two fish

     Halfway squared equals twice back to zero. Primordial rhythms surge against the neonate. Blue hall, blue wall, blue crystal ball. I don’t know yet what I am. Always returning, resurging, resurgence. Gathering documents from an internal realm. Ali Akbar Khan showed his tabla player how to become more powerful, how to pulse with a new beat in the midst of metaphysical ecstacy. Damaged hands re-enact helplessness.

Past life):

     I sit there with my fallen self, heiroglyphic belt trapped outside. Dark tall cell, golden wall, window-slit of light above. The room is a three-dimensional trapezoid. A woman dances in red on a stone-covered courtyard. Children with golden halos, around their small heads. Was it a priest, lost them

         –  remainders .

Joseph Rowe writes
In all the excellent material that has been published and broadcast (notably by Bill Moyers) about stories and myths of the hero figure in Campbell, there seems to be little awareness of the fact that the hero archetype is really one pole of a dialectic, one which I also overlooked in my previous post. It cannot be complete without its Other, the Hero’s complement (and in a sense, his opposite) which I shall call the Sage, though there are other possible ways of describing it.

Campbell himself is keenly aware of this dialectic. He continually discusses and alludes to it in many ways in his writings. He associates the strong emphasis on Hero archetypes mostly with Western traditions, and with the masculine pole; and strong emphasis on the Sage archetype with the Eastern traditions, and the feminine pole. Of course this is a generality, with commonsense caveats against reductionism – after all, these poles exist within each of us, psychically. But the historical and cultural manifestations are fascinating, and can perhaps be helpful for dealing with them in our own lives.

In a nutshell, the Hero says : “I will.” The Sage says “I am.”

Action vs. Being.

There is an ineluctable tension, and sometimes even a conflict between these two. This tension will always return sooner or later, no matter how many times we think we’ve “solved” it with truisms such as “true action is non-action.” We can verify this in our own lives. Of course the two poles of the dialectic can (and must) be reconciled. Figures like Jesus and the Buddha are great inspirations. But it’s not as easy as we think! And it’s a process, not a static formula or solution.

It reminds me of something Ram Dass once said (quoting approximately):

“Our human predicament seems to be that we must live with two truths simultaneously: that all Being is One, absolutely and mind-bogglingly perfect, just as it is; and also that there is an experience of suffering, and of wrongness, and that compassion compels us to do something about it, to try to make things better.”

The poles of Hero and Sage have always existed, of course, but different cultures and different epochs of human evolution have placed very different emphases on one or the other. Historically, heroism comes into its fullest expression, according to Campbell, with the advent of warlike, patriarchal cultures, who give priority to masculine, sky-gods. These religions replaced the older Bronze-age, goddess-oriented religions, and their emphasis on wisdom, acceptance of impermanence, and the cyclic, cosmic order of time. Campbell is worth quoting at length here, from the chapter called “The Serpent’s Bride” in Occidental Mythology:

“For its is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle-herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat herders from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for whom not the patient toil of earth, but the battle spear and its plunder were the source of both wealth and joy. In the older mother myths and rites the lighter and darker aspects of the mixed thing that is life had been honored equally and together, whereas in the later, male-oriented, patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature-powers the character mostly of darkness — to which, also, a negative moral judgment now was added. For, as a great body of evidence shows, the social as well as mythic order of the two contrasting ways of life were opposed. Where the goddess had been venerated as the giver and supporter of life as well as consumer of the dead, women as her representatives had been accorded a paramount position in society as well as in cult. Such an order of female-dominated social and cultic custom is termed, in a broad and general way, as the order of Mother Right. And opposed to such, without quarter, is the order of the Patriarchy, with a ardor of righteous eloquence and a fury of fire and sword.”

He then goes on to discuss the figure of the Serpent, which was associated universally and intimately with the goddess, and which also represented, in its coiling movement, and its shedding of skin, the ever-destroying, ever-renewing, cyclic nature of Time. It is very significant that a number of patriarchal god-heroes — the three best-known are Yahweh, Zeus, and Indra — do battle very early in their careers with a cosmic Serpent, vanquishing that figure (seen as a monster), and thereby instituting a new, heroic order of things. Not the least of this new order of things is a new concept of time. When Yahweh whipped old Leviathan’s ass, Zeus did likewise with Typhon, and Indra with Vritra, they were not just getting rid of monsters associated with the old Mother Right religious order, they were vanquishing, according to Campbell,

“daemons that formerly had symbolized the force of the cosmic order itself, the dark mystery of time, which licks up hero deeds like dust: the force of the never-dying serpent, sloughing lives like skins, which, pressing on, ever turning in its circle of eternal return, is to continue in this manner forever, as it has already cycled from all eternity, getting absolutely nowhere.”

