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.

Magnetic North

This weekend I'll be driving to Minnesota, so won't be blogging-flogging so many poems as of late.  Here's the new addition to Ravenna Diagram.  (Was interested to learn that Bruegel's great painting "The Hunters' Return" plays a role in two of Andrei Tarkovsky's films, Solaris and Mirror.)

MAGNETIC NORTH

Snow on backyard pine, a winter

scene.  With bitter words

the hunters return.  Bird’s-

eye view.  A raven’s splintered mirror

integrates the earth with cold

& calm – ravenous fire

with ice-skating, the hounds’

dire hunger with a master’s hold.

Strange distance in this place of graves.

Graven with flames... a tinder

touch.  So you will render

up the whole of life, in silent waves

windblown, articulate (ash-

hexagon from one

remote hearth-rune).

Only dappled light (reed-wash,

acacia screen).  In the continuum

of strange dream-song, a black

milk pours into Black Elk,

Melchizedek... slips back to you, O

Somno-Man (where sparrows hum

across the mirrored ice).  Your

wing-palms print once, twice

beneath aurora burial (drum-

roll, funereal).  Snow gathers

at magnetic north.  Rose

dust & wilderness

meet on your lips (coal-cinders).

1.9.15

Old bells, old beret

Listened to news from Paris today, after the Charlie Hebdo attack.  This afternoon they broadcast the bells tolling - old Paris bells, deep & groaning.

I blogged recently about "occasional poems".  My method, time & again, over 25 years, has involved a sort of recursive movement - a fold-back on what came before.  I have a lot to work with.  The poems roll out for a while; then they turn, making a kind of feedback loop, & going forward at the same time (hopefully).

This process is a motif in the poems themselves.  It's about recollecting what came before.  There's also a theological dimension to this.  History is about remembering something - someone - buried or misunderstood, but stubbornly there - will not go away.

I see someone on the street who re-appears often in my poems (over decades).  At the same time, I notice the final two stanzas of a poem I posted here the day before the Charlie Hebdo incident : lines which seem to celebrate or beautify the very name of the magazine.  Very strange.  This too is a kind of backward glance, an elegiac impulse.

Here's another occasional poem, then, written today.  Another collage, another cartoon - maybe topical, maybe not.

OLD BERET

Cherish yet this goblin-goblet

buried in George’s field.

Iron curve, silvered

by time & rain – thin graphene net.

Your delicate recursive thread

bears planetary load.

Her slow gait (pigeon-toed)

& long brown coat, her bowed head

musing down the street, black hair

beneath an old beret.

Agenbite of inwit,

egret; sad, by shoreline (ancient ire).

Time shunts loom’s backbrace (thundering

boom).  Young Charlie’s oak,

febrile with Hebrew spokes

(dove-speak).  Gdspd, my blundering

cartoon – your secret sunny man

is safe with me.  I fell

from towers of Notre Belle

Dame, late of Galilee (bold Magdalen)

when the lights went out.  Hawk’s eye

& raven’s wing, a shadow-

script of Jonah’s prow

just now emerging from the sea,

the Southern Cross of everything.

Rose octahedron in

your heart... ponderous bronze

groaning (pain)... OK, Ahaz.  Palm-king.

1.8.15 

Occasional Poems

I write a lot of occasional poems.  This is one reason many (though by no means all) of them appear here, on me blog, hot off the brain-pan - because they are knotted to a specific date on the calendar or current event.  So this ongoing project, Ravenna Diagram, is a kind of crossweave of recurrent themes and motifs, with more spontaneous combustions, improvisations.  The result can be a sudden mosaic or collage of old hobby-horses and immediate happenings.

Today's effort, posted here, is an example.  What may seem very confusing on the surface is actually a tissue of old & new.  There's a nod to the late Bernard Jordan, a British WW 2 veteran known as "the Great Escapee", because not long ago he walked away from his nursing home in Hove, England to attend a memorial service at Normandy Beach (see article in NY Times today).  There's a reference to the "leap-second" process of setting the atomic clocks in Paris (see today's London Telegraph).

Then there are the recurrent motifs circling around Apollinaire, WWI, the "Rite of Spring" first performance (which Apollinaire attended, in Paris, on May 29, 1913), my cousin Juliet, who had her fatal leap from the Golden Gate (which opened to the public on the weekend of May 27-29 1937), and the French ship SS Normandie, which had its maiden voyage on May 29, 1935, and which sank in NY harbor in 1942.  A statue from the ship, called "La Paix", was rescued from the boat & now stands in Pinelawn Memorial Park on Long Island.

