Simone & Maximus & me

The French writer/philosopher/mystic Simone Weil appealed to me in the mid-1980s (still does).  Ascetic worker/dreamer; deep Biblical exegete.  I remember walking down to Seward's Folly bookshop, at the Fox Point end of Brook St., & asking Mr. Seward, the freewheeling eccentric bookseller & former Connecticut goat farmer, to look for a scarce book by her.  Seward threw up his hands.  "Simone Weil!  I adore that woman - but sometimes I want to grab her by the shoulders & give her a good shake!"

I can't remember much of what I read back then.  But I have a vague idea regarding some of her commentaries on the growth of the human soul.  How at a certain point the natural energies of the human person (like vegetation that runs out of water) wear themselves out; through mistakes & sufferings, the natural person reaches a psychic & physical limit.  Then only an infusion of supernatural grace can save the soul.

It meant something to me; I could identify with it.  I'd been there.

This is all by way of a lead-in to a second writer who (like Osip Mandelstam) has meant a lot to me, periodically, intermittently, over the years : the Byzantine theologian (& ordinary monk, & martyr) Maximus the Confessor.  I'm back again reading him, & about him (Microcosm & Mediator, by Lars Thunberg, is a magisterial study, a terrific book; Cosmic Liturgy, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, is another one).

My "professional" life in the vocation of poet has been a very strange & frustrating experience.  I think I speak for all poets when I say this (just kidding, sort of).  I'm absolutely sure that 99% of the mistakes along the way - moral, ethical, intellectual, aesthetic, etc. - have been my own.

But there is a kernel of strangeness in this overall experience - not so much strange, as uncanny - which I attribute to objective reality, rather than to my own quirks of psychology & moral turpitude.  This uncanny crux has something to do with Simone Weil's schema of the end of nature & the beginning of grace.

Maximus, I hazard to think, would trace Weil's divide back to the ur-distinction of his own theological vision : the difference between Creator and Creation.  What the worldview of brilliant Maximus does, however - with the suavity of Shakespeare & the incisiveness of Aristotle - is to reconcile this basic difference without blurring the distinction.  That is, he propounds a cosmic landscape, wherein the simple unknowable Oneness of the Creator is reconciled with the multitudinous Manyness of the Creation.  Incarnation is the name of that process by which the Many are harmonized with the One - by which all beings are united in creative Love, without losing their distinct identity & freedom as unique replicas of that original Creator.

I realize how hokey this sounds.  But it has a lot of resonance with the worldview of a poet who inherited - after many long centuries - the Orthodox legacy from Byzantium : Nikolai Gumilev, the founder of the Acmeist movement in Russian poetry, which Mandelstam & Akhmatova brought to full flower.  Gumilev adumbrated an underlying worldview for Acmeist poetics : he called it "chasteness".  It is something maybe akin to Walt Whitman's visionary sense of the "Union" of many equally beautiful things (small & great, humble & vast).  The idea is that poetry's moral purpose has to do with celebrating the "chasteness" - the inherent dignity - of all things on earth : because it (poetry) is a loving response - an echo - of the supernatural good will of their creative Origin.

This is a sort of mystical idea, I guess.  My own life as a poet is rooted, paradoxically, in a spiritual crisis & break from poetry.  I came to the end of my vegetable nature, so to speak (in Weil's sense), at the age of 19.  It was a common thing, & still is : a young person torn apart by the world's chaos, & by his or her own sense of betrayal (self-betrayal, betrayal of others).  The fanatic young enthusiasts of ISIS are not really that different.  They are Simone Weil's déracinés - the spiritually uprooted.  There but for the grace of God go I.

So I worked back slowly into poetry (thanks mostly to Stuart Blazer, John Tagliabue, Edwin Honig & Osip Mandelstam).  We are talking about things that happened 35 years ago, in the late 70s.  But these spiritual experiences marked me.  I have lived on the margins of "professional" poetry ever since.  There are many reasons for this, I admit, not all of them having to do with the present self-mythologizing.  But the central motive, the reason which keeps impelling me to write, is the theological one.  Once you have this salt of the realm of Jesus planted in you, it does not easily fade away.  It's a realm of supernatural joy : an infusion of saving grace : who would want to throw that away?