To me, this brings us close to the heart of the tension between the Hero and the Sage, as well as the related tensions between West and East, and between the Masculine and the Feminine. For the Sage, time is characterized by eternal cosmic cycles and the implacable Law of Impermanence. For the Hero, on the contrary, time is actually GOING SOMEWHERE … there is a purpose, a goal, a meaning in its story, its evolution, and its outcome. It seems to be more linear than cyclical — it may contain cycles, but they are subservient to its over-arching, linear story.

How can these be reconciled? Apparently we are faced with a paradox which cannot be solved intellectually, for this dual aspect is inherent in the very nature of the way we think about time. Campbell’s great virtue is that (like Ram Dass, in his comment about our “predicament") he never really takes sides, though he is fearless in pointing out deluded cultural and religious exaggerations on either side (which has led to a number of misconceptions and fatuous charges against him by some critics). And for anyone who is tempted to take sides, and find easy solutions, he offers copious material for deeper reflection, bringing us always back to the paradox.

I am tempted to leave things here, because this paradox is something that each of us must work out in our own lives. But I can’t resist closing with another short quote (with a delicious allusion to Wm. Blake), one which sympathizes with the Sage and the goddess-oriented aspect. This may seem like taking sides — but after all, we live in an age of unprecedented planetary crisis, when the hyper-masculinization of culture, politics, and economics is so imbalanced in its worship of competition, elevating the market to the status of divinity, and those whom it favors to the status of heroes, that it has become pathological, threatening all life on Earth. In speaking of the exquisitely beautiful figures of Cretan and Mycenaen goddess-figures consorting with serpents in a Garden of Paradise, a Garden which appears in many Bronze-age cultures, and which is much older than the Garden of Genesis which was derived from it, he says:

“… [these figures still] stand as a shrine to this goddess of the early Garden of Innocence, before Nobodaddy made her serpent lover crawl, and locked the Tree of Life away for all time.”

Watching The Source, there’s a moment when Norman Mailer appears (in 1990s present), offers a short poem to Allen Ginsberg, and says

He may be the bravest man in America.

Jay Stevens

The hipster, Mailer wrote, was the man who understood the central role Death had come to play within life—in the Fifties death was personified by the concentration camp (cultural death) and the H‑Bomb (species death)—and as a result had decided “to divorce” himself from society, “to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.” But for Mailer these rebellious imperatives did not include looking into the face of God, which was the whole point as far as Ginsberg and Kerouac were concerned.

In Storming Heaven, Stevens continues
It was ironic, but … at the height of their fame the Beats already were mutating toward what a later generation would call hippies. But a few heard a peculiar siren song amid all the bad poetry and smelly feet. Writing in Playboy, Herb Gold, who was considered an expert on the Beats largely because he lived in San Francisco, was reminded of some lines that William Yeats (another nineteenth‑century man who had thought Homo sapiens was in the process of climbing the evolutionary ladder) had written:

What rough beast, ifs hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

Could the beatniks, Gold wondered, be Yeats’s proto‑gods? Naw. “When Yeats looked into the future to find a terrible savior, an evolution up from animality into something strange and wonderful—he did not mean James Dean. Perhaps, as they claim, the tunneling hipster’s avoidance of feeling can lead to a new honesty of emotion. Perhaps a ground hog might someday learn to fly, but man O man, that will be one strange bird.”

Precisely the point Yeats was making.

In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s second Beat novel, there is a moment when the Gary Snyder character experiences a vision of the future comparable to Yeats’s. What he sees is “a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh … wild gangs of pure holymen getting together to drink and talk and pray.”

That was the Beat fantasy, and it was one that Allen Ginsberg was using all of his market research skills to bring about. Ginsberg became the public relations director of the Beat movement, which irritated some of the more self‑reliant poets. He badgered the intellectual journals, particularly hostile ones like Partisan Review and Hudson Review, to publish the work of his friends; he contacted agents and editors and was rarely without a selection of manuscripts that he was trying to place. If the Beat movement was a modestly glowing goal, he was going to do everything within his power to make sure it burst into flame. Years later Ginsberg described the potential of this moment this way:

We’d already had, by ‘48, some sort of alteration of our own private consciousness; by ‘55 we made some kind of articulation of it; by ‘58 it had spread sufficiently so that the mass media were coming around for information, and by that time I realized that if our private fancies, our private poetries, were so serious that they absorbed the attention of the big, serious military generals who wrote for Time magazine, there must be something strange going on.”

