Nostalgia for world culture

Quick stray thoughts tonight... Osip Mandelstam once defined the impulse of the Acmeist movement (early 20th cent. Russian poetry) as "nostalgia for world culture."  Nostalgia for world culture.  Implying that "world culture" once existed (or still existed, elsewhere).  But then Acmeism also promoted a Bergsonian, anachronistic anti-sense of Time - what was deep in the past (Ovid, Dante) was actually calling to us from the future.  (In this he may have been attempting to one-up the contemporary Futurist movement, among other things.)

But what would be a real world culture?  A global culture, life-supporting, life-enhancing, humane, refined, playful.  Not the world as we know it today... but maybe an aspiration.

Then again one way of thinking of culture is as an inherently parasitic lichen-like growth.  Culture is opportunist.  For example, the culture of the "divine king", established around the world in various phases & formations - the culture of powerful rulers and autocrats, with their enormous suction machines for collecting & channeling the labor of millions of slaves (see : pyramids) - the culture of royal power might be seen as a defense mechanism of the kings themselves.  A survival mechanism, in other words, insinuated into society by the rulers, to protect themselves from being divided up and eaten, tossed about in communal games, by the whole peon mass of the tribe itself (see A.M. Hocart's Kings and Councillors for a consideration of such phenomena).

Then imagine that the speedy vine-growth of culture takes another world-historical bend, once the ziggurat of royal power & totalitarian government reaches its apex : I mean the turn toward apocalyptic messianism (see Norman Cohn's classic study of the Iranian-Zoroastrian roots of same, Cosmos, chaos & the world to come).  Here religious thinking happens upon a viral antidote to overweening political power : the idea of the return of the God-King - the uber-King, the "King of Kings", who will finally put the tyrants in their place (like Yurtle the Turtle, at the bottom of the pond).

I think of these parasitic culture-shifts as edge-phenomena, happening on the margins of something even deeper & more invisible & slow.  I'm thinking of the historical project of "species-Man", homo sapiens, seeking equilibrium.  Humankind is still building the conceptual house which is truly life-enhancing, lovable, livable.  This, as it happens, is another theme which turns up in Mandelstam's version of Acmeism : the idea that poetry has a role to play in the human project to "domesticate" life on earth.  "Domestic hellenism", he called it.

What would be a really "domestic" global culture?  Livable, lovable, familial, gemutlich?  It would have to involve the old English theme of liberty - the freedom from encroachment by tyrannical government.  But, on the other side, it would also have to involve something beyond pure individualism : the active engagement in the common good, the commonweal, the welfare of the whole community.  (These are, you may have noticed, the primal ideals, respectively, of the two major political parties in the U.S. - yet how sadly & stupidly & rigidly & uselessly & backwardly & corruptly & blindly & dogmatically & inflexibly they have worked themselves out in the electoral process.)

What's really needed in order to stimulate Mandelstam's "world culture" - what's required at the most basic level of conception - is a spiritual orientation.  Pope Francis, it seems to me, is saying some of the right things in that direction.  The "poor church" is the global house we share.  The spiritual attitude is one that sets aside narrow pleasures & greedy ambitions & haughty pride on behalf of a sense of wholeness : a "gratitude for existence" (another Brodskian, Gumilevian, Mandelshtamian theme).

How is this possible?  I'm not an advocate by any means of any kind of theocracy : don't get me wrong.  Rather I am talking about something much more basic, simple, and primitive - the kind of childlike faith represented by the original St. Francis.  How can we live in the global house if we cannot trust in the benevolent love of the Spirit that formed & created it all?  How can we build a future without a sense of being "at home" in the universe?  I think of Jesus, the first "son" of God, as playing the middle C on the piano, of a major chord of affirmation - of union with the source of Being.  Francis only echoed the same.  "Unless you turn & become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

Granted much of this will strike many as idiocy or ideology, or both.  So be it.  The poet represents a "nostalgia for world culture".  As such he or she represents a link in the spine of historical time - a time working itself out in the human sense of reality & possibility.  The poet's vision is grounded in harmony, triggered by a basic sense of wonder : of wonder at all that exists, majestically, from nothing at all.

The personal, subjective & familial love we experience among ordinary friends, strangers, & family, might someday be echoed & reinforced by culture at large - & this might, actually, be a return to "Nature" itself - the natural cosmos stamped by the seal of divine Providence.  "The Son of Man is coming, & he will restore all things."  O ye of little faith!  Sursum corda.

Deep lands

Home again in Providence.  Tucked into the old house, with the dogwood & the weedy patio in the backyard, the books upstairs.  I realize after 25 years how much I have become an appendage of this appanage.  I'm part of the local landscape.  May have to leave it soon.

Driving non-mindedly through springtime Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania... wide fields, deep lands, prim farms... trying to keep things going.  The banks of weeds & flocks of trees along the roadside (somebody's Rock Candy Mountain).  The beckoning earth.  (Burchfield's Ohio.)

"Beauty will save the world."  (Dostoevsky)  Reading The Education of Henry Adams.  Adams' quasi-Buddhist passivity.  He understands the futility of late-Darwinian naturalism - yet scrambles around without finding an alternative.

Faith, from the naturalist view, seems an expression of bad faith - a deliberate shuttering of the rational mind.  Mantra for closed eyes.

My whole focus an attempt to justify another view : one which has grown on me over time, prompted by a sort of unconscious prescience, an adolescent St. Vitus' mime of my own future orientation.

The naturalist reads the universe in a context of shock - the shock of recognition of the unknown.  This is the real psycho-cultural after-effect of the development of modern science.  Thanks to the Hubble Telescope et al., we see the universe more immediately, more concretely - an incalculably immense wasteland of burning stars & circling rocks.

The religionist sees the universe as a metaphor, an allegory, a sign.  This kind of seeing is now judged, by the scientific mind, to be the most egregious & central scandal.  It's a kind of evasion, an idealistic feint - as fiction, myth-making.

The poet (arch-Romantic) believes in a vitalist, personal, Reality.  The poem is a document of this faith : a vivid speech, a living voice evoking a living world of living beings.

I can't convince you of what I believe - I can't even enunciate it.  I'm trying, but I fall short.

"Beauty will save the world."  This is Dostoevsky's version of what was once (back in medieval times) understood as "the economy of salvation".  Divine Providence has a plan for the redemption of the earth.

The story of Christ's death & resurrection is a kind of metaphor.  A mystery play.  A symbol, a sign of the "Son of Man" : that is, a representative image of the destiny of the human race as a whole on earth, and of the fortitude of the individual person enmeshed in same.  We die, yet we live again.  We overcome evil through love.  We redeem the earth.  This is "Man's" project here, "Man's" goal.  Joseph Brodsky : "Man was put on this earth for one purpose : to make civilization."  I would revise this formula, however.  Man was put on this earth to discover the love of God (which is really the same thing).

All these phrases of mine are completely useless.  I can't put into words what I really sense & know.