509 to 509

Wrote another quasi-occasional poem today.  A Thanksgiving yodel, completed at exactly 5:09 p.m. this afternoon.  I grew up at 509 Arthur St., in the Mendelssohn neighborhood of Edina/Hopkins (first settled in the 19th century by a bunch of young musicians of the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, hence its name).  & now, after much travail, my parents have moved to the Episcopal Home (senior living) near their old neighborhood of Tower Hill (Minneapolis) - into apartment # 509.  I'm very glad they made it there before Thanksgiving.  "There's a divinity that shapes our ends / Rough-hew them how we will." (Hamlet)

MIRROR LAKES

The drizzle of sleet, monotonous

snare drum.  New England gloom

(Nor’easter coming).  To whom

shall we give thanks, U.S.?

Fields furl their cornucopia

to pumpkin horns.  Blow,

milkweed, for Fergus now –

so low on oil of gladness.  Yeah.

Can you loop some snarly comet

with your lariat?  Invite

that hobo down the street?

Unleash the joy in Joyce – the might

in Lincoln’s painful mite?  Mosey

on up with Moses, Jordan

way – beach Promised Land

in Plymouth sand?  Say yes in Yeshuee?

Wampum rests with Wampanoags.

Holidays rewind

red Vinland soil – to bind

the serpent to Kid George’s

fleecy cradle-calumet.  Your eyes

are Mirror Lakes, child;

Mendelssohn’s a neighborhood

for Minnesota symphonies;

the deep stars comprehend our schemes.

The bears all harmonize

& tumble through the skies

their growling round (hearth-beams).

      11.26.14

Elkhart

ELKHART

Elkhart.  Planed (horizontal)

onto flat plate of the fields.

Winnebago windshields

flock to leeward (behind motel).

I mosey through October park.

Light amid oaks, the old

Masonic bandstand.  Lake-bound

rivers intermingle through dark

Indiana valves.  Small-town museum

could be Russian (one

spare Burchfield windblown

farm, out of Depression).  Hum

the highways, south of the lake (U.S.

80).  Truck route, grain-

belt shuttle.  Hymnal (plain-

song).  Bible radio.  Esso, S.O.S....

Black Elk might have passed through here

(on the train).  The Buick

shuttles east-west, slick

with amaranth, milkweed... sheer

sunset loom-dust (grain elevators).

My father in rehab,

voice faint (grabs

phone with one good hand’s

bone grip) at the end of the line.

The left-side vision’s

gone.  Yet mind’s precision

lifts hoarse laughter (like a highway sign).

11.20.14

Minnesota kenosis

Late Tuesday night, I'm in a semi-underground motel (former locker room?) off positively 4th St, in Dinkytown, Minneapolis (U of M neighborhood. Giant Koons-esque plastic statue of toothy Gopher in mini-lobby.  Nice place otherwise).  Have been here for a few weeks, far from typical subterranean hutch in Providence.  Trying to pilot parents into retirement abode - big project, since my mom, Mary Ravlin Gould, has been a plenipotentially prolific painter/potter/prosaist/packrat (the genuine article of unrecognized Tower Hill local artist, with some special 40's-ish, Sheeleresque, Burchfieldoid, oils & watercolors, streetcorners, grain elevators, Hopkins, people...).  & my dad, John Gould the patent lawyer (Frisbee, anyone?  Pacemaker?) is just hanging on, it seems, these days...

Anyway, just rambling here.  Was able to spend a good part of last Saturday at some of the "Berryman at 100" conference just across the river. Wish I could have taken it all in, including the large Irish contingence of convergent evence.  The talks by Kamran Javadizadeh (JB & Hart Crane), Alex Runchman (JB & Delmore Schwartz), Philip Coleman (on Berryman's influence on JM Coetzee & other novelists), Radu Vancu (on JB & his Romanian soul mate Mircea Evanescu), & Claudio Sansone, especially (on JB, EP, & EPic) were ultra-wonderful & supremely convergent for this Henry.  I was even emboldened & nervy enough to get up & recite a poem at the end of Saturday's proceedings.  I hope some people enjoyed the Ecclesiastes references.  I was, indeed, too nervous & too silly.  Would have liked to have properly introduced myself, as the person designated in the spring of 1972 to organize a weekend-long memorial reading/event in honor of Berryman (who taught at Brown briefly at Edwin Honig's invitation (I think, not positive), before going to Minnesota).