What was happening, Ginsberg thought, was an alteration of consciousness that was filtering up through the young into all levels of society. It was as though the country was just catching up to where the New Visionaries had been back in 1944. “That year on the literary scene in New York it was all in fashion to go crazy,” remembers Barbara Probst Solomon. “It was the fashion to push things to their ultimate extreme—all kinds of sexual and drug experimentation. Once, at a party, someone put LSD in my drink, and I went home and woke up seeing things. I thought I was going crazy until someone phoned later in the afternoon and asked how I liked my acid trip …. It was the beginning of the Sixties, really, and I used to say to Larry Roose, a Freudian friend of mine, that it was all very violent, that I didn’t like being part of it.”

America, thought Ginsberg, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

In these days of haste, you may not want to waste your time reading the merely superb; what you want is the superlative. You need it – ya gotta have it. Whaddaya do, comb through the LRB, the NYT, the ABR, the NYRB? Rely on bestseller lists? Admirable as Adam Ant, yet why not have a quick go at Harold Bloom’s contemporary writer short list: cut to the chase.

Compendia Courtesy of Wikipedia

Bloom’s association with the Western canon has provoked a substantial amount of interest in his opinion concerning the relative importance of contemporary writers.

In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: “Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett. He’s certainly the most authentic.” Beckett died in 1989, and Bloom has not suggested who occupies that position now.

Concerning British writers: “Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active,” and “no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Murdoch’s eminence.” Since Murdoch’s death, Bloom has expressed admiration for novelists such as John Banville, Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, and A. S. Byatt.

In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, he named Portuguese writer Jose Saramago as “the most gifted novelist alive in the world today,” and “one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre.”

Of American novelists, he declared in 2003 “there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise.” Claiming “they write the Style of our Age, each has composed canonical works,” he identified them as Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. He named their strongest works as Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, American Pastoral and Sabbath’s Theater, Blood Meridian, and Underworld. He has also praised fantasy writer John Crowley as these writers’ equal – especially his novel Little, Big.

In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975) he identified Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s he regularly named A.R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he has lately come to identify Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He has expressed great admiration for the Canadian poet Anne Carson, particularly her verse novel Autobiography of Red. Bloom also lists African American Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets.

Bloom also has something to say about the superlatives in American art–that is, the sublime:

Bloom’s introduction to “Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon” (1987) features his canon of the “twentieth-century American Sublime,” the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. Bloom singles out the following works for distinction:

“Miss Lonelyhearts” by Nathanael West
William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying“
The end of the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup“
Nearly all of Hart Crane
Wallace Stevens‘ “Auroras of Autumn“
Bud Powell’s performance of “Un Poco Loco“
“I Remember You” and “Parker’s Mood” as performed by Charlie Parker
“Byron the Light Bulb” from Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”

Happy hunting, Earthers.

It’s a bit tragic that, if glimmers become dreams and dreams become social realities, if the realities are consuming enough, the manifestation appears as organic, simply part of the existing landscape, thus relatively unnoticed. The glimmer of a dream - instantly being able to freely access those most-condensed fonts of human wisdom: books, works of intense labors, devotion – just beyond reach. No more! A panoply of sacred texts translated, straight no chaser.

Just now the golden-sandled dawn has called.

(Sappho, Fragment 18)

Sacred Texts Online

Sacred Texts: Timeline

World Mysteries dot com

Bibliography of Sacreds Texts - with online links

Comparative Religion dot com

Some 2000 free eBooks - relating to Asian cultures and and cultural studies generally

here at the U Virginia eText Center

Beyond Reading: Papyrology Links

Sappho and

Other Women’s Voices: Translations of Writings Before 1700

What greater good can be done for the future without learning, growing into knowledge. Even without a friend, impoverished, with only food, an Internet Cafe and a few bucks – open your mind.

A napkin dripping.

(Sappho, Fragment 110)

Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the poetry of Wallace Stevens by Gyorgyi Voros is a wonderful book reframing Wallace Stevens as a poet of nature. This book seems to have met with but a peep from the literary community, though praised by John Ashbery, who wrote, “a dazzling, multi-tiered account of the poetry,” and Harvard Prof. Lawrence Buell (known for his works on 19th century literary transcendentalism), notes her work is “incisive, ambitious, original, timely.” If you’re into haiku and/or Stevens, or wish to contemplate a modern philosophy of nature, a sensible ecocritical adventure, you could do worse.