I helped bury my loving, steadfast father last month.  He went into ashes by Minnehaha Creek.  Yet he lives.  He leaves an outline of the Son of Man, a fulfillment of one local corner of the creation, where he shone like a star.

"Ariel was glad he had written his poems..."

"A Tear is an Intellectual Thing,
& a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King."

Beauty will save the world.  There is a harmony to the whole of life which no artist or scientist has been able to express.  It is "grace", it is "love".  It will overcome evil & will make all things new.

It is personal beyond our understanding of the visible person.  It is whispering to you.

Which reminds me of this little poem I wrote about 30 yrs ago :

from a cave

Such a small voice,
I would not stop to hear;
the sun was going down, and
there were no houses near.

Such a strange voice,
whispering out of the ground -
familiar, though it seemed
unearthly, utterly profound.

Such a sweet voice,
twining my cavern ear;
a vine for water jars, when
all the wedding guests are here.

The poem that took the shape of a state

One last memo from Elkhart.... a very old (& now a little revised) "shape poem"

 ARROWHEAD
    
        A
 Maze of lakes in northern Minnesota,
 Crisp air adrift on owl's wings
 Between the wide gray skies
 And fanfare of muted pines;
 Waves lapping, lapping
 Against the riding prow
 Of the motorboat, my dad
 At the tiller, looking
 Out toward shore, quiet,
 His beard grown rough now
 After a weekend in the woods –

 I'm afraid to dive too deep
 Into the scales of the past,
 My callow bones, the large
 Boy head full of springing
 Illusions, upstart to replace
 A sense of imperfection
 With voracious all-devouring
 Enveloping thought – fishline,
 This daily bait of blind birdsong.
 Before you, Iron Range long gone, I
 Will always be that unbound, reedy son.

Hieroglyph for a father

Reporting once again from Elkhart, Indiana, en route to Providence.  Elkhart is green & in the middle of the country, south of some Great Lakes.  Today the sun shone, the trucks plowed, the bugs spattered 'gainst the windshield of the golden Buick.

I wrote this poem about 25 yrs ago, thinking of my dad, and also of the "word of the father", the Biblical Word filtering down the Nile between sand dunes & pyramids.  The Twin Cities are a sort of Egypt in reverse : the Mississippi is the Nile, the great seed companies (Pillsbury, General Mills) & the many grain elevators are like the Pharaoh's storehouses, watched over by prudent Joseph.  My Dad was a very wise & prudent Joseph himself, a sort of self-contained perfectionist & workaholic.  Coming of age in America in the late 60s, I think I (along with my brothers to some extent) found it hard to reconcile our highly motivated, organized, dedicated & driven father, with the sharp & sour odor of violence, chaos & confusion of that time.  The "social malaise" (Nixon, Agnew, the War, the riots, the Weathermen...).  I was part of that prodigal confusion myself.

He worked in a profession (intellectual property litigator) saturated in conflict, rivalry & stress.  But he didn't bring it home or channel it against us.

Anyway, this poem is about my father but it's also an allegory about the Word.  "Out of Egypt have I called my son..." - the son Joseph of the 12 tribes, & also the son of Joseph, the carpenter...

HIEROGLYPH

Papa was always working on the house,
his long shadow bent across the sill
like a letter in an unknown alphabet,
his hoe or hammer making their steady
marks across the vagabond afternoons,
the deep summer water we lived through
holding our breath, our lungs tight
with promises, danger, laughing gas.

And when we grew older, more serious
and dangerous, Papa was always working
late at the office. For all we knew
he was a drone of the dread Pharaoh,
one of the caretakers of the Sphinx,
late into the night composing riddles,
subtle passwords and husky undertones
which opened the secret granary doors.

And it was only later, as we watched
his dry wooden boat slip underground,
that we understood the clean framing
of intention, the straight crossbeams
of its execution, that house of his
a kind of sounding board for praise.
Working across the tightrope of the
roofline was his way of walking on air.

& here's another, even older poem, which gets a little at that difference of the generations, and the feeling we had of our Dad, moving on ahead of us into the pine forest.

MORRIS DANCE

Every morning my father followed
the dusty freeway rings - a welter
of iron circles, a maze of wheels
dodging beneath the vertical
shelter of the concrete law.

And he jousted with the cold
steel cables of the elevators;
he stood before the judges,
spearing a wet dollar each day
in the rockbound pool of possession.

Somewhere between the inventive silence
of the shop, and the hollow hunger
of the labyrinth, he traveled out
with a ball of legal twine, ready
for turbid blades in the gripping dream -

and at the end of December,
the two of us, the rusty brothers,
trailing those roads again
in your rattling clunker,
remembering the dance steps

of the breakdowns, the power,
the glory, for ever and ever.
A mystery man goes on ahead of us,
on through the green light,
into the lake-blue sky -

(and there's a charitable shadow
in the norway spruce tonight, a star
already hidden in the thunderhead;
there's all the peaceful sleep
we never knew, winging over the highway).

The other Henry

Driving home to Providence tomorrow.  The route (Providence-CT-NY-NJ-Mercer, PA-Elkhart, IN-Chicago-Wisconsin-Minneapolis, and flip/reverse) takes about two and a half days.  U.S. 80 etch-a-sketched on my brain, as by a no.2 lead pencil.  I've seen the heartland, from winter to summer - busy old world of pasture, trucks, silos.  Roadsigns.  Burning machines, fleeting memory, archaic billboards.  Sunny green slopes & wide, sly streams.  Beef jerky.  Construction fellas from Tennessee & Missouri, families back home, playing beanbag in the motel parking lot night after night (beer & barbecue).

The little witches' hat of the water tank on Tower Hill (only high point in the metro area).  Conical green cap peeking up in the exiled distance from my mother's balcony (steadfast old Southeast lady, shipped to the old folks' home over in St. Paul).

These past 9-12 months, very rattling for me.  Change in the air.  I retire from ye olde library at Brown, I go back home to help my Dad in the throes of dying, & deviously the life he's made is snarled, inwoven again with the so-called life I made.  This is going home, I guess.  I'm reading The Education of Henry Adams in my off-time.  Watching the early swallows from my mother's strange new balcony, I think : Henry could have been a poet, if he'd listened more carefully.

The Big River, with its screech of pileated woodpecker, & ghost of Berryman, is listening.

I mean Henry Adams, the other Henry.  A sort of translucent mind & heart, plangent & sad.  He never did get it.  It wasn't up to him.  (I mean that other Henry.)

I, me, this Henry, will get back to poetry, though.  I've made a vow on my father's strong handshake (as I quote Ecclesiastes in the obit : "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your strength.")  My father was a mighty man, a righteous man.  My mother has a fine hand too (artist, through & through).

I have this sense that America doesn't quite understand itself or its own poetry yet.  Poetry is a spiritual discipline, a trial by fire.  That lead pencil pressed down by the 2-yr-old - that US 80 with the green-gray "Venus Wins All" down the margins - is an ash-trail of a blue-bright flame (world-shaping metamorph).

