As it's Election Day here in the U.S., I will endeavor to steer this imaginary conversation toward the galaxy of spiritual election.
Cosmic oceans of ink have been spilled on the subject of monotheism, its historical/cultural development, & (recently) on the shifting, tricksterish, unaccountable personality of Yahweh as portrayed in the Bible. I'm just going to try to articulate what strike me as the most basic & important features of this portrait.
Three features stand out :
1) this God is a Creator. As I tried to describe early on in this thread, the Genesis story of "creation in 7 days" sets the cosmos within a solar/planetary framework of day, week and year - a way of "domesticating" the universe for Man. The seasonal rituals of Judaism are in part, then, a kind of annual dance of celebration within this scheme. And this feature lays the groundwork for :
2) this God is a Savior. This may be the most distinctive aspect of Yahweh : he enters History as an agent on behalf of the lowly & the oppressed (saving the Hebrews from exile and oppression in Egypt : leading them to their Promised Land). The Bible is in this sense an epic, quasi-historical chronicle - a "transgressive" mix-up of genres (theology, history, poetry). Which leads to the third, fateful characteristic :
3) this God is Universal. The texts of the prophets make two great claims in the latter portions of the Bible : first, that Yahweh is the God of all things and all people, who has called the Jews to be a "priestly nation", offering worship and sacrifice for all nations; and second, that the Messiah promised through Moses is coming, at some future time, to complete the salvation of Israel and the whole world.
When, firstly, the Bible portrays a personal (though at the same time invisible, ineffable) God, who intervenes in history in order to establish his elect - his chosen people - for the purposes of world salvation - and then, secondly, declares through his prophets that he will send his Messiah - the combination of these two elements lays the ineluctable groundwork for the appearance of one who will claim that mantle, bring it to fruition (the Messiah). The Messiah, as the personal "representative" of a personal God, is what you might call "the elect of the elect" : one can imagine the wonder, unease and tumult that such a claim would unleash at any time or place.
I want to go back to the 2nd of the three original characteristics of Yahweh for a moment, since the Messiah is, again, presenting an enactment of salvation. The Hebrew "God as Savior" is distinct from other gods and religions in that, rather than being welded into a hierarchical, authoritarian structure of cultural power (say the Egyptian or Assyrian sacred kings), Yahweh is the God of the lowly, the poor & the oppressed : he challenges, undermines, and overthrows kings and empires on behalf of a universal spiritual relation between every person and his or her Creator. We need to underline this distinctive quality of the Bible (pointed out memorably by Eric Auerbach in his masterwork, Mimesis) : here even the great kings and priests of Israel (Moses, David, Solomon...) are delineated in all their comical human weakness and imperfection - as wholly dependent on the grace of their saving God.
One of the implications of this egalitarian emphasis is that it short-circuits, again, the official mediation of "sacred rulers" (priests or kings), who would "authorize" the relation between human persons and God. The barrier is beginning to be broken down. But the radical claim of Jesus : to be the Messiah himself, to be, in fact, "one with the Father" - coexistent with the eternal Spirit of God - completely dissolves that barrier of mediating authority. The personal God has manifested in person : the circle has come round. Man and woman - persons - made "in the image of God" have been set in a contextual frame of earthly time and space (of history) which incarnates, embodies, this abstract ratio (Logos). The spiritual relation between God and Man has been simultaneously universalized and personalized. The "God of slaves and servants" has appeared fully embodied, as Isaiah predicted, "in the form of a servant" : but in this lowly approach (through suffering), Jesus serves by opening the cosmic door : the "Way" which unites the cosmic Source with the "children of God", and the children with each other.
Many of the early Christians suffered persecution and martyrdom as they traveled through the Roman Empire proclaiming this new "kingdom" of God. But a pivotal change took place when, in a.d. 313, Emperor Constantine ended the suppression of Christian worship. The Church, especially in the East, gradually became aligned with the authority of the State; while in the West, the decline of the Empire and the social disorder caused by the barbarian invasions forced the Church to take on many of the former responsibilities of government; bishops oversaw the safety and welfare of local communities. The development of the Byzantine theocracy and medieval feudalism not only re-established archaic forms of mediating authority between the person and God; they also set in motion fateful changes in the relationship between Christians and Jews. What had formerly been a matter of polemic and religious debate, became a rule of enforcement and discrimination (once Christianity became aligned with the power of the State). The destiny of this fateful divide unfolded catastrophically in the 20th century, when malevolent Nazism exploited ancient religious divides and social enmities, the deep & poisoned well of anti-semitism.
The original message to Man is direct, without mediation of any earthbound authority. It is a personal spiritual invitation to believe and understand. Roger Williams (of Rhode Island) - who called himself a "seeker" - is the great saint of this principle, which he termed "soul liberty." Williams' Rhode Island colony is considered the first government in history founded on an explicit separation of church and state.
I feel a curious personal connection with this particular story, since I was born on May 29, 1952, & thus celebrated my first birthday exactly 500 years after the fall of the Byzantine Empire (the conquest of Constantinople, 5.29.1453).
11.05.2012
Jesus Thoughts (8) : repentance & belief
Will continue as I can with this line of conjectures, come confusion, rain or shine. Gentle blog readers might want to start with #1 of these Thoughts - otherwise the drifts might be too high, the cloud banks too dark. They will be dark enough anyway...
Have been thinking out loud here about the spiritual claims Jesus makes : that he is the Messiah, that with him the gate and the way to God's presence, the kingdom of God, is opened : which is a personal presence. Which means that the ultimate ground of the cosmos is in some way, somehow, personal - beyond our sharpest consciousness & comprehension of what that might mean (in the abstract, anyway : we might experience it, however, in some kind of unknown spiritual trance or rapture). In the depths.
But Jesus does more than simply make a claim for his status, for who he is. His message, his mission, is to invite people to join him there. The NT repeatedly summarizes the announcement he made as he wandered around Galilee and Judea : "Repent and believe in the Gospel (the good news)."
These two go together : repent and believe. Why? Well, for one thing, the spiritual pigeon-code, the message, he is delivering, is so earth-shaking, so transformative - such a shock to our ordinary earthbound perceptions and way of thinking, that we have to repent - to turn, to make an inward moral change - in order to receive it. it's simultaneously a moral and intellectual change which is demanded here.
If we accept the message, we are no longer grounded in common sense or material calculations : we are suddenly participating in some kind of previously-unknown spiritual community. We are grounded in a relationship with the creator of the universe : as the NT puts it (I paraphrase from memory), "he gave men the power to become children of God." Children of God. It's an assertion which requires an almost incomprehensible revolution of consciousness.
And it has a moral component. If God is the pure power of infinite Love and Wisdom - the "whole Good" in a Platonic sense, or the goodness of the whole - then we are called upon to refashion our lives in response to this invitation to infinite love & joy. We're asked to re-evaluate the partial goods we pursue on earth, in the context of an acknowledgement of a new spiritual dimension : the life of our eternal soul. Inner and outer correspond to and influence each other, as in the saying "Give, and you shall receive." What we acknowledge and do with respect to loving our neighbors as ourselves, will have repercussions on our inward state of mind and soul - every day, in every situation. It really is an invitation to be "born again" into a new way of life, rooted in a spiritual dimension which we have until now shunted to the sidelines (a low priority).
It's an invitation, not a command. I hold firmly with the notion that Jesus's message was never intended to condemn the world, but to liberate our minds - from an enslavement to anything less than eternal life. God the father in Jesus's words, is a God of infinite love, mercy and forgiveness. The renewal of repentance and belief which Jesus outlines is a challenge for every person - not an easy path. We all have our burdens of inward & outward trouble, suffering and shame - our selfishness, our complacency, our moral obtuseness, our unkindness, our stupidity & rage, our fears, our despair. "For unless you turn and become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God." - this is a saying both easy and hard. But listen to this : "Come unto me, you who are burdened and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.' My burden is.... light.
Have been thinking out loud here about the spiritual claims Jesus makes : that he is the Messiah, that with him the gate and the way to God's presence, the kingdom of God, is opened : which is a personal presence. Which means that the ultimate ground of the cosmos is in some way, somehow, personal - beyond our sharpest consciousness & comprehension of what that might mean (in the abstract, anyway : we might experience it, however, in some kind of unknown spiritual trance or rapture). In the depths.
But Jesus does more than simply make a claim for his status, for who he is. His message, his mission, is to invite people to join him there. The NT repeatedly summarizes the announcement he made as he wandered around Galilee and Judea : "Repent and believe in the Gospel (the good news)."
These two go together : repent and believe. Why? Well, for one thing, the spiritual pigeon-code, the message, he is delivering, is so earth-shaking, so transformative - such a shock to our ordinary earthbound perceptions and way of thinking, that we have to repent - to turn, to make an inward moral change - in order to receive it. it's simultaneously a moral and intellectual change which is demanded here.
If we accept the message, we are no longer grounded in common sense or material calculations : we are suddenly participating in some kind of previously-unknown spiritual community. We are grounded in a relationship with the creator of the universe : as the NT puts it (I paraphrase from memory), "he gave men the power to become children of God." Children of God. It's an assertion which requires an almost incomprehensible revolution of consciousness.
And it has a moral component. If God is the pure power of infinite Love and Wisdom - the "whole Good" in a Platonic sense, or the goodness of the whole - then we are called upon to refashion our lives in response to this invitation to infinite love & joy. We're asked to re-evaluate the partial goods we pursue on earth, in the context of an acknowledgement of a new spiritual dimension : the life of our eternal soul. Inner and outer correspond to and influence each other, as in the saying "Give, and you shall receive." What we acknowledge and do with respect to loving our neighbors as ourselves, will have repercussions on our inward state of mind and soul - every day, in every situation. It really is an invitation to be "born again" into a new way of life, rooted in a spiritual dimension which we have until now shunted to the sidelines (a low priority).
