sense of proportion & harmony....
*
- & having digested as best I can the great syntheses in Padovan's multidisciplinary work (Proportion) - science, philosophy, architecture - I find my response is a sense of mystery, a recognition of the limits of human knowledge.
The book itself is really built like a large structure, a cathedral... on the simple ground of an essential contrast : between 1) the empathetic/Platonic attitude - which finds its human reflection in the (numbered) order of Nature, & understands human intellect as a union (or reunion) with the order of nature - rooted in memory (the mind as a blank slate on which impressions appear); and 2) the abstract/Aristotelian stance, which recognizes a fundamental break between inside and outside, human and natural, & understands the intellect as inherently active, formative, creative : what we know is what we make. Padovan shows how these fundamental stances return as leitmotifs through Western history : so the development from Locke to Berkeley to Hume exhibits a sort of dead-end for both empiricism and idealism - until Kant reasserted the human mind itself as formative agent of nature, experience, reality...
Padovan returns & grounds these abstract heights of western thought to the most basic & primitive human activities (building, shelter), by connecting a notion of the human intellect as active, form-creating (out of Aristotle & Kant), with van der Laan's sense of architecture as the basic human building-impulse. We know what we make, and what we make is a separate living-space (by way of walls) within the infinite space of nature : and in doing so setting up a ratio or proportion between the measured & the immeasurable, the inside & the outside.
Again, though, what I come away with from this reading is a sense of mystery, of the limits of knowledge per se. Because I understand the fundamental contrast - between Plato & Aristotle, idealism & empiricism, number & irrational space - as irresolvable on a purely intellectual or epistemological or abstract level. For me, all this is Athens : there is another & greater binary or contrast at play : with Jerusalem. As I understand it, the dimension represented by "Jerusalem" is the Hebraic-Christian understanding of personal, subjective consciousness & existence as the very marrow of reality : life. We live in an irreducible, inalienable cosmos of Persons : and the true proportion which maintains all life (which "created" the cosmos) is based not on knowledge or mathematics, but on love. This is the mediating "song of the turtledove" which is heard in our land (Song of Songs, which is Solomon's - the figure of wisdom).
Thus we inhabit, yes, something architectonic - filled with "number, weight & measure" - but also something more than architectonic, more than abstract, more than is found in your philosophy, Horatio. We participate in a fundamentally dramatic occasion : life on earth, life in the universe. A life rooted in kinship with one another, with relationship, with persons : where the ultimate harmonies & proportions are transposed to the ethical sphere, to the dimensions of love, to the plummet of the human heart.
*
Hart Crane's The Bridge is suffused with, & structured by, something like this kind of "dream-architectonics." I think my daughter Phoebe's photo on the cover of Lanthanum (taken from a bridge over the Mississippi, a few blocks from my parent's house - both sides of the family have lived in this area for 3-4 generations) evokes this dream-sense too.
Especially Richard Padovan's great book, Proportion, and another book he translated, by the Dutch monk-architect Hans van der Laan (Architectonic Space).
Padovan bases his book on an interpretation of Wilhelm Worringer's influential 1905 book on aesthetics, Abstraction and Empathy. Very basically, the impulse of "empathy" projects the human into nature, and then models art and architecture on a reflection (an empathetic imitation) of Nature. Whereas the impulse to "abstraction" is more basic & "primitive" : humankind looks out at reality as a threatening chaos, immeasurable, and (abstract) art is a sort of escape/shelter - a means of controlling chaos through imposing order....
anyway, that's just how Padovan gets going, & organizes his review of geometry, proportion, architecture & philosophy in the West over the past 4000 yrs.... it's the opposite of the mystical-magical occult numerological "Golden Section" theorizing which has been popular...
(I'd be curious to know if Wallace Stevens read or was interested in Worringer's monograph. A lot of the modernist artists read it.)
Proportion is the key to form, whether in architecture or aesthetics generally. But do we draw proportion from nature, or impose our own orders? Padovan describes how van der Laan sets out the basic requirements for proportion (the smallest element in an ordered ratio with the whole, and with the other elements), and discovers the "plastic number" - a ratio of 1 : 1.325 (close to 3 : 4), which is proportional through a broad range of whole numbers, & thus handy for the kind of incremental design of basic structures... And this is tied in with van der Laan's very original philosophy of architecture (an "abstract" approach, in Worringer's terms) in which humankind imposes form & creates relational spaces, "homes", within the infinite & measureless continuum of natural space....