Gyorgyi

    Voros

First,

The Idea of Order at Key West
    (Stevens reads it here)
      Wallace Stevens (1935)
 
 

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

 
 

Below, an excerpt from Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the poetry of Wallace Stevens (University of Iowa Press, 1997), partly commenting on the poem:

Stevens’s sense of the American experience of the Nature / culture relation was that modern awareness of Nature – whether Nature be manifest as wilderness, as the human body, or as the human unconscious – had diminished dangerously. Stevens complained, “The material world, for all the assurances of the eye, has become immaterial. It has become an image in the mind.” Human preconception had so blunted the human experience of and relation to nonhuman Nature, upon which the human rested, that indeed nothing but empty anthropocentric image remained. Stevens knew that a cancerous humanism diminishes human experience. “The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real,” he asserted.

This interdependence of imagination and reality is, of course, the subject of “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The poem’s speaker, walking on the shore, listening to the singer, posing questions and propositions about the nature of art to his companion, posits a series of antinomies which can be reframed as usefully within the categories of Nature and culture and human and nonhuman as they can within reality and imagination. The speaker pits mind against Nature’s “body wholly body,” singer’s song against the “meaningless plungings of water and the wind,” the glassy lights of the town against the darkness of the sea, and language against the “words of the sea.” While he asserts the mutual influences between sea and song, he emphasizes an essential discontinuity between them and averts any suggestion of an easy synthesis: “The song and water were not medleyed sound / Even if what she sang was what she heard,” he cautions and stresses that “it was she and not the sea we heard.”

The poem’s central question asks, “Whose spirit is this?” That is, what interface exists between human and Nature in song, the poem’s metonym for art? The speaker has already shown that the singer’s song fails as direct translation of the sea’s “constant cry,” nor can song effect a seamless identification between singer and natural elements. Is it then a production of individual vision against the spectacular stage set of Nature? After all, “she was the maker of the song she sang. /… [the] sea / Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.”

The poem’s final third is customarily read as an avowal of the romantic doctrine of the mind’s ultimate superiority over Nature: after all, “It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing” and the aftermath of her song that answers to the human “rage for order.” In the resounding silence that follows the song, the lights of the fishing boats

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Indeed, Helen Vendler’s reading of this poem places it within the Wordsworthian mind / Nature dichotomy and reads it as asserting the romantics’ sense of “the power of poetry over nature.” Similarly, Harold Bloom writes that the poem “remains equivocal and perhaps impossible to interpret” because it simultaneously “affirms a transcendental poetic spirit yet cannot locate it, and the poem also remains uneasily wary about the veritable ocean, which will rise up against Stevens yet again.”

Placing this poem too squarely within the romantic framework of mind over Nature, however, discounts the poem’s true dynamic, which does not rest solely on the dichotomy between singer and song. The two listeners themselves engage in creation (song making) by attending to sea and singer. The stimuli around the speaker – singer, song, companion, “bronze shadows heaped / On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres / Of sky and sea,” night descending, lights emerging – engender in him a flow of propositions, questions, and highly charged perceptual experiences. Rather than depicting the power of poetry over Nature, the poem depicts the power of the sum of perceptual experiences created by human and nonhuman components in the speaker, whose main role in the poem may be summarized as that of creative listener. . . .The night deepens after the song has ended; the resounding silence, as it were, heightens the effects of song and what might be regarded as the visual analogues to song, the lights, boats, town, and other human productions that order and “portion out” the natural scene. This difference – the juxtaposition and interface between before and after – is more significant than any element of the experience. It is finally the speaker, not the singer or the song, who effects the enchantment of the night . . .

Gyorgyi Voros

 
 

 

 

The Zen monk Ikkyu seldom painted landscapes, preferring instead such subjects as birds, orchids, prunes, and especially poems and Zen parables written in his powerful calligraphic brush manner. These bokuseki (ink traces) are revered in Japan because they reveal the spiritual character of this eccentric cleric’s life and thought (Cleveland Museum of Art).

It’s nice to read something beautiful from 15th century Japan:

Natural, reckless, correct skill;
Yesterday’s clarity is today’s stupidity
The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change
One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.

(Ikkyu Sojun, number 291 in Sonja Arntzen)

Ikkyu also ponders sexuality, passion, as Jusin Hall writes:

There’s something nicely saucy about sex poems that last five or six hundred years. Ikkyu wrote graphically, straightforwardly, about a woman’s vagina as a beautiful, alluring, important place, “the birthplace of all the ten thousand buddhas” and his own penis and the joys that could be found playing in his loincloth.

