Jesus Thoughts (17) : it tolls for thee

Humankind cannot bear very much reality, wrote T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets.  I doubt he was thinking here of some arcane, ineffable reality.  I suppose he was thinking, ironically, of the ordinary passage of time.  We avoid it.  We can't bear it, the ineluctable wave-force of it.  Great scientists and philosophers have constructed complex theoretical sand castles to evade the power of will be, is, was - all pretty much in vain (check out The Natural Philosophy of Time, by G.J. Whitrow, for an extremely incisive, erudite exploration - full of physics & math equations which I can't follow, but lots of other wonderful things too, in ordinary language).

It's why the Old Testament somewhere (Psalms?) calls out, Lord, teach us to number our days.  It's why those strutting, arrogant Renaissance princes made sure to keep a skull in their private study, for a memento mori.

Passing time.  We avoid the knife-edge of it, the "raven-knife" (Mandelstam), the voron-nozh (in exile, counting slow hours, in Voronezh).  Quoth the Raven...

Old cantankerous literary exiles like me write screeds about it... young poets ignore us (all the time in the world).  Number our days, says the word to the wise.  We don't listen : too much reality.

& if someone comes to us & says : I am the Way, the Truth, the Life....  I am the sheep-door to eternal life.... we show them a short-cut to Golgotha : we don't want to hear about it.  The impertinent suggestion that there are two separate dimensions of reality : earth & heaven, mortal time & eternity... no, no - we can't bear it.  We crush our hands over our ears.  Let me just get back to my favorite pastimes, please!

But then here is another dose of reality : feel it in your bones.  Feel the knife-edge, Now, scraping your skin.  Now.  & meanwhile imagine there is this ineffable realm - some kind of soul-space, some "kingdom of heaven", where this death-bound world is abrogated, changed, redeemed - transfigured.  Like that monarch butterfly, on the milkweed pod, drifting (nonchalant, inexorable) across America, toward death-haunted Mexico... that monarch only recently a silk-bound worm...

When I try to hold this doubleness, these two circles, this Venn diagram, in my mind - time & the Eternal - what comes sharply home to me is the so very strange (weird, uncanny) dramatic quality of our ordinary, mortal existence.  We keep moving, in this play of Time : moving toward our own inevitable Golgotha.  We hold the end of it all in our mind, our limbs, our bones : & we go on walking through the day, each day, as the seconds move along & pass.

We are all on stage in this mortal play together... so John Donne writes, with such eloquence : "No man is an island,  entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were;  any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." (Meditation 17) 

Or Shakespeare' s Prospero (in The Tempest), speaking of actors : 

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. 

*

A strange dream it is.  Life is a dream (the play, by Calderon).  "A dream within a dream" (Poe).  Time bearing all of us mortals, each bearing a Golgotha within, down the stream, toward... - & in the middle of this dream, say, an image of the Shroud of Turin : that ghostly-pale, naked, prophet-like, bearded carpenter, his eyes closed... or maybe just a "babe in a manger"...

What am I getting at?  We carry this live coal around in our hearts : this flicker of mortal time, this spiritual thing.  "You are the salt of the earth."  And, "You shall all be salted with fire."

Teach us to number our days, the Psalmist says (Psalm 90).  & lift this mortal gravity with a featherweight, or a butterfly wing.  So we can dance a little.  As old man Eliot, Old Possum,  writes : "Where you must move in measure, like a dancer."