Family of Man

It's late at night on 5.28.  May 28.  We buried my father's ashes in St. Stephen's churchyard today (my mother was born on St. Stephen's Day - 12.26).  In a beautiful spot beside Minnehaha Creek.  My mother will be buried there too, someday.  She says she hopes the creek will flood sometime, & wash them all downstream.  My mother had her first drink (sherry) at the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (in Portland, Maine) at the age of about 12 or 13 (ca. 1940).  She was pals with the daughter of "Laughing Allegra".  "By the shores of Gitchee Gumee..." (- just a little further downstream stands the statue of Hiawatha carrying Minnehaha across the stream...)

5.28.  May 28.  I finished the long poem (about 600 pp.) Forth of July on 5.28.2000.  The poem circles around (among other things) the early New England Anglican minister & freethinker & librarian & orchardist & Seeker William Blackstone.  First exile from Boston.  Early settler (pre-Roger Williams) in Rhode Island.  He shows up in many of my poems (see the books Lanthanum, Dove Street...) - even a poem celebrating my father's birthday (4.12.27).  In fact a lot of my poems are numerically structured around the numbers 5, 28 (28 is a perfect number).

Forth of July.  My grandmother (John Gould's mother) was born on the 4th of July, 1900.  Florence Gould was the first Episcopalian (Anglican) in the family.

William Blackstone was buried on his property in Cumberland, RI on or around 5.28.1675.

It's kind of mysterious how life imitates art & art imitates life & the structures of the imagination are worked out in the dust to which thou shalt return.  All these strange shadows of many lives well lived (in the "Family of Man")!

Elkhart octahedron

Greetings, old-time friends.  Once more I am ensconced in my usual way station in Elkhart, Indiana, on the road again between Providence & Minnesota.  Pleasant spring rain falling outside open motel window, sound of U.S. 80 & robins in background.  On the turnpike I try to turn off the radio, re-invigorate ancient gray matter with thoughts down usual off-ramps & blue highways.  Today (between Mercer, PA & Elkhart) the Great Mind bent its mighty focus yet once more to Poetry - what it means, & what the heck I'm doing there...

Struck once again by the sense of being so off the grid, off the contemporary map.  This is not another complaint about neglect.  What I mean is that my personal pointe-de-vue on the whole dang subject seems to be so idiosyncratic.  This itself is probably an error on my part; I'm not as solitary as I imagine. But it feels that way here in mid-America at the moment.  Poetry as a contemporary cultural phenom in the U.S. appears in some ways to have "matured" : it doesn't have to explain itself or account for itself.  In fact, it can't - it's too pervasive, shifty and diverse.  It just is, and being just itself, has embedded itself (to a small distinct degree anyway) as a part of the present scene & structural interface of society (come again?).  Poets are those who react to the common life in the form of poems, and they are accepted & sometimes appreciated for that.  Thank you, America.  No, thank you, Poet.

But this is not my approach or situation.  Gradually over decades it seems like my track has led through certain landscapes of poetry as a world tradition, and through the channel of what we call the "long poem", to a place where for me poetry & thought, poetry & worldview, have become entangled.  & the worldview feels "embattled".  This I admit could be evidence of a fatal mis-step or pitfall - one has the sense that "embattled" could just be a way of either missing something (a failure of imagination) or avoiding something (say, the Reality Principle so to speak).  But then again, maybe not, maybe not.  As Mandelstam told an interviewer once who asked him (pertly) for a definition of poetry : "It is the poet's sense of being right."

So I'm driving west on U.S. 80 this morning, and once again for the millionth time am sketching out very provisionally, while trying not to back-end any giant trucks, what is the whatness of it all...

Have been reading of late in the remarkable anthropologist Roy Wagner (Symbols that stand for themselves, et al.).  Wagner's a very provocative thinker, a sort of cross between Spengler & Bergson & Hocart.  He rejects the Saussurian/structuralist concept of "the sign", & folds language into a more fundamental symbol-making human process, essentially a dialectical means of joining "microcosm & macrocosm" (word & image) to shape human culture(s).  His background study was in New Guinea; he traces how marriage rites & death rites etc. hold society together, while at the same time evolving into these strangely self-standing & self-canceling & totalizing myths (a process he calls "obviation").  Wagner loves little charts, & I do too.  These dialectical diamond shapes or octahedrons which illustrate the strangely diagrammatic shifts in a culture's self-definition & worldview.  Then he does the same for the Modern and Medieval West, seen as a long-playing chronological working out of these culture shifts between a God-centered balance ("the eucharist") and a human-centered system (Descartes, "I think therefore I am").  I'm drastically oversimplifying.  Wagner also has this very thought-provoking perspective on the nature of Time - there are these "now" epochs of human time, self-defining, which are distinct (as Bergson's & Spengler's ideas are distinct) from the "clock-time" which we manage & which manages us (really a convenient abstraction of the "epoch" into measurable "coffee-spoon" space).

Please consider the previous paragraph as a digression.  But Wagner's dialectic schema of Medieval & Modern (think Henry Adams) is interesting for a poet working on a vast mental project titled Ravenna Diagram (think of a venn diagram overlapping "now & then").  Wagner's "eucharist-centered" Middle Age, however, is shifted or complexified in my own way of thinking.  Neither theism in general nor the Abrahamic religions are pure products of Western civilization (in Wagner's neo-Spenglerian sense).  Their roots lie elsewhere, which suggests that their ultimate fruits might also.  They are not fully "explained" by the Medieval/Modern dialectic.

Please consider the previous paragraph as a second digression.  Hey, I'm digressing because my worldview is embattled!

I'm tooling down U.S. 80.  I see a vague sort of diamond shape or octahedron in my mind.  These are the facets of a worldview or a vision which perhaps underwrites what I think of as poetry, or my motives for making it.  There is a vanishing point at the end of this road, where all the facets meet.

1. One facet let's call "consciousness".  Consciousness itself I think of in terms of a kind of infinite regress or vanishing point.  We have the immense incomprehensible material universe, of burning stars & some other phenomena, whirling & whirling in vast rings.  & we have consciousness.  Everything material is filtered through this human lens, this mirror of comprehension.  So the material world is terrible & humbling... yet it is known only in the mind.  This inward infinity comes to bear no matter how solid the outer phenomena.  The mind is unavoidable : it's "always there".  This is a mystery.

2. Another facet : "something from nothing".  That Henri Rousseau who wrote Genesis narrates a deity who "speaks" the cosmos from nothing (how He did this on certain "days", when days weren't invented yet, is part of his charm).  But it's the principle of the thing that counts.  However it happened, the underlying idea here is of the visible cosmos as a consequence of some shaping, forming architectural aim.  This leads to the third facet, which is

3.  "the beautiful".  Natural beauty & the harmony of planetary growth, along with the distinctive beauty of distinct things, along again with the "spiritual"-moral beauty of certain true renderings of human actions (love, freedom, kindness, devotion, selflessness, originality, etc.)... these are understood as ends in themselves.  The phenomena we call beautiful are encountered in a dimension which remains undefined by scientific causality.  I know I'm being sloppy here but I'm writing from a motel & scribbling this diamond cartoon in the most provisional way.