I'm finding all this very interesting, anyway, in relation to compositional & thematic aspects of poetry... & I am trying to connect it with other not-so-architectural dimensions of Lanthanum....
like the theological musings on the status or ontology of the human Person.... Maximus, & all that. A trinitarian, incarnational theology sets up a relational situation, a kind of family kinship or resemblance, between God & Man, Father/Son & Spirit.... so to make it possible to unite the notion of "Man is the measure of all things" ("I say unto you, the Son of Man is coming at the right hand of Power"... Jesus says somewhere) - but not in a disproportionate, arrogant stance : rather in proportion with the other Persons of the trinity.... the Image and the Substantial....
More later, maybe. There's a connection in all this with my Mandelstamian & Acmeist leanings. OM's "domestic hellenism" is about the Word as an architectonic that "humanizes" the earth, makes it fit to dwell in.... Gumilev's "chaste vision" is an embodied kind of sense of proportion & harmony....
*
- & having digested as best I can the great syntheses in Padovan's multidisciplinary work (Proportion) - science, philosophy, architecture - I find my response is a sense of mystery, a recognition of the limits of human knowledge.
The book itself is really built like a large structure, a cathedral... on the simple ground of an essential contrast : between 1) the empathetic/Platonic attitude - which finds its human reflection in the (numbered) order of Nature, & understands human intellect as a union (or reunion) with the order of nature - rooted in memory (the mind as a blank slate on which impressions appear); and 2) the abstract/Aristotelian stance, which recognizes a fundamental break between inside and outside, human and natural, & understands the intellect as inherently active, formative, creative : what we know is what we make. Padovan shows how these fundamental stances return as leitmotifs through Western history : so the development from Locke to Berkeley to Hume exhibits a sort of dead-end for both empiricism and idealism - until Kant reasserted the human mind itself as formative agent of nature, experience, reality...
Padovan returns & grounds these abstract heights of western thought to the most basic & primitive human activities (building, shelter), by connecting a notion of the human intellect as active, form-creating (out of Aristotle & Kant), with van der Laan's sense of architecture as the basic human building-impulse. We know what we make, and what we make is a separate living-space (by way of walls) within the infinite space of nature : and in doing so setting up a ratio or proportion between the measured & the immeasurable, the inside & the outside.
Again, though, what I come away with from this reading is a sense of mystery, of the limits of knowledge per se. Because I understand the fundamental contrast - between Plato & Aristotle, idealism & empiricism, number & irrational space - as irresolvable on a purely intellectual or epistemological or abstract level. For me, all this is Athens : there is another & greater binary or contrast at play : with Jerusalem. As I understand it, the dimension represented by "Jerusalem" is the Hebraic-Christian understanding of personal, subjective consciousness & existence as the very marrow of reality : life. We live in an irreducible, inalienable cosmos of Persons : and the true proportion which maintains all life (which "created" the cosmos) is based not on knowledge or mathematics, but on love. This is the mediating "song of the turtledove" which is heard in our land (Song of Songs, which is Solomon's - the figure of wisdom).
Thus we inhabit, yes, something architectonic - filled with "number, weight & measure" - but also something more than architectonic, more than abstract, more than is found in your philosophy, Horatio. We participate in a fundamentally dramatic occasion : life on earth, life in the universe. A life rooted in kinship with one another, with relationship, with persons : where the ultimate harmonies & proportions are transposed to the ethical sphere, to the dimensions of love, to the plummet of the human heart.
*
Hart Crane's The Bridge is suffused with, & structured by, something like this kind of "dream-architectonics." I think my daughter Phoebe's photo on the cover of Lanthanum (taken from a bridge over the Mississippi, a few blocks from my parent's house - both sides of the family have lived in this area for 3-4 generations) evokes this dream-sense too.
4.23.2010
Restoration Day (the harmony is there)
It's Friday, it's Shakespeare's birthday... Henry will talk some more about poetry...