It's an invitation, not a command. I hold firmly with the notion that Jesus's message was never intended to condemn the world, but to liberate our minds - from an enslavement to anything less than eternal life. God the father in Jesus's words, is a God of infinite love, mercy and forgiveness. The renewal of repentance and belief which Jesus outlines is a challenge for every person - not an easy path. We all have our burdens of inward & outward trouble, suffering and shame - our selfishness, our complacency, our moral obtuseness, our unkindness, our stupidity & rage, our fears, our despair. "For unless you turn and become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God." - this is a saying both easy and hard. But listen to this : "Come unto me, you who are burdened and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.' My burden is.... light.
11.04.2012
A letter from World War I
Grandpa Edward Gould was an artillery captain in WW I. He was around 20 yrs old at the time. My brother Jim recently emailed this transcription of the 1st letter he wrote after the Armistice :
Envelope: (this was probably not original envelope – has a 5 cent Lincoln head stamp that is part of the envelope)
Writing on outside of envelope:
“Letter –
Edward S. Gould
To
His Dad Nov. 24th 1918”
Contents:
“Nov. 24, 1918, Ville France –
Dear Pa: -
This is Fathers Xmas letter with a few events and dates to show how fast we went in this last drive.
After the Battle of Argonne we were sent back to Brocourt for a little rest and to get enough horses to haul our carriages.
We left there Oct. 26 and marched 30 kilometers thru the blackest nights without even a star out. On Oct. 27 we came to our first position for the drive. Romagne. This was a veritable hellhole – The German planes had us spotted and for three days we we[re] subjected to enfilading fire – The last day when the order for the advance came I had just completed a rolling barrage and the horses caissons and limbers having just pulled in to the side waiting for the fire to cease so they could limber up and make a quick getaway - Four German 150mm high explosive bursts right square amongst them. Two of my caissons were blown so far in shell holes we just left them. But it would have done your heart good to see how those drivers of mine cut loose those horses hit and down and there was about 15 horses killed and many of the others had slugs in them and it wasn’t long before we were on the road. I had my hand roll in an ammunition shed and that was blown up and my hand roll looks like the pup played with it but luckily nothing inside was damaged. During all this heavy shelling though when we were getting direct hits on the battery position those gun crews did not miss a shot in the barrage.
We pulled out and up the road. This was Nov 1 and went in a position south of Remonville. This was a regular mudhole and the next day Nov. 2 we pulled up again – Our horses had been in the harness 60 hours without a rest and the mud was so heavy it took 5 pair to pull a gun carriage out to the road.
We advanced to a position in an aviation field near Barricourt. All along the road effect of American artillery on German retreat could be seen. German dead horses were everywhere along the road side.
Nov. 3 we advanced again. You can see by our advances how they were being pushed back, but they put up a heavy resistance all thru the drive. This time our position was just north of Beauclair. My reconnaissance officer was up selecting a position before the first wave had gone over and when we went into position we were only a kilometer behind the advancing infantry. On the night of Nov. 5 we were advancing again and going into position in woods thru a mudhole road when orders are changed and we are given orders to follow close on the infantry and protect the crossing of the Meuse. We came up on a dark night thru Laneuville and about 4 kilometers up the road toward Beaumont. It was lucky for us that it was misty and dark for the road was in direct view of the German hills for quite a distance and subject to constant shelling.
We came up between the 89th and 90thdivision [s]. We could see the first wave and the reserves back of us in the woods. Machine gunners on our right flank burning flares to protect bridges. I never will forget that march. Suppose you have read in the Newspapers of the crossing. I went over to the other side the next day to look around and a long hedge ran on the other side of the river. Behind this hedge machine gun pits were placed one right next to another.
We are back now at Ville France 7 kilometer from DunSu [not sure spelling] Meuse.
Hoping everyone will have a merry Xmas and a Happy New Year –
Yours Very Truly
Edward
Envelope: (this was probably not original envelope – has a 5 cent Lincoln head stamp that is part of the envelope)
Writing on outside of envelope:
“Letter –
Edward S. Gould
To
His Dad Nov. 24th 1918”
Contents:
“Nov. 24, 1918, Ville France –
Dear Pa: -
This is Fathers Xmas letter with a few events and dates to show how fast we went in this last drive.
After the Battle of Argonne we were sent back to Brocourt for a little rest and to get enough horses to haul our carriages.
We left there Oct. 26 and marched 30 kilometers thru the blackest nights without even a star out. On Oct. 27 we came to our first position for the drive. Romagne. This was a veritable hellhole – The German planes had us spotted and for three days we we[re] subjected to enfilading fire – The last day when the order for the advance came I had just completed a rolling barrage and the horses caissons and limbers having just pulled in to the side waiting for the fire to cease so they could limber up and make a quick getaway - Four German 150mm high explosive bursts right square amongst them. Two of my caissons were blown so far in shell holes we just left them. But it would have done your heart good to see how those drivers of mine cut loose those horses hit and down and there was about 15 horses killed and many of the others had slugs in them and it wasn’t long before we were on the road. I had my hand roll in an ammunition shed and that was blown up and my hand roll looks like the pup played with it but luckily nothing inside was damaged. During all this heavy shelling though when we were getting direct hits on the battery position those gun crews did not miss a shot in the barrage.
We pulled out and up the road. This was Nov 1 and went in a position south of Remonville. This was a regular mudhole and the next day Nov. 2 we pulled up again – Our horses had been in the harness 60 hours without a rest and the mud was so heavy it took 5 pair to pull a gun carriage out to the road.
We advanced to a position in an aviation field near Barricourt. All along the road effect of American artillery on German retreat could be seen. German dead horses were everywhere along the road side.
Nov. 3 we advanced again. You can see by our advances how they were being pushed back, but they put up a heavy resistance all thru the drive. This time our position was just north of Beauclair. My reconnaissance officer was up selecting a position before the first wave had gone over and when we went into position we were only a kilometer behind the advancing infantry. On the night of Nov. 5 we were advancing again and going into position in woods thru a mudhole road when orders are changed and we are given orders to follow close on the infantry and protect the crossing of the Meuse. We came up on a dark night thru Laneuville and about 4 kilometers up the road toward Beaumont. It was lucky for us that it was misty and dark for the road was in direct view of the German hills for quite a distance and subject to constant shelling.
We came up between the 89th and 90thdivision [s]. We could see the first wave and the reserves back of us in the woods. Machine gunners on our right flank burning flares to protect bridges. I never will forget that march. Suppose you have read in the Newspapers of the crossing. I went over to the other side the next day to look around and a long hedge ran on the other side of the river. Behind this hedge machine gun pits were placed one right next to another.
We are back now at Ville France 7 kilometer from DunSu [not sure spelling] Meuse.
Hoping everyone will have a merry Xmas and a Happy New Year –
Yours Very Truly
Edward
11.03.2012
Jesus Thoughts (7) : in the beginning....
Improvisation is part of this thread; I'm not always completely sure of what I'm going to say. This is just a journal, Henry's Logos-log : I have to seize the day, free time is scarce... so when the moment is opportune, then here I am. Maybe this diary will accumulate gradually into something of value.
Someday I'll try to write in more detail about the crisis, back in 1972-3, which entirely reshaped, re-oriented me. I've posted scattered things here & elsewhere about it (including an essay in the 1994 anthology for Edwin Honig, A Glass of Green Tea), but much more could be written. Someday. For now, let's just say that - to paraphrase Simone Weil - when I was about 19 years old, I had come to the end of my "natural" self - I reached an inner limit, my merely personal spiritual resources were exhausted, burnt out. I was sinking under the weight of my own natural gravity - I was in need of supernatural grace. & grace arrived, in the nick of time.
Faith itself is a spiritual gift. Without it, the mystery of truth is too deep for any one person. I know exactly how meaningless these phrases sound to someone who doesn't think they believe in God. I've been there. I'm still there. But my convictions are firmer now than they were three, five, ten, fifteen years ago. When convictions and principles are weak, then the short day's distractions, mistakes, temptations are strong. Yet, as Roger Williams well knew, and proclaimed from his rustic rooftop - you can't force belief or conviction of any kind, on anyone. An imposed conviction is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms - a mode of intellectual tyranny.
No doubt I could be dwelling in utter delusion; yet I feel confident instead. I feel my vision of things as they are is growing more clear. Not wise myself (& never have been) - still, I sense my perception becoming aligned with a truth that is inherent in reality.
I say these things because, to repeat, I understand how extremely difficult it can be to attain a rational basis for a spiritual truth. I spent many years in the mid-1970s as a kind of wandering seeker, a dreamer - mostly in a kind of meditative trance (while hitchhiking around out West, or doing odd jobs in New York City or Minneapolis, or traveling to London with musical ambitions) : reading, reading, thinking, pondering... trying to grasp 1) what had happened to me, and 2) how to imagine - realistically - a "personal" divine Being.
Many writers & thinkers fall back on mystical paradoxes when confronted with these issues. I can't disagree with them : I agree (reservedly) with Nicolas Cusanus, that there is a fundamental distinction between the finite and the infinite, the human and the divine - a logical distinction, in other words - which is, nevertheless somehow bridged and transcended in the Incarnation (the union of finite and infinite, of divine and human). But mystical paradox can result in a sort of explanatory cul-de-sac. It's poetry, not prose.
So today, here, I am going to sidestep in my discourse, make a flanking maneuver. I'm simply going to assent to the irrational bridging of that distinction (as the diagonal bridges a square with an irrational number). I'm going to take it, for the moment, on faith. And I'm going to turn (return) to a schematic mapping of what seem to be some implications of such a (cosmological, ontological) logos-design.
To do that, let's go back and reiterate, in a new figuration, the main plot of the Bible. We recall the "hexaemeral" cosmology of the opening chapters of Genesis. The story is metaphorical, analogical - we were never meant to take it literally. When Genesis states that God created the universe in 7 days, what the author is doing is aligning the cosmic, seasonal order of solar time with a theological explanation of that order. It's convenient : it's "fitting" - it fits, since the 365 days of the solar year and the 12 months of the lunar cycle divide into 52 weeks of 7 days. The story that the world was made in 7 days is a kind of hymn of praise disguised as a prose narration : it allows a people, a tribe, a community, to align itself with the cosmic order on a human level - on an ordinary, daily (weekly) basis.