A Woman’s Sex:
It has the original mouth but remains wordless;
It is surrounded by a magnificent mound of hair.
Sentient beings can get completely lost in it
But it is also the birthplace of all the Buddhas of the ten thousand worlds.

A Man’s Root:
Eight inches strong, it is my favourite thing;
If I’m alone at night, I embrace it fully -
A beautiful woman hasn’t touched it for ages.
Within my fundoshi there is an entire universe!

(A fundoshi is a type of loose-fitting underwear once worn by Japanese men.)

Definitely a different take, for a Zen Buddhist Priest, on the age-old Buddhist precept, expressed in contemporary language in Thich Nhat Hanh’s 14th Precept: Three Sources of Energy

Do not mistreat your body. Learn to handle it with respect. Do not look on your body as only an instrument. Preserve vital energies (sexual, breath, spirit) for the realization of the Way. (For brothers and sisters who are not monks and nuns:) Sexual expression should not take place without love and a long-term commitment. In sexual relationships, be aware of future suffering that may be caused. To preserve the happiness of others, respect the rights and commitmennts of others. Be fully aware of the responsibility of bringing new lives into the world. Meditate on the world into which you are bringing new beings.

One zen priestess writes glowingly about Ikkyu:

One of the miscellaneous koans is, Why are perfectly enlightened bodhisattvas attached to the vermilion thread? The vermilion thread is the red thread, and the red thread is symbolic: I have recently learned that it is not the line of tears , as I used to think, but it comes from early China, where the geisha girls and courtesans would wear a red garter on their thigh, as the line of passions. So: Why are perfectly enlightened bodhisattvas attached to the vermilion thread? One of the characters I want to introduce you to is a wonderful character in the Zen tradition, called Ikkyu, who is one of my longstanding and favourite Zen masters and who appeals, I guess, to the wild woman in me. He was born in 1394 and was an illegitimate son of the emperor Go-komatsu. He was known by some as the emperor of renegades, a wild wandering monk and teacher, sometimes called Crazy Cloud. He was a lover, a poet, and he could write very tenderly about the beauty of women. He relentlessly attacked the hypocrisy of the then corrupt Zen establishment, and even had women as his students. I think he was one of the first Zen masters to have women as students; that was considered quite radical. It was in the brothels and geisha houses that he developed the Red Thread Zen, a notion he borrowed from the old Chinese master Kido and extended to deep and subtle levels of realisation.

This very body is the lotus of the true law. This very body is the lotus of the true law, linking human beings to birth and death by the red thread of passion. This approach was closely related to Tantric Buddhism, that used sexual union as a religious ritual. Ikkyus Red Thread form of Zen practice was a radical approach, a non-dualistic interpretation of the sexual act, realising this very body is the Buddha-dharma. Ikkyu wrote a poem after his first realisation experience:

From the world of passions returning to the world of passions:
There is a moments pause.
If it rains, let it rain; if the wind blows, let it blow.

Ikkyu’s Red Thread Zen and wild, poetic, passionate nature was also tempered, though, by his extensive training in the Rinzai school, very intense training. Rinzai was a very strict master, and Ikkyu was very strict and demanding with his own students.

At the age of 77, Ikkyu had a passionate relationship with a mistress named Lady Shin. She was a blind singer and composer and a very skilled musician, and she was in her late thirties. He wrote lots of beautiful graphic poetry celebrating their love, and it was in Lady Shin that Ikkyu finally located his own missing female self.

As Manfred Steger commented in his book Crazy Clouds [Crazy Clouds: Zen Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers (with Perle Besserman: A cross-cultural study in Zen Buddhism and Politics; Shambhala Press, 1991], Ikkyu incorporated bold elements of the physical relationship into his teaching of Zen, playing on koans in an erotic context, and bound the manifest and essential worlds in a love-knot. His radical methods and practices honoured women and the red thread that binds even the most enlightened Zen masters to passion, birth, and death.

Ikkyu celebrated the joy in human love, and within sexuality there lies a profound sacred practice, similar to Tantric Buddhism. He infused Zen for the first time with a feminine element that had long been missing. When Ikkyu was about 80 years old that he was asked to be the abbot of Daitokoji, which is one the great temples in Japan. At that time it was completely in ruin from a civil war, so it was an extraordinary thing to do at 80 years old, to rebuild Daitokoji: which he did. He had an extraordinary enlightened mind.