Well, all this terrifically academic information doesn't quite get at the quiddity of what's on my mind.  It's been a long couple weeks in my old home town.  Berryman lived at the eastern & western borders, respectively, of 3-4 generations of Goulds & Ravlins, who, non-academics all, occupied houses & apts in an area bounded roughly by Tower Hill and the Washington Bridge.  My grandfather John Ravlin, a civil engineer, built a number of the grain elevators dotting the immediate skyline (along with the Pig's Eye sewage plant).  My other grandfather, Edward Gould, another engineer, was a veteran of WW I, & acted as marshal for the Vets Day parades every year in Minneapolis (on horseback).  He was City Assessor of Mpls for 35 years or so.  I guess I'm from old Twin Cities people.  So I spent last Saturday - John Berryman's 100th birthday - shuttling between my parents' old apartment (where I currently serve as librarian, cleaner, nurse, cook, mover, etc.), & this marvelous poetry conference : shuttling across the bridge where Berryman most mournfully ended his marvelous life, on my grandfather Ravlin's birthday.  Me, Henry, thinking about my own Hart Crane/Berryman/Ezra Pound epical efforts (orbiting in turn around Grandpa Ravlin's granddaughter, my tragickal-ghostly cousin Juliet)...

Me, Henry.  When I thought about the implications of this red-letter day, & my odd part in it at the end, so close to the bridge there - I was reminded of Russian Czar Peter the Great's legendary (but historical) visit to Amsterdam in disguise.  The king in disguise.  I wrote about the connection between epic poetry and the theological concept of kenosis, once upon a time.  & I felt a happy affinity for material presented in several of the talks, esp. those by Radu Vancu, Claudio Sansone, and Kamran Javadizadeh. Yet on Saturday, at the end of the conference, I seemed more like the flaky clown among serious literary personaggi - the scholars, the editors, the lauded poets...  I was just a minor nobody, hopping up to recite my goofy Berryman pastiche at the tail end of the show.  Maybe I was just Henry in disguise that night.  I hope a few people got the joke.

Once upon a time, when I was in high school (around 1969), I visited the home of my friend (& really my idol) Jeffrey Greenspoon, jazz guitarist, hipster guru, deep writer, old before his time (future doctor).  On his desk in his bedroom I noticed a book : John Berryman's Dream Songs.  He was reading it.  It was over my head.  Turns out Berryman was a personal friend of the parents of Jeffrey's girlfriend at the time.  He said Berryman used to show up at their suburban Minneapolis parties, with his wild Irish beard & thrilling talk, with intent to delight & astonish...

On the road

I write this evening from a motel in Elkhart Indiana, the "RV and Band Instrument Capital of the World."  I drove here down Interstate 80, through Pennsylvania, Ohio, & Indiana, on a couple of beautiful October days.  The farmlands roll out to infinity, trailing soft earth colors.  Some say Elkhart's name derives from a Potawatomi phrase for "heart of stag".  The island in the middle of town - now a park - between the St. Joseph & Elkhart Rivers does seem heart-like, with the two river veins merging there.

Anyway, this is a record of a brainstorm I had, driving west on 80.  I left early this morning from Mercer, PA, & turned off the radio in order to focus my mind a little.  I've been on a leave of absence from work since August, hence these trips to Minneapolis (to help my parents move to a retirement place).  The leave has been a blessing as far as my poetry-writing goes.  But something different happened on the road today.

I don't want to be too explicit.  Let's say there was a sudden sense that it's time for me to step out more as a poet.  I began to foresee a new way to address my - mostly American - world.  Along with the necessity of doing so.  One must dive into the arena and embody the poetic telegram - dramatize it, drive it home.  One must be less the shrinking violet & more like Vachel Lindsay, maybe : or Pindar, the impresario (Hart Crane once expressed a desire to be "a suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age"), or... Whitman.

