Jesus Thoughts (2) : footnotes & leaves

John Meier (in The Marginal Jew) makes a convincing case that the siblings of Jesus mentioned in the Gospels really were his siblings (or half-siblings), rather than his "cousins", as has sometimes been claimed.

In which case, I suppose it's quite possible (likely?) that descendants of these siblings are alive & with us on earth today.

*

Jesus appears to have at times  referred to himself as "the Son of Man".  This is a phrase from the OT Book of Daniel, for the apocalyptic Messiah-figure Daniel sees in a vision.  But to my ears it also has connotations of "Everyman".  Thus Jesus is presenting himself and his fate as representative of the fate of each man and woman.  This chimes with the later theological notion that God has imprinted his signs, his signature, all across nature.  & it reminds me of Joyce's idiosyncratic, anti-clerical fashioning of reality in Ulysses : of the layers of symbolic echoes joining every element in linked scales of meaning; of Stephen Dedalus, reading the "signatures" in things; of the pivotal encounter in the late-night bus station between the two male protagonists, Bloom & Stephen, with its Biblical echoes of grieving father & prodigal son.

If the natural and human worlds radiate these parabolic signatures of the Son of Man, then we are all caught up in a sort of cosmic mystery play of life, death, eternity.  Jesus, the "woodworker", starts out life in Nazareth as the "son of the woodworker", fashioning wood : he ends life fastened to the cosmic Tree at the matrix of all things.

The other day I was sitting on a bench at Prospect Park, on my lunch break.  Beside me I found a little curled maple leaf, its reds and yellows fading into brown; it reminded me of an old piece of parchment.  The red-brown veins branching through the leaf spread like a microcosm of the tree the leaf had fallen from, or like a dark brown microcosmic river.  I thought about autumn, and Halloween, and the mortality of all physical things...  I thought about the mystery play of Resurrection, & the role of the hero Jesus plays there.

These are not original ideas, obviously.  But I find them curiously generative... might lead to something more distinctive here someday.

Jesus Thoughts (1) : 1st things

First things first.  First of all, dear reader, please keep in mind : this is a blog.  An informal space for notations.  Scribbled on the fly, extemporaneous, incomplete - in the narrow spaces between work assignments, or in the late hours, after work & everything else.  It's not going to be elegant or highly organized, I promise.

First things first.  Religion, needless to say, sustains a moral dimension - a demand for personal commitment, self-sacrifice, existential change.  If it were only a matter of words, of comfortable speculations, it would obviously not carry much weight.  I'm a sub-librarian, in an academic library: the dangers of tweedy detachment and abstraction are real.  Possibly I've already dropped irrevocably into the pit of effeteness, complacency.  You, the reader, will have to be the judge in that regard.  Beware.

First things first.  In my own experience, to think about Jesus, God, & Christianity, is to gaze into a deep - maybe infinite - well of mystery.  "Food for thought", yes... an endless supply.  I walk to work in the morning, thinking perhaps Vermont has thrown itself together (to paraphrase Stevens) - that I've seen the truth, that I have a foothold, a slight grasp : only to be pulled up short again by an equally-strong sense of uncertainty - of hiddenness (especially re: the resurrection).

But then, on the other hand, I do admit to having felt something like Poe's Eureka-thrill... Eureka!  I have found it!  If I hadn't, I wouldn't be bothering with even this rough draft of preliminaries.

First things first.  We map reality - a synthesis of imagination and experience.  And then we interpret and refine our maps.  The map of ancient religion, the worldview of ancient humanity, begins with God.  The existence of God, on this particular map, means that reality in toto is rooted in a creative, ordering consciousness.  Let's call it (rough sketch) "God the Father, the Mother, the Origin, the Source".  We can't understand Jesus without first recognizing this founding "principle".  Nor can we begin to comprehend Jesus without knowing something about the matrix of Judaism in which he lived : a culture and faith which was, and is, motivated and devoted to this universal God. 

Jesus' mission - to put it in the most reductive nutshell possible - was to proclaim and celebrate the personal, mysterious, loving presence of this God - the Father, the Parent, of whom he was (& is) the Child, the human Son, the Image.  Jesus was an ecstatic, dynamic, eloquent and charismatic teacher, healer and leader, all in one (think Martin Luther King and his impact for a partial contemporary analogy).  And what was the core of his message?  That through himself - Jesus - this God was revealing himself and entering the space of human history, in order to bring all of humanity into the Family whose original is metaphysical, cosmic, and paradisal. 