OK, got all that?  (There's more to it, but I can't tell you everything today.)  So here's the poem, fresh off the garage roof...

LEAP-SECONDS

Fresh snow crowns a fresh year

with infinite white

diamonds – even the summit

of that garage in back, a pyramid

of blinding hexagons, brilliant.

Don’t know if I’ll ever see

Mont Saint-Michel – may

have to cross that Jordan very ancient

& in secret, like Mayor Bernard,

Great Escapee

(of blessed memory).

Not Proust nor any Time Lord

in Paris can hold back the earth

entirely (though she’s

ralentir, apparently)

from wheeling pear-wise (O mirth-

cunning ham) toward her favorite

star.  Thus my mental

golden spider must recoil –

revert apsidal synapses, knot

quipu cloverleaf across

this bubble-octagon

(Emanu-El, the sun).

Apollinaire dreams toward his Croix-

de-Guerre; Bernard pops into PX

for a final cigarette;

Stravinsky’s Juliet

leap-seconds to St. Vitus rite (La Paix).

1.7.15

Epiphany poem

My grandfather John Ravlin would have turned 130 today.  He was born in La Porte City, Iowa, and worked as an engineer with the Barnett & Record Co. in Minneapolis, building grain elevators & other big structures.  This poem is dedicated to him.

A grain elevator is a kind of gigantic silo, a barnyard building, a seed container.  Sort of a manger for wheat & corn, a rustic-industrial edifice.  This poem jumps all over the place - my grandfather's in there, along with Dante, Ravenna, Epiphany...  part of Ravenna Diagram, another large construction project.

ROYAL OAK

                               i.m. J.H. Ravlin

Strings of tiny Christmas lights

buried in prickly green

spine-fans, almost unseen.

Grandpa’s Tannenbaum, his birthday

night.  Where trillions of miniature

Lincoln logs emerge

(Railsplitter’s urge

to mend all men, amen).  Within your

triple rainbow, Alighieri.

Omnipresent OMO,

eagle’s starry memo...

Beatrice glowing in your eye.

Starlight, moonlight, chill, ghostly

behind those tamaracks.

Swamplands (weathered shacks,

old rowboats).  Adriatic Sea.

You trace the ineluctable distinctions

of your fork-tongue land –

Chief Broken Hand

or Florence Ainsworth – widows, orphans –

Juliet, my lost Ophelia-

Ravlin – granddaughter –

twig-bent ever after

from that bridge – ey yo...

Wrath simmers in the stolen earth

many buffalo years.

Pathos echoes, whispers

from your ghost-dance birth-

                   *

star (veinous branchings from

on high thread winglets

for an infant Jonah’s

prow).  & each squaw-mummer

bears the whole universe

bundled on her back –

houseboat, tepee or shack,

motel or Royal Oak – all mangers

everywhere.  That gangly monk

with the blue-white beard

felt your pulse, heard

your wedding-sigh (on Black Sea bunk

in prison cell) – beheld the chaste

conjunction of a cosmos

with its heart’s anonymous

warm hand, bright eye...  Make haste,

make haste to find her here, him

there, hid in the vineyard,

my Beloved, O... (weird

Janus-coign of almond bloom,

warm elbow of imperial yardarm).

Charlie sleeps in the oak,

a slumber-king, a bloke

with head round as an apple.  Charm

in a name there be, like Charmion

or Charlemagne... a rose

smiles through its rainbow’s

reign, your charity incarnadine.

1.6.15

The Incredible Shrinking Letter to the Editor

I'm not ungrateful.  It's not easy getting a letter published in the New York Times (they receive up to 1000 letters a day).  Here's a link to mine, published in the paper today - thank you, NY Times.  It's just a little painful to watch the original whittled down so much.  Some of the flavor is lost.  Also, I think editors nowadays apply certain prevalent pseudo-rules of grammar - like the one that says "always replace the word which with that" - resulting in a duller, more awkward style.  Anyway, here's my original :

To the Editor:

General Michael Nagata displays welcome intellectual humility in voicing puzzlement about the nature of ISIS, and how to combat it.  As he gathers his "unofficial brain trust", he should add theologians and religious leaders to his group, because it is clear ISIS is about manipulating the disconnects between the theocentric worldview of Middle Eastern societies, and the generally secular, anthropocentric viewpoint of Western political systems.  