Ikkyu Sojun, Crazy Cloud, Zen priest and haiku master, (brief bio; 1394 - 1481), is one of the most eccentric figures in the history of Rinzai Zen. He has become quite a cult folk-hero in modern Japan. He once defended masturbation by quoting the Sixth Patriarch (who had written that “outside of licentiousness there is no true Buddha-nature").

Links to Zen poetry
Buddhism – free eBooks
Chan Buddhist texts – comments
online Zen Buddhist texts.

Shin-ju An Temple, dedicated to Ikkyu

Shichi Butsu Tsukaige

Ikkyu inadvertently
omitted the character
zen
and so wrote it in smaller
at the side. He later said
this accident gave
the calligraphy its
tasteful feeling.

I am reminded of Shelley [PBS], who in my view was a keen influence on the early
Stevens of Harmonium.

In his Prometheus, PBS puts into the mouth of Demogorgon (itself a . . . ‘mighty darkness . . . ungazed upon and shapeless’ (II.4., 2-5) the statement that ” . . . the deep truth is imageless.” (II.4., 19).

And Stevens himself famously observed that ‘ . . . the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.’

(reprinted from a Wed, 15 Dec 2004 wallace_stevens listserv post)

 

Demogorgon - Prince of Demons
From Monster Manual I, Gary Gygax:
“Demogorgon appears as an 18-foot tall reptilian-humanoid.
He has two heads that bear the visages of baboons.
His blue-green skin is plated with snake-like scales, his body
and legs are those of a giant lizard, his twin necks resemble snakes,
and his thick tail is forked.
In place of arms, he has two huge tentacles.”
While MMI indicates that this demon has baboon heads,
I decided to model them more after baboon skulls
to enhance the general evil look of the thing.
Keep in mind that a human to scale to this drawing
would only come roughly to the middle of its thighs.

I was asked, “How does this zeal for life shape your haiku and haiku spirit?” (what zeal you ask . . .) by Robert Wilson, co-founder of the new and exponentially growing site Simply Haiku. His question inspired the below speculations on haiku and sacred space.

What is poetry, why do we need it, what does poetry do—to us, for us? In The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde affirms a sense that the poem, indeed all art is created fundamentally as an offering. Our culture commodifies artworks, a rather aberrant activity, apparently. Hyde reminds the reader of a truth concerning artwork – the desire to offer a gift, not only to humanity but to the cosmos, the sky, sun, moon, animals, plants, universe, to the moment, to history, one’s ancestors, to the invisible. To offer in a sacred way. Mircea Eliade discusses another aspect of offering in The Myth of the Eternal Return, the means for constructing sacred space, and of enacting life within that space (and timeless time) of the sacred. Experientially investigating the absence and presence of the sacred has been a high value in my life, and also a “saunter: a sense of being sans terre, without Earth, has involved a meandering desire for holiness, a goal echoed in the last stanza of Goethe’s The Holy Longing:

And so long as you haven’t experienced
   This: to die and so to grow,
   You are only a troubled guest
   On the dark earth.

A portion of my research has been concerned with oblivion: the figure of Lethe, mother of the Graces. Why might Forgetting give rise to Splendor, Delight and Blossoming, the three Graces? Heidegger writes,

       The oldest of the old follows behind
   us in our thinking and yet it
   comes to meet us.

      That is why thinking holds to the
   coming of what has been, and
   is remembrance.

      ("The Thinker As Poet,” poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 10)

To remember that thinking is remembrance. . . It seems the sacred is easily forgotten, and entering again, in the encounter is a sense of remembrance, a return of “the oldest of the old. I’ve been interested in why not only the sense of poetry but the experience of poetic dwelling becomes lost. The danger inherent in a world, in any society, which loses poetic dimension and thereby becomes overtly literalistic, is a danger perhaps greater than that of terrorism. To know or feel the sense of poetry in life is to know “the coming of what has been, to desire remembrance: to re-member the world, cosmos, oneself, a leaf, a tree. It may be that a necessary means of entering the zone of the sacred is the experience of oblivion.

Haiku are not always instantly irruptive, do not always enact a sudden shift, yet they seem to draw us into a new resonance, creating a sense of the sacred, a context. Hoshinaga Fumio’s haiku,

nigemizu e sengo no chichi wo oitsumeru

      towards the mirage of water
the postwar fathers
            chasing after . . .