4. "the incarnational".  This facet follows from a very basic Trinitarian triangle at the edge of our diamond.  The "I am" of consciousness who stands mysteriously behind (in a creative mode) the visible universe is here mirrored in person.  Adjacent thus to the previous facet, the divine-human person is recognized in the form of the beautiful as an end-in-herself or -himself.  History, time, & cosmos take on the outline of the person, as a kind of natural fulfillment of creation.  But this is only the Alpha, the beginning, leading to

5. "the providential".  Let's go back to the previous remark noting that Judeo-Christianity is rooted outside & prior to the history of the West.  An almond tree grows in Galilee.  In the Biblical sense, the historical act of Jesus on earth was represented as a provisional fulfillment of the more ancient "promise" of the Promised Land.  & we can read the Jewish destiny here as itself a representation of the destiny of the species and the planet as a whole.  As a whole (holism is important).  "Divine providence" declares that the whole earth, the planet as a whole, will "return" to that future, promissory state of being a peaceful & blessed home (the promised land).  This is the promised end for which the Messiah performs his role.

6.  The "familial".  But such a vision implies a regeneration of "familial love" in the broadest sense - a kind of moral & spiritual reform of the person & the community.  A renewal motivated by a sense of the whole, the purpose of life & the beauty of the cosmos.

7. which brings us back again to "creation".  The most basic, most foundational root idea is that of creatio ex nihilo.  This way of thinking of reality, most deeply considered, leads the mind to joy.  This spark of light, this sense of reality as conditioned by an order of love, is the whole ground of a peaceful response, a normal "gratitude for existence" (Joseph Brodsky's phrase).  So the facets meet at their matrix, the vanishing point.

Now this kind of thinking today is "embattled", as I said.  I'm not going to battle over it here, though.  The reader may take it or leave it.  For me, in any case, this general view of things enacts a kind of pivoting dance with poetry as an activity, an art.  The joy of poetry is an expression of the joy of this worldview.  This is the substance of poetry's difference from prose.  The difference is harmony : some kind of cosmic harmony.

Wally & Me

Mayday, Mayday... maypole, maypole ... I was thinking about an ocean liner, S.S. Normandie - & discovered Wally Stevens had been thinking about her too...

An Ordinary Evening in Minneapolis

After weeks of late winter & spring away from home & away from my books & the library, spending time with my parents at the nursing home, one day last week I had a sudden desire to travel to Wallace Stevens Land.  I was apprised of a good local bookstore during the AWP invasion, James & Mary Laurie Books, & went back there & got a copy of Stevens' collected writings, and The Dome & the Rock, by James Baird (a study of Stevens' architectonic tectonics).

Wallace Stevens... what can one say.  The man is a great artist and American genius, & as representative of the "modern" as Dante is of the "medieval" or Shakespeare the Renaissance or Milton the Reformation.  Representative, that is, as a kind of quintessence or benchmark or perihelion of achievement.  Refinement, acumen, absolute originality, conscious artistry taken to the limit.  & mostly just an utter wonder to read, sparkling with vitality & intellectual force.

That (inadequately) being said, Stevens is a constant challenge to my own way of thinking.  This is part of the bracing experience of the encounter - the sense that deep down I have these qualifications which at the same time I have difficulty shaping into a proper argument.  There seem to be so many pitfalls involved in challenging a poet's basic "worldview" - it seems unfair & liable to blinders & mis-reading.

Stevens himself, unsurprisingly, encapsulated my problem for me.  As he put it in one of his Adagia : "Life is an affair of people, not of places.  But for me life is an affair of places and that is just the trouble."  Baird's study fully amplifies what an "affair of places" - of topos, of landscape, of habitations - actually meant for Stevens.  He argues that Stevens' entire oeuvre is an "amassing harmony" of coordinated elements, one Grand Poem whose form is a mighty arc, a dome built on rock - the rock of the absolute self, a post-Emersonian Adamic American imagination.  The central (& here, American) self - not king, not emperor, not God, but Man as master of reality - is the sole source of true & vital perception.  It is a sort of post-romantic Renaissance Romanticism - a disenchanted naturalism (reality) brought to life again by the human spirit (imagination).

But there's no need here to clamber down into a sort of academic gully.  The encounter with Stevens occurs, as he constructs it, only on a plane of pure poetry.  It is a master building of the absolute spirit of the unique builder - it does not stand for, symbolize, myths & paradigms, but is rather their source.

What I find challenging about all this is that my own "sense of reality" seems to be constructed intellectually (reasonably or not) on an entirely different foundation.  Stevens seems to be part of the central Emersonian spine of American thought & poetry, the tone of "self-reliance", which challenges all past tradition as out of date - because it is recognized as essentially a (continually-obsolescent) myth-making process.  The Christian tradition is a burden and oppression on the free mind & spirit of the present, the American here & now.  When Frost, for example, blends his narratives into an arc of Christian interpretations, he is folding himself under another master, he is choosing to renounce the absolute Kantian-Romantic freedom of the human mind, that categorical enlightened Subjectivity which makes the exterior world what it will.  This is the "modern" (Cogito ergo sum).

But my own mind & imagination have always seemed to trend in a counter-direction.  Stevens' imaginative "dome" is like the under-layer or the photo-negative of the freedom & exaltation of the believing Spirit.  & "life is an affair of people" is a very apt summation of the ground of this other way of seeing.  The Emersonian drive for the spirit's autonomy seems to stumble on the question of "other people" : the nature of the relation (the ratio, the Logos) we call Love.  If the "affair of persons" is a matter of intersecting arcs (rather than sole solar domes) then suddenly we have the potential to imagine "the person" as extending into infinite mystery, and of reality as a whole grounded in this very personal threshold.

Which is a view of things, by the way, which seems to correspond to some elements of traditional Judeo-Christian faith.  I think Stevens understood all this : & further exploration of his poetry will no doubt reveal (& probably has already) such undercurrents.

I like to think of my own attitude as oriented somewhere between Eliot & Stevens & Crane : accepting Eliot's "historical sense" & reverence for tradition, without falling for his reactionary & doctrinaire pessimism.  Thinking of poetry as involved in the creative re-imagining of old sacred meanings - so as to see them in the present in a changed light, a different relevance.*

But let's conclude this boring lecture & get back to Stevens now.  "The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself."

*p.s. reminder to self : it was the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam who enabled this attitude for me.  Mandelstam's own utterly nonpareil poesie der poesie is yet comparable with Stevens.  The neo-classicism and traditional Judeo-Christian grounding of Mandelstam's & Gumilev's Acmeism resonates with Eliot.  & yet Mandelstam's Dante - in his famous essay "Conversation about Dante" - is not Eliot's paragon of the medieval mind, but rather a kind of playful "futurist" - a voice from an earth to come.  Thus Mandelstam allowed me to find a way between the antipodes of American modernist poetry, and has been a taproot for my own branching these past 35 years.

