Since the ol' Quatrain Express seems to have finally come into the station, I've been pondering about the general basis of my ways in poetry... so it's been quiet around here.

Thinking about my deep attraction for "Deep Image" kinds of things... Mandelstam & Crane's riddles, hermetic imagery, some of that in Pound's Cantos & elsewhere... it's a kind of imagism-symbolism, visual music... Poe's "vagueness"...

but now I'm thinking about it as a kind of limitation...

wondering if there's a psychological/intellectual aspect to it. Like nostalgia for home or childhood instilling a subconcious hunger for vision - which is perhaps temporarily appeased by the striking, un-paraphrasable image, like a gong sounding...

(speaking of gongs, I think Yeats went through something like this, a re-examination of his style... not that I'm doing anything so systematic or dramatic here)

So the challenge for me might be to find a way of writing which I can take to, which involves something more like direct discourse, statement... Maybe.

Paul Fry's Defense of Poetry really is a defense of poetry, mainly (for me) for its sensitive readings of Wordsworth, Keats & other Romantics. (& he's got me going back to Bachelard, & Wordsworth, & looking for Allen Grossman.) Fry's argument can be understood as an elaboration of Keats's "negative capability" : poetry provides a rest from the "irritable reaching after fact & reason". He quotes Blanchot, who writes that he reads literature to find rest in actuality, the thingness of ordinary things - beyond meaning, beyond reference, beyond interpretation.

His argument is also, it seems, rooted in a disenchanted naturalism. The basic ground of reality is the nonhuman, the inanimate - King Death being the much-evaded terminus, the inanimate to which all dust returns. For Fry the Romantics, especially Wordsworth, are naturalists avant la lettre, or in spite of themselves.

At one point though, in a sort of aside, Fry mentions Blake, as something of an exception to the rule. & I find myself closer to Blake's supernaturalism than anyone else's naturalism.

Naturalism, as a literary atmosphere, succeeded Romanticism, under the pressure of 19th-cent. science, politics, and war. (Symbolism and modernism succeeded naturalism, but only within the restricted sphere of their aesthetic self-enclosure.) Simply put, poetry's role was sidelined and trivialized - penned up in the realm of "culture" and "feeling".

Basically, Science took the place of Religion, and everything else lined up appropriately.

But let's look over at Pope Benedict's essay (see link below). Faith, according to Paul, is the substance of hope, the evidence of things unseen. In Benedict's reading, then, faith is a spiritual something from outside, which we internalize (or already possess) - and such possession makes possible a kind of intuition of a greater goodness or joy which we cannot see yet, but which we hope for. Because faith is a "substance" we actually possess, it is also the evidence which grounds our hope.

As I see it, this spiritual intuition is still active in the world, and provides a way of seeing &/or understanding reality, which has not been displaced by science. And there's a kind of analogy here with the intuitions, the aesthetic discoveries, which guide artists and poets. (& that's the key to my Byzantium)

For Fry, literature & poetry intuit and represent an austere ground of being, in the non-human, the inanimate, the extreme limit of death. For me, I guess, the labyrinth of the human mind and spirit is yet more subtle. At some unspoken level, we recognize and intuit the formations of life & death together (this is actually close to Fry's reading of Wordsworth) : but death doesn't necessarily have the last word.

(I realize my notes might strike some people as a very aggressive and unpalatable confusion of categories... I'm sorry for that. This is how I organize certain categories of understanding, for myself : but my main interest lies in the actual ("shamanic") praxis of the visionary, synthetic imagination...

- & what the heck : I graduated from Blake School, in Hopkins (MN) !)

More thoughts on "visionariness" (see previous post). Awkward word, I guess : there's probably a better one...

Differing views on the relation between "this world" and some future world beyond probably signal some kind of hard-to-resolve crux or problem, such that the human imagination wavers between its opposing sides. The ancient Jewish sect of Sadduccees, for example (along with Stoics, Epicureans, many others of various faiths & philosophies), rejected the concept of the resurrection of the dead, while the Pharisees affirmed it. Proust wrote somewhere that "the only Paradise is Paradise lost". Freud & psychology attempt to liberate us from faith in our own wishful thinking, our "illusions" of omnipotence or eternal life, by translating them into effects of the psyche - signs of inner conflicts & desires we must try to resolve or bring to awareness (in order to find happiness through adjustment to the disenchanting truth).

This oscillation between commitment to a stoic/epicurean worldiness vs. platonic/religious other-worldliness surfaced in the polemical debate between Russian Symbolism and Acmeism, in the early years of the 20th century. Gumilov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova & their circle formulated an argument opposing the vague otherworldly mysticism of the Symbolists, on behalf of a resolute, craft-oriented acceptance of the known "four dimensions", and the beauty/vitality of this world.

In the reading I've been doing about Joachim of Fiore, Bonaventure, etc., a similar oscillation comes to the fore. There is a shift toward (or return to) a notion of divine Providence which included the redemption of this world, in history : paradoxically drawing Christian theology slightly closer to the Jewish conception of world history as the drama of God's salvific acts in this world as well as for eternity (on this see Robert Lerner, The Feast of Saint Abraham, Univ. PA Press, 2001, as well as Joseph Ratzinger's monograph on Bonaventure's theology of history, noted here previously).

I guess in my own thinking, and in this ongoing poem project, I'm not coming down firmly (not yet anyway) on one "side" or another. It's all so fundamentally subtle & mysterious! I favor a notion of purpose in history, or "providence", as opposed to a purely subjective or individualistic concept of reality; as Martin Luther King put it, we are involved in a "web of mutuality". I give weight to the visionary/prophetic imagination, which asserts some mysterious mingling of two realms - earthly and "heavenly" - both now and (even more so) in the future. But most of all - and this is how I provisionally resolve these mysteries - I accept the analogy between the universe - nature itself - and a work of art.

When I think of the work of art, I think of a kind of beauty which depends on both an equilibrium/proportion of the whole, and on an intense, affectionate perception of, and care for, the particular and partial things and creatures contained in within it. Thus I can imagine a Creator who does not show his/her hand about eternal life and resurrection : does not make it plain. This artist-creator only hints at such. And why? Because this creator gives priority to the limited, mortal, and diverse particulars - to the play of time and space in all its strangeness, splendor and pathos. As Mandelstam put it : the artist plays hide & seek with God.

This notion of hiddenness (ars est celare artem) and resurrection reminds me most of all of : Vladimir Nabokov.