Thus Jesus calls himself the Way, the Door, the Gate.  As the looked-for prophetic Messiah, he represented God's "seal" upon human history.  As the Messiah, he played the hero, and walked through Death : in the process leading the rest of us into the presence/comprehension/awareness of life and consciousness beyond time & death.  The recognition of this metaphysical dimension of "eternal life" was not offered as a means to a detachment from mortal, ordinary, earthly life (as the Gnostics and Stoics proposed) : but to reconcile and balance the material and spiritual, the physical and the metaphysical, time and eternity, soul and body.  In such a balance, rooted in vision, each person, and humanity as a whole, can be redirected toward rightness (justice), joy, hope, and peace.

First things first.  I'm laying out some basic elements, foundations.  No doubt you've heard them before.  But to start with the basics might lead further....

Jesus Thoughts (prologue)

Today is All Souls' Day (with emphasis on ALL Souls) - old Christian holiday, & perhaps a seasonal festival too, back in prehistory.  So maybe it's a good day for this particular wayward soul to start a new thread on HG Poetics.  Can't promise it will continue, but I hope so.

Am reading 1st volume of John Meier's 4-vol magnum opus, A Marginal Jew - in this layperson's opinion, the place to start for anyone interested in learning more about that Jesus fellow who intervened in something so serious and ponderous as Human History.

I can identify with the title somewhat, when I mope about my status as a marginalized American poète maudit.  But let's not mope.  When I look back on my life, I see several often snarled patterns : 1) an artistic bent; 2) a boy's fascination with heroism, glory, history; 3) a tendency to ponder philosophical/existential/metaphysical conundrums; 4) an upbringing shaped by parents and grandparents who participated in American "mainstream" Christianity (in my case, Episcopalian).

The combination of these four tendencies - and added to them, 1) a turn to poetry, and 2) an adolescent psychological crisis, a near-breakdown, an "extreme" response to BOTH Shakespeare and the Bible simultaneously - offers background for a longtime focus on the nexus of poetry, religion, history.  For example, in the last 20 years I've written several long poems with an historical, "epic" dimension.  Part of my motive there involves a resistance to other long poems, a desire to revise or rewrite them.  And what is the source of this resistance?  My own worldview, my own "inspiration", calls for a different world-picture.  Meier's work helps me right now in this respect.

What I'd like to do, and hope to accomplish, in this thread , is to reflect further on that historical-theological (and poetic) sense of things.  So we'll see if I can manage to do that.

3-chord wonder... after the storm

after reading Apollinaire

This was the first poem in a chapbook published in 1972 by the Brown Univ. Literary Board, featuring the winners in fiction & poetry of the 1st annual Charles Philbrick Award (Henry Gould & James Morgan).

*

FOR MARCH 28 NINETEEN 71

(after reading Apollinaire)

I made this notebook thoughtlessly
out of marks that separate me
from what my feet touch
though it bakes my eyes
each morning leaving a room
I find a lot of people without shoes
are whistling down the street
without caring about stars or dark bowls
a girl's hair beckons the evening on

in the warm air the first fly of spring
drones about my face looking for summer
short-legged people with winter hats
glance at the sun and bounce off the sidewalk
my back to a warm wall
I know how silence defeats love
leaning like an old man
against a warm day like this

remembering Edwin Honig

Edwin Honig was born Sept. 3 (Labor Day) in 1919.  He'd be 93 today.  I remember being at a wine & cheese thing after a poetry reading, sometime in the early 70s, when I was a freshman or sophomore at Brown.  I had just read Edwin's long poem "Four Springs", and I said to him that this closing passage reminded me of John Donne's poem "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" ("O more than moon, draw not up tears,

to drown me in thy sphere...")

Edwin looked at me, & smiled, & said "You're making my hair stand on end."

13.

My heart is a love that I like and dislike a bit more, 

a bit less, than a friend. 

It turns like a world half-known that is huge and cold 

as the moon still-a-moon, 

And you don't remember me, it says, because 

I've always been there. 

You bear with me as you would with a parent you care for 

more the less that you see,

the longer you live to remember as younger 

than you are now.

Oh world, my heart, as you live and sleep, remember me 

less and less,

but bear with me to wake to the stars and the moons 

always there to land on 

in dreams when the earth, grand mother-father of life, 

is no longer there.

Lowlands

More cricket music

Singing with crickets

August chords

Talkin' Henry Blues #1

One of the big watersheds in American poetry of the last 100 years : the shift in the late 50s, by several major poets, from traditional high style, to free verse and a more informal diction.  Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, James Wright come to mind.  Maybe this was a second wave, since in the early decades of that century there had been a kind of double movement - first, the rise of vers libre and imagism (spearheaded by Harriet Monroe and her Poetry magazine), and second, Eliot's and Pound's complicated and influential reaction (both with & against) that trend.  In the 20th century several contradictory crosscurrents of style were set in motion, causing trouble for partisan critics of one stream or another, since the poets' models and aims were so various and distinct.