All the seasonal festivals of ancient peoples are simply elaborations of this fundamental cultural orientation. This is what is called piety : the structuring of human works and days on an attitude of trust and supplication offered toward the logos, the divine order, of the universe. The dome, the house, the temple - fundamental, global phenomena representing what Osip Mandelstam (in a literary analogy) termed an attitude of "domestic hellenism" - a radiant push-back against harsh existence with "teleological warmth" : confidence in humanity's ultimate place, a being-at-home on earth, a dwelling.
Of course, we are no longer ancients : we are modern. In the context of 19th-21st century history & science, the voices conceptualizing a remote, impersonal cosmos, subject to randomness, chance, violence, and the finality of death, have grown strong. For many, the notion of a cosmic Spirit, a somehow "personal" God, simply outrages our own rationality. It's a shock to the mind.
Yet the mind itself is the key. One meaning of Logos is "ratio". The poet, the seer, deals not so much in analysis, but with analogy (leading to synthesis). An analogy is a kind of ratio. The fundamental ratio that structures belief in God was narrated at the climax of the creation story at the opening of Genesis : when "God made man, in his own image and likeness". This too is a literary fiction : it was never meant to be taken literally. But it symbolizes a ratio inherent in nature, in the entire cosmos. Here is the analogy : just as the mind of Man (male & female) senses, interprets, & orders life on this planet, so the ineffable mind of God orders the cosmos which emerged from nothing. Body is to mind as Man is to God : and the "Son of Man" is the verbal sign given to the summary, the totality, of that physical manifestation, that embodiment of the logos, the ratio. "God is Spirit," declares Jesus, "and those who worship him do so in spirit and truth." In this spirit, then - in this light - it's possible to recognize the signs of the "Son of Man" as omnipresent and pervasive throughout the natural world.
Suddenly we understand we are participating, mostly without being aware of it, in a planetary and cosmic mystery play : as St. Paul wrote, we are all dying to this "body of death", all at once - & all rising too : into that "third heaven" (the intellectual heaven, above the 1st heaven of the sky and the 2nd heaven of the stars). Into the dimension of the eternal, "uncreated" Logos. There the spirit of God is the living "person of persons" - that is, a personal being more personal than our own deepest experience and consciousness of personhood (as we have known it, imperfectly, in our own lives).
These are the strange metaphysical mysteries I've come to accept, after much hard experience, seeking & searching. I know exactly how drastically they overturn the modern "rational" worldview. But this is the way home; this is the fireplace in the kitchen of "domestic hellenism."
Someday I'll try to write in more detail about the crisis, back in 1972-3, which entirely reshaped, re-oriented me. I've posted scattered things here & elsewhere about it (including an essay in the 1994 anthology for Edwin Honig, A Glass of Green Tea), but much more could be written. Someday. For now, let's just say that - to paraphrase Simone Weil - when I was about 19 years old, I had come to the end of my "natural" self - I reached an inner limit, my merely personal spiritual resources were exhausted, burnt out. I was sinking under the weight of my own natural gravity - I was in need of supernatural grace. & grace arrived, in the nick of time.
Faith itself is a spiritual gift. Without it, the mystery of truth is too deep for any one person. I know exactly how meaningless these phrases sound to someone who doesn't think they believe in God. I've been there. I'm still there. But my convictions are firmer now than they were three, five, ten, fifteen years ago. When convictions and principles are weak, then the short day's distractions, mistakes, temptations are strong. Yet, as Roger Williams well knew, and proclaimed from his rustic rooftop - you can't force belief or conviction of any kind, on anyone. An imposed conviction is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms - a mode of intellectual tyranny.
No doubt I could be dwelling in utter delusion; yet I feel confident instead. I feel my vision of things as they are is growing more clear. Not wise myself (& never have been) - still, I sense my perception becoming aligned with a truth that is inherent in reality.
I say these things because, to repeat, I understand how extremely difficult it can be to attain a rational basis for a spiritual truth. I spent many years in the mid-1970s as a kind of wandering seeker, a dreamer - mostly in a kind of meditative trance (while hitchhiking around out West, or doing odd jobs in New York City or Minneapolis, or traveling to London with musical ambitions) : reading, reading, thinking, pondering... trying to grasp 1) what had happened to me, and 2) how to imagine - realistically - a "personal" divine Being.
Many writers & thinkers fall back on mystical paradoxes when confronted with these issues. I can't disagree with them : I agree (reservedly) with Nicolas Cusanus, that there is a fundamental distinction between the finite and the infinite, the human and the divine - a logical distinction, in other words - which is, nevertheless somehow bridged and transcended in the Incarnation (the union of finite and infinite, of divine and human). But mystical paradox can result in a sort of explanatory cul-de-sac. It's poetry, not prose.
So today, here, I am going to sidestep in my discourse, make a flanking maneuver. I'm simply going to assent to the irrational bridging of that distinction (as the diagonal bridges a square with an irrational number). I'm going to take it, for the moment, on faith. And I'm going to turn (return) to a schematic mapping of what seem to be some implications of such a (cosmological, ontological) logos-design.
To do that, let's go back and reiterate, in a new figuration, the main plot of the Bible. We recall the "hexaemeral" cosmology of the opening chapters of Genesis. The story is metaphorical, analogical - we were never meant to take it literally. When Genesis states that God created the universe in 7 days, what the author is doing is aligning the cosmic, seasonal order of solar time with a theological explanation of that order. It's convenient : it's "fitting" - it fits, since the 365 days of the solar year and the 12 months of the lunar cycle divide into 52 weeks of 7 days. The story that the world was made in 7 days is a kind of hymn of praise disguised as a prose narration : it allows a people, a tribe, a community, to align itself with the cosmic order on a human level - on an ordinary, daily (weekly) basis.
All the seasonal festivals of ancient peoples are simply elaborations of this fundamental cultural orientation. This is what is called piety : the structuring of human works and days on an attitude of trust and supplication offered toward the logos, the divine order, of the universe. The dome, the house, the temple - fundamental, global phenomena representing what Osip Mandelstam (in a literary analogy) termed an attitude of "domestic hellenism" - a radiant push-back against harsh existence with "teleological warmth" : confidence in humanity's ultimate place, a being-at-home on earth, a dwelling.
Of course, we are no longer ancients : we are modern. In the context of 19th-21st century history & science, the voices conceptualizing a remote, impersonal cosmos, subject to randomness, chance, violence, and the finality of death, have grown strong. For many, the notion of a cosmic Spirit, a somehow "personal" God, simply outrages our own rationality. It's a shock to the mind.
Yet the mind itself is the key. One meaning of Logos is "ratio". The poet, the seer, deals not so much in analysis, but with analogy (leading to synthesis). An analogy is a kind of ratio. The fundamental ratio that structures belief in God was narrated at the climax of the creation story at the opening of Genesis : when "God made man, in his own image and likeness". This too is a literary fiction : it was never meant to be taken literally. But it symbolizes a ratio inherent in nature, in the entire cosmos. Here is the analogy : just as the mind of Man (male & female) senses, interprets, & orders life on this planet, so the ineffable mind of God orders the cosmos which emerged from nothing. Body is to mind as Man is to God : and the "Son of Man" is the verbal sign given to the summary, the totality, of that physical manifestation, that embodiment of the logos, the ratio. "God is Spirit," declares Jesus, "and those who worship him do so in spirit and truth." In this spirit, then - in this light - it's possible to recognize the signs of the "Son of Man" as omnipresent and pervasive throughout the natural world.
Suddenly we understand we are participating, mostly without being aware of it, in a planetary and cosmic mystery play : as St. Paul wrote, we are all dying to this "body of death", all at once - & all rising too : into that "third heaven" (the intellectual heaven, above the 1st heaven of the sky and the 2nd heaven of the stars). Into the dimension of the eternal, "uncreated" Logos. There the spirit of God is the living "person of persons" - that is, a personal being more personal than our own deepest experience and consciousness of personhood (as we have known it, imperfectly, in our own lives).
These are the strange metaphysical mysteries I've come to accept, after much hard experience, seeking & searching. I know exactly how drastically they overturn the modern "rational" worldview. But this is the way home; this is the fireplace in the kitchen of "domestic hellenism."
11.02.2012
Jesus Thoughts (6) : a Fri. afternoon blast from past
5.7.2004
My God, my God, my whole weird life has pivoted on this hair's-breadth. I am not kidding, nay, not one bit.
The poetry of Shakespeare & the Bible drove me out of college into the wilderness. The poetry of the NY School got me into college (Ted Berrigan imitations : he grew up a couple miles from my alma mater).
Zen & the Art of Information Maintenance.
voice/text
art/knowledge
Gospel: Jesus (the Nazir - not the "Nazarene", but the Nazir, the ecstatic singer-prophet) - speaking of the future, says, offhandedly: "Knowledge shall increase." Oh, heart/mind. Logos/pathos/ethos. Mimesis vs. analysis.
One of the best books I've ever received was a gift from a carpenter-photographer high school friend, who dropped out of college in the early 70s & came to NY to get into the art scene: The Nazarene : Studies in New Testament Exegesis, by Eugenio Zolli, Univ. of Rome (publ. Herder, 1950). On the Hebrew/Aramaic context of the poetics of the parables.
http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/2004/05/my-god-my-god-my-whole-weird-life-has.html
My God, my God, my whole weird life has pivoted on this hair's-breadth. I am not kidding, nay, not one bit.
The poetry of Shakespeare & the Bible drove me out of college into the wilderness. The poetry of the NY School got me into college (Ted Berrigan imitations : he grew up a couple miles from my alma mater).
Zen & the Art of Information Maintenance.
voice/text
art/knowledge
Gospel: Jesus (the Nazir - not the "Nazarene", but the Nazir, the ecstatic singer-prophet) - speaking of the future, says, offhandedly: "Knowledge shall increase." Oh, heart/mind. Logos/pathos/ethos. Mimesis vs. analysis.