Not every poet has or requires a "message".  A poem is a dandelion, an end in itself.  A poet with a theme or a message is no better - not in the slightest - than any other.  The poet who has an over-arching message to convey simply has a particular inner obligation : a certain job to do.

All I want to report here, for the moment, is that today I had that realization : along with some inklings about how to proceed.  Time to amp up my game.

p.s. just noticed again the photo to the right on this blog : the caption (from a very old postcard which a librarian colleague from Illinois handed to me once, about 30 years ago) reads : "Henry Thunder Winnebago, recording songs in a grove".  Clearly this image dates back to the early 20th century, when teams of anthropologists fanned out across the U.S. to study the "vanishing cultures" of the Native Americans.  The Winnebago of Wisconsin were near neighbors to the Potawatomi.  &, of course, the Winnebago is now the trademark model RV.  We are indeed on the road... but what road?  (The road from Elkhart.)

background music

The Language Trap

For some reason, not sure why, a few weeks ago I started immersing myself in anthropology.  Books on human prehistory, ancient kingship, ritual.  Reading Sir James Frazer, A.M. Hocart, Rene Girard, Walter Burkert, Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King (very interesting novel), many other things.

Burkert and Girard both published their seminal works (Girard, Violence and the Sacred; Burkert, Homo Necans) in 1972.  Their theories of violence and human origins are close parallels, but not the same.  Burkert traces the origins of human culture & consciousness back to animal life, & the emergence of hunting (homo sapiens distinguished itself early as the "hunting ape").  Homo Necans : "man the killer".  In Burkert's view, the violence involved in killing other large mammals - and the close proximity of hunting to "intraspecific" (man vs. man) killing - ie., murder, cannibalism - was the ground on which the rituals which structure later society developed.  Even after hunting was displaced by agriculture and animal husbandry, the ritual patterns remained, imprinting human culture with traditions of awe and taboo.

Girard offers a more radical and astonishing - a global, or total - theory.  (There is a fascinating book titled Violent Origins, edited by Burton Mack, which is a symposium of texts & conversations between Girard, Burkert, & anthropologist Jonathan Z. Smith, along with others).  Girard builds his global explanation of human consciousness & society on a re-fashioning of Freud.  For Girard, humankind is essentially the "mimetic (imitative) animal".  Violence instigated by "mimetic rivalry" - "what he has must be good : I must take it" - proved unstoppable, without limit, in primitive human collectives.  Rivalry and feuding threatened human self-extinction, until one day, the rival mobs united against a scapegoat.  The victimization of the scapegoat is the very ground of human social concord, of the peace necessary for social order.  But along with this act of mob violence went the "founding lie" : the human collective had to pretend 1) the killing was the victim's fault; 2) the victim actually initiated the violence;  3) the victim was therefore an alien being, superhuman, not one of us : that is, a god.  Thus Girard sees mimetic violence as at the root of social order (with its laws, rituals & taboos) and of human imagination.  The vast mythologies of divine beings turn out to be an elaborate ruse - a double displacement of responsibility for murder.  First, violent death is displaced onto the scapegoat victim; second, the scapegoat is held to be responsible for - or, what amounts to the same thing, the rescuer from - the original state of violent collective chaos.

This is a dark, but powerful theory.  Girard, a literary critic, draws his conclusions (as Freud was wont to do) from the evidence of myth & literature.  He also reserves a special place for the Bible and Christianity in his schema.  Judaeo-Christian texts are the antidote to the false consciousness of human culture (built as it is on the version of reality written by the victors, the scapegoat's persecutors).  Biblical texts, especially the New Testament, are instruments of disenchantment : they reveal the scapegoat mechanism from the perspective of the victim.

There are many elements of Girard's theory which I find both shocking & enlightening.  (One can read, for example, about the bear-hunting rituals of the Ainu of Siberia.  When the Ainu killed a bear, they apologized to it, and then they announced - "We didn't kill you; the Russians did.")  But I'm not yet quite convinced... I can't quite accept this total, global theory in toto.  What gave me pause was a passage in Mack's symposium, where Girard, in conversation, states that "Man is the mimetic animal".  In the end I find this to be a reductive formula.  Human nature is not defined merely by the impulse to mimic that which strikes us as the source of what is powerful, desirable or necessary.  I think that ultimately human nature is defined by a kind of freedom with respect to the "source" of reality itself.  It is in this sense that we can define ourselves as "children of God".  We are undetermined by everything except the spiritual source of all things.