The liberation of poetry from traditional prosody allowed for a great influx of new subject-matter, expanded ranges of diction and vocabulary; it brought to the fore all kinds of "prose virtues" (directness, simplicity, precision, clarity, etc.). What it also did was give an advantage to poets whose strength lay in invention : I mean the ability to invent new and fantastic scenarios, plots, and impressions with wit, satire, humor, journalistic immediacy, or fanciful inversions of ordinary experience.  This capability - to evoke clever imaginary scenes - went a long way to make up for a thinning-out of the more traditional music of poetry (sonority, resonance, rhythm, rhetorical ebb & flow).

When I look back at my own stylistic models, choices & directions taken over the last half-century or so, it strikes me that one common thread joining my early love for the NY School and Ashbery, with my later fascination with Mandelstam and the Acmeist poets - and tied in as well with my affection for some aspects of Hart Crane, Berryman, Pound - is a distaste for prosaic direct statements, testimonies and observations.  Not so much in themselves - I'm in favor of directness and simplicity in prose and ordinary conversation! - but in poetry.  There is something one-dimensional about talky, flat, prosaic poems, which almost always puts me off.  Does this make me an elitist, an aesthete, a reactionary, a traditionalist? I don't think so (just read my poems).  The prosy poets make a claim for commonality, for egalitarian engagement : but I find the stance proves in the end to be mostly parochial and narcissistic.

There's a strong current in American poetry which resists the prosaic by an ascetic paring-down, a further simplification, in the interest of sharp observation, pithy statement. I admire these poets.  I think I do retain a streak of midwestern reserve and understatement, which comes out in at least some of my writing.  I like much in this vein, but I think it's not for me.  I'm too interested in the resonance which comes from multiple layers of meaning, allegory, allusion; I'm too taken with the musicality of obscure images, their emotional freight.

cicada chords

Poetry reading : Stuart Blazer, Henry Gould

Rancho Lazy-L

Lanthanum.  The design of this long, long poem is like the letter "L" laid on its back. For 3/4ths of the way it pokes along, slow & repetitive, sleepy... & then finally it stands up!  Like lazy Hobo, or Lazarus in his grave - a lazy Rus.  Like a Mississippi river-barge, or Mandelstam's "Egyptian bark of the dead."  


Or Lanthanum is like a still gray clam, rather dull on the outside... which finally produces a pearl. You have to be patient & willing to listen as it goes along - a very quiet turtle (or turtle-dove) song.


The numerical design of this poem is rather intricate and symbolic - something like a wheel.  But I will leave that for others to figure out....

poetry continuum

Next project may be some kind of essay, responding to the discussion around Marjorie Perloff's article on the Conceptual poets, and Matvei Yankelevich's response, & so on.  The effort to inject Russian avant-garde/Futurist/Formalist models and theories into the American milieu has a pretty long history.  The Language Poets expressed an affinity for same.  Perloff's critical formulae have an oddly recherche quality, and Yankelevich echoes that to some extent : they both set up the personal MFA-workshop lyric as the great stumbling-block to literary advance, the middle-brow bourgeois anti-intellectual mainstream conventionality which must be demolished and overcome.

I have an ongoing, longstanding problem with this maneuver... I remember arguing about it often on the Buffalo Poetics list back in the 90s.  My problem is that I identify with the contrasting poetics and worldview of the Russian Acmeists.  Of course there were crossovers and overlaps and collaborations between these two (or three or four) tendencies in 20th-cent Russian poetry - yet the basic contrast is there.  And I'm repeatedly impelled to try to articulate it, to re-draw that line.  For me it gets to the character of one's most basic sense of what the art of poetry is, is for.

Is art, is poetry, a radical detachment from experience - a permanent "making strange"?  Are the roots of art in the alienation effect - of consciousness detached from unthinking life?  This it seems to me is a fundamental article of faith among the modernist and postmodern avant-garde.  Even the efforts of Dada and similar movements to disintegrate the special status of the art object, to merge art with everyday life, seem to be rooted in an act of disjunction : of shock, of breakage.  The avant-garde seems tinged with violence at its core.  The Futurists' concept of "the word as such" really means the word uprooted from its origins in the whole continuum of a language (the history of words, of syntax, of rhetoric, of representation, of dialect... and of meaning).  Words were to be treated as things : not living things, but material - in other words, available (in an ethical sense) for artistic manipulation by force.

