Rene Girard & the latest war

Following the terrible sequence of summer news from Syria & Iraq, all the atrocities... occurred to me today that the strange convolutions of recent upheavals might find some meaning through the anthropological-theoretical lens of Rene Girard.  Girard knows One Big Thing (he's the perfect example of Isaiah Berlin's "hedgehog" - as opposed to the "fox", who knows a little bit about everything) - & I have to approach his totalizing theory with caution.  Yet here we have a formation of current events which apparently could be illustrations of his Big Idea.

For Girard, human life & culture are rooted in subconscious "mimetic rivalry", culminating in "mimetic violence", & resolved (very imperfectly) by ritual sacrifice/scapegoating.  Is it possible to consider the Sunni-Shiite divide in Islam as an example of this?  Girard says that what begins as mimetic rivalry over a desired object - the psychological mechanism whereby because he has this thing, it must be good, so I must have it - morphs eventually into pure rivalry : the object itself is forgotten, it becomes simply a matter of me against him, us against them.

The appearance now of the "Islamic State", or ISIS, seems to have upended the formalized (& centuries-old) rivalry between the two sects.  For the time being, & in some places, Shiite & Sunni political groups are actually working together.   The transgressive violence of ISIS has set this in motion : Girard's idea that the vertiginous magnetism of social breakdown, leading to the obliteration of all social differences in a chaos of destructive violence, is that most-feared thing, the only thing that could bring the two sides to work together.  So now Iran & Saudi Arabia & the US are all converging to combat the common menace.

The trouble is, ISIS does not quite fit the Girardian pattern of the "arbitrary sacrificial victim" - the scapegoat whose sacrifice "resolves" (for a while) the pattern of violence, rivalry & vengeance.  History is a little "messier" than theory (as Pres. Obama noted recently).  Once ISIS is defeated, another candidate for the leadership of glamorized political violence will arise, another iteration of the crisis.

It seems to me that the phenomenon of militant Islam is rooted in a theological notion, perhaps a distortion of normative Islam (I don't really know).  The notion is that humans - followers of the Prophet - can know God's will, and carry it out in terms of a political sovereignty based on force.  It is the totalizing concept of theocracy : that divine law and human laws are one & the same.  God is essentially an invisible cosmic commanding officer; & if you know God's will, and those others do not, then those others must eventually submit to your will.

There are other ways of thinking about God, and the human soul, and the destiny of the earth; other ways of thinking about law and political justice.  The ancient Egyptians, for example, had very considerable notions of law & justice, in a civilization which lasted 3 or 4 thousand years before the monotheistic religions arose.  Not that I am lobbying for ancient Egyptian culture : this is just one example.

The Western concept of "natural law" is another example.  It's possible to believe that "divine Providence" has provided humanity in general - across the globe - with innate notions of good & evil, right & wrong, which are suitable & equipped for the ordinary challenges of civil, earthly society.  The "theological virtues", on the other hand, are distinct spiritual gifts, which lift the human soul toward its supernatural, eternal destiny.  This is inevitably a personal journey; one cannot compel a person, either by law or by sheer force, to inhabit a moral/spiritual dimension which only God can offer.  This kind of idea is at the root of Roger Williams' pioneering political construct, the "separation of Church & State".  Let human law govern one global humanity; let divine grace govern the individual soul.

Some such alternative theological ideas might come in handy, during the long future struggle with militant & violent political ideologies of all kinds.

Zoroastrians

Another sort of topical poem.  I'm on a Ravenna Diagram allegorical roll.  You, cher lecteur, are meant to look beneath the surface, as well as surf the surface.  For example : "prose Popeye" is a pun for the Greek rhetorical term prosopopeia.  A very old thing in poetry... in culture generally.  "Personification."  Archaic, prehistoric, in fact.  You put on a mask (persona) in order to represent something very hard to picture.  An absent Presence.  So the idea here is that fanaticism has a very weak or corrupted "picture" of the Good, the Divine, the Holy, the Person.  So they attack ancient religions they know nothing about.  ISIS, for example (so ironically, the ancient Egyptian goddess...).  What is your "picture" of God?  We are all imperfect, many of us suffering from various mental distortions... so this might affect the image in our minds.  I think of Jesus in the Gospels saying "You must become as little children to enter the kingdom of God.  For these little ones always behold the face of their Father who is in heaven..."  Think of the adoration of children for the image of that which they need & love.  This is a psychological insight, you might say... to which my silly "prose Popeye" is pointing.

SAILOR-SKETCH

O big zebra-striped cicada

with the Air Force wings

found adrift this morning

in Sophie’s baby-purple wading

pool – can I identify with you?

Or maybe only your husk

was left behind.  Ask

Jonah in his whale, or Zarathustra

in his Cyrus-shade (serene

weatherman).  Inquire

of the Yezidi-martyrs

on their mountain.  Savage scene

of human inhumanity

today.  The mimic-men

love Mickey Mouse – then

spool to hate such levity;

they kill what they deny (themselves)

persecuting poor Me

in the name of purity –

pure folly (petty peevish dwarves).

I’ll circulate the prose Popeye

instead.  A sailor-sketch

of Pappy in his ketch

(the Pope, perhaps?).  Only the sigh

of Peacock Angel – delicate thread,

goldfinch trompette marine...

yet you sense what I mean :

bright Joan – ah! – surfing from the dead.

8.12.14

A Game of Chess

MACAU MACAW

Another eleventh (August this time)

on brick-silly wasteland of

one shady summer patio.  Well

of hurry-up peas... bee-balm...

Joe-Pye weed... & yet this elfin

flower-team backyard

is not exempt.  The hard

news (frenzied shrunken headlines)

bearbaits me too.  From River Alph

to Yezidi desert, innocent

Peacock Angels get bent

down again.  The gibbering gulf

twixt glib libel & Guelf remains kiln-set

in demosthenic night.  Rainbows

of violets against violence? – how

coin bowl for Guinea-worm alphabet?

Sketches of Spain... Spanish Castle

Magic.  Convivial Jorge

the Gardenia been draggin’

me, all over.  Plays chess, too.

Iris, sez I, is a yurt-mother.