"There is indeed a profound connection between the reality of time and the existence of an incalculable element in the universe." (G.J. Whitrow)

My new watch is my old watch

I took a walk this afternoon, around the East Side (of Providence). Sunny & brisk outside. I was cogitating the next Lanthanum passage... thinking about time & memory & my own time & memories... about Proust & Augustine & Nabokov, & a phrase from Nicholas of Cusa : "Thus time, since it is the measure of motion, is an instrument of the measuring soul." & I was thinking about how this related to 1) Aristotle's approach to knowledge, his affirmation of the absolute, the primordial integrity (in an epistemological sense) of the reality of individual, distinct, unique living things... empiricism, I guess, of a sort... (I really don't know much about philosophy - dropped out of the one ph. course I signed up for in college). & I related this sense of the soul also to 2) the Judaeo-Christian background, which is somewhat opposed to Plato's otherworldly idealism, since both Judaism & Christianity are all about hard & incontrovertible historical actuality (no matter how spun & mythologized) - about chosenness, redemption, Messianism, and Incarnation... about the History of This World, its fabric - the Greek "appearances" (which Aristotle wished to "save")... (ie., "Before Abraham was, I Am." That's a very soulful comment. It means, to me, that something in us exists before time & history.)

Anyway, I was very vaguely pondering all this stuff, in the context of some personal issues & themes & imagery in my poem - the question of time & memory & loss & recovery, of the things we love & don't love enough... wondering about the idea that "grace" or forgiveness allows one to re-enter the texture of one's own past, & love it & understand it in a new way... "Proustian" in a sense, I guess, or Nabokovian...

So, I was vaguely chewing over these things, walking along a side street on the East Side... when suddenly I noticed, down on the sidewalk... a wristwatch. In fact, it looked like a brand new wristwatch. In fact, it was the same inexpensive Timex "woodsman" wristwatch (sort of an outdoorsy, Boy Scoutish watch) which I had owned all through the 80s & 90s, & then lost or broken or worn out somehow, & replaced with a watch I have never really liked that much. I hesitated... but no one was around, no one seemed to be looking for it. "Finder's keepers," as we used to say back in Hopkins. Right there on the sidewalk, I took off my old watch and put on the new one.

It was a sort of epiphany, this afternoon - which belonged with the poem. I found my old Timex.

Spent weekend packing & moving books & files from a room we want to paint... cleaning out old papers... opportunity to look back, old correspondence & correspondents about poetry, in the pre-9/11 & pre-blog (even pre-internet!) era... Nedge, The Poetry Mission, old local & distant literary friends & allies, many of whom I've lost touch with, old family stuff, photos, letters...

- good thing to reflect on all this; fleeting ephemeral aspect of things... (I know I'm being vague). The feathery lightweight silliness of my track in life... dreamworld of books & words, & the endless/intermittent laboring to articulate, enunciate...

- probably without realizing it I've become much more impersonal, abstractly "ambitious" (ambition in an inverse proportion to time divided by nonentity)... I don't blame the internet, it's me, me. The weight & inertia of seemingly ineffectual literary activity. Would like to reconnect somehow, on a new plane.

Thinking about a kind of memoir-opus, but must keep plan under my hat for the moment.

There is more time experienced in an individual life than in the whole span of history. Un paradoxe, n'est-ce pas? Proust had an inkling of this, which is why his novel runs to 8 volumes. It could have been so much longer.

The Thousand and One Nights is, I guess (I'm not an expert), structured on the idea of saving life by wasting time : idling it away with stories-within-stories, told to keep the tyrant amused - distracted.

Time is one of the stage properties.

p.s. if I were to re-write those comments quoted in Octopus, I would probably rein in some of the grand abstract claims about poetry & zeitgeist. Mandelshtam, Dickinson, Dante... each had their own unique, characteristic ways of expressing some of the metaphysical questions in relation to poetry. Mandelshtam, for one, made explicit in his essays that poetry-making & poetics are always a living, developing, changing process.

Yet I wouldn't renounce the comments entirely. Even though the insights of the Chicago critics, which I've been talking about over the last couple weeks, have helped me recognize certain critical distinctions - which, if they were put into play, would take the reading of poetry far deeper into the particulars of individual works - still, I think that those critics' forthright renovation of Aristotle's Poetics - after a hiatus of a few thousand years - chimes somewhat with my essay's theme of anachronism.

In the midst of the Festivites d'Hiver, mon dieu, HG Poetics is swallowed by an Octopus [see "Essays"]. Merci bien, Octopus!