The Acmeists' shared sense of their vocation (I mean Gumilev, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, primarily) and of the nature of poetry is strikingly different.   The best word I can think of to describe this attitude is "continuum".   The "word as such" - for Gumilev, for example - is God.  Such an equation implies the whole panorama of Western cultural history.  The word - words - exist in a continuum : of speech, of sentences, of philology, of cultural history, of time, of theology... and of past poets and poetry.  You cannot tear off a piece of language by violence without harming the continuum.  As Mandelstam put it : "the Word is bread and suffering".

As I see it, this is a fundamentally "incarnational" concept of poetry.  We don't know words as detached self-sufficient entities : words are inflected and shaded by their presence in the poems of the past.  Words have a history in flesh and blood, and continue to appear there, in the matrix of human conflict and strife : not as instigators of more shock and violence, but as avenues for mediation and reconciliation (peacemaking, healing).

I think there's a mystical dimension to all this.  In the Acmeist sense of the "word as such", an aesthetic equilibrium arises which is really rooted in the unity of experience and representation, of intellect and sense, of word and flesh.  Union, oneness, harmony.  This is something I hope to explore more fully in another essay.

Why I am a Russian poet

COSMIC LOCAL POETRY

                Brown Univ. Bookstore, Providence, RI.  July 18, 2012

Stuart and I are here today as part of the Bookstore’s Local Authors series.  And we are local authors – very local.  But we’re involved with something global, even universal.  Poetry is a world endeavor, and we are caught up in that, each in our own way.  For my part, I consider myself  a sort of  Russian from Minneapolis.  I’ve been inspired by a group of poets based in St. Petersburg around 1910, who called themselves Acmeists : Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam.  Mandelstam defined Acmeism as “nostalgia for world culture”.  This is a concise summary of their sense of poetry as an enterprise in building civilization, and as poetry as a global, trans-historical continuum, a tradition stretching back into prehistory.  

Orpheus, legendary ur-poet of Greece, was priest of Apollo, god of music and medicine : a pairing which suggests that art and song are about healing.  For the Greeks, this meant a restoration of health and balance through reason, justice, clarity, wisdom.  Orpheus, Apollo’s representative, fell victim to the frenzy of the cult of Dionysius : the music of the word was sacrificed to the fury of desire amputated from understanding.  Poetry appears at the edge of this polarity, between mind and sense, intellect and feeling, consciousness and dream.  The Acmeists looked to their national poet, Pushkin, as embodying such an equipoise – at the cusp between alternating waves of neo-classicism and romanticism.  

Mandelstam wrote : “Classicism is revolution.”  This had a special implication in the context of revolutionary 1920s Russia.  The Acmeists were seeking a paradigm, within art, for the sanity and equilibrium – the “nostalgia for world culture” – which they recognized in the poetry of the ancient world.  The Roman poet Virgil was searching for such balance in his own day.  His Georgics, ostensibly an agricultural manual in verse, was really a meditation on a world which had fallen from a Golden Age of rural peace, into an Iron Age of violence and war.  The “audacity of the poet”, as Virgil put it, was to re-imagine that Golden Age, by way of an all-embracing pity : compassion for a world oppressed by the rule of brutality, force and chaos.  This is the fundamental Apollonian vocation : through imagination and song, to bring mankind, us, back to our senses – our intuition of profound justice and harmony.  This is the inner meaning of Mandelstam’s “nostalgia for world culture” : he thought of Classicism in this sense as the future.  

To my mind, these ideas bring us back to the local, as well : for here we are, in Providence : we are Providence poets.  Providence, to Roger Williams, the city’s founder, is a theological term, closely bound up with the RI state motto : Hope.  Providence signifies a cosmic plan : the Master Architect’s (or Musician’s) intention to restore all things to their original well-being.  Note how the meaning of this word resonates with Virgil’s, and the Acmeists’, sense of the poet’s vocation.

Today we are awash in aggressive discourses, a feverish babble of new technological means and motives.  Many today would advance the image of the poet as master communicator : rock star, rapper, stand-up comedian, celebrity, social spokesperson, political activist, promoter of recondite ideologies.  But I think the most basic stance of the poet is as listener.  Dante wrote, “Love speaks, and I follow after, noting down her words like a scribe.”  The poet listens to a mute song : the whisper of conscience, the music of understanding.  And this means that we are all poets here – Stuart and I and each of you, who are also listening.                                                                                                                                                                                                             

 

                                              

                                                                                                             

                                                                                                             

                                                                                                           

Lanthanum 12.23

23

       ...nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, 

       and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.  They grasped not only the whole race of men then

       living, but... reached forward... seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon...     