King’s taken baby steps

between crooks, bishops...

Q’s unreadable.  & here’s another

pawn to put in (yawning spacesuit).

A pair of carpenter asps

of the caduceus, Jasper –

dove from the deep.  Shalom (checkmate).

8.11.14

Cricketland

On the Inability of our Elected & Well-Paid Partisans to Enact Immigration Reform, or Any Other Useful Legislation

SAND CASTLES

August, goldenrod of the Caesars...

& the paisan smile (inscrutable

& sad).  Drawn to the water table

of lakes & seashore, the sea’s recess.

Fold-on-fold cascades (irretrievable

decades).  In the crazy-quilt

of recursive fields... your guilty

maize, & mine (South-Sea Bubble

of the mind).  The Omaha train

pulls out at 7.  Osage

family.  On the last stage of

mourning (in the land, under the rain).

Traveling without their kids (Honduran,

Guatemalan) – refugees

from the stupidities.

Natural harbor (salty, hardpan).

Paralloid Congress troops into recess.

Up to the lake somewhere.

Collective crowd-esteem, hot air

fog spectacles with greediness –

navigators led by speech-balloons

exhale (from stingy lungs)

each bartered hearts’ unsung

remorse.  So an unseen moon’s

ray numbers our undoing.  Unkind

theoreticals & partisan

we mold a house from sand

that cannot stand.  Yet, love is blind...

    8.2.14

Lafayette, we are here

The first poem I wrote after arriving in Providence had an epigraph, "after reading Apollinaire".  That was 44 years ago, in the spring of 1970.  I'm still after Apollinaire, I guess.  This is another "occasional poem", on the sad occasion of the 100 years of war since the War to End All Wars began (in which my grandfather, Edward S. Gould, was a captain in the 124th Artillery.  "Lafayette, we are here").

(A few days ago I remembered that in my grandparents' apartment, near the U of M & the Mississippi River, there was to be seen not only Grandpa's big brass shell ("the last shell fired in the Great War," he always said), & not only his rack of ever-present pipes & tobacco fumes, but also an old print, hanging over the dinner table - a formal 18th-century dance, with Lafayette twirling on his toes, & George Washington & friends off to one side, looking on.)

AFTER APOLLINAIRE

That pudgy Parisian poet-vet

tattooed all over with scars –

a Queequeg of the War

to End All Wars (but not just yet) –

he of the blundered parentage (the

Pope was perhaps his father?)

– all that Roman bother –

a fenced-in pyramidical sage

gypsoid tumbleweed, fuming

over his Dallas Lorelei

across the Rhine (goodbye,

good luck)... O trench-spit spuming

rural rose!  & the grapevine murmurs

Marne, Loire... the soil

of France – the ceaseless toil

of dew, pour l’amour de Dieu (showers

of tipsy fireflies in the wind-blown

hair of remote by-ways, so

gently merveilleuse)...

Adroit the boatman, who hath sewn

these sails – hath bent these anchored ribs

into prow, & figure-

head (one pierced oreille);

subtle the fisherman (Gennesareth

swab) who scanned these Galilean farms

with an ear to the waves.

Après l’Armistice, he saves

a little pipesmoke... (ashen charms).

7.28.14

Guillaume Apollinaire

Cosmos vs. chaos

LAND & SEA

FOR THE FLIGHT-VICTIMS

        one if by land, two if by sea

The labyrinth of your fingerprint,

Sophie.  The human touch,

impregnable (not much).

Love’s murmur in sleep – rue, mint...

only rumors, next morning.

Kuala Lumpur, O

KL!  Five years ago now.

Humid trance-kayak, flush with beaming

taxi-drivers (& one friendly Parsi

from Indie-archipelago).

Quiet storefront Tao-

templa.  Shrines, mosques...

all side-by-side (recumbent lakes

amid brass moped squalls).

Phoebe & Khaled’s

tropical apartment (your namesakes’

Polynesia to come).  Long flight

Boston Los Angeles Seoul

(Malaysia Air).  All

to knit my future son, in law (bright

Baba-to-be, Sophie).  They fall

into the sea, these planes.

Or to the earth.  Cranes

drift to Missouri... elegant, sprawl

(regal, awkward) in the naked stream.

All the birds of the air

shall make nests... where?

OK, acorn (steep cowpoke dream).

    7.22.14 

Swords... plowshares

Some ringing lines from the prophet Isaiah (verse 2.4) came to mind today :  

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Reading, thinking much about the "Great War" lately (as are many people these days).

Note how Isaiah specifies three aspects of war - singling them out for a future renunciation :

1)  the technology of war ("swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks").   This zeroes in on the special obscenity of modern warfare.  We are enslaved by our own mastery of technology : it has become so easy to kill a human being.  To commit mass murder.  The technology we make is our accomplice.

2)  the politics of war ("nation shall not lift up sword against nation").  The nation-state has become a sophisticated, polished machine of power-accumulation.  Power in the Machiavellian sense, for its own sake.  War is a means to this end.  Here war itself becomes the accomplice of centralized human viciousness (our pride, our vanity, our greed, our wrath, our fraudulence).

3)  the pedagogy of war ("neither shall they learn war any more").  Someday mankind will have to renounce the whole panoply of militarism and warcraft.  At present, we limit certain weapons as taboo, out of bounds (chemical weapons, nerve gas, land mines).  Thus we avoid the really difficult renunciation - to do away with the whole shimmering glory of arms and war science.  Isaiah can only project such a social transformation into an undefined future.... On that Day.

Battle of the Somme

Today marks 98 years since the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916).  One of the ultimate expressions of military & general human folly.  I've written another occasional poem (for my ongoing folly, Ravenna Diagram).

THE LONG GRASS

The trench was like a twisted river

of manure and rust.  Bent-

over Al & Bertie, faint

now in memory.  That ravin’ conniver

H.G., with the bloodshot eye –

souvenir de Louie?  “A touch

of the royal” – not much.

Slaughtered under a Ruskin sky.

All three.  South of Ypres-jeepers,

beside the sleepy Somme.