       (Kumaso-Ha, Honami Shoten, 2003)

is a haiku which seems to have layers (allusive adumbrations) of mirage: of image, time and space – heads curling Esherlike around tails. It’s a haiku I work into, never quite out of. There is an unfolding which I sense as lament, echoing back through millennia, through a myriad of cultures. I recall this haiku,

spring evening -
   the wheel of a troop carrier
   crushes a lizard

        (Knots: The Anthology of Southeastern European Haiku poetry, Red Moon Press, 1999)

by Dimitar Anakiev. Its main image is violent, shocking. But this haiku is not merely violent. There is also a sense of sacredness, the context or field of reality which is only partly given by the poem; the haiku also requires rapprochement on the reader’s part:

The genre itself indicates the boundary lines of the sacred, as context, and it is within the landscapes of the sacred, oriented by the genre as a whole, in which image and action occur.

Concision, disjunction and image elements largely contribute to a haiku’s effect, but these elements alone aren’t enough. If one reads the above poems without a pause, they quickly lose much of their drama and vividness. So, what happens when we slow down, allow this unique poetic form to come to life? I would argue that in some measure we experience oblivion(s), if for instants, and through such psychological moments, remembrance. Mnemosyne, anamnesis, Lethe’s sister, is mother to the Muses. Such may be said for any art one becomes absorbed in and passionate toward; nonetheless, haiku are quite uncompromising in the way they cut into reality. There is extreme and concise rupture. To my knowledge, the phenomenology of poetic process has not been explained by science. In fact, qualitative conscious experience itself has not yet been demonstrably elucidated—there is so much we experience and feel which is immeasurable. Without being able to precisely measure or define, it is nevertheless apparent that haiku becomes a genre due to demonstrably unique modes of poetic encounter and dwelling. I should say that what is truly unique isn’t the experience itself, but its prevalence and intensity, when compared with other poetic and artistic forms.

We may tend to devalue the significance and importance of poetic movements which open us to the sacred, to remembrance because of their immateriality, contrastive with the predominant materialist cultural ethos. I know I have, and it is one reason for my returning to the wellspring of haiku. The haiku genre (which includes a reader) constructs an environment within which its language (i.e. symbolic representation) uniquely occurs. It may be a zest for life that draws me to haiku, but likewise a zest for oblivion and erasure. Though not erasure in itself so much as what happens through it.

Some years ago, Barbara Dilley (a Merce Cunningham dancer, Naropa teacher and former Naropa President) introduced me to “square work, in which a length of bright red yarn is made into a large square on the dance floor, tacked down with a few bits of masking tape. What is within the square is defined as sacred space. Dancers (people) relate to the fact of the square, and to entering and exiting that space. It is quite difficult to remain conscious as one steps across the boundary, quite hard indeed. A gap in consciousness nearly always occurs right at the apotheosis of transition. This is one of the consciousness research-questions we explored in an embodied manner as dance. There’s nothing much to taking some twine and making a square on a patch of bare ground. The square has only as much meaning and significance as is intended by the participants; and, what grows from experiences of many crossings and movements (object and human arrangements) within and without. After the dancers have gone, seeing that red twine on a darkened stage, would an aura exist? Is there a magical quality to that bare ground, so carefully demarcated? I would say, yes, to a sensitive reader there is, because there is an intentional architecture, much like a temple or church, just much more minimalist. Haiku likewise possess an intentional architecture; hence, natively embody natural and nuministic aspects of being.

These days I watch Sumo on television; the dohyo, or fighting square, is a sacred space. Rikishi (wrestlers) climb the steps and enter throwing salt, an act of purification, as they step across the sacred rope boundary embedded within the clay ground, into the inner ring. Above, a temple roof hangs suspended, emblemizing the divine. Such an arrangement of objects in space is an example of an archetypal sacred architecture, explored in detail in Eliade’s works, among others. The sense of sacred space existing or inhabiting cultural constructions is no doubt a deeply archaic if not an intrinsic aspect of the human spirit. Haiku as poems are a bit like that length of red twine, though the boundaries and evidences of sacrality may appear more subtly. An objectively intentional aspect exists, not necessarily in the poem itself, but in the fact that sacred space inhabits the poem, out of which the poem presents new ideas of reality. Isn’t this what is implied by the term, “poetic tradition. The oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking and yet it comes to meet us.

mirai yori taki o fukiwaru kaze kitaru

From the future
   a wind arrives
   that blows the waterfall apart

      (Ban’ya Natsuishi, A Future Waterfall, Red Moon Press, 2nd. ed. 2004)

In that art is an offering to the cosmos, the reader is returned by that offering to a cosmic sense or scene. Returned to the world purified and renewed by the “first moment, the moment before creation.