Henry has been let us say struggling with poetry & with being a poet nigh on 40 years now. I started being a poet in earnest just 40 years ago, in 1970 - when I came to Rhode Island & the East from Minnesota, for school (though I started writing it before, in the 60s... composing my first poem in 1959 - my father scribbled it down on a key card as he went out the door to work).
& a struggle it has been... for recognition, for validation, for publication, for fending off failure & shame & fear & oblivion... but mostly a struggle to write well, to keep at it, to find a way to keep making poetry... when the pressures & temptations & distractions of life are sometimes all against it...
& why? It's a calling. I find a certain superficiality, a thinness, a lightweight quality to much of the current talk about poetry in US circles... a forced & slightly fevered tone that comes mostly from the anxiety of trying to make poetry a career... that's one of the factors, anyway. Another might be the typically-American obsession with technique, technology, gimmickry : the poem is treated as a cool gizmo rather than an utterance emerging from the real stress of human experience, of life & death, of time & history. The "realism" of poetry is not some kind of photographic or documentary replication (another technique) : it's the product of the poet's confrontation with the trials & sufferings & perplexities & joys & marvels of actual life, in the struggle to answer the call of the poetic vocation itself - to fulfill the claim of that calling. The Greeks named memory the "mother of the Muses" - & what is memory, if not the reflection of the conscience - on life lived, choices made, crimes & sins committed, love & charity given & received, punishment, ignorance, foolishness, mistakes, wisdom, & grace? The inward field of the human drama - in this "vale of soul-making," as Keats put it. This is partly what I think Wallace Stevens meant when he wrote about the "conscience" of the "faithful poet" - the poet faithful to conscience & memory & the truths they bear. Every true poem is an accounting, part of someone's last will and testament. This is one of those affective dimensions which a literary world trimmed to the latest gizmo-circus spectacle simply cannot see.
& there are other dimensions missed, too - aspects of poetry seen from a more impersonal or philosophical (aesthetic) perspective. I understand poetry most basically as song. By "song" here I'm referring to harmony, in its essential (not simply musical) sense. A poem, as a work of verbal art, is an entity in harmony with itself. In other words, it is a thing of beauty : it displays an integrity & wholeness & proportion & brilliant originality (Aquinas' & Joyce's requirements, basically). As a thing of harmony, it resonates : in the poem, language reverberates, stands free, returns upon itself in generative reflection & depths of meaning. This is the magnetism of the work of art in general : we are drawn to its resonance, as something with inner integrity & life, as something with inherent value.
But is poetry, then, an end in itself? Is it art for its own sake? Not in my view. The poet's vocation - the vocation to "sing"- stems from an inward (often-unconscious) faith in the ultimate harmony of life itself. How is this possible? Is poetry, then, essentially a throwback to pre-Enlightenment civilization? Is not the Modern era defined by the term disenchantment? Is there not a fundamental chasm between modern and medieval consciousness?
If there is such a chasm, then poetry spans it. Because neither atheism nor religious faith can be proven, we are faced with a pragmatic choice : we must think, that is, inductively - gather up our inferences, order our incomplete knowledge, and live by means of a "working theory," an hypothesis. This gets to the crux of my understanding of poetry's highest purpose and the poet's ultimate vocation. Poetry's song is - at its most basic and its most exalted - primarily a song of thanksgiving. A celebration of the ultimate (unknowable, but sensed) harmony of reality. And (for me) this harmony is ultimately Personal : human & divine. Reality is Creation : God is Personal : and the God who created all from nothing will also save that creation, and us along with it - in fact, has already done so. This is the ur-drama, the play-within-the-plays, of the history of the earth (theologian Hans Küng has described all this better than I can, in his great book Eternal Life?). To the sceptic this will sound like typical neo-medieval mystification; but, as anyone who has followed the theism/atheism debates over the last decade will know, there are many intelligent people today, with impeccable intellectual credentials in various professional fields, who are also theists. To repeat, neither side can prove its case : but what I am arguing is that the harmony of poetry bears witness to a greater harmony at the silent, hidden heart of reality itself. It is the imagination of an inexpressible dimension (a dimension, as Küng suggests, that humanity must go through death to find - the way of the Cross, and of Everyman).