This somnolent hum

of toothy cogs must end, the weepers

say.  Someday.  When rabid dogs

cease racketing around by

Snuffy’s Drive-in (west end

of Mendelssohn – past the Log

Cabin – in the long grass, by the lake).

Remember the Limping Lady?

Cartwheels no more, sadly.

Tears well.  & for God’s sake.

There is only one kingdom, only

one king.  We’ll see her through.

That aureole around a blue

moon, Jeanne... born before we.

She cycles through ruin, absolutely.

Up from the crooked well,

like a gleam in a lake.  Sea-shell.

To bear it all, enfant.  Anew.  Étoile-épée.

7.1.14

End of June

Kings & Councillors

Have been reading this pow'rful anthropology book, Kings and Councillors, by A.M. Hocart.  (Led there by a note in another deep study, Moses & Civilization).  A good book for poets to read, & everybody else. An eye-opening vision of things.  Hocart is one of a kind.  I guess Isaiah Berlin would call him a hedgehog, as opposed to a fox - a thinker who has "one big idea" & pursues it relentlessly.  But Hocart was not just an idea man.  A veteran of 4 years on the Western Front in WW I, he spent much of the 1920s and 30s doing field research in Fiji, Ceylon, India, along with teaching & etc. in those countries.

Hocart is just a very challenging, provocative & entertaining writer.  He makes his one big idea come alive for the reader.  & what is that idea?  Like any good anthropologist, Hocart shows how contemporary human society is rooted in hundreds of thousands of years of ancient and prehistoric human activity.  But he's especially interested, in this book, in the origins of government.  The intro by Rodney Needham is helpful in comparing Hocart's ideas to those of British philosopher David Hume.  Hume challenged the 2 main traditional theories of government : 1) that government is essentially organized exploitation by the rich and powerful of the weak and poor, or 2) that government is a social contract by which the people as a whole provided for their own welfare through representative authorities.  (You could call these the Autocratic & Democratic options.)

For Hume, government originates in the actuality of warfare between different tribes and peoples.  It is the violent rivalry between groups, and this alone, which necessitates government : gov't is essentially defense.

Hocart has yet another view.  Using comparative examples from very different times & places, he argues that the social orders we call government today, originated in ritual.  And what motivated primitive ritual?  Simply this : the collective human desire for what Hocart calls "Life." Modern society has grown so complex and specialized we find it hard to comprehend the simplicity and universality - the "hive-mind" aspect - of this notion.  What Hocart calls Life, his editor Needham writes, might be more accurately defined by the German word, Heil - health, wholeness, overall goodness.  ("Hale & hearty"...)  What Jefferson called "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

For Hocart, archaic human groups equated the spiritual, universal, divine sources of "Life" with their representatives.  Thus the King or the Chief "stands for" the God, the invisible source of all plenty, the "cornucopia" of all human welfare.  Ritual involved the solemn (or not-so-solemn) acknowledgement of these sacred powers & origins : their representation and application in the actual world.  The King, in fact, is not just a stand-in or symbol of the God - he is the God made manifest.  The "actors" in ritual practices shape a kind of cosmic microcosm.  The "impersonators" (king, priest, messenger, etc.) coordinate their ritual acts to shape a holistic ceremony meant to magically evoke and in fact actualize that which the tribe desires : which, Hocart says, is simply (to use the Biblical phrase) "fulness of life".

Hocart elaborates, in fascinating ways, on how contemporary forms of government and social organization exhibit the archaic categories of authority first present (in embryo) in the prehistoric clans and tribes of humanity.  Before articulated, specialized social orders existed, ritual action began to sketch out their later roles.  As Hocart explains, archaic symbolic roles (or "principals" - kings, priests) became modern functions (presidents, advisers, etc.).  In the process (modernization), the sense of human society as a whole, as a "natural order" centered around a common aim ("Life"),  can become obscured.  But Hocart is more scientific than nostalgic.  He sees human culture as a process of continual change and adaptation - every historical situation is a complex, ambiguous mix of that which has always been & that which is fading away & that which is new.  But it's clear he understands anthropology - or the "study of mankind" - as one way to shed light on what often seems irrational or inexplicable or chaotic in human history.

*

One thing that struck me forcefully, in reading this book, is the picture presented of a certain likeness between the shapes of prehistoric ritual, on the one hand, and the central rites of Christianity, on the other.  This is not a new idea, obviously.  Lots of writers, from a variety of motives & perspectives, have tried to connect Christianity with ancient pre-Biblical religions & myths (Jesus & Osiris, & all that) - often in order to undermine the integrity or distinctness of Biblical religion.  This is not Hocart's aim, nor mine.  What does strike me as very curious, however, is how the basic orientations of prehistoric ritual seem to echo the rites of Christianity.  The poet David Jones, in The Anathemata, & other works, makes much of these echoes and comparisons : yet Hocart seems to find a parallel on an even more basic level.  The king stands in for the sacred spirit : the King is that Spirit, manifest in the ritual.   The "principal" (the royal or sacred officer of the rite) is the embodiment of the god.  The rite of acknowledgement of the king's generous gifts (of Life itself) culminates in a feast.  The food offered by the king is the spirit, is the god : the king offers himself as food.  For Hocart, ritual is a kind of poetic, metaphorical activity.  The physical differences between distinct things (kings, priests, sacred yams, etc.) are dissolved, or fused, by the ceremony itself.  God = king = sacred yam...  the thing is the embodiment of the invisible spirit which is the center of the whole ritual.

Reading Hocart sent me on a path of preliminary speculation : is it possible that Jesus's call for a return to "things as they were in the beginning" involved a re-creation of very prehistoric and universally-human rites?   Was it a kind of archaism rooted in part in ancient Galilean culture itself?

Hocart emphasizes the communal and "traditional" character of prehistoric human ritual.  It's almost like a tribal "mind-set", or a hive of dancing bees, acting out a collective act of homeopathic magic.  The whole community gathers to ceremonialize the "order of life" itself, as a whole.  What is done by the king now is done because the spirits of the past kings did the same.  I also detect a slight strain of idealization of this in Hocart : a slightly Nietzschean or Spenglerian tendency (the "health" of a society is desiccated by merely "moral" or "intellectual" abstract revisions of the primordial unity - as in Buddhism or the monotheistic religions).  But as I say, this bent in Hocart is so slight as to be almost undetectable.  (Idealizations of "tradition" are less palatable when you consider the downside of mob mentalities and superstitious prejudice, all the forms of "tyranny of the majority".)