One of the best books I've ever received was a gift from a carpenter-photographer high school friend, who dropped out of college in the early 70s & came to NY to get into the art scene: The Nazarene : Studies in New Testament Exegesis, by Eugenio Zolli, Univ. of Rome (publ. Herder, 1950). On the Hebrew/Aramaic context of the poetics of the parables.
http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/2004/05/my-god-my-god-my-whole-weird-life-has.html
Jesus Thoughts (5) : fields of Messiah
Context is everything. The framework, the field of the message-in-embryo nurtures its meaning, forms the protective husk of the traveling pigeon-signal. Thus when we think & talk about Jesus we have to envision the wider field, the landscape, the ground upon which the Messiah-figure stands.
We could start with the meaning of "Messiah" itself. The root of the messianic phenomenon lies in the character & nature of Yahweh, the High God, the only God, as presented in Hebrew monotheism, the beliefs and practices of Judaism. Two characteristics, it seems to me, distinguish Yahweh from other ancient mythologies of the divine. First, is the monotheistic concentration of all power and benevolence in the one God, a creator-God, apart from whom nothing exists at all. Second, is the active, personal character of Yahweh : as narrated in the Bible, God intervenes in history in a way that can be chronicled. Yahweh is a saving God, coming to rescue the poor and oppressed, raining down judgement on the wicked - in this life, in this world.
This narrative depiction of Yahweh, as an actor in history as well as all-powerful Creator, lays the foundation for the prophetic expectation and reception of a Messiah : one who comes to fulfill all the promises of justice and salvation made by God to Israel (and through Israel, to the world).
And this is the context, I believe, in which we have to build a mental sketch (merely a conjectural hypothesis!) of Jesus's self-understanding : how he himself comprehended his vocation, his mission in life. He believed himself to be the Messiah : the one called upon to fulfill the messianic expectations of the people of Israel. From this original position flows the application of all of his spiritual, intellectual, charismatic and rhetorical gifts, and the expression of decisive moral choices, as he faced up to the consequences of his vocation.
Let's think about this for a moment in a yet wider context. The Jewish "fulfillment of Scripture" in the embodiment - the personhood - of a Messiah shows imperfect parallels with the rhetorical denouements found in other philosophical & religious cultures. Buddhism was embodied by the Buddha. Platonic philosophy culminated (theoretically, as befits Plato) in a "philosopher king" who would implement, in the real world of history, the ethical paradigms of Platonism. Aristotle, Plato's pupil, inculcated a living ruler - Alexander the Great, no less - with the precepts of his own philosophy. What I'm looking at here is what might be (in my admittedly very sketchy and unsystematic review) a general tendency : the expressions of religious world order tend to become personified, embodied, expressed in action by representative figures (ie. the prophet Daniel's messianic "Son of Man").
With this in mind - this sense of Jesus shaping his mission as a messianic fulfillment - perhaps we can appreciate his message itself in greater depth. His message, to put it simply, is that he is opening the door to God. God as the universal, ever-living fulness of an overwhelming love, wisdom & mercy : as the eternal cosmic Mind of creative lovingkindness, out of which all creatures have emerged. Thus, in this vision, we are re-shaped, "reborn", as "children" of this God - children, with Jesus, of his divine "Father". & so we begin to share a new life in this new, divine-human nature. Moreover, Jesus aims to create a community in which "we shall all be one." Through the recognition of our common "creaturehood" - offspring of a divine Mind - we begin to live together according to the precepts of such an understanding - the original Logos, what "was from the beginning."
The message is challenging, radical & strange. It is also rooted in ancient worldviews & conceptions which we sometimes fail to grasp today. But it is "possible, possible"... when we go back to the original comprehension or insight : that is, when we ask ourselves, "why is there something at all, rather than nothing?" When we consider : "What if human consciousness and action, as we know it on this planet, represent a ratio, an analogy, a proportion - ie., a Logos - with a universal Consciousness from which reality proceeds (is given)?"
We could start with the meaning of "Messiah" itself. The root of the messianic phenomenon lies in the character & nature of Yahweh, the High God, the only God, as presented in Hebrew monotheism, the beliefs and practices of Judaism. Two characteristics, it seems to me, distinguish Yahweh from other ancient mythologies of the divine. First, is the monotheistic concentration of all power and benevolence in the one God, a creator-God, apart from whom nothing exists at all. Second, is the active, personal character of Yahweh : as narrated in the Bible, God intervenes in history in a way that can be chronicled. Yahweh is a saving God, coming to rescue the poor and oppressed, raining down judgement on the wicked - in this life, in this world.
This narrative depiction of Yahweh, as an actor in history as well as all-powerful Creator, lays the foundation for the prophetic expectation and reception of a Messiah : one who comes to fulfill all the promises of justice and salvation made by God to Israel (and through Israel, to the world).
And this is the context, I believe, in which we have to build a mental sketch (merely a conjectural hypothesis!) of Jesus's self-understanding : how he himself comprehended his vocation, his mission in life. He believed himself to be the Messiah : the one called upon to fulfill the messianic expectations of the people of Israel. From this original position flows the application of all of his spiritual, intellectual, charismatic and rhetorical gifts, and the expression of decisive moral choices, as he faced up to the consequences of his vocation.
Let's think about this for a moment in a yet wider context. The Jewish "fulfillment of Scripture" in the embodiment - the personhood - of a Messiah shows imperfect parallels with the rhetorical denouements found in other philosophical & religious cultures. Buddhism was embodied by the Buddha. Platonic philosophy culminated (theoretically, as befits Plato) in a "philosopher king" who would implement, in the real world of history, the ethical paradigms of Platonism. Aristotle, Plato's pupil, inculcated a living ruler - Alexander the Great, no less - with the precepts of his own philosophy. What I'm looking at here is what might be (in my admittedly very sketchy and unsystematic review) a general tendency : the expressions of religious world order tend to become personified, embodied, expressed in action by representative figures (ie. the prophet Daniel's messianic "Son of Man").
With this in mind - this sense of Jesus shaping his mission as a messianic fulfillment - perhaps we can appreciate his message itself in greater depth. His message, to put it simply, is that he is opening the door to God. God as the universal, ever-living fulness of an overwhelming love, wisdom & mercy : as the eternal cosmic Mind of creative lovingkindness, out of which all creatures have emerged. Thus, in this vision, we are re-shaped, "reborn", as "children" of this God - children, with Jesus, of his divine "Father". & so we begin to share a new life in this new, divine-human nature. Moreover, Jesus aims to create a community in which "we shall all be one." Through the recognition of our common "creaturehood" - offspring of a divine Mind - we begin to live together according to the precepts of such an understanding - the original Logos, what "was from the beginning."
The message is challenging, radical & strange. It is also rooted in ancient worldviews & conceptions which we sometimes fail to grasp today. But it is "possible, possible"... when we go back to the original comprehension or insight : that is, when we ask ourselves, "why is there something at all, rather than nothing?" When we consider : "What if human consciousness and action, as we know it on this planet, represent a ratio, an analogy, a proportion - ie., a Logos - with a universal Consciousness from which reality proceeds (is given)?"
Jesus Thoughts (4) : Pigeon 40TW194
A blog is an imaginary conversation, & for this reclusive librarian such conversations are important. I like to imagine a bunch of Russians with nothing much to do sitting around a cramped apartment building, doing what they do best, talking. This is not that. My "Jesus thoughts", in comparison to more formal kinds of rhetoric (speeches, articles, academic papers), may be just a jumble of meandering undigested opinion-babble... but it's not formal in those professional ways, and isn't meant to be : it's just me talking, relating what's crossed my mind as I walked in to work this morning. Just keep visualizing that kitchen table, all right?
The brilliant pre-Renaissance thinker Nicolas Cusanus outlined how we inhabit a "conjectural world" - a human world constructed out of our conjectures about the truth. So I'm just sharing my own conjectures. I'd like to emulate that street vendor, the "carver of spoons", in one of Cusanus's dialogues, who reveals more wisdom than do his interlocutors, trained academicians.
In a NY Times article today (11.2.12), Alan Cowell reports the discovery of the bones of an heroic WW 2 "special agent" carrier pigeon, found in a chimney near Bletchley Park (site of British secret code-breaking during the war). The coded message, folded into a tiny red capsule attached to the pigeon's leg, has been sent to Britain's top-secret GCHQ intelligence office, for de-coding.
Thinking about this on the way to work, I received a slightly different signal from Pigeon 40TW194. The pigeon with the coded message, lost during the war after dying in a chimney, reminded me of the Logos (the word, the meaning, the order, the code) descending from heaven "in the form of a dove", and resting on the Messiah, the "Anointed", as he was baptized by John in the river Jordan. Consider a structuring code, a pre-existing Logos, framing the cosmos, delivered to Jesus, and through Jesus, absorbed into the Pentecostal "body of Christ" - the church : represented in the NT as the day of Pentecost, when the disciples, gathered in a "high room" in Antioch after Jesus's ascension, are suddenly filled with the fire of the Holy Ghost, and begin speaking and understanding each other multi-lingually, in a host of different languages. Here is the narrative representation of a prime moment - the global "decoding" of the signal.
I'm well aware that the message I'm delivering is just a far-fetched metaphor (Pigeon 40TW194 to Holy Ghost) - a symbol, a conjecture. But I like it.
p.s. In truth, my own poetry is heavily filtered through bird-signals. The entire plot of the massive long poem Forth of July is triggered by a mysterious Bluejay, yodeling in a backyard dogwood tree.
The brilliant pre-Renaissance thinker Nicolas Cusanus outlined how we inhabit a "conjectural world" - a human world constructed out of our conjectures about the truth. So I'm just sharing my own conjectures. I'd like to emulate that street vendor, the "carver of spoons", in one of Cusanus's dialogues, who reveals more wisdom than do his interlocutors, trained academicians.
In a NY Times article today (11.2.12), Alan Cowell reports the discovery of the bones of an heroic WW 2 "special agent" carrier pigeon, found in a chimney near Bletchley Park (site of British secret code-breaking during the war). The coded message, folded into a tiny red capsule attached to the pigeon's leg, has been sent to Britain's top-secret GCHQ intelligence office, for de-coding.