Henricus Poeta Australopithecus

America (US) is such a great and good and democratic nation.  Walt Whitman says so.  Our literature today is produced en masse while following the fairest, strictest ethical protocols, using the most objective measures within completely standardized procedures of agonic literary contests, academic accreditation, absolutely appropriate recognition and financial underwriting.  The Program Era has proven to be incredibly productive in terms of nurturing and supporting vastly diverse and talented young poets from all walks of life, who go on to publish widely, teach consistently, and interact with their audiences in healthy & socially-approved ways, applying the multifaceted dimensions of literary & creative methodologies in ever-new permutations of lyric and experimental modes of poetry.

Our powerful, thriving literary scene here in contemporary America only throws into sharper contrast the debilitated condition and existential cul-de-sac of Henricus Poeta Australopithecus (or HPA).  Some critics have suggested that one motivating factor for the problematics of HPA is a possible high-count percentage of Neanderthal DNA in this primitif-naif pre-Program Era poet's genetic inheritance.  Such indeed might account for the sadly hilarious exponential series of multiple social disconnects between HPA's view of his own rightful position in the literary sphere, and his actual degenerate, debased, humiliated, outcast, leprous, persona non grata, laughingstock non-status within the professional literary communities of our great land.

HPA has more than once been captured on video cursing his own Muse as "that stubborn hag", and indeed his professional career, if one can call it that, has been punctured and punctuated by extreme forms of masochistic counter-intuitive, illogical, unreasonable and self-defeating acts.  Let us list just a few of the more egregious examples here in roughly chronological order :

1. HPA had the gall to begin writing poetry in the mid-1960s, before MFA programs became widely established.  He "started writing" on his own at the age of 14 or so, "inspired" by the likes of ee cummings and Guillaume Apollinaire.  For his undergraduate college application essays, he sent poems (the nerve!).  Throughout his career, he has repeatedly objected to the notion that MFA programs are necessary - he sometimes even claims they are inimical to literature!  He has been heard saying he could never teach poetry!

2. HPA has frequently been heard proclaiming, in a variety of terms & tones, that there is something sacred, miraculous, uncanny, autonomous, prophetic, socially-challenging, shamanic, different, authoritative, and world-shaking at the core of art, the beautiful, and poetry - & that poetry is sometimes a peremptory calling to step outside the boundaries of a society's customary norms of literary authorization.  He has been heard to claim that poetry is a gift and a miracle and that no one will authorize, approve, or judge it - that, au contraire, poetry itself will be the judge.  O the arrogance!

3. When HPA was a young collegian of 19 yrs or so, back in the early 1970s, he renounced poetry - because he believed that the ghost of Shakespeare had tried to communicate directly with him - through The Sonnets!  Overcome by spiritual fright, HPA fled from the irrational abyss of this event, abjuring the art (like Prospero) for about 5 years - during which phase he successfully found God, ran a food coop and became a VISTA volunteer!  He traveled to London on a dime - in order to join the Rolling Stones & convert them to Christianity!  He bummed around the United States, a young Jesus freak!  All this while the literary compeers of his generation were assiduously pursuing advanced graduate degrees!

4. HPA has published most of his poetry...  himself!

5. HPA has the strange illusion that literary tradition is a holistic entity, a sort of human organism subsisting in Time, history, & cultural memory.  Thus he began in the early 1980s to absorb the lessons of Eliot, Pound, Mandelstam, Brodsky and other outmoded "neo-Classics" - with the idea that democracy is beautiful for civil society, but that poetry is the dimension of the individual, the spiritual, the soul.  He repeatedly quotes Mandelstam, that arch-foe of the social order of his time : "The Word is Psyche."  Poetry, for HPA, is clearly a sort of Neanderthal fire-ceremonial : the engravement of the eternal Spirit in all its power upon the passing pageant of eras & centuries.  He sits by his Classical fire-pit & mopes, while America freely & rationally produces an infinite array of poetic bouquets of the never-ever-changing New Wheel.  He is a hopeless reactionary!

6.  In the late 90s, at the dawn of the internet era, HPA dove foolishly head-first into the online squabbles of various poetic schools - & succeeded in offending and insulting everybody!  He became known as a motor-mouth "commentator" - someone to be snubbed and derided for his clownish & unseemly behavior in the poetry community!  & thus his literary "career" careered along, on its inexorably downward trajectory!

7.  At some point in the early 1980s, HPA took an interest in the epic and the "long poem"... woe unto him!  That cess-pit of failed eccentricities - the "long poem"!  O HPA, your infallible instinct for the unachievable, the unrealistic!  & to think he actually thought he was bringing the "American long poem" to a kind of apex, fulfillment & recapitulation!  To think that Forth of July or Lanthanum might represent any kind of benchmark or accomplishment!  What was he "thinking"?  The industry is not looking for outriders, my friend!

8.  HPA was the heir of a bygone era.  His time is long past.  & yet he persists in his endless reiterations of oblique & gnomic (rhyming!) ekphrasis - his latest hobbyhorse being, unsurprisingly, that backwater archive of obliterated glory, the city of Ravenna.  Dante lies in his grave there, & HPA conjures his ghost, like an idiot caveman doodling graffiti on his private mental wall.  No wonder no one in America will publish him! Read through this list of embarrassments & obloquy - this plethora of antic foolishness - & you will see why!  This man belongs in lock-up, like his goofy sidekick in Stubborn Grew (what was his name?  Bluejay?).

Recently a certain poetry publisher in far-off Australia expressed preliminary interest in actually publishing a sort of retrospective collection of HPA's poetic follies of half a century.  There must be something in the Aussie water.  Well, all power to them.  This man is not fit for America - perhaps they can find some use for him in the former continental penal colony.  We wish the Australians the best of luck - & with this warning : HP Australopithecus is a deep-dyed villain & Neanderthal.  Hopefully the authorities in Sydney, Melbourne & the other southerly nodes of civilization & public order will keep this in mind.

Notes on the way

My days are mostly spent in a semi-darkened room in a nursing home in St. Paul, in a chair next to my father's bed, where he lies very quietly, almost immobile, usually silent but still quite cognizant.  Often my mother sits in a chair on the other side, reading a book or reminiscing, trying to understand various things.  I'm a long way from Rhode Island, my wife, my bookshelves, scribblings.  But it seems to help to sit next to my father, sometimes take the hand he reaches out, to show me his grip is still strong.  I'm not thinking very clearly or energetically these days.  I'd like to get back to my poems.  But I do experience amorphous globular sub-thoughts, now & then.

*

The moral law is universal, it has to do with the human in a personal sense.  And therefore I myself, as an individual, am responsible not only for my own actions, but also for their repercussions, their consequences, their effect on my own soul.

*

"Soul" as a term does not carry much weight or bear much prestige within the "high civilizations" of our time.  There are so many sophisticated doctrines which appear especially devoted to explaining it away.  & yet psychology as a mode of thought still seems to retain some vestigial authority.  Psychologists used to be called, in popular parlance, "soul doctors".