It would be very interesting to consider the "promissory" or future-oriented quality of Judaism and Christianity in the light of Hocart.  Here is a faith of the word, of the book : the word of the promise of a future "land of promise", rather than an a-chronous or synchronous celebration of the king's & the land's divine bounty now.  Biblical religion seems rooted so deeply in a withdrawal from Egyptian & Mesopotamian rites of a glorious "now" ; it is a fundamental re-making of that "now" on behalf of a more profound and universal "goodness of life" and world to come.

*

But I think of poetry itself as somewhat primitive in Hocart's sense.  Poets write poetry from every conceivable motive & mind-set, of course.  Much of it is "culturally determined", of course, by the historical situation & the fads of the day.  For my part, though, I seem to have been impelled by this "cosmic ritual microcosm" array of phenomena.  Maybe I'm what they call a "monist" at heart.  I believe in a "spiritual source" of cosmic Life.  I believe the future order of life on earth will be defined by the "good will" which proceeds from a shared sense of this "common good" : some kind of acknowledgement and thanksgiving for the gift of Life itself.  This is at the root of poetic "making", as far as I'm concerned.  It's in all the elaborate structures of my poems, boring & monotonous & obscure as they might be (for some, anyway, sometimes...)

(p.s. my middle name happens to be : "Hale")

Reminds me of this old "poem about poetry", writ at least 30 years ago :

PROVERBIAL

I give you the parables as I received them -
my mother's voice, the nursery rhymes,
the memorized rhetoric and the anthem
leading us like sheep to death sometimes.

The mystery ringing in our ears,
the noise of the cultivated howl
of ubiquitous unknown lusts and fears,
the music of monkey, wolf and owl.

In silence before music and the word,
a voice already prepared to save
delivers you into a pastoral world,
out of the dank and bestial cave.

A cadence I cannot repeat just right -
the pristine choir of many morning birds,
or the patience of children in the dancing light
performing the ritual of careful words.

The King Must Die

We apply faulty words to profound things, words which are then misunderstood and misused, by ourselves and others.  Yet the words are necessary - or perhaps we simply desire them, we can't live without them.

The Spirit of God = the Spirit of Love.  The Mind of the Creator = the Mind of Love.  The source of all phenomena is a creative origin, a living Mind - oriented toward wisdom, freedom, wonder, truth.  Toward Life.

Powerful intellectual movements have arisen which simultaneously enlighten us about our moral darkness, while at the same time denying our capacity to change by means of such knowledge.  We are held captive by our own unconscious drives (Freud, Lacan).  We are unknowingly dedicated to a tragic will-to-power (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger).  Even those who acknowledge the power of human enlightenment transmute it into an ineluctable, objective process of historical determinism (Hegel, Marx).

The three traditional Abrahamic religions, in contrast, make a bolder claim : "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."  God is a personal God (despite the fact that  this hypothesis is beyond our comprehension).  The moral root of civilization and humanity consists in the re-ordering of the individual human soul toward higher ethical purpose - toward the Spirit of Love, and the common good which is its expression.  Toward what is called "the Great Commandment" (to love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and likewise, to love your neighbor as yourself).

All three Abrahamic religions have much to answer for.  The root of the problem lies in the idolatry of their own verbalized doctrines.

 Judaism forgets the global, providential purpose of its own calling (to be a "guide to all nations"), and devotes itself to separation from "the outsiders".  As a result, Judaism is unable to recognize its own Messiah, the one who is actually carrying out the providential purpose of the original commandments.

Christianity, once it canonized its texts and latched onto worldly states (in Constantinople & Rome), began to persecute its own elder brother (Judaism) - misreading St. Paul's polemical distinctions between "law" and "grace", and using them to lay the foundations of Western and global anti-semitism, with all its unspeakable historic consequences.  Jesus said, "I have come not to abrogate the law, but to fulfill it."  Law and grace depend upon each other : the Spirit of Love is law-abiding (in the sense of abiding by the Great Commandment).

Islam denies God's saving intervention in history, by way of Judaism, and his "personification" in the Messiah (Christianity).  As a result the Spirit of God remains remote and unaccountable, reduced to a commander of submission.  But the Oedipal dynamic underlying human anthropology - outlined in Robert A. Paul's important study, Moses and Civilization - illuminates the psycho-sociology of a patriarchal world order.  Where there is submission there will inevitably also be the flip side of the coin : domination.

We have all gone astray in the midst of our imaginings, says the prophet.  We inhabit a conjectural world, and our conjectures are finite, human, & imperfect, wrote Nicholas of Cusa.

This dynamic which Robert Paul explores is at work in all three Abrahamic religions.  Ultimately I think we could characterize it as the historical legacy of human nature's battle with death.  Death threatens the continuance of human social life.  Paul's anthropology explains how the the paradoxical conjunction of 1) individual mortality with 2) collective social continuity, produces transformative mythologies of "royal succession", the conjunction of divine and earthly kingship serving as the basic model or "political explanation" for the existential dilemma of human mortality.  The Oedipal complexes and neuroses on the individual level are recapitulations of an essentially collective, political, anthropological reality (or we could say they are two faces of a connected reality).  This, for Paul, is a global phenomenon, exhibiting its variations (transformations) in every human culture (not just the Abrahamic religions).

Two things seem clear to me from Paul's analysis :

1) The deep-rooted violence which accompanies this human history is at least in part a consequence of patterns of patriarchy.  The whole question of "royal succession" - Freud's young males of the horde overthrowing the tyrannical old males - is rooted in a power struggle over the pacified, objectified female members of the puzzle.  The third person - the woman in the middle - is left out of the equation, except as a matrix of sexual pleasure and biological continuance.