Thinking about this on the way to work, I received a slightly different signal from Pigeon 40TW194. The pigeon with the coded message, lost during the war after dying in a chimney, reminded me of the Logos (the word, the meaning, the order, the code) descending from heaven "in the form of a dove", and resting on the Messiah, the "Anointed", as he was baptized by John in the river Jordan. Consider a structuring code, a pre-existing Logos, framing the cosmos, delivered to Jesus, and through Jesus, absorbed into the Pentecostal "body of Christ" - the church : represented in the NT as the day of Pentecost, when the disciples, gathered in a "high room" in Antioch after Jesus's ascension, are suddenly filled with the fire of the Holy Ghost, and begin speaking and understanding each other multi-lingually, in a host of different languages. Here is the narrative representation of a prime moment - the global "decoding" of the signal.
I'm well aware that the message I'm delivering is just a far-fetched metaphor (Pigeon 40TW194 to Holy Ghost) - a symbol, a conjecture. But I like it.
p.s. In truth, my own poetry is heavily filtered through bird-signals. The entire plot of the massive long poem Forth of July is triggered by a mysterious Bluejay, yodeling in a backyard dogwood tree.
11.01.2012
Jesus Thoughts (3) : Day of the Dead
Halloween. Day of the Dead. Strange carnival abolishing time & space, life & death, the living, the undead - by way of twilight parades of kids en masque, costumes from other times, other planets. Thinking as I walked home from work today of T.S. Eliot's line from Four Quartets : "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." & of the famous phrase of Pascal : "Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'affraie." (The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.)
These came to mind today as I had been pondering (& bloggifying) the riddle of resurrection. If there are countless earth-like planets out there, circuiting a zillion stars - and even if, as Giordano Bruno speculated, God has sent his cosmic "Son" in some fashion to redeem those myriad worlds - still, on the Day of the Dead, that infinity, that vastness, can project a melancholy image : chill the bones a little, when we think of all that space as a theater of final separation from everyone we love & keep near.
Yet there is something bracing in the effort to imagine that daunting "very much reality". Jeffrey Schnapp, in his book on Dante (The transfiguration of history at the center of Dante's Paradise), describes how Justinian's architects laid out the mosaics in the Ravenna church at St. Apollinare in Classe - & how Dante figured their design in his Paradiso. Over the image of the martyr-saint (Apollinare) hovers a tremendous cross-in-circle, composed of 99 stars, with a small face of Christ at its center : representing both the resurrection-body of Christ - prefigured in the Gospel narrative of the Transfiguration - and the eschatological "sign of the Son of Man" which was to appear in the heavens at the Day of Judgement. In the church, the sacrament of the Eucharist, performed at the altar over the fragmentary relics of the saint, enacts a communion of transfigurement : the body of Christ becomes bread and wine, becomes the collective Body of Christ (the Church itself, the "communion of saints"), and finally becomes the unimaginable "resurrection-body", when "in the twinkling of an eye, we shall all be changed" (St. Paul).
& when we circle back to the logical foundation-stones of this "Way", which I sketched very casually in the first section of this thread - that is, when we keep in mind the concept of God's creative Mind & Being as the origin of the universe which we inhabit (as in a dream) - then suddenly the idea of death's finality, the threat of remote separation from those we love - is modified. We recognize the limitations of our human vision : we acknowledge the brevity & fragility of our lives within the framework of eternity & infinite space : in an almost Buddhist or Hindu or Zen state of mind, we behold the road of infinite experience stretching out before the soul. But most of all, we sense, in the love-beauty-joy that we have actually experienced in this world (somehow manifested out of nothing at all) - we sense a promise of future happiness, we feel the warmth, the smile of a cosmic victory hidden within the suffering at hand. (Relativity & quantum physics have begun to alter our sense of mystery in this regard : things are seldom what they seem. What seems infinitely remote may actually be too close to perceive; what we thought was matter might actually be mind; life might indeed be more like Poe's "dream within a dream" - to quote a well-known Halloween author).
It's intriguing to remember that behind the stodgy old stone walls of ancient churches, people are gathering for a rite of communion which is indeed a kind of pantomime, a mystery play, representing the transfiguration of the "body of death" (the body we know so well) into the body of Christ - the holy fellowship of spiritual glee : that is, the grace of an intellectual perception of shared life beyond death, when "Death itself shall die" : and then "Death, where is thy sting?" And "Death is swallowed up in victory."
Here's a Halloween poem I wrote years ago, which glances at some of these things :
These came to mind today as I had been pondering (& bloggifying) the riddle of resurrection. If there are countless earth-like planets out there, circuiting a zillion stars - and even if, as Giordano Bruno speculated, God has sent his cosmic "Son" in some fashion to redeem those myriad worlds - still, on the Day of the Dead, that infinity, that vastness, can project a melancholy image : chill the bones a little, when we think of all that space as a theater of final separation from everyone we love & keep near.
Yet there is something bracing in the effort to imagine that daunting "very much reality". Jeffrey Schnapp, in his book on Dante (The transfiguration of history at the center of Dante's Paradise), describes how Justinian's architects laid out the mosaics in the Ravenna church at St. Apollinare in Classe - & how Dante figured their design in his Paradiso. Over the image of the martyr-saint (Apollinare) hovers a tremendous cross-in-circle, composed of 99 stars, with a small face of Christ at its center : representing both the resurrection-body of Christ - prefigured in the Gospel narrative of the Transfiguration - and the eschatological "sign of the Son of Man" which was to appear in the heavens at the Day of Judgement. In the church, the sacrament of the Eucharist, performed at the altar over the fragmentary relics of the saint, enacts a communion of transfigurement : the body of Christ becomes bread and wine, becomes the collective Body of Christ (the Church itself, the "communion of saints"), and finally becomes the unimaginable "resurrection-body", when "in the twinkling of an eye, we shall all be changed" (St. Paul).
& when we circle back to the logical foundation-stones of this "Way", which I sketched very casually in the first section of this thread - that is, when we keep in mind the concept of God's creative Mind & Being as the origin of the universe which we inhabit (as in a dream) - then suddenly the idea of death's finality, the threat of remote separation from those we love - is modified. We recognize the limitations of our human vision : we acknowledge the brevity & fragility of our lives within the framework of eternity & infinite space : in an almost Buddhist or Hindu or Zen state of mind, we behold the road of infinite experience stretching out before the soul. But most of all, we sense, in the love-beauty-joy that we have actually experienced in this world (somehow manifested out of nothing at all) - we sense a promise of future happiness, we feel the warmth, the smile of a cosmic victory hidden within the suffering at hand. (Relativity & quantum physics have begun to alter our sense of mystery in this regard : things are seldom what they seem. What seems infinitely remote may actually be too close to perceive; what we thought was matter might actually be mind; life might indeed be more like Poe's "dream within a dream" - to quote a well-known Halloween author).
It's intriguing to remember that behind the stodgy old stone walls of ancient churches, people are gathering for a rite of communion which is indeed a kind of pantomime, a mystery play, representing the transfiguration of the "body of death" (the body we know so well) into the body of Christ - the holy fellowship of spiritual glee : that is, the grace of an intellectual perception of shared life beyond death, when "Death itself shall die" : and then "Death, where is thy sting?" And "Death is swallowed up in victory."
Here's a Halloween poem I wrote years ago, which glances at some of these things :
Halloween. The sun’s already down. Everywhere leaves are gathering, lightly rustling and shivering, their ruddy bloom already fading, the sun’s dry wine drunk to the dregs. The neighborhood grows anonymous. Soon the small ghosts will appear, flickering and half–transparent under the streetlights, costumed for space travel, or the Middle Ages. This is that ancient harvest night. Harvest of time, harvest of souls. Tonight the years are buried quietly under a shroud of old leaves, and I am a child too, standing at the door.
Jesus Thoughts (2) : footnotes & leaves
John Meier (in The Marginal Jew) makes a convincing case that the siblings of Jesus mentioned in the Gospels really were his siblings (or half-siblings), rather than his "cousins", as has sometimes been claimed.
In which case, I suppose it's quite possible (likely?) that descendants of these siblings are alive & with us on earth today.
*
Jesus appears to have at times referred to himself as "the Son of Man". This is a phrase from the OT Book of Daniel, for the apocalyptic Messiah-figure Daniel sees in a vision. But to my ears it also has connotations of "Everyman". Thus Jesus is presenting himself and his fate as representative of the fate of each man and woman. This chimes with the later theological notion that God has imprinted his signs, his signature, all across nature. & it reminds me of Joyce's idiosyncratic, anti-clerical fashioning of reality in Ulysses : of the layers of symbolic echoes joining every element in linked scales of meaning; of Stephen Dedalus, reading the "signatures" in things; of the pivotal encounter in the late-night bus station between the two male protagonists, Bloom & Stephen, with its Biblical echoes of grieving father & prodigal son.
If the natural and human worlds radiate these parabolic signatures of the Son of Man, then we are all caught up in a sort of cosmic mystery play of life, death, eternity. Jesus, the "woodworker", starts out life in Nazareth as the "son of the woodworker", fashioning wood : he ends life fastened to the cosmic Tree at the matrix of all things.
The other day I was sitting on a bench at Prospect Park, on my lunch break. Beside me I found a little curled maple leaf, its reds and yellows fading into brown; it reminded me of an old piece of parchment. The red-brown veins branching through the leaf spread like a microcosm of the tree the leaf had fallen from, or like a dark brown microcosmic river. I thought about autumn, and Halloween, and the mortality of all physical things... I thought about the mystery play of Resurrection, & the role of the hero Jesus plays there.
These are not original ideas, obviously. But I find them curiously generative... might lead to something more distinctive here someday.
In which case, I suppose it's quite possible (likely?) that descendants of these siblings are alive & with us on earth today.