ISIS expands by offering a visionary alternative to decades of dictatorship and civil disorder in the Middle East - but it is an option which is more tyrannical and dehumanizing than the regimes it seeks to displace.  It is rooted in a propagandistic version of theism - the rebirth of the caliphate in the name of service to God.  The best counter-narrative which the West can offer is a vision of society rooted in a dual sense of freedom : a synthesis of both religious and civil liberty.  But post-Enlightenment Western societies are no longer very adept at thinking in terms which include a theistic perspective (hence, in part, Gen. Nagata's bewilderment).  

Yet there is a Western religious tradition, stemming from the concept of free will as essential to God's benign purpose for creation.  Individuals and societies, in other words, must freely choose goodness and righteousness : spiritual values cannot be applied by force.  Historically, this principle has been the basis for the separation of church and state.  If General Nagata and others like him can develop a holistic narrative, which meshes the sacred precept of spiritual freedom with the secular values of civil liberty, the West might have a better chance against various seductive ideologies of tyranny and fanaticism.

Sincerely,

Henry Gould

Poem for a New Year

SIMPLE PRELUDE

Quietness in Providence,

for them that can afford.

Calm streets (no Ford

Blunders).  Sabbath silence.

Another year is gathered in

to history.  Beautiful

vast former battlefields

blend into distance now (someone

booms a bell across a plain).

Only earth remains.

Infinity stains

each rusted blade, unreckoned pain.

Have you not felt, have you not seen

the lovely icon of

her face, beamed from above

on limpid threads – buried in the grass

so green?  Trepanned Apollinaire

smokes by her bedside,

spies stars in tears that slide

across her wide land’s cheek.  There,

there.  Everywoman wears

Night’s 99 candles now,

he mumbles.  On your brow

anonymous rain rinses the lairs

of lost crusaders, broken kings.

Your rustic diorama’s

humble panorama

magnifies in miniature – brings

crèche-gifts from the galaxy

to crushed paisan, bent

slave, dishonored filament

of glory.  A raven’s orthodoxy,

player’s rule – world-overturning

in one mild eye’s glance.

Epiphany or trance

transfigured into bird-learning –

the earth seen through a blade of grass,

a child’s infinity –

cosmic society

of spooky charity – forgiveness

born of magnanimity (O just

justice) & gratitude

(just being).  Simple prelude...

groaning Shostakovich, glittering dust

of Bach & Mendelssohn – a swirl

of sound now shapes your

ghostly figure (hour-

glass, bright everlasting Pearl) –

                     *

Two strands crossed, hidden in a field.

Of night & day, of earth

& sky, of raven-black

& light-brown, blonde.  A low tone sealed

their bond, a hum, a servant-song –

& then a lens caught fire

magnifying everywhere

Love’s equanimity (calm tuning-prong).

12.31.14

Allegorical Holiday

I wrote this poem about 35 years ago, soon after the birth of my son... seems to have some Christmas resonance (& maybe Hanukkah & Eid as well).

LITTLE SUN

Only just arrived from the Milky Way

and still dwelling in the mountains,

the soft hills of the small planet

of your mother – you can relax,

your cradle snug in the branches;

all around you vague motions,

sounds of mingling birds or people;

over your head a bright mobile, swaying

and glittering like a sailing ship.

Only just lifted from the river,

still rocking with the evening ripples,

at that quiet hour when the earth

settles down to dream – who are you?

An echo of some voice, a reflection

at the water’s edge, in Egypt,

in the wilderness, in the Milky Way –

your little boat bumping the shoreline,

floating to the ocean sound asleep.

Only just delivered from your absence,

lifted from the mineshaft, from empty space;

only now beginning to awaken, to remember

all these familiar rhythms; just lifted

from the water and now lifted and held

aloft in your father’s arms – still

almost weightless, but gaining momentum,

little planet, little sun, coming down

to bear the full weight of the earth.

All Clear

... from an old poem with Christmas overtones (the Holy Family, after all, were homeless at the time) called "All Clear".   Published about 10 years ago in Fulcrum magazine.  (Note : poem was written during the 2000 Presidential campaign.  Reference to "pallid prize" in penultimate stanza : there are 132 rooms in the White House.)