The literary pleasure principle is tempered somewhat by the fact that civilization, which sustains it, is itself sustained (in ways both great and small) by vows, labor, and self-sacrifice.

This is a good thing for literature, in the long run. "Time silvers the plow, and the poet's voice." (O. Mandelshtam)

Here I compost my difference.

If we accept the R. Formalist 6-sided model, still, we say, language is not dicing. The simple hexagonal formula elides an implication of the fact that the addressor is one of its facets: the implication that motive, impulse, is inextricable from the actuality of language.

"Words are fossil poetry", says Emerson (Thoreau?). The word from its origin is gestural, indexical, representational, mimetic. The "inner image" of the word (Mandelshtam's Potebnia, the anti-R. Formalist) is a complex made up of its etymological-gestural roots.

Imagine, not a six-sided die, but a sword turning every way.

A sequence:
1. the primitive word points to that.
2. the primitive word-maker inches toward self-consciousness.
3. the primitive word takes on the tincture of same (self-consciousness).
4. the primitive word becomes a polished mirror, a flashing sword.
5. the primitive word-maker points toward his/her Maker.
6. the primitive word turns every way.
7. and the primitive word saw that it was good, and rested.

For the (Mandelshtamian) Acmeist, the poetic word exults in liberation from necessity, it celebrates its inner free-standing harmonics, it honors the creative nature of which it is a part, it acknowledges the origin of its freedom in the "historical fact the the Redemption". Thus the primary border is not between past & future, as with the Futurists, but between time & eternity, or heaven & earth, which the intervention of the Divine Word fused together, and which the poetic word echoes & celebrates.

Mandelstam wrote that, ironically, the revolution broke the spine of cultural chronology stemming from the Incarnation (the Christian calendar), and in doing so, led not into a utopian future but a kind of inert state, which he mocked as "Buddhist Moscow".

(Obviously, here, I'm taking Mandelshtam in my own direction, building on certain strands of his oeuvre; I'm not presenting an objective/scholarly version, but a Henry-adaptation.)

To summarize: in poetic language, impulse & representation are inherently meshed & fused with the "verbal material"; there is no toss of some dice-object; rather, language is a human creation which is surrounded by & points toward its maker-matrix. The langpo/futurist/modernist emphasizes chance & formal reconstruction; the acmeist/modernist emphasizes historical fate, the inextricable cultural context. Futurism is construct; acmeism is embodiment & image.

Proust. The idea that our only real experience of Time is in the form of personal time. But art's transpersonal effect - leading us out (errantly, erroneously) into the world, and back again into ourselves - draws maker (& reader) toward a hidden self, experiencing"beyond-time".

The only real experience of Time is personal. Corollary : all time, as humanly understood, is Now (the now, that is, of a 5-act play, lasting roughly 3 score years & 10).

But this is not quite right either. Because at the same time we recognize the pastness of the past. Caesar may yet be living his "now" - but for us, his dust stops a bunghole in Neder-nederland.

Hard to grasp how these two dimensions really intertwine.

Two faces, two aspects of literature - light & heavy. Pastime - and funeral rite for past time.

Literature, memory, nostalgia, time-travel, reincarnation. . . all efforts to ameliorate Time's irrevocable power, to soften the blow. "Humankind cannot bear very much reality" (or something like that). Who wrote that history is not simply the past, but the "pastness of the past" (more Eliot?)?

But what good is the present without memory & memories (personal & collective)? Question has a bearing on my "poetics", I guess. Memories (commitments) which we share - & in so doing "redeem the time".

After the Good Friday end-stop of Stubborn Grew, the "return" of Juliet-Eurydice, the Forth of July - an expansion/acceleration/attenuation in two directions: toward a remote (& secret) personal past, and a remote (& imaginary) collective future (Jubilee). By way of the Mississippi River ("upstream, down").

Latta-day Proust.