*

Conscience is a modality of soul, a faculty of mind, which is responsible for the orientation of the person toward justice and righteousness.  The soul is immortal and conscience is its guardian.

*

The soul is a dimension of the individual person.  History is a pantomime of conflicting allegiances and group identifications, a struggle for power - drawn with stock figures and broad strokes, like a commedia dell'arte melodrama.  But "what shall a man give for his soul?"  Or what they used to call "our sacred honor"?  Your conscience?  This is where the real battles are won & lost.  Jesus said it another way, too : "The kingdom of heaven is in your midst, but men do not see it."

*

Sometimes I think the most profound saying is this : "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."  The "quality of life" is planted not in the newspaper or the headline news, but rather in your own soul : your actions and their results.  "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."  "Give, and you shall receive."

*

"Wisdom cries out in the streets..."  I read it today in the newspaper.  A Turkish Armenian, thinking about the 1915 genocide and the denials which followed it, is quoted as saying (& I paraphrase from memory), "Life used to be about persons, what they did, good or bad.  It didn't matter so much what group you came from or what religion you professed.  It was about people - the people you knew and lived with, good and bad.  But now you are judged by what group you come from."

*

But the path of history is with the 99% of traits we all share as humankind, not the surface distinctions we make and the lines we draw between skin colors, nations of origin, religious proclamations, ethnic traditions... the sentimental patterns of parochial pride.  Ban Ki-Moon, the U.N. Secretary General, pleaded for more such universal understandings and actions in a recent & passionate speech to the National Press Club.

*

The notion of human freedom is grounded in a metaphysical or cosmic sense.  The idea of "the kingdom of heaven" is an intellectual idea, a kind of Euclidean proposition.

*

Kingship is archaic, traceable perhaps back to the primates.  A figure of authority, a powerful person, a charismatic figure, a scapegoat, is the personification of cosmic wholeness, the Origin, the Source.  The tribe gathers around this conduit of otherwise uncontrollable fates and life-threatening dangers.

*

I see the Bible as threading back to a very archaic rivalry between the nomadic tribes of herdsmen, on the one hand, whose life is based on relatively simple choices under an open sky, and close kinship - and the early royal empires, based on the agricultural revolution and the expansion of political dominion.  Kingship vs. kinship.  The nomads domesticated animals so they could carry their food with them; the kings domesticated human herds to grow their food for them.  These different social structures had implications for their thought-worlds.  Abraham was guided by his personal God to leave home & head for a certain place.  This would not happen in Pharaonic Egypt.  For the Egyptians, God was always mediated/disguised by the divine Ruler and his ceremonies.

*

Life is lived in the individual soul, the outcomes of our response to the whisper of conscience.  Sovereignty belongs to the Origin, the Creator, the "ground" of our being.  Moral freedom, what Roger Williams called "soul liberty".   Of course these notions have implications for the social & political formations we have made on earth.  I see a future world of civil society, rooted in free peoples, aware of their rights and willing to sacrifice so that every person shares the same dignity.  Not judging and condemning one another, but showing tolerance and mercy, as befits the love which gives life to the roots of the soul itself.

*

"Children of God."  "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

*

The "glory" of the Artist who fashions the cosmos is manifest in the everyday good works of her children.  As Jesus puts it in the Gospels, "Wisdom is justified in all her children."  So the spinning planet produces flowers... in my homespun soul-dream.

Après le AWP

1.

I happen to be living temporarily in my hometown, Minneapolis, living in a motel with a giant golden styrofoam Gopher (Univ. of MN mascot) in the lobby.  This happens to be a few blocks from the SE Mpls neighborhood, by the U of M & the Mississippi & Tower Hill, where my family on both sides have lived for about 150 years now, ever since George P. Gould, my great-grandfather, married the daughter of a riverboat captain named Jacob Lawrence, who's name was Jessie Ophelia.

I'm here, as I've written/blogged already, because my father John Gould is in hospice, on his deathbed, & he & my mother can use some help, & because I'm able to be here (thanks to my wife primarily), & because I want to be here.

& as it happens there was a massive gathering of poets in Minneapolis this weekend.  The annual Associated Writing Programs Conference (AWP) was convocated at the splendid & immense convention center, wherein converged at least 10,000 literary people, hundreds of publishers, & so on.

So for a couple days I shuttled between the nursing home in St. Paul & the fervid, spontaneous & scheduled festivities in Minneapolis.  Twin Cities.

I discovered a good bookstore (James & Mary Laurie Bks) & a good performance space (Pow Wow Grounds).  I heard some beautiful poetry, met some wonderful people in person, bought a few rare (& new) books.

For a long time I used to mock the AWP conferences - on principle, I thought.  I was devoted to the concept of the writer as absolute free agent : of the poet as semi-divine being, entrusted with the sacred voodoo of the Word.

Actually I'm still devoted to that concept.  It's just that now I think everybody at AWP is committed to the same thing.  It's just that everybody else there has their own particular necessities & difficult aims to attempt to accomplish, duties to fulfill.  Devotions which are perhaps at odds with my own, but no less absolute.

How boring!  But life, friends, is boring.

2.

Which brings up Berryman, which brings up Henry....

What a hard time I had of it on Thursday night at the Rain Taxi Walker Art Center Extravaganza.  There I was, in the heart of Minneapolis postmodern ultra-coolness, trying with gaucheness in extremis to interest some of the swimmingly hip poets with whom I was barely acquainted to allow me to get up on stage that night - & read a section of a long poem in honor of my father, John Gould.  Excess of Quixote.

The coolness of the Walker is like an icicle - a Popsicle, to be exact.  A prophet is not honored in his own country.  I used to gather wild grapes in the swamp NW of the Walker as a boy.  I shook hands (in a line of Boy Scouts)  in the football field next door with Hubert H. Humphrey.  I took part in school plays (& suffered terrible anxiety cramps) with the girls of Northrop School, at the Women's Club (just across the famous Ashbery Bridge).  Yet that Thursday night (April 9, 2015, 150 yrs after Appomatox) I was the humiliated outcast, persona non grata.  No one wanted to hear about it.  You don't jump up on stage at the Walker Art Center with the likes of Ann Carson (who actually handed me her book for free).

Nevertheless I read my poem eventually - on a more fitting occasion, the following evening (Friday, Apr. 10).  I was at the Laurie Bookshop on 3rd Ave N., with the Station Hill / Geo. Quasha / Kimberly Lyons / Vincent Katz / Burt Kimmelman / Pierre Joris / Nicole Peyrafitte / Martha & Basil King / Elizabeth Robinson / Sam Truitt / Laynie Brown et al. crowd.  Beautiful bookstore.  After refusing to add me to the schedule, they grudgingly allowed my rude interruption ("one more poem!") at the tail end of the reading - & applauded my recital.  Mission accomplished.  I'm grateful to those characters, poets all.

3.

Why was I so obsessed about doing this self-abasing, humiliating Henry thing @ AWP?  Because the time was right.