(This view is closer, I think, to the writings of another remarkable anthropologist & theorist (of the prior generation), A.M. Hocart.  Hocart views human society as structured by ritual.  But ritual, for Hocart, is not primarily a mode of negative or false consciousness (a la Girard).  Rather, ritual is the form(s) applied by the human pursuit of Life itself : Life understood (by early human cultures) as a gift of the divine in its totality.)

Now Girard, as an anthropologist & scientist as well as a self-defined Christian, might not disagree with this : but he would say that our very language of the sacred is shaped & defined by the victimage scenario which was "hidden since the foundation of the world" (as he quotes the New Testament).  Unless we acknowledge this reality, we are "part of the problem" - we are merely continuing the false consciousness of a human culture structured on persecution.  This, too, I can almost accept : you could say in a sense that my representation of basic human nature is that of the "redeemed" Mankind - redeemed precisely by Christ's enlightening message - whereas Girard's schema offers a kind of prophetic warning about the real status of "unredeemed" Man.  They are two sides of the same coin.

Yet I guess I find something slightly oppressive itself about Girard's totalizing theory.  Man is not merely the "mimetic animal" - but also the "inventive, changing, transformative, originating" animal.

Girard constructs his illustrations from the Bible on the primal story of Cain & Abel.  And it is true that the Cain story implies the historical origins of urban, collective human society in Cain's murder of his brother - a murder spurred by envy (a frustrated mimicry).

Yet there is another story in Genesis, even more primal than Cain's : that is the story of Adam & Eve.  In this tale, human error is not motivated by imitation - though Adam's immediate effort to shift the blame to Eve (telling God, "she offered me the fruit, & I ate it") seems like the very "earliest" example of scapegoating.  But the point here is, Eve (& Adam after) are not motivated by mimicry, but by ignorant desire.  The great irony is that their physical desire - the "desire of the eyes" - is for the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge : the one tree in the Garden God forbids them to touch.

There is some special blend of ironic humor & pathos at play in this story... something infinitely complex.  & oddly enough it suggests to me a return to the theory of Girard's "twin" in this field - Walter Burkert.  Think of it like this.  If anthropoid human culture was deeply shaped in its beginnings by the hunt, then there must be something "hunterly" about human language itself.  The Bible, we are told, is the language, the Word, the message of the one invisible Most High God.  So think of it as both a hunter's trap, and a trap for hunters.  In a sense, the Genesis story of the garden of Eden represents a sort of hunter's trap set for mankind.  Man is forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge - the knowledge that will make him "like God" (according to the serpent, anyway).  Nevertheless, unknowingly & willfully, Adam & Eve eat from the tree. The fruit of the tree is the knowledge of death : of their own mortality, their infinite distance & alienation from the eternal living God.

The long lesson of Biblical monotheism here begins to be enunciated.  When you choose merely the visible, the tangible, the timebound goods - the "desire of the eyes" - you simultaneously blind yourself to the ultimate source of such "partial" goods.  As Jesus noted, much later (according to the gospels) : "First get right with God, then all these (material) things shall be yours as well."

God the hunter set a trap for Man - called the Word, the "tree of knowledge".  (He set the serpent nearby, to attract Man to the bait.)  Essentially, the Bible is the voice of the divine hunter, mollifying & healing the wounded animal in his trap.

So what we have represented in the first Genesis story is not so much a tale of mimicry, envy and murder, but rather a lesson of blind desire : of "lost sheep."  Man is not inherently or necessarily violent; homo sapiens is not irreparably aggressive.  Man, you might say, is the animal most capable of failure to imitate, to follow : Man is the animal who gets lost.  Man is not only wolfish : Man is sheepish, too.

(p.s. I'm not a proponent of Biblical literalism, by the way, in any sense.  I can accept that the scriptures were "inspired" by the spirit of God, as a whole, in general : but they were written by men.  There are contradictions, mixed messages, many elements open to mistaken interpretation.  Through the ages, the Bible has sometimes been abused for purposes of bigotry & scapegoating.  This should never be forgotten.  In fact it should be investigated : & Girard offers a powerful hermeneutic for such exploration.)