2) Paul's model, while deeply explanatory of human behavior, is fundamentally empirical.  It is scientific, in his own sense of based on the "reality principle".  Thus, for Paul, any transcendental or metaphysical dimension is ruled out of the analysis.  The positing of a cosmic Spirit or a personal God or eternal life or life-after-death, or any such metaphysical proposition, is held to be a product of human imagination, or at least as groundless in an "evidentiary" sense.

I would suggest, however, that modern science itself has unraveled many of its own materialist, positivist, and empirical certainties in the course of the last century.  Physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology have all bumped up against the unknown, the unexplained, and the paradoxical.  This, of course, is their modus operandi and raison d'etre : but these revolutionary "unknowns" have somewhat tempered the pride of scientific positivism.  It's possible again to imagine our own blindness : & to wonder in the face of the unknown.  As I understand it, the spirit of poetry, of the human imagination, still presents possibilities which stretch beyond the "reality principle" as we know it.  In the matrix of the poetic (a feminine Muse?) it's possible to "remember" the roots of reality in creative freedom : to find a harmony between the beauty and wonder of nature and the intuition of a cosmic Mind... a divine Spirit... a Spirit of Love...

Hiya, Sophia

Today's my birthday.  Thinking of kids, & Mom.  Wrote another poem today.  I'm always a sucker for occasional poems, especially if it's an important day like May 29th.  JFK's birthday.  Rhode Island Statehood Day.  Oak-Apple Day (Restoration Day) in England (Charles II's birthday).  The day Constantinople fell, in 1453.

Constantinople was founded on May 11th (3 hundred something) - Phoebe's birthday.  Sophie was born in August, however.  My mother hand-made a wooden bathtub boat for me, when I was 2 or 3 years old - painted blue & white, with "Sophie" inscribed on the bow.  The little boat has turned up in a few poems over the years (I wish I had a photo of that vessel).  Eventually I gave it to Elena Shvarts, the dear Petersburg poet,  & she kept on her windowsill.  Petersburg is a place for boats.  Here's Sophie in a boat, too...

& here's a poem from Ravenna Diagram, which I wrote just before Sophie was born.  So we weave these odd carpets with words... past & future...

THE HUMAN DOME

Now daughter Phoebe’s salient belly

measures the girth of future

earth... Hiya, Sophia!

She shall be dark, but comely,

I prophesy.  & coming soon,

I reckon.  So the sweep

of Time’s straw broom

swings reaping into sunny bloom

again, again.  Let there be light

& joy, after the pain

that day – O reign,

Sophie, that day – with gentle might!

As when the heir looks out, calmly

from oaken hideaway

like Noah, into hay-

stacks of a cleanswept sea

of waving grain... I pledge allegiance

to the flag of the United

States of a merry, delighted,

omnibenevolent Pacific... O glance

encompassing – your quietude, your

equanimity!  Your rain

that slakes the level plain

of just, unjust... onion & all!

I hear the drone of universal union

peal from bells in Petersburg

& Panama... in Denver, Darling,

& Dhaka... my child... my matryoshka-lion!

  8.5.13

Memorial Day

Friday on the Ponderosa

We look back, we reminisce, and in the process we shape, suppress, edit, & deform everything.  For the sake of an idea or an argument, we oversimplify.  But it's unavoidable - and sometimes it's useful.  Sometimes a confusing series of events long ago can be summarized, characterized... maybe illuminated.

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What is the ground of civilization?  What makes for a peaceful, free, happy & just world?  Good will toward others.  The ability to transmit as much goodness & kindness to others as we would like to receive ourselves.  The sense of universal justice.  The recognition of the dignity of persons.  The sense of responsibility toward nature & the sustaining earth.

The words alone sound Pollyanna-ish - a wishful, sentimental pablum.  But that's how it is sometimes with words.  One way to think of the poetic notion of "incarnational speech", or the idea of "the Word made Flesh", is with a moral recognition of the limitations of mere words.  "Words made flesh" are words materialized in deeds, in action.  So we have the saying "a man/woman of his/her word".  To "keep your word" is to acknowledge the responsibility for the promise of a commitment.  A covenant of words "underwritten" by deeds.

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In ordinary & contemporary everyday life - and setting aside for a moment those times of real suffering and crisis -  we are made constantly aware of the friction and trade-offs and anxieties and irritations involved in our interactions with others.  Other drivers, other shoppers, other co-workers, other neighbors... the little frictions & frayings which result from opposing territorial rights.  "It's my turn to go at the stop sign."  Road rage, etc.  The spirit of community, the sense of fellow-feeling, the willingness to be flexible, to give way, to respect others.... how fragile these things sometimes seem in a competitive world of demanding, self-interested, sometimes arrogant & selfish people...

These bourgeois realities of wear & tear have their parallels in the macrocosm of politics.  We live in a country split between two major parties, whose central dividing line appears to be a dispute over the boundaries of private and public interest.  Republicans stand for liberty and small government.  Democrats stand for equality and big government.  On this disagreement over the proper territories of the private & the public, the individual & the collective, property rights & social rights, the whole country seems to be slowly grinding to a paralyzed standstill, or stand-off.

Mine & yours.  Ours & theirs. The two parties divide the country by way of a mimesis, a magnified mirror of ourselves : ourselves at an intersection, having lost our temper.  Angry, stupid, self-righteous grumps, unwilling to give an inch.  My way or the highway... my way or the highway...

& it's all about the common good.  Except the two parties agree to disagree, since it means so much for their fundraising & public relations.

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Jesus in the Gospels somewhere says you have to choose.  "No man can have two masters : you must serve God or Mammon (riches, wealth)."

Doctrinaire dogmatists of various stripes have often interpreted this in ways that serve their own absolutist political aims.  We see the same thing in the propaganda wars between extreme enthusiasts of both Left & Right.  Left dogmatists idealize the State, the Collective, the Common Good.  Right dogmatists extol Liberty, Property, & Privacy.

I'm a conservative liberal, a liberal conservative.  I hold with the "incarnational" idea that mere words & theoretical formulae with regard to political principles have to be tested & confirmed in actual, working, unspoken, normal, active life.  (I won't call this pragmatism, however, because I think that word is often used as a cover for expediency.)