*
Jesus appears to have at times referred to himself as "the Son of Man". This is a phrase from the OT Book of Daniel, for the apocalyptic Messiah-figure Daniel sees in a vision. But to my ears it also has connotations of "Everyman". Thus Jesus is presenting himself and his fate as representative of the fate of each man and woman. This chimes with the later theological notion that God has imprinted his signs, his signature, all across nature. & it reminds me of Joyce's idiosyncratic, anti-clerical fashioning of reality in Ulysses : of the layers of symbolic echoes joining every element in linked scales of meaning; of Stephen Dedalus, reading the "signatures" in things; of the pivotal encounter in the late-night bus station between the two male protagonists, Bloom & Stephen, with its Biblical echoes of grieving father & prodigal son.
If the natural and human worlds radiate these parabolic signatures of the Son of Man, then we are all caught up in a sort of cosmic mystery play of life, death, eternity. Jesus, the "woodworker", starts out life in Nazareth as the "son of the woodworker", fashioning wood : he ends life fastened to the cosmic Tree at the matrix of all things.
The other day I was sitting on a bench at Prospect Park, on my lunch break. Beside me I found a little curled maple leaf, its reds and yellows fading into brown; it reminded me of an old piece of parchment. The red-brown veins branching through the leaf spread like a microcosm of the tree the leaf had fallen from, or like a dark brown microcosmic river. I thought about autumn, and Halloween, and the mortality of all physical things... I thought about the mystery play of Resurrection, & the role of the hero Jesus plays there.
These are not original ideas, obviously. But I find them curiously generative... might lead to something more distinctive here someday.
Jesus Thoughts (1) : 1st things
First things first. First of all, dear reader, please keep in mind : this is a blog. An informal space for notations. Scribbled on the fly, extemporaneous, incomplete - in the narrow spaces between work assignments, or in the late hours, after work & everything else. It's not going to be elegant or highly organized, I promise.
First things first. Religion, needless to say, sustains a moral dimension - a demand for personal commitment, self-sacrifice, existential change. If it were only a matter of words, of comfortable speculations, it would obviously not carry much weight. I'm a sub-librarian, in an academic library: the dangers of tweedy detachment and abstraction are real. Possibly I've already dropped irrevocably into the pit of effeteness, complacency. You, the reader, will have to be the judge in that regard. Beware.
First things first. In my own experience, to think about Jesus, God, & Christianity, is to gaze into a deep - maybe infinite - well of mystery. "Food for thought", yes... an endless supply. I walk to work in the morning, thinking perhaps Vermont has thrown itself together (to paraphrase Stevens) - that I've seen the truth, that I have a foothold, a slight grasp : only to be pulled up short again by an equally-strong sense of uncertainty - of hiddenness (especially re: the resurrection).
But then, on the other hand, I do admit to having felt something like Poe's Eureka-thrill... Eureka! I have found it! If I hadn't, I wouldn't be bothering with even this rough draft of preliminaries.
First things first. We map reality - a synthesis of imagination and experience. And then we interpret and refine our maps. The map of ancient religion, the worldview of ancient humanity, begins with God. The existence of God, on this particular map, means that reality in toto is rooted in a creative, ordering consciousness. Let's call it (rough sketch) "God the Father, the Mother, the Origin, the Source". We can't understand Jesus without first recognizing this founding "principle". Nor can we begin to comprehend Jesus without knowing something about the matrix of Judaism in which he lived : a culture and faith which was, and is, motivated and devoted to this universal God.
Jesus' mission - to put it in the most reductive nutshell possible - was to proclaim and celebrate the personal, mysterious, loving presence of this God - the Father, the Parent, of whom he was (& is) the Child, the human Son, the Image. Jesus was an ecstatic, dynamic, eloquent and charismatic teacher, healer and leader, all in one (think Martin Luther King and his impact for a partial contemporary analogy). And what was the core of his message? That through himself - Jesus - this God was revealing himself and entering the space of human history, in order to bring all of humanity into the Family whose original is metaphysical, cosmic, and paradisal.
Thus Jesus calls himself the Way, the Door, the Gate. As the looked-for prophetic Messiah, he represented God's "seal" upon human history. As the Messiah, he played the hero, and walked through Death : in the process leading the rest of us into the presence/comprehension/awareness of life and consciousness beyond time & death. The recognition of this metaphysical dimension of "eternal life" was not offered as a means to a detachment from mortal, ordinary, earthly life (as the Gnostics and Stoics proposed) : but to reconcile and balance the material and spiritual, the physical and the metaphysical, time and eternity, soul and body. In such a balance, rooted in vision, each person, and humanity as a whole, can be redirected toward rightness (justice), joy, hope, and peace.
First things first. I'm laying out some basic elements, foundations. No doubt you've heard them before. But to start with the basics might lead further....
First things first. Religion, needless to say, sustains a moral dimension - a demand for personal commitment, self-sacrifice, existential change. If it were only a matter of words, of comfortable speculations, it would obviously not carry much weight. I'm a sub-librarian, in an academic library: the dangers of tweedy detachment and abstraction are real. Possibly I've already dropped irrevocably into the pit of effeteness, complacency. You, the reader, will have to be the judge in that regard. Beware.
First things first. In my own experience, to think about Jesus, God, & Christianity, is to gaze into a deep - maybe infinite - well of mystery. "Food for thought", yes... an endless supply. I walk to work in the morning, thinking perhaps Vermont has thrown itself together (to paraphrase Stevens) - that I've seen the truth, that I have a foothold, a slight grasp : only to be pulled up short again by an equally-strong sense of uncertainty - of hiddenness (especially re: the resurrection).
But then, on the other hand, I do admit to having felt something like Poe's Eureka-thrill... Eureka! I have found it! If I hadn't, I wouldn't be bothering with even this rough draft of preliminaries.
First things first. We map reality - a synthesis of imagination and experience. And then we interpret and refine our maps. The map of ancient religion, the worldview of ancient humanity, begins with God. The existence of God, on this particular map, means that reality in toto is rooted in a creative, ordering consciousness. Let's call it (rough sketch) "God the Father, the Mother, the Origin, the Source". We can't understand Jesus without first recognizing this founding "principle". Nor can we begin to comprehend Jesus without knowing something about the matrix of Judaism in which he lived : a culture and faith which was, and is, motivated and devoted to this universal God.
Jesus' mission - to put it in the most reductive nutshell possible - was to proclaim and celebrate the personal, mysterious, loving presence of this God - the Father, the Parent, of whom he was (& is) the Child, the human Son, the Image. Jesus was an ecstatic, dynamic, eloquent and charismatic teacher, healer and leader, all in one (think Martin Luther King and his impact for a partial contemporary analogy). And what was the core of his message? That through himself - Jesus - this God was revealing himself and entering the space of human history, in order to bring all of humanity into the Family whose original is metaphysical, cosmic, and paradisal.
Thus Jesus calls himself the Way, the Door, the Gate. As the looked-for prophetic Messiah, he represented God's "seal" upon human history. As the Messiah, he played the hero, and walked through Death : in the process leading the rest of us into the presence/comprehension/awareness of life and consciousness beyond time & death. The recognition of this metaphysical dimension of "eternal life" was not offered as a means to a detachment from mortal, ordinary, earthly life (as the Gnostics and Stoics proposed) : but to reconcile and balance the material and spiritual, the physical and the metaphysical, time and eternity, soul and body. In such a balance, rooted in vision, each person, and humanity as a whole, can be redirected toward rightness (justice), joy, hope, and peace.
First things first. I'm laying out some basic elements, foundations. No doubt you've heard them before. But to start with the basics might lead further....
Jesus Thoughts (prologue)
Today is All Souls' Day (with emphasis on ALL Souls) - old Christian holiday, & perhaps a seasonal festival too, back in prehistory. So maybe it's a good day for this particular wayward soul to start a new thread on HG Poetics. Can't promise it will continue, but I hope so.
Am reading 1st volume of John Meier's 4-vol magnum opus, A Marginal Jew - in this layperson's opinion, the place to start for anyone interested in learning more about that Jesus fellow who intervened in something so serious and ponderous as Human History.
I can identify with the title somewhat, when I mope about my status as a marginalized American poète maudit. But let's not mope. When I look back on my life, I see several often snarled patterns : 1) an artistic bent; 2) a boy's fascination with heroism, glory, history; 3) a tendency to ponder philosophical/existential/metaphysical conundrums; 4) an upbringing shaped by parents and grandparents who participated in American "mainstream" Christianity (in my case, Episcopalian).
The combination of these four tendencies - and added to them, 1) a turn to poetry, and 2) an adolescent psychological crisis, a near-breakdown, an "extreme" response to BOTH Shakespeare and the Bible simultaneously - offers background for a longtime focus on the nexus of poetry, religion, history. For example, in the last 20 years I've written several long poems with an historical, "epic" dimension. Part of my motive there involves a resistance to other long poems, a desire to revise or rewrite them. And what is the source of this resistance? My own worldview, my own "inspiration", calls for a different world-picture. Meier's work helps me right now in this respect.
What I'd like to do, and hope to accomplish, in this thread , is to reflect further on that historical-theological (and poetic) sense of things. So we'll see if I can manage to do that.
Am reading 1st volume of John Meier's 4-vol magnum opus, A Marginal Jew - in this layperson's opinion, the place to start for anyone interested in learning more about that Jesus fellow who intervened in something so serious and ponderous as Human History.
I can identify with the title somewhat, when I mope about my status as a marginalized American poète maudit. But let's not mope. When I look back on my life, I see several often snarled patterns : 1) an artistic bent; 2) a boy's fascination with heroism, glory, history; 3) a tendency to ponder philosophical/existential/metaphysical conundrums; 4) an upbringing shaped by parents and grandparents who participated in American "mainstream" Christianity (in my case, Episcopalian).
The combination of these four tendencies - and added to them, 1) a turn to poetry, and 2) an adolescent psychological crisis, a near-breakdown, an "extreme" response to BOTH Shakespeare and the Bible simultaneously - offers background for a longtime focus on the nexus of poetry, religion, history. For example, in the last 20 years I've written several long poems with an historical, "epic" dimension. Part of my motive there involves a resistance to other long poems, a desire to revise or rewrite them. And what is the source of this resistance? My own worldview, my own "inspiration", calls for a different world-picture. Meier's work helps me right now in this respect.