The objections to all this are already clear. Henry, you do a disservice to the autonomy and variety of art and poetry (not to mention of life) by yoking it to a theological rationalization. You narrow poetry down, you squeeze the life out of it : poetry is more than pious vision. This is another unending, irresolvable debate. I respond : yes, poetry is various, secular, impertinent, impious, impish, unpredictable, free. But I also say this : harmony is the heart and soul of poetry; and harmony is something inherent within life itself, within reality as a whole. My own explanation for the presence of this harmony is theological : there may be other, and differing, explanations for it : but I, as poet, assert that the harmony is there - and that is why I sing.
This, in my view, is the essential difference between poetry and prose : you can have prose without art, but not poetry. For a long time, the modern, post-Enlightenment temper has reflected disenchantment; and as a result, we have had a flood of dense, reductive prose "explanations" for life's phenomena. But what if the ultimate truth is harmonious, is harmony? This is what the Romantic poets asserted (Coleridge, Blake) - this was at the heart of their protest. I am not a Romantic, but something a little older (let's say, a Christian humanist) : put me with Donne, and Milton, and Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. This is the true Restoration (check out the photo of young Henry, in NYC, ca. 1975, at his Royal typewriter). I was born on Restoration Day, by the way - May 29th; also Rhode Island Statehood Day, and the date on which my gr-gr-...grandfather Zaccheus Gould established the town of Topsfield, Massachusetts (1637 or so). Poetry has been a long struggle, for me - but I will top the field. I live by the River Okeanos; Rhode Island is the Ocean State. My poetry is not so well known, yet - but it's out there; its endless surf of abba-soundwaves will penetrate the atmosphere, someday.
* p.s. I suppose I said almost all of this more effectively in this earlier post (The scrambled oeuvre of Henry Gould).
4.21.2010
3.25.2010
Poetry, Religion... Maximus
Poetry & religion, two different things... I think of religion as social-collective behavior - a cultural phenomenon made up of countless social orientations, commitments, actions. It is belief consolidated - substantiated in social formations : ethical traditions. This is obviously not poetry. Poetry is the verbal expression of the artistic imagination (or simply, the imagination). There is no sanction or requirement for the vagaries & dreams of free imagination.
Poetry (some poetry) might be closer to theology, though. I think of theology as intellectual reflection upon (& maybe insight into) the "givens" of religious tradition. There's a range - let's call it "vision" - where such endeavors can overlap.
In the modern era, religion is often represented as irrational, oppressive, & silly. I suppose modernity could even be defined as "the critique - & mockery - of religion." Novels & various discourses since the Enlightenment abound in satires on Medieval ritual, dogma, superstition, & the general moeurs of churchgoing folk. Certainly much of the critique was (& is) indeed liberating & enlightening; but the secular ideological-political formations which then sought to replace religion resulted in the vast desolations & conflicts of the 20th-century. So who gets the last laugh, so to speak (aside from the Devil...)?
Our local hero, Roger Williams, was an avatar of a different kind of cultural equilibrium between sacred & secular. By advocating tolerance of all faiths, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech, and the separation of civil and religious Authority, Williams set the stage for the Enlightenment, and for the balance of secular government & religious freedom as we know it today. Yet Williams' Puritan innovations had deeper roots in the cultural development of the West. Even medieval Catholicism recognized that peace & order depended on harmony between the "two swords" - the two Powers of Church and State, Church & Empire. The authority of the Church was an ethical counterbalance to the power of the King : they were never fused into one. This balance of the two had a scriptural basis in the New Testament - in Jesus' command, "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, & to God what is God's". The apostle Paul, in his letters, took up this theme, when he described how God's Providence works through all things, including the State & its ministers, "for our good" (an argument often used to justify passivity & conformity in the face of State-sponsored evil : but not necessarily or entirely false, in spite of this.) It was this conception of Providence working through all things, Christian & non-Christian, sacred & secular, which informed Williams' political vision.