It's possible to imagine a humane community of persons who, in their own ways, set aside pure selfishness (Mammon) on behalf of better, more altruistic goals (the social pursuit of happiness, for example).

Call it a global civil society.  When people are just - when they rise above their own narrow self-interest on behalf of love, charity & the common good - they work together to solve common problems.  The common good does not necessarily entail or require the surrender of property rights.  Collectivism, in general, does not serve human happiness any more than private greed does.  They  both (in opposing ways) detract from human rights & dignity.  But we all need to seek the right balance of public & private : both in our personal lives & in society at large.

Many ideological enthusiasts will certainly describe this as a lamentable form of sentimental delusion.  Maybe.  I just call it "the pursuit of happiness."

In fact the two faces of private greed & collective statism - let's call them Mammon & Cyclops - coincide in the Janus-face of Theft (like the two thieves hanging on either side of the crucified Son of Man).  "Behold, I am coming like a thief."   The current government of China, for example, has masterfully welded private greed & authoritarian collectivism into a seamless whole.  Meanwhile, of course, we in the U.S. have our own thriving cults of Mammon & Ideology, with all their down-home refinements of hypocrisy & fraud.  (Mark Twain & Herman Melville anatomized our special talents in this area 150 years ago.)  This is the world of force, not consent.  The Iron Age, not the Golden.  The Tower of Babel, not the Kingdom of God.

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French thinker Jacques Rancière has an eloquent, subtle essay on the poetry of Mandelstam in his book Chair des mots (Flesh of Words).  He interprets poems from Tristia (& others) within a political-historical context, the movement from 19th-cent. republicanism & romanticism (Wordsworth), to the revolutionary 20th century.  It's about the impasse of lyric poetry in general & Mandelstam's particular (& in Tristia, definitely elegiac) "resolution" (comprehension) of this impasse.  I think  Rancière offers only a "partial" Mandelstam in this essay, which seems suffused (the essay) with a fairly pessimistic consciousness.  (Understandable, really, when you acknowledge 20th-cent. history.)

But his reading brings out elements of Mandelstam's own "program" (which R. describes as more idealistic than the poetry itself) : the Acmeist concepts of "domestic hellenism", which he traces back in part to M.'s allegiance to the Russian language itself, and its roots in Eastern Orthodoxy.  Some of these threads emerge in M.'s short (truncated) essay "Pushkin & Scriabin" : the freedom of the poetic word runs parallel to human cultural freedom generally, which is, in its "Western" manifestation, underwritten by the Redemption.  The free gift of love of the "Word made Flesh" sets art free (along with everything else) - to play "hide & seek with the Father" (but see Robert Paul's great, & rather darker, neo-Freudian interpretation of all this in his book Moses & Civilization).

Maybe you can see how this particular shaping of a sense of Mandelstam's "incarnational" poetics has echoes, parallels, with the general "liberal conservative" political stance I've been sketching out here.  This was all laid out in the first (biographical) chapters of Clarence Brown's early study (Mandelstam) : the Acmeists emerged from the last vestiges of an "ordinary", church-going,  pre-Revolutionary Russian middle class.

Maybe some things come back around again...

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When we reminisce about our own remote past, we select, we over-simplify.  40 years ago I went through a psychological crisis which brought on, or was triggered by, a sort of upwelling of uncanniness & inexplicable, irrational experiences.  I've written about it several times before.  I think a sort of "rational" way of analyzing that crisis would be to think of it as an adolescent vocational impasse.  I was a poet, of all things - a poet in America - & I couldn't handle it.

As a result I had an "encounter" with the Bible & Shakespeare.  You could say I was thrown back on the literary foundations of Western culture - I had to reiterate them, recapitulate them in terms of my own breakdown.  Somehow I kept my head about water - but it changed me.  The ground had shifted : you could say I became intellectually committed to the notion of a spiritual Presence or subjectivity.  Thus words to the wise like "No one can serve two masters - you must serve either God or Mammon" (along with the rest of the Bible) seemed to manifest a real "living" imprint : a personal charisma.

My "encounter" with Mandelstam a few years later had nothing irrational or uncanny about it.  I didn't feel Mandelstam's personal "spirit" drawing near.  Instead, his life & words seemed to help me actualize or realize or amend the original break between everyday reality and religious enthusiasm.  Because, perhaps, for me it all began - the crisis itself - in a specifically literary context.  It was a problem for a poet, a problem of poetry.  It was a local iteration of the story - of the Word made Flesh...

Poetry, religion, metaphysics, & all that stuff

I write about these cloudy subjects a lot.  I brood 'pon them.  It is what it is.  I yam whut I yam, as Popeye so memorably put it.

The recent essay in Coldfront proposed a literary-historical contrast & a conflict between a skeptical/ironic/disenchanted mode of poetry (exemplified by Language Poetry), and mode with an ultimately spiritual basis (ie. the "New Gnostics").  Lots of people would object to this binary set-up itself, as well as to its terms.

Lots of people will insist that art & poetry get along just fine without spirituality & religion & all that mumbo-jumbo.  Thanks but no thanks.

Those of us, however, who have some first or even 2nd-hand knowledge of what's called sin, or guilt, or bad conscience, or crime, or just plain blues & trouble, will have some sense of what moral & spiritual or psychological illness & sickness is.  From experience.  & by the same token they will have an inborn sense of the desire for relief, for liberation from same.  This is the case, whatever your diverse scientific or religious or philosophical explanations for these conditions might be.

The longing, you might say, is a desire for healing.  For wholeness.  For happiness.  For a return, perhaps, to a sense of innocence.

Some people may have not much experience with these kinds of "moral" suffering.   It seems to me that such healthy & innocent people often have an unintentionally callous & superficial attitude toward life.  But then, sometimes we need the lighter touch of vapid ignorance (& I mean that).  Not everybody is as guilty as we may be.

It seems to me that if you're an American poet, and you do subscribe to some sort of spiritual or metaphysical basis or connection underlying art & poetry, then you face one major problem or theme.  Of course I'm generalizing here : let me just say that I feel like this is a theme or a design which I myself as an American poet find important.