On April 10, 1998 - exactly 17 years before - I finished the long poem Stubborn Grew.  It was Good Friday that year.  In the closing passages, there is a recapitulation of everything that went before - but put through a sort of Finnegan-Wakean Irish phase-shifter.  Then suddenly the voice of my father breaks through : he addresses me, directly, elegiacally - & the poem ends.  You can read it here.  I wanted to read this passage in honor of my father this weekend, & I was very stubborn about it.... & so it came to pass.

In that passage, the persona of my father speaks about my (Henry's) "crown", and that he must "go to Jerusalem".  This is part of the Shakespeare ambience (see esp. the chapters "Ancient Light" and "Shakespeare's Head").  In Henry IV pt 2 there is a climactic scene where the young Prince Hal, visiting his dying father (Henry IV), puts on his father's crown ahead of time... & his father catches him at it.  Meanwhile his father is dying... regrets never having fulfilled his vow to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem (to repent for usurping Richard II's throne)... & then is carried into the Jerusalem Chamber, where he expires.  This is all there, at the close of Stubborn Grew.

Last Friday I was "Henry" - Berryman's, Shakespeare's - fulfilling my own strange little vow, reading my elegy in honor of my dear father...  "when men least think / I will".

Good Friday, looking west

There's a good view of the Minneapolis skyline from my mother's new senior apartment in St. Paul.  Looking westward, a vast pink sunset over the skyscrapers, where my father John Gould used to flourish.  Looking east, a full moon.  Strange times here; taking care of my father in hospice during the day; by night, reading an odd, semi-convincing book about Edward de Vere ("Shakespeare" by another name, by Mark Anderson) - of the Oxford School of Bardolatry.  Turns out the Earl was born on my father's birthday, April 12th - which he is now inching toward, & might possibly reach.  The fatherly aspect of the author of The-Artist-formerly-known-as-Shakespeare's (Prince?  Hamlet?) Sonnets had a decisive impact on my own obscure biography, just as the rebellious/dutiful decision to become a "poet" seems to epitomize our see-saw, tentative balancing act with my own father.  I am now keeping vigil, I am attending & caring for him, from whom for a long time it seems I found ways to keep my distance.  Yet I am so happy to be here with him now, my great kind meek wise father.

I finished the long poem Stubborn Grew on a Good Friday in 1998.  You can read the grand finale (along with the rest) at this link - it's pretty good, I daresay.  Toward the end, the voice my father suddenly breaks in, to talk to me.  It's pretty good.  It's all tangled up in roses & Henrys & Shakespearean mysteries, too, which you can read about further here... "how stub born grew the / rose."

Pie squared in the sky squared

Dinkytown, where Bob Dylan lived for a while, is an old campus market area adjacent to the University of Minnesota.  My parents & grandparents on both sides have lived near here for about a century and a half.  Ever since the riverboat captain father of Jessie Ophelia and Cleopatra Desdemona Lawrence settled here, & Jessie married my great-grandpa George P. Gould, and Judge W.E. Hale's daughter, poet & songwriter Helen Hale, married Shephard Alcide Ainsworth, who worked for Pillsbury & died suddenly of pneumonia, but not before fathering Florence Ainsworth (born to patriotic songwriter Helen on the 4th of July, 1900) who married Jessie & George P.'s son Edward Gould, who had 3 sons and a daughter, the youngest son & daughter being twins, John & Mary Gould, John Gould being my father (who married Mary Ravlin, youngest daughter of another very local neighborhood River Road family, the Ravlins, which is another story entirely) - John Gould, my father, now in hospice & lying very quietly, not eating anything to speak of, drinking juice, receiving lots of visitors, becoming skin & bones very quietly & peacefully, in his old neighborhood, being attended to by his oldest son, that being me, & many others...

I learned today that ordinary meandering rivers (like the Mississippi) cover the average distance of a straight line from source to delta multiplied by pi (3.14.15...).  I took a walk along the Mississippi this afternoon, traversing the old portage route (back to the Ojibwa) through the U of M campus (my father's & grandfather's alma mater)...  everything about life seemed infinitely incomprehensible, insoluble, labyrinthine, & inexplicable to me as I walked along.  I felt stymied, incompetent, incapable, stunned, knocked back temporarily like Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass... but maybe that's all a regular element of International Pi Day...

Happy Pi Day.  Happy Ides of March, too.
http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/2005/06/you-want-meaning-drummer-boy-try-to.html

Seeker or Jihadist ?

Arrived back in Providence last night, after 5 weeks in St. Paul.  It's been a long time.  First thing I did after removing luggage from car was to shovel enormous mountain of snow out of driveway so I could actually park.

This week Pres. Obama is hosting a big conference at the White House to discuss ways to counteract appeal & tactics of terrorism.  Obama sounded the right note when he stated that government alone cannot solve these problems, but must work with individuals, families & communities.  In fact, with respect to Islamic terrorism at least, this may be doubly true.  Government, at least in Western nations, is necessarily, and rightly, secular : yet perhaps the most profound approach to the problem of religious fundamentalism is an approach which is itself grounded in religious belief, in theology.

Why?  Because, from a religious perspective at least, the root of the problem of violent religious extremism is this : its perpetrators have lost, or have never found, God.

The lead propagandists of the ISIS phenomenon - cynically or fanatically, I'm not sure which - uphold a kind of caricature of God as an avenging judge.  Allah & Muhammad serve as dual totem, or mythical facade (like the warlike friezes on Aztec temples), for an essentially political will-to-power, which is characterized by oppression, by tyranny, by the domination, victimization, and enslavement of others.  The movement is akin in some ways to other totalitarian movements in history : it flourishes in the soil of a utopian, all-encompassing vision of unlimited power & glory on earth, and vindication in the afterlife.

This utopia of vengeance, violence and military glory is the essence of its seductive appeal to alienated young Muslims in both the Middle East and the West, and elsewhere in the world.  One of the ironies is that ISIS may in fact be driven by aggrieved former officers of Saddam Hussein's regime - a regime which was characterized by a kind of Stalinist reign-of-terror program, cloaked (in later years) in faux-Islamic propaganda.  If this is actually true, it would help explain a certain creepily parodic, surreal aspect to its gruesome demonstrations of public cruelty.  This is an enterprise which uses violence as a tactic - as provocation, symbol, propaganda - with the dehumanized coolness of a Stalin or Hitler.

It seems to me that one way to defeat ISIS is to offer a clear public counter-message with a theological basis.  Obviously this is something that Western governments are not in a position to do.  But it is something that individuals and faith communities - Jewish, Muslim, Christian - can do, in different ways and in different spheres, on their own.  They can offer to alienated, angry young men perhaps the one thing they need most : a true understanding of God.

The true Abrahamic image of God is that of a loving Creator, who loves all the marvels of a universe s/he has brought forth from nothing.  This God has made humankind in his/her image; God's desire is for human beings to live in the benign shade of the divine wisdom, goodness, lovingkindness, righteousness.  God wishes Man to draw near, by putting away the things that are not God, and recognizing the divine wholeness & goodness of all things.