And one could trace this tradition back much further. It's possible to think of Judaism as a religion which is a theological reflection & critique - a re-working, or overturning - of Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion. The God of the Hebrews - the primal & universal Creator of all things, who allies himself personally, not with the rulers of mighty nations, the immortal god-kings atop their ziggurats & pyramids, but with humble shepherds & slaves. This God does not merely issue obscure demands (though He does issue demands) - but comes down to dicker & argue with his adopted people. & the main aim of this Hebrew God is to provide liberation from oppressors, & from human wrong-doing in general. So we can see the historical consequence of this basic stance of Biblical religion : a theological challenge is offered to oppressive rule. A line is drawn between sacred & secular. The authority of the divine is set up in opposition to, rather than conjunction with, the secular or theocratic power of nations. Thus the seeds of individual conscience - the ethical demand of a divine & infinite universality, above and beyond any earthly power - were planted, long ago.
Recurrently in my poetry (esp. in Lanthanum) the figure of "Maximus" shows up. This could be taken as an allusion to Charles Olson's epic persona of the same name, but I'm referring to another Maximus : Maximus the Confessor, a Byzantine theologian. This Maximus was enmeshed in controversies over the Trinity and the nature of Christ's Person, with which Orthodoxy, centered in Constantinople, was engaged for centuries. A profound & creative thinker, Maximus synthesized Greek philosophy & Christian faith, to produce an affirmation of the Orthodox sense of the union of divine & human Persons. That the universal Godhead would manifest on earth as a particular human person was a mystery, a conundrum & a scandal from the very beginning - a scandal involving first of all the splitting apart of Judaism and Christianity, & then, within Christianity itself, at least a thousand years of polemics over its exact meaning (& of course, those debates have not yet concluded).
But poetry per se is not so formalized (logical) or realistic (descriptive) as theology claims to be. Poetry, as an (artistic) end in itself, is to some extent free from the claims of realism and denotative meaning. It's more concerned with modelling or representing "possible" realities : and in doing so, poetry is able to express deeper, more elusive, less systematic, more subtle layers of sense, feeling & experience. These "free, unsponsored" dimensions of psychic & emotional life themselves reflect back on the formal, "official" records of history, & dogmas of religion, & assertions of ideology, the oppressive superstitions of hide-bound culture. & that "reflecting back" is the substance of poetry's immemorial radicalism : the prophet's challenge to arrogant priesthoods, the poet's rebuke to overweening state authorities, the critique of "realism" offered by the imagination.
But protest and politics aside... I see a sort of harmonic affinity between theology and poetry, in the likeness between : 1) Maximus' synthesis of divine and human consciousness within the form of the Person - ie. the whole reality of experience is keyed to a human scale, and 2) the Petersburg/Acmeist poetic tradition of Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam - hewing to Mandelstam's idea of poetry as "domestic hellenism" : the humanizing, civilizing, & domesticating of life on earth with a "teleological (human) warmth." Both represent an architecture of existence based in confidence : a deep confidence in "Providence", in the eventual working-out of "faith, hope & charity" (history as Redemption).
Poetry (some poetry) might be closer to theology, though. I think of theology as intellectual reflection upon (& maybe insight into) the "givens" of religious tradition. There's a range - let's call it "vision" - where such endeavors can overlap.
In the modern era, religion is often represented as irrational, oppressive, & silly. I suppose modernity could even be defined as "the critique - & mockery - of religion." Novels & various discourses since the Enlightenment abound in satires on Medieval ritual, dogma, superstition, & the general moeurs of churchgoing folk. Certainly much of the critique was (& is) indeed liberating & enlightening; but the secular ideological-political formations which then sought to replace religion resulted in the vast desolations & conflicts of the 20th-century. So who gets the last laugh, so to speak (aside from the Devil...)?
Our local hero, Roger Williams, was an avatar of a different kind of cultural equilibrium between sacred & secular. By advocating tolerance of all faiths, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech, and the separation of civil and religious Authority, Williams set the stage for the Enlightenment, and for the balance of secular government & religious freedom as we know it today. Yet Williams' Puritan innovations had deeper roots in the cultural development of the West. Even medieval Catholicism recognized that peace & order depended on harmony between the "two swords" - the two Powers of Church and State, Church & Empire. The authority of the Church was an ethical counterbalance to the power of the King : they were never fused into one. This balance of the two had a scriptural basis in the New Testament - in Jesus' command, "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, & to God what is God's". The apostle Paul, in his letters, took up this theme, when he described how God's Providence works through all things, including the State & its ministers, "for our good" (an argument often used to justify passivity & conformity in the face of State-sponsored evil : but not necessarily or entirely false, in spite of this.) It was this conception of Providence working through all things, Christian & non-Christian, sacred & secular, which informed Williams' political vision.