4
Christmas is coming      but here      in sleepy-febrile Florida
tied at the neck      under stage lights      one big brother
wrestles with another      and      when this battle is over
who will wear the crown?      as a gospel voice in the rotunda

croons in my ear      and as reporters cluster by the grave
of Robert Trout (“Iron Man of the Blitz”) and you perceive,
ephebe, the idiom of this      intervention      (requiem
for a midnight sun      or century)      and through the nave

today      they bore a body to the columbarium
(rotund profundity beneath nine bells)      only him
(Brown, William Wallace, Jr.)      a homeless man
and blind     who stopped the wheels of the imperium

one day      right on the street      asking the father of
George W.      please pray for me      and he paused there
(the President)      and said      come along with me
to St. John’s      we’ll pray together

the music of what happens      when      no man is
and the bell tolls for thee      like Janis Joplin’s
high note      who will wear the crown?      your doom
Kosmos      a little world      curls into bronze

and sounds      from the 132 rms of a pallid prize
to the 132 acres of N. Main Cemetery (Providence)
where you’ll find me (here now      there then) mourning
a vagabonded      end of century      where a dove strays
 
from San Francisco      down to Florida      an unknown
hobo Noman      left behind      his leaf gone brown
is your redemption      (sleepy time and railroad
nation)      W.W. is his name      crowned    here    and    gone
       
                                                           12.3.2000

Web of mutuality

Just rolling along with Ravenna Diagram.  (Dante Alighieri is buried in Ravenna.)

IN THE RIVER

Listen to the waterfall.

Late-autumn rain.

Shadow of a raven

passing.  Mirror on the wall.

Through this hollowness of things

reflected... way-off echo

of a chord.  Blow,

Memphis trump.  The milk-train sings

at dawn.  I see a pine-swamp

in the background.  Gaunt

figure, shoulders bent

into the wash.  Her upright tramp.

The long fields, where trashmen sang,

collecting time, scars.

Equal among stars

is your little lamp, my lambchild.  Strong.

Underwater, in the river, borne

downstream... your friend.

In my beginning... end.

Blackboard scrape of railroad horn.

We seek a broad place, a place

to land.  Slave quarters,

the servants’ house (yours).

Squire’s antic foal is full of grace,

Jessie.  The minister of joy

praises with baritone,

bearing the tune (bone-

dry).  So we give thanks, Dante.

12.10.14

Personal Advent

Poets employ a type of fuzzy laser-light, reflecting & deflecting the living & dead poets who seem to be signaling them in turn.  Semaphore, smoke-signals.  I keep going back to the main poets who interest me, while also trying to spread out & venture into new regions.  I circle around Ezra Pound, for one.  There's a strange blinking mixed code emanating from him, so right & so wrong.

For some reason over the past year or so I've been delving a lot into anthropology & ancient belief systems & mythologies & prehistoric rites & the roots of human motivation... at least the theories about those roots...

I wrote an essay about the "New Gnostic" poets a while back (published online in the Coldfront zine).  Pound is important in that constellation of developments, along with Yeats.  Both of them deeply caught up in hermetic & occult philosophy.  Am now re-reading a good book on this topic, The Celestial Tradition : a study of Ezra Pound's The Cantos, by Demetres Tryphonopoulos.  The author explores what was called "the rising psychic tide" of all kinds of heterodox & occult beliefs & practices around 1880-1920, from the scholarly to the "thaumaturgic" & the fraudulent/comical hocus-pocus (see "Madame Sosostris" in Eliot's The Waste Land, for a sample).

Pound took no interest in Yeats' style of "practical" spiritualism (magic).  His was a more theoretical focus on the so-called ancient hermetic wisdom.  & his sifting of those traditions and values through the shaping of his poetry was very refined & remarkable, in some ways - and simultaneously extremely harmful & ugly.  His anti-semitism ran deep, his ideology always promoting the "pure, clean, luminous" mythology of the Greeks & the Romans, as opposed to the "dirty, evil" oppressions of the Judeo-Christian (Biblical) cultures.  He was fascinated by Catholicism - but as an expression of more ancient pagan "truths".

Just setting aside for a moment the hatefulness of Pound's anti-semitism - which parallels so closely the despicable Nazi ideology & program of degradation & de-humanization - I am struck by the irony of Pound's very serious, & sometimes beautiful, devotion to the spiritual heights of philosophical-poetic Wisdom.  As Tryphonopoulos so cogently explains, The Cantos are designed not as a narrative journey so much as a mystical initiation.  The process of reading The Cantos is meant to lead the seeker toward an inner spiritual enlightenment, joining the mind through poetry with the heights of wisdom represented by Confucius, the medieval saints & theologians, Ovid, Dante, etc. etc.  It's a very high-minded symposium of mystic illuminati, to which Pound is offering the reader an exalted poetic invitation.