I, too, find it unpopular

The powerful machinery of instantaneous discourse-proliferation & dissemination has its effects on poets' lives & careers.  Meanwhile the forces at work, the loci of the pressure, seem to become more visible.  Nevertheless these phenomena take on the tincture, exhibit the deformations, of the general strangeness of the times.  Thus we have the monotonous drumbeat demanding that poets & poetry become more socially engaged & transparent - that poets must claim their place & make their stand on the burning political & moral issues of the day.  Then we have the backbeat  (it's a duet of sorts) : journalistic/media experts, bemoaning the death of poetry, its irrelevance to the larger scheme of contemporary life.  Then a 3rd, dialectical, voice leaps into the fray - poets, editors, & poetry teachers, for the most part - who insist with vehemence that, to the contrary, poetry is becoming more & more popular, relevant, dynamic, pervasive, & culturally powerful!  Poetry is on a roll!  Poetry is coming into its own, shedding the old stodgy elitism & academic fetor, & emerging as the revolutionary expression of the people & the common life, the 99%!

The common thread here seems to be that poets have a moral obligation to serve populist movements & what appear to be the political questions of the moment.  & the technology of media dissemination actually promotes & forwards this attitude.  The popularity of poets & poetry now seems to be a product of very sophisticated public relations & media manipulation, rather than an effect of poems themselves.  Am I being paranoid?  Is this sour grapes?  I don't know, but there does appear to be at least an element of "selling" & Babbittry to the whole poetry enterprise - & it seems to be rather pronounced in our days.

OK, let's say I have no problem with the notion that serious poetry has an obligation to engage with the moral dimension of human history & life.  & I do not.  What I do have reservations about is how this gets translated simplistically into popular/populist memes, movements, celebrity, & (supposedly-) critical attention.  (I hate Pop Art, by the way.  I like Jasper Johns, though.)

I am not going to drag out this mini-jeremiad.  But let's just look for a moment at the micro-technology of literature.  The arts of the word (poetry, drama, fiction) are constructed around quasi-ritual acts : that is, they mirror the continuum of reality, while at the same time distancing themselves, becoming strange forms of serious play.  The verbal art of a long family novel, to give one example, offers us a telescoping of ordinary time & experience - & thus opens a window upon both life's pathos & its ironies.  What this character says & does now is framed inside an unforeseeable future, with consequences & ramifications (emotional, existential, moral, spiritual) which cannot be predicted in advance : & this situation is the very marrow of plot, the very essence of our emotional engagement with narrative.  & remember : it's art.  It's not everyday life.  It's not a speech, it's not a program.  It's a very complex mimetic evocation of an ultimately inexpressible wholeness.

Poetry telescopes the same foreshortening of fiction, with all sorts of other complicating effects (the mimicry of presence, the prosody of suspense...).  In general, though, all three modes (poetry, fiction, drama) aim toward the same telos, the same end, which is essentially aesthetic.  That is, the end of these arts has something to do with the beautiful.

How then can we have "the beautiful" by means of some kind of inherent distancing effect?  Isn't there a problem, or a danger, here, of diffidence, detachment, moral indifference?  Certainly : but it's the same  moral, existential & personal problem which faces us in all modes of human social life.  The arts do not have a monopoly on detachment & indifference.  You notice it also, by the way, in economic & political life - the various deviously-systematic modes (all rooted in selfishness & callous pride) of amoral indifference with regard to the common welfare & the rights of the poor.

The pressure for populism, political engagement, relevance & mass popularity with respect to poetry is underwritten by a kind of devil's bargain : we will trade aesthetic values for social power.  We will actually deny that there exists something objectively "beautiful" in itself (even if "objectivity" & "subjectivity" are impossible to delimit in a reductive way), for the sake of a persuasive political argument or a naively self-gratifying sense of our own political righteousness.

These pressures all seem to be part & parcel of the downgrading of the arts & humanities in education generally.  We are enslaved to various modes of functionalism & determinism today - all in the name of liberation, justice, &, yes, economic realism.

How boring.  It's enough to make me feel like writing another unpopular poem.

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...