It's the contrast between Emerson/Whitman/Crane/Dickinson, on the one hand, and Eliot on the other.  These are just the most iconic exemplars of the polarity.  It's the divide between Transcendentalism and traditional Judeo-Christianity.

(Then you have people like Melville and Wallace Stevens : their deeper skepticism about the "spiritual" - their ironic searching orientation - puts them in a separate category.)

Emerson is the model of the Transcendental antinomian Romantic.  These are just academic tags for a stance toward reality which claims an ultimate originality.  For Emerson, traditional religion represents the primitive folktales of what has evolved into a more conscious relation between the free human mind & spirit and the "Over-soul" which is the spirit of God.  The poet celebrates the New Day Every Day of this primal, creative ecstasy.  Whitman himself was the great American poet of this generally rhapsodic state of mind.

Eliot stands for something else.   For both Jews & Christians, the faith is, that underneath all the fables & allegories & fantastic (often literally unbelievable) twists & turns of Biblical testimony... something happened.  Something metaphysical and historical happened.  Underneath, that is, all the Freudian psychodrama and pseudo-Pharaonic baloney, there is the ineradicable and inimitable thumbprint of some inexplicable Presence.  A sacrifice was made, for all time, for the whole race of mankind.  A self-sacrifice by the ghost who said "I am what I am" or "I will be what I will be."

For the Eliotic traditionalist, the human predicament of sin and guilt & suffering cannot be thrown off so easily & heroically as the Emersonian Romantics would like to think.  We are, as MLK famously put it, bound up in a seamless network of mutuality : there is a much-suppressed history which underwrites every person's most-distinct identity, their quiddity of personhood.

Knowledge, & the pursuit of knowledge, it goes without saying, is and will be the basis for any future global humane civilization.  However, ironically, it is the pride we invest in our knowledge - our petty vainglory, our greedy chauvinism, our blind self-regard, our will-to-power - which corrupts truth into propaganda, and turns the tools of enlightenment into weapons of war.  The issues facing Plato's Atlantis are still with us.  There will be no peaceful & just civilization on earth without humility, mercy, mutual forgiveness, & reconciliation.

As you can probably tell, I am, at least on a conscious level, aligned more with the Eliot than the Emerson end of this spectrum.  But I am also an American poet - & I think unless you, the poet, share some of the iconoclastic & searching mind of Stevens & Melville & Pound & Emerson & Crane & Dickinson, then you will not be able to interpret the inheritance of traditional metaphysical & religions concepts & notions & hobgoblins with the requisite salt of originality.   You won't bring anything new to the table.  Poetry at the core is visionary, exploratory, experimental, celebratory, creative, harmonic.  It verges on the oracular.  It is not, as often in Eliot, only retrospective lamentation.  Thus we find the generative oscillation between these two poles.

So for me anyway, it's always been this nexus - this middle area of poetic thought & meditation - this uncertain no-man's-land situated somewhere in the midst of seemingly opposing States  - that I find most fertile & valuable for my own mythongeries...

Quiet Friday thoughts

The library is always quiet, but Fridays toward the end of the school year, especially so.  Lately am absorbed in very deep Freudian/anthropological book : Moses and Civilization, by Robert A. Paul.

One of the first principles in my conception of poetry : "vitalism".  By this, I guess, I mean vital in a sort of Bergsonian sense.  Text, in this schema, involves a kind of death, a sort of clinical operation : living language entombed on the stone, or the page.  Poetry works backward from this situation : it dramatizes a sort of resurrection of vital speech.  Poetry is the sign of a living person speaking or singing or telling us a tale.  It's the rhythm and the verbal complexity - the concentrated energy of these two forces - which represents or mimics the living voice.

I guess there's an irony involved here, because poetry is also a form of "encryption" : it also entombs in text this "sign" of vitality.  Maybe this irony points to the limits of human language itself.  Poetry is as "living" as words can be : but life, in the end, is a fire beyond speech... an actuality...

In my view, consciousness - let's call it "super-consciousness' for the moment - and life itself are pretty much the same thing.  We inhabit a circle of consciousness : it is the oneness, the One, beyond which we cannot step.  As Nicolas of Cusa put it in a letter to his friend Giuliano :  "The universe giulianizes in you, Giuliano."  Cusanus also talked about how human beings exist, unavoidably, in a "conjectural" cosmos.  He points to our finiteness in relation to infinity : but he posits some kind of unknowable "infinite" consciousness - another imperfect human indication of God.

"La vida es sueno."  Life is a dream (as the title of the classic Spanish Renaissance play by Calderon has it).   We humans burn the brief candle (as the cliche has it), and then we go into the vast Beyond, the Space which so frightened Pascal.  We leave home & family & loved ones behind, or so it seems.

But dreaming leads to waking, too.  We can conjecture another door opening, into something on the other side of this "all the world's a stage."  (I'm loaded with these old chestnuts today.)  The mind peers into its own unknown.

Robert Paul's Freudian analysis talks about how the myths & rituals of ancient religion resonate with universal human stresses & emotions - unconscious for the most part, primitive childhood loves, hates & fears, translated and transferred & suppressed.  The rituals resonate psychologically, and channel these infantile anxieties - loves & hates - into cultural order, meaningful covenants which stabilize societies.  Cultures live on as they keep faith with their own conceptions of reality.  In a Freudian pattern, Paul rationalizes metaphysics.  It's a necessary knowledge, but it may have its own limits...

I think one can assent to this kind of necessary knowledge, regarding the subconscious motives & patterns of the human psyche, and yet retain a kind of metaphysical, even religious vision.  This sounds like a contradiction... but as Whitman put it, "very well, I contradict myself."

If life is a dream, then life is also a "stage", a theater.  So let me ask the oldest, deepest question once again : how did all this Something come from Nothing?

If life is consciousness, then life is personal.  The Ariadne-thread in the labyrinth leads from the human guilty (& ritually-repetitive)  knowledge of the Mosaic law (in Freud's & Paul's terms, the Oedipal fantasy of a primal murder of the tyrant-father-pharaoh)... the thread reaches back to its life-source, seeking for life itself, seeking for reconciliation, for love, for peace.  It gradually ("prophetically") universalizes itself, in the dramatic imago of the angry, jealous, kindly, just Heavenly Father.... until the Messiah is revealed, or reveals himself.  And dies ("Oedipally") and lives again, & "goes to the Father" - becomes one with the Father.  & lives forever, beyond death.