What do I mean by "irony" in this case?  I'm thinking of the juxtaposition between Pound's fervent philosophical/mystical theme and his actual spiritual blindness.  There is the sense, reading his biographies, that perhaps, toward the end of his life, he himself had some awareness of this contrariety, this impasse.  Of course by calling his situation one of "spiritual blindness" I am expressing my own personal worldview...

The legacy of Biblical/Judaic/Christian spirituality includes, at its foundation, the sense that the Creator of the Universe (as we know it) is somehow "personal".   I see here a root contrast with Yeats, Pound, and the legacy of Neo-Platonism & hermetic gnosis.  In their case, spirituality and wisdom are a progress toward a kind of abstract higher wisdom itself.  The seeker is transfigured by spiritual knowledge into a kind of divine being.  Whereas, for Judaism & Christianity, spirituality is ultimately a relationship.  Though we cannot comprehend how the Origin of the Universe could possible be personal - except in some form of the person who reaches down into our own limited vision of the same - yet that is what we sense & believe the case to be.

This is underwritten (for Christianity) by the Trinitarian doctrine of "persons".   The philosophical synthesis (Greek-Judaic) achieved by such thinkers as the Byzantine monk Maximus the Confessor seems foundational - if not yet complete - in this regard.  (Not yet complete, in that while it represented a philosophical synthesis, it did not yet express a full reconciliation with Judaism : a task for the future.)  God is simultaneously present in the original Creator-Spirit, in his "Son-Servant" (Jesus), and in the "Holy Ghost" (present in the world, in infinite manifestations, now and everywhere).  In this way our notion of "person" is not abstracted into some merely transcendent sphere, but is fused with the personhood represented by a particular, historically-contingent, individual - which then serves as a kind of template for humankind in every other situation (rooted in loving relationship).  

For Pound, apparently, the essence of spirituality can be characterized as subjective experience.  For Judaism & Christianity, on the other hand, both the beginning and the end of spirituality rests in relationship.  This is not to say that Ezra Pound did not cherish his own dreams of utopia, human fellowship, and social justice.  But his basic orientation toward knowledge and wisdom - as a kind of abstract goal or measure, something to be achieved and learned - leaves aside any acknowledgement or  recognition of the prior (originating) presence of a sacred Personhood.  The fleeting appearances of Diana or Aphrodite as psychological experiences do not seem, in the end, to provide a firm ground for belief.  But he was searching.

I realize for some this is only another mode of mumbo-jumbo.  But I find reasonable support for this position in, among other places, the 20th-cent. philosophy of the scientist and polymath Michael Polanyi.  Polanyi's major work, Personal Knowledge, is a theory of epistemology.  What is knowledge, actually?  And how do we know anything?

For Polanyi, as his book title implies, all knowledge - including objective, scientific knowledge - is grounded and bounded by human subjectivity - by "personhood".  We don't develop "new knowledge" in the sciences, or any other field, without the mediation of human persons.  This sounds pretty obvious (in my sketchy summary) : but Polanyi draws out its consequences in quite profound ways.  He is able to bring the materialism and objectivity of 19th & 20th-cent. scientific positivism back into the moral/spiritual matrix of human persons : which was what Yeats & Pound themselves set out to do, a generation earlier.  With "faulty instruments" (cf. Eliot's Four Quartets).  The great ideological struggle of the "two cultures" (science and art, science & humanism, science & religion) finds a philosophical reconciliation in Polanyi's epistemology : one which Yeats & Pound so brilliantly sought, & so dramatically failed to find.

Michael Polanyi

Gateway Arch dream songs

I picked up this week's New Yorker (12.8) out of the mailbox tonight, & was surprised to see the cover art - a drawing of the Gateway Arch Monument in St. Louis.  It's a great image : the nation's racial divide surfacing in the very shape of one of the country's key architectural symbols - which happens to be in St. Louis.  The Arch also happens to be the key to a long poem of mine called Lanthanum, which was triggered by a strange dream I had one night about the Gateway Arch - which I've never seen, and had never previously given any thought.

The poem is not exactly topical - more like a long daydream or dream vision.  But the closing poem seems to gesture, a little bit, toward the basic question reflected in the magazine cover.  The poem was finished the day before the 4th of July, 2012.