One of the distinct historical endowments to the theological knowledge of God was offered right here in Providence, by the teachings and example of Roger Williams.  Williams called himself a "Seeker".  His imposed exile from the theocracy of colonial Boston hinged on the central emphasis of his preaching : that no government could impose belief by force.  "Enforced belief" represents an oxymoron, a theological contradiction in terms, since God's greatest gift to the human person is free will.  A person must choose wisdom and righteousness; they cannot be imposed by political means.  Faith and wisdom are spiritual gifts offered directly to the person by God.  Williams called this sense of things "soul liberty".

This spiritual orientation is obviously in direct opposition to the theocratic/propagandistic vision offered by ISIS and related groups.  For Williams, it is the primal need for God which drives Man to become a spiritual seeker.  Yet the God he finds is not a vengeful ruler or tyrannical authority : God is the opposite of all this.  "God is Love."  God is the root of human freedom and moral choice.  Williams' newfound political entity (the colony of Rhode Island) was chartered - for the first time in history - on universal religious tolerance, and the separation of church and state.

Maybe what's needed in the U.S. and Europe today are three-person teams of "Abrahamic" spiritual advisors.  A priest, a rabbi, an imam, working together with troubled youth, specifically to offer a different, more humane (& accurate) vision of God.  This might be the most direct way to counteract the totalitarian/utopian propaganda of violent political jihadism.

Snowbelt doodle redux

Left RI about 3 weeks ago, drove to Minneapolis, expecting about 20 degrees colder weather. Instead, it's balmy here (mid-30s) : Providence is digging out.

Busy negotiating senior care options for 2 stubborn old Goulds (parents). "Negotiating senior care options" - a euphemism. Let's say it gives you another perspective on the usual priorities (check the TV schedule). Bombs terrorism lotion ads. Viagra Florida Vacationland. "We are here to help you". Ultra-boring, super-pretentious NPR sponsor slogans. "And when you practice charity, do not trumpet your generosity in the marketplace, but give alms in secret - and your Father who sees in secret will reward you."

We abhor the fundamentalist monsters & authoritarian Neanderthals. Yet our own money-culture seems dehumanized. I feel very detached from Poetryland, too. Real life is the only tonic.

 

Seedy universe

My long-term plan to seed the universe with Ravenna diagrams is very slowly, haltingly, coming to fruition... some more just appeared in the Battersea Review.... (others not too long ago in Blackbox Manifold... more due soon in Notre Dame Review)....

Charlie Hebdo, Peter Chaadaev, moral freedom

Two Frenchmen, brothers, apparently with training & inspiration from the Yemen branch of the terrorist network Al Qaeda, murder a group of Paris cartoonists & journalists, for the crime of publishing satirical images denigrating the Prophet.

Obviously the shock waves produce varying responses, of many kinds, on many levels.

A phrase occurred to me today in this regard : "moral freedom".  The phrase comes from an early essay by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, titled "Peter Chaadaev".   This curious short prose work reminds me of some writings of Whitman.  In describing Chaadaev, the 19th-century Russian thinker, Mandelstam seems on the one hand to sketch a version of his own iconoclastic mind & personality, and on the other, to offer a nationalistic icon of the spirit of Russia, situating itself dialectically (as St. Petersburg was perennially called upon to do) between the prestige of Western Europe, and the vast inchoate future of the Russian soul.   Chaadaev is presented as both that rare Russian emigre who returns to the motherland, with a message of intellectual rigor and cultural order - as a "Westernized" Russian, in other words - and as a representative of Russian moral freedom - the "diamond" of a perfected individual soul (in contrast to the enfeebled West, sunk beneath the weight of its own unquestioned tradition).

This Chaadaev is a fish out of water, a free spirit, an exile's exile : his rectitude is inward, spiritual, personal.  His moral freedom seems to stem (via Mandelstam's interpretation) from Orthodox Christianity, with its relative devaluation of "objective history" in favor of inward spiritual unity, perfection, "divinization".

What does all this have to do with Charlie Hebdo?  With events in Paris?

"Moral freedom."  The phrase rings.  Mandelstam says Chaadaev was obsessed with unity : the basic unity of intellectual vocation & moral value.  This was the source of his charisma, his personal integrity.  But where did he discover this unity?

I'm not a Russian scholar.  My guess is, Chaadaev was drawing from the well of traditional Orthodox values.  & what strikes me about Orthodox Christianity is its visionary focus on the unity and divine origin of the whole creation.  Life, with all its suffering & injustice, is beautiful & good because God made it so.  The Acmeist poetic movement, founded by Gumilev, Akhmatova, & Mandelstam, was grounded in this ordinary Orthodox sensibility.  Gumilev called it "chasteness" : an idea not very different from Whitman's notion of cosmic goodness. Each individual thing in nature is inherently valid & beautiful because it has its source in the supernatural Artist.  With this spiritual grounding Chaadaev (& Mandelstam) could represent a version of "moral freedom" : the dignity of humankind (& Russia) without the overpowering weight of Western grandeur & authority.  As Mandelstam wrote :

Let the names of imperial cities
caress the ears with brief meaning.
It's not Rome the city that lives on,
it's man's place in the universe.

But again : where am I going with this?  What has any of this to do with Charlie Hebdo?

My point is this.  So the phrase "moral freedom" - from Mandelstam's Chaadaev - came to mind as I pondered the events in Paris.  Why?  Because both Chaadaev & Mandelstam underline the central, sine qua non place of freedom in any architectonics of civilization.  For them, moral freedom is the primal divine gift.

& what then exactly is "moral freedom"?  It is the recognition that the whole benign cosmic order is balanced on a "givenness" or original context of moral choice.  The universe is designed for Man to choose goodness & righteousness : it is rooted in free will.  The path to Paradise and "divinization" is open to those who accept this free offer.

But if this is the case, then where are the powers of tyranny, force, compulsion, fear?  Where are the gods of domination?  Where are the thought police?  They have no place to stand.  They are vanquished.  They have been defeated by a supernatural power Who authorizes moral freedom : by the law that you must choose the path of righteousness yourself.

I tried to explain this in my letter to the editor published in the NY Times on Monday.  This is a basic theological tradition shared, actually, by both Orthodox East and Catholic/Protestant West.  You cannot impose spiritual values by force.  Why?  Because God ordained Nature for moral freedom : we are free creatures, as God is free : we are made in God's image.

The fanatics of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State want to punish others for disobeying the commands of their God.  In the process they commit murder and other outrages against God's own creatures, & against divine Law.  It may be that they are driven by political pressures and deep grievances : but my point is that their ideology, which provides them with propaganda and "moral" justification, represents the worship of a false god, an idolatry.  If God is neither hateful nor murderous, but instead calls on persons to redeem themselves through love of neighbor, then the propaganda of fundamentalism has no basis in reality.  They need to be saved from their own delusions.  There needs to be a new conversation about the nature of God.