So goes the plot, in my reductive sketch.  The plot of supreme Authority, of the humble King over all kings, the Father of all fathers... a very male story here, obviously : a psychological symbolism for the "maturation" or "integration" of the adult person... in a civilization...

I think of hunters, herder/shepherds, and farmers.  These primitive three.  I think of the Garden of Eden, and of the resurrected Jesus in Gesthemane, mistaken by Mary Magdalen for "the gardener".  Shepherds, nomads, are the median between the other two, maybe.   Prehistoric hunters honor & respect their prey, but the prey is "foreign" to them, an enemy.  For ancient herders, on the other hand, the animals are in a sense part of the family.  Nomads, paradoxically, don't go anywhere : they are always with their extended family.  This gives to the act of killing or murder a special psychological horror, since it resonates more closely with the Freudian (Oedipal) unconscious.

I think of the Jewish shepherds, brooding, pondering for centuries, reliving the sacrifice of their familial animals... while becoming a 20th-century holocaust to another culture, which had become a mob of psychotic hunters.  Those they killed were only "strangers" to them.  The shepherds become the "lambs of God" themselves... in this unspeakable tragedy.

Cain, the son of Adam, was a farmer - & the first murderer (of his brother).  The sin of Adam - cast from the Garden - is brought immediately to this tragic extremity.  From Eden... to murder.

Hunters.... shepherds... gardeners...

In my myth, the human Person - the Everyperson of a global humanity - looks beyond the violence of Man himself... back to the origin of origins.... the cosmic origin of all things.  It is, as the old Book tells, a "creative" Reality.  It is a dream made out of nothing.  And it is an infinitely wonderful and amazing and generous dream : a Cosmos emerging out of sacred Fire.  It's given us a garden to tend together, this gem, this emerald, set in a silver sea...

 This is where real justice begins : in a metaphysical thankfulness.  Which is why Jesus taught that "love God with all your heart" and "love your neighbor as yourself" are joined : the vertical, the  horizontal.  +

Article in Coldfront Magazine

(This is my second blog post about this.  I deleted the first one, which was certainly impassioned, but a little over the top.)

Coldfront magazine published an article of mine a few days ago, about the New Gnostics group of poets, here.  Ed Foster, an old acquaintance from Hoboken Russian-American poetry conference days (late 90s), edits Talisman magazine and recently ran a special section featuring the writings of the NGs.

I guess there are strengths and weaknesses in shaping an essay which foregrounds a history of rivalry between (mostly male) poetry collectives or schools.  This is what I do, framing the spiel on a contrast between the NG's and the Language Poets.  As it happens, I am currently reading a lot of psychoanalytic writings about the Bible & other literature.  History in general seems to be made up in large part of violent struggles based on (mostly male) Oedipal & pre-Oedipal fantasies - mythical stories -  about objects of desire (Mom, women, slaves...), and domination of rivals for same.  Very primitive, very adolescent, very subconscious...

So I can see why poets - especially female poets - might sigh with boredom & despair... deja vu all over again...

It's got me thinking, vaguely, though, about the region of poetry & the imagination... the middle region, the realm that Wallace Stevens liked to call "sense"... which art & poetry inhabit.  Where the intellect & the reason are fused with feelings, emotions... the "affective" responses to experience.  Poetry limns this region & helps us grasp where we are... the sense of words in poetry is multivalent.

Moreover, this brings in the whole question of the relation between the human imagination - the "vision thing" (as the 1st Pres. Bush so demotically put it) - and our knowledge of reality, our worldview.  There is no denying that poetry down the ages has been a platform for synthesizing and ordering a culture's "sense" of the world it inhabits.  And because this is true, it seems that there will inevitably be clashes of worldviews, battles over the orientations of basic belief.  Believe it or not, the stakes are high in this regard.  They are high, even if we wish they weren't - because part of us wants poetry to be a day of rest, a playful Sabbath-day, from ideology and fact.  We want the poet to express an idiosyncratic liberation from all fixed ideas and cultural shibboleths.  We want the poem to be free (& fun).

As my article sketches out, there are these incidents of forking paths : disagreements over how poets employ language, how they ring variations on past poetry.  I think, speaking as generally & basically as I can, that the story of the "contretemps" between Barrett Watten and Robert Duncan, and between Ed Foster & Charles Bernstein - this "event" - may have been motivated primarily by two different attitudes toward the "language of poetry".

(An aside : it would be interesting to reconsider the role of Louis Zukofsky in this regard.  He was apparently the occasion of the original disagreement between Watten & Duncan : & his work can be seem as greatly overlapping & over-shadowing both "schools".)

Simply put : for the Language Poets, the "word" is a Saussurian system of binary signals.  Words are bundles of potential meaning-signals.  if we "turn off" the meaning-function, we detach ourselves from hegemonic, oppressive ideologies & political structures; we create a new anarchic space of purely textual freedom.

For the New Gnostics, on the other hand, words retain their more traditional aura or ambience.  They can never be merely counters or linguistic codes, because words themselves are dwelling-places of affective memory and cultural-historical meaning.  In other words, there is the assumption of some over-arching, if implicit, meaning-architecture - which is not to be "switched off", but rather "turned on", intensified.

The encounter between Watten & Duncan seems emblematic in many ways.  I see it as a sort of a clash of two worlds : Duncan's mythic-archaic-shamanistic-magic-Romantic realm of the traditional Imagination, as opposed to Watten's modern, post-modern, disenchanted, ironic, intellectual Rationality.

My current readings in psychology and psycho-history underline for me how King Oedipus still reigns over the world of human imagination.  We live out myths without knowing it, sleepwalking down familiar paths marked out by the natural rhythm of pre-conscious fears & desires.  Art still has to discover its own lanterns, its own ways through this human labyrinth, toward some kind of liberation.  Both the Langpos & the New Gnosts were, & are yet, engaged in such searching & making.