          – Abraham Lincoln (Aug. 17, 1858)

Your birthday tomorrow, Grandma   born

on the 4th of July, 1900   far off there   in

Sunset Land   I’m thinking of you   & of

Great-Grandma   J.   2-wheeler captain’s

daughter   Jessie O.   Ophelia   the river-girl

now   at the end of this   milk-train rainbow

way back in   summertime   prairiespace   O

Jessie, little tree   I hear that lonesome horn

wail   my old St. Anthony trystle-humlet

suspended 7th   plunged into black earth

a shiny hinter-horn   of milky lanthanum

(dawn-anthem)   &   Amaranthousa   sets

her Pocahontaseal   a Morning Star   some

menorah-constellatio   over 50 more   their

hard-earned stripes   a chord (accord)   for

ear attuned   to Jubileeday (freequilibrium)

only a promise of   soul liberty   (Everyhew-

manever)   under these stars   their birthright

mine   may be   new birth of freedom   (night

brings dawn)   the sun of justice   risen again

to bloom   as once   on earth   in stable   born

out of the Pharaoh’s precinct   into happiness

just over Jordan (almondejoie) by wilderness

to mercy   forgiveness   peace   a Restoration

of all things   beneath two tender-tending wings   lark

tempering my mumbling   well, contrapuntal   polar

sarabande   (labor & rest   yin & yang).  Soar,

7/4   to 4x7 : welded   annealed   (almond birchbark)

          7.3.12

O Happy Henry

Lanthanum 12.22

22   EVENING LAND

We drove to the curl of Sakonnet Point   at the

SE corner of RI   snuck past the private property

& the “keep out” signs   onto its pebbly spiral jetty

& watched the sun set, somehow   into the Atlantic

late early summer evening   the sun only an eye

veiled in lambent mist   57 fine shades of violet

most luminous sky   ever screened by retina   &

I saw   one kind round   rose   iris   in clerestory

lanthanum air-cathedral   through the vault

of steel   in heart of the earth   or simply

the heart itself   where 144 lines meet (ply

pan o’ply) an elemental number (all complete

now, fin)   for Love is Lake Victoria   of Poem

& Universe   the shared factor (O Unionverse)

both yin & yang   a givenreceptive   openness

infinitenfoldunfurled banner of Joy (freedom)

Love is egalitarian & kind   it will not break

the weakest willow branch   of orphan   poor

man   widow   it will endure with them,   for

righteousness   & justice   & when the scales

fall from our eyes at last   we’ll behold Scales

held in your palm   of matrix-lines   life-lines

a Romany (RIMN) hrmny, Maggie   28 pines

all swimming into view   &   one eye-in-hand 

prevails.   & the shadow of your hand   on my

brow   in the starlight   of Cosmos-over-Chaos

(olive mountain)   your paddlwhrlng S-O-S (O

sip & see)   Ja-El   Jessie O’L   little song-tree

        7.2.12

Lanthanum 12.21

21

I’ve lived for some years now   along Abba River

in Q’ville   a stream wide, deep, invisible   to which

Ocean is tributary   & stars are lights   each

in a niche of a bend   along its banks   a quiver-

full are clustered   at the center of the earth

matrix of bends & origami folds   a silvery thread

knotted tight   & gleaming there   the stream’s head

source &   watershed   (east   west   north   south)

This river’s where   inside turns out   & myrrh

turns mirror (by St. Louie MO)   where wanderer

goes OM at last   prodigal Absalom   to his poor

long-forsaken Solomon (Abba   Pop   Dad   Father)

& the tripod of their lost, lasting embrace   is

bond of universal steel   (titanium-lanthanum-

oxide alloy)   which is most tautwound   anthem-

flower   in the planetary plot   grave Providence

of all things   in those arms   their hands

united   fingers   interwoven &   unbreakable

palm-vault   beyond every Olympic pinnacle   of

bronze or gold   & racing now (triple-handstands)

toward that Finnish line   in summertime   halcyon

days   up north   (is it Karelia?  Sibelius swam-

pineland?)   where a vain little man   in his own

birch canoe (Longfellow?  Hiawatha?)   glides down

Minnehaha Creek   his boat festooned with 7 flags

of 50 stars (red, blue, purple)   a paper hat (or

tiny boat) crowning his brow   crowing   Excelsior!

paddling home   (homesick Frank   in his glad rags)

      7.1.12