What I'd like to do, and hope to accomplish, in this thread , is to reflect further on that historical-theological (and poetic) sense of things. So we'll see if I can manage to do that.
10.29.2012
10.17.2012
after reading Apollinaire
This was the first poem in a chapbook published in 1972 by the Brown Univ. Literary Board, featuring the winners in fiction & poetry of the 1st annual Charles Philbrick Award (Henry Gould & James Morgan).
*
FOR MARCH 28 NINETEEN 71
(after reading Apollinaire)
I made this notebook thoughtlessly
out of marks that separate me
from what my feet touch
though it bakes my eyes
each morning leaving a room
I find a lot of people without shoes
are whistling down the street
without caring about stars or dark bowls
a girl's hair beckons the evening on
in the warm air the first fly of spring
drones about my face looking for summer
short-legged people with winter hats
glance at the sun and bounce off the sidewalk
my back to a warm wall
I know how silence defeats love
leaning like an old man
against a warm day like this
*
FOR MARCH 28 NINETEEN 71
(after reading Apollinaire)
I made this notebook thoughtlessly
out of marks that separate me
from what my feet touch
though it bakes my eyes
each morning leaving a room
I find a lot of people without shoes
are whistling down the street
without caring about stars or dark bowls
a girl's hair beckons the evening on
in the warm air the first fly of spring
drones about my face looking for summer
short-legged people with winter hats
glance at the sun and bounce off the sidewalk
my back to a warm wall
I know how silence defeats love
leaning like an old man
against a warm day like this
9.03.2012
remembering Edwin Honig
Edwin Honig was born Sept. 3 (Labor Day) in 1919. He'd be 93 today. I remember being at a wine & cheese thing after a poetry reading, sometime in the early 70s, when I was a freshman or sophomore at Brown. I had just read Edwin's long poem "Four Springs", and I said to him that this closing passage reminded me of John Donne's poem "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" ("O more than moon, draw not up tears,
to drown me in thy sphere...")
Edwin looked at me, & smiled, & said "You're making my hair stand on end."
13.
My heart is a love that I like and dislike a bit more,
a bit less, than a friend.
It turns like a world half-known that is huge and cold
as the moon still-a-moon,
And you don't remember me, it says, because
I've always been there.
You bear with me as you would with a parent you care for
more the less that you see,
the longer you live to remember as younger
than you are now.
Oh world, my heart, as you live and sleep, remember me
less and less,
but bear with me to wake to the stars and the moons
always there to land on
in dreams when the earth, grand mother-father of life,
is no longer there.
8.31.2012
8.27.2012
8.26.2012
8.24.2012
Talkin' Henry Blues #1
One of the big watersheds in American poetry of the last 100 years : the shift in the late 50s, by several major poets, from traditional high style, to free verse and a more informal diction. Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, James Wright come to mind. Maybe this was a second wave, since in the early decades of that century there had been a kind of double movement - first, the rise of vers libre and imagism (spearheaded by Harriet Monroe and her Poetry magazine), and second, Eliot's and Pound's complicated and influential reaction (both with & against) that trend. In the 20th century several contradictory crosscurrents of style were set in motion, causing trouble for partisan critics of one stream or another, since the poets' models and aims were so various and distinct.
The liberation of poetry from traditional prosody allowed for a great influx of new subject-matter, expanded ranges of diction and vocabulary; it brought to the fore all kinds of "prose virtues" (directness, simplicity, precision, clarity, etc.). What it also did was give an advantage to poets whose strength lay in invention : I mean the ability to invent new and fantastic scenarios, plots, and impressions with wit, satire, humor, journalistic immediacy, or fanciful inversions of ordinary experience. This capability - to evoke clever imaginary scenes - went a long way to make up for a thinning-out of the more traditional music of poetry (sonority, resonance, rhythm, rhetorical ebb & flow).
When I look back at my own stylistic models, choices & directions taken over the last half-century or so, it strikes me that one common thread joining my early love for the NY School and Ashbery, with my later fascination with Mandelstam and the Acmeist poets - and tied in as well with my affection for some aspects of Hart Crane, Berryman, Pound - is a distaste for prosaic direct statements, testimonies and observations. Not so much in themselves - I'm in favor of directness and simplicity in prose and ordinary conversation! - but in poetry. There is something one-dimensional about talky, flat, prosaic poems, which almost always puts me off. Does this make me an elitist, an aesthete, a reactionary, a traditionalist? I don't think so (just read my poems). The prosy poets make a claim for commonality, for egalitarian engagement : but I find the stance proves in the end to be mostly parochial and narcissistic.
There's a strong current in American poetry which resists the prosaic by an ascetic paring-down, a further simplification, in the interest of sharp observation, pithy statement. I admire these poets. I think I do retain a streak of midwestern reserve and understatement, which comes out in at least some of my writing. I like much in this vein, but I think it's not for me. I'm too interested in the resonance which comes from multiple layers of meaning, allegory, allusion; I'm too taken with the musicality of obscure images, their emotional freight.
The liberation of poetry from traditional prosody allowed for a great influx of new subject-matter, expanded ranges of diction and vocabulary; it brought to the fore all kinds of "prose virtues" (directness, simplicity, precision, clarity, etc.). What it also did was give an advantage to poets whose strength lay in invention : I mean the ability to invent new and fantastic scenarios, plots, and impressions with wit, satire, humor, journalistic immediacy, or fanciful inversions of ordinary experience. This capability - to evoke clever imaginary scenes - went a long way to make up for a thinning-out of the more traditional music of poetry (sonority, resonance, rhythm, rhetorical ebb & flow).
When I look back at my own stylistic models, choices & directions taken over the last half-century or so, it strikes me that one common thread joining my early love for the NY School and Ashbery, with my later fascination with Mandelstam and the Acmeist poets - and tied in as well with my affection for some aspects of Hart Crane, Berryman, Pound - is a distaste for prosaic direct statements, testimonies and observations. Not so much in themselves - I'm in favor of directness and simplicity in prose and ordinary conversation! - but in poetry. There is something one-dimensional about talky, flat, prosaic poems, which almost always puts me off. Does this make me an elitist, an aesthete, a reactionary, a traditionalist? I don't think so (just read my poems). The prosy poets make a claim for commonality, for egalitarian engagement : but I find the stance proves in the end to be mostly parochial and narcissistic.
There's a strong current in American poetry which resists the prosaic by an ascetic paring-down, a further simplification, in the interest of sharp observation, pithy statement. I admire these poets. I think I do retain a streak of midwestern reserve and understatement, which comes out in at least some of my writing. I like much in this vein, but I think it's not for me. I'm too interested in the resonance which comes from multiple layers of meaning, allegory, allusion; I'm too taken with the musicality of obscure images, their emotional freight.
8.03.2012
7.21.2012
Rancho Lazy-L
Lanthanum. The design of this long, long poem is like the letter "L" laid on its back. For 3/4ths of the way it pokes along, slow & repetitive, sleepy... & then finally it stands up! Like lazy Hobo, or Lazarus in his grave - a lazy Rus. Like a Mississippi river-barge, or Mandelstam's "Egyptian bark of the dead."
Or Lanthanum is like a still gray clam, rather dull on the outside... which finally produces a pearl. You have to be patient & willing to listen as it goes along - a very quiet turtle (or turtle-dove) song.
The numerical design of this poem is rather intricate and symbolic - something like a wheel. But I will leave that for others to figure out....
Or Lanthanum is like a still gray clam, rather dull on the outside... which finally produces a pearl. You have to be patient & willing to listen as it goes along - a very quiet turtle (or turtle-dove) song.
The numerical design of this poem is rather intricate and symbolic - something like a wheel. But I will leave that for others to figure out....
7.19.2012
poetry continuum
Next project may be some kind of essay, responding to the discussion around Marjorie Perloff's article on the Conceptual poets, and Matvei Yankelevich's response, & so on. The effort to inject Russian avant-garde/Futurist/Formalist models and theories into the American milieu has a pretty long history. The Language Poets expressed an affinity for same. Perloff's critical formulae have an oddly recherche quality, and Yankelevich echoes that to some extent : they both set up the personal MFA-workshop lyric as the great stumbling-block to literary advance, the middle-brow bourgeois anti-intellectual mainstream conventionality which must be demolished and overcome.
I have an ongoing, longstanding problem with this maneuver... I remember arguing about it often on the Buffalo Poetics list back in the 90s. My problem is that I identify with the contrasting poetics and worldview of the Russian Acmeists. Of course there were crossovers and overlaps and collaborations between these two (or three or four) tendencies in 20th-cent Russian poetry - yet the basic contrast is there. And I'm repeatedly impelled to try to articulate it, to re-draw that line. For me it gets to the character of one's most basic sense of what the art of poetry is, is for.
Is art, is poetry, a radical detachment from experience - a permanent "making strange"? Are the roots of art in the alienation effect - of consciousness detached from unthinking life? This it seems to me is a fundamental article of faith among the modernist and postmodern avant-garde. Even the efforts of Dada and similar movements to disintegrate the special status of the art object, to merge art with everyday life, seem to be rooted in an act of disjunction : of shock, of breakage. The avant-garde seems tinged with violence at its core. The Futurists' concept of "the word as such" really means the word uprooted from its origins in the whole continuum of a language (the history of words, of syntax, of rhetoric, of representation, of dialect... and of meaning). Words were to be treated as things : not living things, but material - in other words, available (in an ethical sense) for artistic manipulation by force.
The Acmeists' shared sense of their vocation (I mean Gumilev, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, primarily) and of the nature of poetry is strikingly different. The best word I can think of to describe this attitude is "continuum". The "word as such" - for Gumilev, for example - is God. Such an equation implies the whole panorama of Western cultural history. The word - words - exist in a continuum : of speech, of sentences, of philology, of cultural history, of time, of theology... and of past poets and poetry. You cannot tear off a piece of language by violence without harming the continuum. As Mandelstam put it : "the Word is bread and suffering".