And one could trace this tradition back much further. It's possible to think of Judaism as a religion which is a theological reflection & critique - a re-working, or overturning - of Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion. The God of the Hebrews - the primal & universal Creator of all things, who allies himself personally, not with the rulers of mighty nations, the immortal god-kings atop their ziggurats & pyramids, but with humble shepherds & slaves. This God does not merely issue obscure demands (though He does issue demands) - but comes down to dicker & argue with his adopted people. & the main aim of this Hebrew God is to provide liberation from oppressors, & from human wrong-doing in general. So we can see the historical consequence of this basic stance of Biblical religion : a theological challenge is offered to oppressive rule. A line is drawn between sacred & secular. The authority of the divine is set up in opposition to, rather than conjunction with, the secular or theocratic power of nations. Thus the seeds of individual conscience - the ethical demand of a divine & infinite universality, above and beyond any earthly power - were planted, long ago.
Recurrently in my poetry (esp. in Lanthanum) the figure of "Maximus" shows up. This could be taken as an allusion to Charles Olson's epic persona of the same name, but I'm referring to another Maximus : Maximus the Confessor, a Byzantine theologian. This Maximus was enmeshed in controversies over the Trinity and the nature of Christ's Person, with which Orthodoxy, centered in Constantinople, was engaged for centuries. A profound & creative thinker, Maximus synthesized Greek philosophy & Christian faith, to produce an affirmation of the Orthodox sense of the union of divine & human Persons. That the universal Godhead would manifest on earth as a particular human person was a mystery, a conundrum & a scandal from the very beginning - a scandal involving first of all the splitting apart of Judaism and Christianity, & then, within Christianity itself, at least a thousand years of polemics over its exact meaning (& of course, those debates have not yet concluded).
But poetry per se is not so formalized (logical) or realistic (descriptive) as theology claims to be. Poetry, as an (artistic) end in itself, is to some extent free from the claims of realism and denotative meaning. It's more concerned with modelling or representing "possible" realities : and in doing so, poetry is able to express deeper, more elusive, less systematic, more subtle layers of sense, feeling & experience. These "free, unsponsored" dimensions of psychic & emotional life themselves reflect back on the formal, "official" records of history, & dogmas of religion, & assertions of ideology, the oppressive superstitions of hide-bound culture. & that "reflecting back" is the substance of poetry's immemorial radicalism : the prophet's challenge to arrogant priesthoods, the poet's rebuke to overweening state authorities, the critique of "realism" offered by the imagination.
But protest and politics aside... I see a sort of harmonic affinity between theology and poetry, in the likeness between : 1) Maximus' synthesis of divine and human consciousness within the form of the Person - ie. the whole reality of experience is keyed to a human scale, and 2) the Petersburg/Acmeist poetic tradition of Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam - hewing to Mandelstam's idea of poetry as "domestic hellenism" : the humanizing, civilizing, & domesticating of life on earth with a "teleological (human) warmth." Both represent an architecture of existence based in confidence : a deep confidence in "Providence", in the eventual working-out of "faith, hope & charity" (history as Redemption).
2.28.2008
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.
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.
2.04.2008
Often the serious thoughts seem to arrive early in the morning, when I'm still half-asleep. I was in such a state recently, half-thinking about Erica Dorf, a dear lady of 88 (John Tagliabue's sister), who died on New Year's eve, and about what I would say at her memorial service, and these lines from Shakespeare's sonnet 116 came to me : "Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,/Or bends with the remover to remove."
Here's the whole sonnet :
- certainly one of the greatest love poems.
It got me pondering (lying there half-awake) in a vague way about several different things... first, about a distinction between modern & ancient, or romantic & classical, notions of love - which seems related, in turn, to very basic aspects of design - ie., form & movement, crystal & fluid...
The modern romantic (Aristotelian?) conceives of love as involving change, growth, transformation. The ancient classic (Platonist?) sees it, on the contrary, as beyond change : steadfast, firm, constant, right & true, eternal.
It's the ancient notion which seems less familiar to us. (& of course there are moral/social attitudes which follow from how we conceptualize love.)