What a mighty vast meme was early 20th-cent. "memory"! The cork-lined French chap made a Mots-Valeurian personal epic out of it.

Out of Baudelaire, Bergson, Nietzsche - "eternal return". The Future is possibility; the Past is fixed; but the Present of writing, through reflection and reiteration, turns the Past once more toward possibility - a spectral revivimummifictation.

Memory functioning like a time-analogy for the spatialization - the multidimensionality - enacted by words on a page (blossoming into imaginative vision & empathy). Bergson's "fan of phenomena" (cf. Mandelstam) enacted (paradigmatically) as the reader opening a book.

Crane's Bridge thusly miniaturized Joyce's Ulysses technique. "America" as a cinematic sleight, an entire history dreamt in a single night in Manhattan.

Eliot's elegant epitome for the whole thing, at the opening of Four Quartets :

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.


(But : see Keith Ward's book, Religion and Creation, for a discerning reconsideration of the whole traditional Platonic eternal "block time" changelessness perspective.)

A lot of claims are made for poetry. Poetry is made the vehicle for every memory, passion, ideal and value under the sun.

I've been one of the worst dabblers in that pursuit, I know. (I wrote, for example, about how poetry's special form of representation allies it with religious vision.) But today I'm focused on a notion of poetry's uniqueness, its separateness.

Poetry does something unique to words, shepherds them into its own aesthetic field. Poetry is essentially an art form, the art of language per se (as opposed to the "language" of visual art, or music, or film, etc.).

Aesthetic response - that is, response at least to some degree self-conscious - begins here, in the recognition of poetry's proper, independent sphere. All poetry, in a sense, creates its own world ex nihilo. When we approach it thus on its own terms, we can respond to what it does with the materials of the ordinary world which it absorbs and remakes - harmonizes into its special poetry-materials. And with this recognition, maybe we can moderate some of the magic thinking which sometimes asks too much of poetry (politically, spiritually, intellectually, etc.).

I guess all this is pretty elementary & obvious. As per.

But I like the idea of looking again & again at the most general, universal concepts about it. Because this is a way to make what is most ancient, foreign, and different, appear close and familiar. I guess this is an acmeist, a Mandelstamian idea (or proto-Mandelstamian), a Bergsonian notion - discovering anachronistic, cross-cultural affinities.

The sense of working in a timeless, universal medium, with long views & deep traditions - doesn't this affect how we speak verse, how we make lines? Where we try to stand in this playground?

Good dialogue here between two very articulate poets.

"New" or "progressive" just seem too vague.  Of course, if a poem is found to be imitative or derivative, it's immediately recognizable as 2nd-rate.  But much so-called progressive or experimental poetry is just as derivative as is much so-called traditionalist poetry.

The work of writing topical or relevant contemporary poetry is so difficult that the poet requires all the resources he or she can muster, and it doesn't matter if they come from yesterday or 500 B.C.  The old is new.

I wrote a lot about this early on on this blog. (stop what you're doing & read the archives straight through.  coffee can wait.)   I ruminated, then, that poetry exhibits a special relationship to Time and Now; it speaks a contemporaneity which overpowers, outwits or transcends clock-time as we know it; and much prose fiction thematizes, in retrospect, what poetry continually performs & enacts, Now.  Thus notions of progress in the arts, tied to progress in politics, are, with respect to poetry, on a certain level, anyway - redundant.

Sitting in miniature cluttered backyard on mellow March 1st coming in like lamb. Yellow-gray pussy willow branch. A downy woodpecker, making a very confident "tock" for such a shrimp.

I look up and say the words vremeni and time (russian & english) a few times, slowly, under my breath. The branches are quiet & the light is soft & opalescent. It's nice not to be at work at this hour. I feel simultaneously like Proust & the madeleine. This is hard to explain. I mean I feel my mortal flesh pronouncing the words for "time", slowly, low & quiet, while that same time passes, slowly, low & quiet.

A sad feeling, something like Ecclesiastes.

I think, "this is something like a poetry reading".