As I see it, this is a fundamentally "incarnational" concept of poetry. We don't know words as detached self-sufficient entities : words are inflected and shaded by their presence in the poems of the past. Words have a history in flesh and blood, and continue to appear there, in the matrix of human conflict and strife : not as instigators of more shock and violence, but as avenues for mediation and reconciliation (peacemaking, healing).
I think there's a mystical dimension to all this. In the Acmeist sense of the "word as such", an aesthetic equilibrium arises which is really rooted in the unity of experience and representation, of intellect and sense, of word and flesh. Union, oneness, harmony. This is something I hope to explore more fully in another essay.
I have an ongoing, longstanding problem with this maneuver... I remember arguing about it often on the Buffalo Poetics list back in the 90s. My problem is that I identify with the contrasting poetics and worldview of the Russian Acmeists. Of course there were crossovers and overlaps and collaborations between these two (or three or four) tendencies in 20th-cent Russian poetry - yet the basic contrast is there. And I'm repeatedly impelled to try to articulate it, to re-draw that line. For me it gets to the character of one's most basic sense of what the art of poetry is, is for.
Is art, is poetry, a radical detachment from experience - a permanent "making strange"? Are the roots of art in the alienation effect - of consciousness detached from unthinking life? This it seems to me is a fundamental article of faith among the modernist and postmodern avant-garde. Even the efforts of Dada and similar movements to disintegrate the special status of the art object, to merge art with everyday life, seem to be rooted in an act of disjunction : of shock, of breakage. The avant-garde seems tinged with violence at its core. The Futurists' concept of "the word as such" really means the word uprooted from its origins in the whole continuum of a language (the history of words, of syntax, of rhetoric, of representation, of dialect... and of meaning). Words were to be treated as things : not living things, but material - in other words, available (in an ethical sense) for artistic manipulation by force.
The Acmeists' shared sense of their vocation (I mean Gumilev, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, primarily) and of the nature of poetry is strikingly different. The best word I can think of to describe this attitude is "continuum". The "word as such" - for Gumilev, for example - is God. Such an equation implies the whole panorama of Western cultural history. The word - words - exist in a continuum : of speech, of sentences, of philology, of cultural history, of time, of theology... and of past poets and poetry. You cannot tear off a piece of language by violence without harming the continuum. As Mandelstam put it : "the Word is bread and suffering".
As I see it, this is a fundamentally "incarnational" concept of poetry. We don't know words as detached self-sufficient entities : words are inflected and shaded by their presence in the poems of the past. Words have a history in flesh and blood, and continue to appear there, in the matrix of human conflict and strife : not as instigators of more shock and violence, but as avenues for mediation and reconciliation (peacemaking, healing).
I think there's a mystical dimension to all this. In the Acmeist sense of the "word as such", an aesthetic equilibrium arises which is really rooted in the unity of experience and representation, of intellect and sense, of word and flesh. Union, oneness, harmony. This is something I hope to explore more fully in another essay.
7.12.2012
Why I am a Russian poet
COSMIC LOCAL POETRY
Brown Univ. Bookstore,
Providence, RI. July 18, 2012
Stuart and I are here today as part of the Bookstore’s Local
Authors series. And we are local authors – very local. But we’re involved with something global,
even universal. Poetry is a world endeavor,
and we are caught up in that, each in our own way. For my part, I consider myself a sort of Russian from Minneapolis. I’ve been inspired by a group of poets based
in St. Petersburg around 1910, who called themselves Acmeists : Gumilev, Akhmatova,
Mandelstam. Mandelstam defined Acmeism
as “nostalgia for world culture”. This
is a concise summary of their sense of poetry as an enterprise in building
civilization, and as poetry as a global, trans-historical continuum, a
tradition stretching back into prehistory.
Orpheus, legendary ur-poet
of Greece, was priest of Apollo, god of music and medicine : a pairing which
suggests that art and song are about healing.
For the Greeks, this meant a restoration of health and balance through reason,
justice, clarity, wisdom. Orpheus,
Apollo’s representative, fell victim to the frenzy of the cult of Dionysius : the
music of the word was sacrificed to the fury of desire amputated from understanding. Poetry appears at the edge of this polarity,
between mind and sense, intellect and feeling, consciousness and dream. The Acmeists looked to their national poet,
Pushkin, as embodying such an equipoise – at the cusp between alternating waves
of neo-classicism and romanticism.
Mandelstam wrote : “Classicism is revolution.” This had a special implication in the context
of revolutionary 1920s Russia. The
Acmeists were seeking a paradigm, within art, for the sanity and equilibrium –
the “nostalgia for world culture” – which they recognized in the poetry of the
ancient world. The Roman poet Virgil was
searching for such balance in his own day.
His Georgics, ostensibly an
agricultural manual in verse, was really a meditation on a world which had
fallen from a Golden Age of rural peace, into an Iron Age of violence and war. The “audacity of the poet”, as Virgil put it,
was to re-imagine that Golden Age, by way of an all-embracing pity : compassion for a world oppressed
by the rule of brutality, force and chaos.
This is the fundamental Apollonian vocation : through imagination and
song, to bring mankind, us, back to our senses – our intuition of profound justice
and harmony. This is the inner meaning
of Mandelstam’s “nostalgia for world culture” : he thought of Classicism in
this sense as the future.
To my mind, these ideas bring us back to the local, as well :
for here we are, in Providence : we are Providence poets. Providence, to Roger Williams, the city’s
founder, is a theological term, closely bound up with the RI state motto : Hope.
Providence signifies a cosmic plan : the Master Architect’s (or
Musician’s) intention to restore all things to their original well-being. Note how the meaning of this word resonates
with Virgil’s, and the Acmeists’, sense of the poet’s vocation.
Today we are awash in aggressive discourses, a feverish
babble of new technological means and motives.
Many today would advance the image of the poet as master communicator : rock
star, rapper, stand-up comedian, celebrity, social spokesperson, political
activist, promoter of recondite ideologies.
But I think the most basic stance of the poet is as listener. Dante wrote, “Love
speaks, and I follow after, noting down her words like a scribe.” The poet listens to a mute song : the whisper
of conscience, the music of understanding.
And this means that we are all poets here – Stuart and I and each of
you, who are also listening.
7.03.2012
Lanthanum 12.23
23
...nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on,
and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of men then
living, but... reached forward... seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon...
– Abraham Lincoln (Aug. 17, 1858)
Your birthday tomorrow, Grandma born
on the 4th of July, 1900 far off there in
Sunset Land I’m thinking of you & of
Great-Grandma J. 2-wheeler captain’s
daughter Jessie O. Ophelia the river-girl
now at the end of this milk-train rainbow
way back in summertime prairiespace O
Jessie, little tree I hear that lonesome horn
wail my old St. Anthony trystle-humlet
suspended 7th plunged into black earth
a shiny hinter-horn of milky lanthanum
(dawn-anthem) & Amaranthousa sets
her Pocahontaseal a Morning Star some
menorah-constellatio over 50 more their
hard-earned stripes a chord (accord) for
ear attuned to Jubileeday (freequilibrium)
only a promise of soul liberty (Everyhew-
manever) under these stars their birthright
mine may be new birth of freedom (night
brings dawn) the sun of justice risen again
to bloom as once on earth in stable born
out of the Pharaoh’s precinct into happiness
just over Jordan (almondejoie) by wilderness
to mercy forgiveness peace a Restoration
of all things beneath two tender-tending wings lark
tempering my mumbling well, contrapuntal polar
sarabande (labor & rest yin & yang). Soar,
7/4 to 4x7 : welded annealed (almond birchbark)
7.3.12
7.02.2012
Lanthanum 12.22
22 EVENING LAND
We drove to the curl of Sakonnet Point at the
SE corner of RI snuck past the private property
& the “keep out” signs onto its pebbly spiral jetty
& watched the sun set, somehow into the Atlantic
late early summer evening the sun only an eye
veiled in lambent mist 57 fine shades of violet
most luminous sky ever screened by retina &
I saw one kind round rose iris in clerestory
lanthanum air-cathedral through the vault
of steel in heart of the earth or simply
the heart itself where 144 lines meet (ply
pan o’ply) an elemental number (all complete
now, fin) for Love is Lake Victoria of Poem
& Universe the shared factor (O Unionverse)
both yin & yang a givenreceptive openness
infinitenfoldunfurled banner of Joy (freedom)
Love is egalitarian & kind it will not break
the weakest willow branch of orphan poor
man widow it will endure with them, for
righteousness & justice & when the scales
fall from our eyes at last we’ll behold Scales
held in your palm of matrix-lines life-lines
a Romany (RIMN) hrmny, Maggie 28 pines
all swimming into view & one eye-in-hand
prevails. & the shadow of your hand on my
brow in the starlight of Cosmos-over-Chaos
(olive mountain) your paddlwhrlng S-O-S (O
sip & see) Ja-El Jessie O’L little song-tree
7.2.12
7.01.2012
Lanthanum 12.21
21
I’ve lived for some years now along Abba River
in Q’ville a stream wide, deep, invisible to which
Ocean is tributary & stars are lights each
in a niche of a bend along its banks a quiver-
full are clustered at the center of the earth
matrix of bends & origami folds a silvery thread
knotted tight & gleaming there the stream’s head
source & watershed (east west north south)
This river’s where inside turns out & myrrh
turns mirror (by St. Louie MO) where wanderer
goes OM at last prodigal Absalom to his poor
long-forsaken Solomon (Abba Pop Dad Father)
& the tripod of their lost, lasting embrace is
bond of universal steel (titanium-lanthanum-
oxide alloy) which is most tautwound anthem-
flower in the planetary plot grave Providence
of all things in those arms their hands
united fingers interwoven & unbreakable
palm-vault beyond every Olympic pinnacle of
bronze or gold & racing now (triple-handstands)
toward that Finnish line in summertime halcyon
days up north (is it Karelia? Sibelius swam-
pineland?) where a vain little man in his own
birch canoe (Longfellow? Hiawatha?) glides down
Minnehaha Creek his boat festooned with 7 flags
of 50 stars (red, blue, purple) a paper hat (or
tiny boat) crowning his brow crowing Excelsior!
paddling home (homesick Frank in his glad rags)
7.1.12
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