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

The New Masons

As usual, I'm immersed in a serial poem which feels like a long-term construction project.  Only the most recent in a series of long poems (I've written 8 or 9 of them in the last 20 years).  I'm calling it, for various reasons, Ravenna Diagram.  (A Venn diagram, as you probably know, is based on a simple geometrical figure describing the intersection of two circles.)  In my experience, whenever I started fiddling with numbers & geometry, a poetic project is being born.

As part of my "research" I recently discovered a book from the 80s by John James titled Chartres : the masons who built a legend (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).  An eye-opener.  James is clearly someone with a builder/architect's background.  But he's a wonderful detective, too.  By studying the smallest changes & differences in details of Chartres' masonry & design, he's able to sketch out the individual masons/architects behind each part of the building.  There were at least 4-5 of them.  I find it marvelous how he illuminates their decisions in shaping & setting-out elements of this unbelievably massive stone structure.  He is also extremely sober, modest & circumspect in his judgements : there are no theoretical flights of fancy here.

One theme James emphasizes is the difference between the medieval artistic ethos & that of the post-Renaissance, modern era.  All these master designers & craftsmen are anonymous.  There is no cult of individual genius - no exalting of the fine artist (the sculptor, say) over the other workmen.  They work in teams.  Teams of teams, actually : each one guided by the characteristic artistry & temperament of the master mason, or team leader.

I started musing about this issue in relation to making poetry.  On the face of it, poetry today seems a typical phenomenon of that Modern individualism - maybe even an extreme manifestation, in comparison to other fields of endeavor.  I myself have certainly tried very hard to remain independent & idiosyncratic - absolutely free to do my own thing in poetry.

But if you scratch a little deeper you find traces of collective effort & collaboration in poetry.  Some poets in fact make an explicit counter-attack on individualism, forming group movements, defining their collective ethos & goals, engaging in collaborative writing projects.

I think there is a further level of collaboration, on a more implicit level.  It comes out of the poetic process itself - of reading, imitation, allusion, parody.  We model & shape our poems following, & revising, forms that have already impressed themselves upon us.  This process is in turn further shaped by collective "canon-formation" - when poets & poems enter the cultural bloodstream, moving from alien products to a kind of "second nature" (see Eugenio Montale's essay, "The Second Life of Art").

Long ago I became fascinated with the Acmeist group of pre-WWI St. Petersburg.  In many ways they were no different from the other modernist art movements springing up at that time (Futurism, Imagism, etc.).  A small group of young poets developed a shared sense of style & thematics - & sometimes formed personal friendships & alliances which long outlasted the platforms of the groups themselves.  In their early days, the Acmeists were quite formal about their activities - meeting at a long table at the prescribed time each week, reading & discussing poems with a kind of official sobriety, dedication & gravitas.  (At least that's one of the historical impressions which they left us.)

There seems a strange kind of literary eschatology involved here.  By that I mean the manifestation or instauration of an actual literary group seems to bring the implicit collective nature of art & craft to an explicit crystallization.  Something briefly surfaces which is perhaps there all the time.  Mandelstam's art of trans-historical allusive richness - & his emphasis on architecture as a prime analogue of the poetic art - are a key dimension of the Acmeist ethos.  Pushkin & Ovid are his contemporaries, Mandelstam proclaims.

There are parallels in American poetry of the same period.  John Irwin, in his massive study of Hart Crane, has brought to light the truly "Masonic" dimensions of The Bridge - the many layers of allusive groundwork laying a foundation for the song itself.  The poem is a "choral" piece, harmonizing American themes with ancient poetics (Crane clearly drawing on the "mythical methods" of Joyce, Eliot & Pound).

(As an aside, I am absolutely flummoxed by the striking parallels between Crane's mythography of Virgo, Astraea, & the Statue of Liberty in The Bridge - as outlined by Irwin - and the hidden Masonic thematics of the constellation Virgo - "the Corn Maiden" - explored by David Ovason in his fascinating book The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital.  This work seems to be more than just another New-Agey fantasy-occult book.  The intricate historical scholarship is remarkable.)

We are probably only beginning to explore this new (neo-medieval?) dynamic of artistic interaction : the collective building project & the characteristic thumbprint of the individual "master".  They go together.  Meanwhile nations & cultures, along their devious, submerged, counter-intuitive, dialectical paths, go about shaping the canonical myths of the future.

Poets : builders in the high room of the Pentecostal word.

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