I started thinking about all this in terms of theology & cosmology. When we read in the Bible that "God is Love" (letter of John), do we envision that as an attribute of the "unchanging Father of Lights" (letter of James)?
If you try to reconcile this older concept of Love with notions of creation & making, what do you arrive at? A notion of the Universe as finished, complete (even if that completion involves freedom, chance, perpetual changes). A crystallization, an end-in-itself.
& I guess these vague notions also have consequences for the artist. If you think of inspiration/creation/artwork less in terms of a sort of expansive Romantic afflatus, and more in terms of a sudden coalescence of disparate materials - a fusion of chaos into cosmos - the formation of an integral whole... - well, maybe this tends toward a sort of "classicism".
Again we come to this (traditional, Byzantine) analogy between nature-as-creation, and artist-as-maker.
But all this was triggered as I lay there thinking about Erica, who throughout her life, in her small apt. in New York City, was an ever-fixed mark - a small harbor of light & joy, for strangers confronting that vast, proud & sometimes intimidating metropolis.
What if reality, cosmos, life-in-general - what if this whole is a crystallization out of an infinitely-deep well of creative Love? & that Dante's notion of the proper direction of the human will-to-love - repentance, in other words - involves not so much a change or transformation, as a re-alignment of one's own small reservoir of love, with that vast infinite source?
Here's the whole sonnet :
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
- certainly one of the greatest love poems.
It got me pondering (lying there half-awake) in a vague way about several different things... first, about a distinction between modern & ancient, or romantic & classical, notions of love - which seems related, in turn, to very basic aspects of design - ie., form & movement, crystal & fluid...
The modern romantic (Aristotelian?) conceives of love as involving change, growth, transformation. The ancient classic (Platonist?) sees it, on the contrary, as beyond change : steadfast, firm, constant, right & true, eternal.
It's the ancient notion which seems less familiar to us. (& of course there are moral/social attitudes which follow from how we conceptualize love.)
I started thinking about all this in terms of theology & cosmology. When we read in the Bible that "God is Love" (letter of John), do we envision that as an attribute of the "unchanging Father of Lights" (letter of James)?
If you try to reconcile this older concept of Love with notions of creation & making, what do you arrive at? A notion of the Universe as finished, complete (even if that completion involves freedom, chance, perpetual changes). A crystallization, an end-in-itself.
& I guess these vague notions also have consequences for the artist. If you think of inspiration/creation/artwork less in terms of a sort of expansive Romantic afflatus, and more in terms of a sudden coalescence of disparate materials - a fusion of chaos into cosmos - the formation of an integral whole... - well, maybe this tends toward a sort of "classicism".
Again we come to this (traditional, Byzantine) analogy between nature-as-creation, and artist-as-maker.
But all this was triggered as I lay there thinking about Erica, who throughout her life, in her small apt. in New York City, was an ever-fixed mark - a small harbor of light & joy, for strangers confronting that vast, proud & sometimes intimidating metropolis.
What if reality, cosmos, life-in-general - what if this whole is a crystallization out of an infinitely-deep well of creative Love? & that Dante's notion of the proper direction of the human will-to-love - repentance, in other words - involves not so much a change or transformation, as a re-alignment of one's own small reservoir of love, with that vast infinite source?
12.14.2007
Quiet in the library today.
Snowstorm yesterday, now sunlight on the trees, old colonial rooftops. Snow-radiance, winter brightness.
Sort of a northern light, Bruegel-light, Thomas More-light... imaginary sense of medieval gemutlichkeit comes to me now & then, like something out of collective memory (fantasy, I should say). It's in a lot of my poetry.
"Lit with the cold and clear Minnesota light" ("Grain Elevator")
Thinking of Stevens' "idea of the sun". & the tale of the Biblical "burning bush" that drew Moses out into eventual Exodus, and a scriptural Code, a social Covenant, & the history of the West.
The spark is like a mathematical equation :
Universal God + Mankind-Imago = Human Dignity/Equality = Justice
ie. if each & all bear this divine image (like M's "gold coin of humanism") then the irrevocable consequence is : dignity & respect & equality for each & all. (cf. the "greatest commandment", from which depends "all the Law & the Prophets" : Love God; Love your neighbor as yourself)
A further thought : these verbal articulations of social design (justice) are themselves epiphenomena of the unspoken Actual - the common intuited relations of love & respect that relatively free & sane persons offer naturally (at their best, anyway) to one another.
In other words, part of the overall gift of life is a certain unspoken normative justice, an equilibrium of happiness & peace.
Then the Biblical revelation (or divine intervention) is not so much a motor of history, on the order of cause-&-effect - but rather a manifestation (a "glory") of the truth as it already is, & always was.
Everything pivots on a sense of the unique Person as enfolded in, or unfolding, an image of the universal & divine Personhood. Everything pivots on consciousness & the Person. "I am that I am."
These things have been known for thousands of years.
Snowstorm yesterday, now sunlight on the trees, old colonial rooftops. Snow-radiance, winter brightness.
Sort of a northern light, Bruegel-light, Thomas More-light... imaginary sense of medieval gemutlichkeit comes to me now & then, like something out of collective memory (fantasy, I should say). It's in a lot of my poetry.
"Lit with the cold and clear Minnesota light" ("Grain Elevator")
Thinking of Stevens' "idea of the sun". & the tale of the Biblical "burning bush" that drew Moses out into eventual Exodus, and a scriptural Code, a social Covenant, & the history of the West.
The spark is like a mathematical equation :
Universal God + Mankind-Imago = Human Dignity/Equality = Justice
ie. if each & all bear this divine image (like M's "gold coin of humanism") then the irrevocable consequence is : dignity & respect & equality for each & all. (cf. the "greatest commandment", from which depends "all the Law & the Prophets" : Love God; Love your neighbor as yourself)
A further thought : these verbal articulations of social design (justice) are themselves epiphenomena of the unspoken Actual - the common intuited relations of love & respect that relatively free & sane persons offer naturally (at their best, anyway) to one another.
In other words, part of the overall gift of life is a certain unspoken normative justice, an equilibrium of happiness & peace.
Then the Biblical revelation (or divine intervention) is not so much a motor of history, on the order of cause-&-effect - but rather a manifestation (a "glory") of the truth as it already is, & always was.
Everything pivots on a sense of the unique Person as enfolded in, or unfolding, an image of the universal & divine Personhood. Everything pivots on consciousness & the Person. "I am that I am."
These things have been known for thousands of years.
12.05.2007
I suppose Mankind per se is that unruly rabelaisan Infant, loving & devouring, with joyful greedy gusto, the world designed for such, making him/herself the measure of all things... endowed with such freedom & power by the Maker's own express & gracious will... & that such futuristic freedom & power might be difficult for popes & philosophers & kings & generals to grasp... so that the Parable of the Prodigal Son is the greatest parable, and Jesus perhaps took the stage name "Son of Man" in a somewhat literal (futuristic) sense...
- & the same prodigality of freedom & power leading miserable Mankind into all the terrible hellholes of both "progress" & the lack thereof... requiring the difficult climbing ascesis of saints, who love the Source and the Whole - the whole Truth - the suffering Shepherd - more than they love any particular thing (including themselves)... [& then, following along, they go on the difficult downward ascesis, loving each most abject suffering unimportant thing as a portion of the Whole...]
- & speaking of Infants, I was reminded of a particular thread on the Poetry site (a posting by A.E. Stallings), about "poetry & prophecy", where I commented that I sometimes felt my poems had prophesied some of my own later poems... & was reminded of this very early poem, & how it seemed to foreshadow the whole Forth of July adventure...
- & the same prodigality of freedom & power leading miserable Mankind into all the terrible hellholes of both "progress" & the lack thereof... requiring the difficult climbing ascesis of saints, who love the Source and the Whole - the whole Truth - the suffering Shepherd - more than they love any particular thing (including themselves)... [& then, following along, they go on the difficult downward ascesis, loving each most abject suffering unimportant thing as a portion of the Whole...]
- & speaking of Infants, I was reminded of a particular thread on the Poetry site (a posting by A.E. Stallings), about "poetry & prophecy", where I commented that I sometimes felt my poems had prophesied some of my own later poems... & was reminded of this very early poem, & how it seemed to foreshadow the whole Forth of July adventure...
6.13.2007
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...)
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...)
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