Rising out of the sea and shedding the tank it’s a bit surprising to not be with fish, feeling weightless in the strangeness of air. What was that dreamlike place, filled with unblinking creatures, turtles with flippers, sharks large enough to blot out the far-off sun? The twine, like sunlight is imaginal, extending along an invisible line between land and sea. Returning, instants of vivid memory quickly fade. But a drop of ocean coheres within, adamantine. It is for that one drop, so pure and crystalline, that haiku seem to speak.

Hoshinaga Fumio is an acclaimed Japanese gendai (modern, stylistically contemporary) haiku poet, whose career has spanned five decades. His sense of soul and brilliance extends far beyond the literary world of haiku style and composition. Th following articles appeared in the autumn issue of Modern Haiku, and are now posted on this haiku research page. I to invite you to read this interview, The Miraculous Power of Language: A Conversation with the Poet Hoshinaga Fumio [PDF], which took place in Kumamoto, Japan. Aa second article, Hoshinaga Fumio: Selected Haiku from Kumaso-Ha [PDF], contains 22 new poems with commentary. This is Hoshinaga’s first substantial appearance in English. A poetic sample from the second article:

The playfully dark, ironic metaphor of “becoming Hitler” is disjunctive, allowing a sense of depth to enter the haiku, a depth partly created through allusion. Due to itchy feet (a summer kigo; season word), the author cannot smartly click his heels or march in goose-step. The poem presents a disturbing psychosocial complex indicating the will to power or assumption of dictatorial authority which often remains hidden in persons or society.

A rhythmically outstanding haiku, which breaks up time into fragments of immanence. In reading this haiku aloud, it was suggested that the last ku, which is the verb, be preceded by a long pause; a dramatic semantic and rhythmic break. The final verb seems more a force of space than time, a wave of sorrow or grief in intimate quiet.

 
 

Reading Naomi Klein’s exposé of the attempted selling off of Iraq, wonder what Marx would make of it. That, and G W’s popularity.

Reading Marx, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” Marx’s statement seems overtly theatrical, and a form of ideological double-speak. Postmodern Marxist camps declaim, “they (we, Bush voters, everyone?) are oppressed (without knowing it).” That’s ideology for you. Hell, don’t you feel oppressed? I do. So, I’m oppressed and I know it. The economic game as it’s played is anti-human in some respects (never mind the environmental costs). Options? BBC panels of experts never seem to come up with a sensible alternative to Liberal Democracy, as we have it. Socialism is a dirty word on both sides of the pond. It seems professionals are afraid to rationally discuss more equitable economies between rich and poor, as a concept of sensible economic theory. In a recent debate, a presenter bemoaned “a failure of imagination” regarding alternative sustainable future economics. Maybe Brazil has a better idea, someone on the panel quipped.

I’m happy and lucky, to have a personal economy with which to live without daily economic anxiety. This pleasant experience began three years ago. It’s a pretty refreshing situation – though work is hard at times and I’m oppressed by it. I’d rather be by the beach, near a big research library, writing a book: Right now. Santa Monica would be okay, though I’d prefer Vancouver. Yeah, Vancouver would be great. Vancouver is my mantra. But I’m so oppressed I’ve had a sort of failure of inspiration or imagination. It’s just all I can do to keep this all up, keep it going. How could I possibly leave my work? And if I did, I certainly couldn’t afford to live in Vancouver for a year or two or three and write a book. Perhaps there are grants. My school doesn’t provide any. Well it’s always been hard to write a book, it’s not any easier now. Whether riding a liter bike via ferry to Amamioshima to snorkel and camp out and spend time alone with the elements eating raw fish will help heal the heat of oppression, I can’t say – it’s only a few hundred kilometers away and a few hundred bucks. But having the right bike seems important. A 1000cc twin. A sportbike, but “soft” enough for occasional light touring. Something used, not in demand, something that’s had its day. A bit of history, touch of gray, old man with a story, carburetion and poor mileage rather than fuel injection. Something lithe. Something you get into, not on top of. Something that reaches into your soul, kickstarts your heart, causes the world to disappear.

Everything depends on that new world and how you relate to it. Also, why you sought it in the first place. What is true citizenship, when your soul calls out for self-erasure, and the senses seek immolation in transformation in order to emerge connected again with unknowns.

In that religion comes from religio, meaning, a linking back to the origin, this defines a religious person, even one who denies God/Gods. In this sense Marx performed a manner of religio (Harry Watson and Joseph Schumpeter argued that Marxism is a religion).

Vehicles of transformation, transmutation. We are: for each other. Love is. Sickness is an initiatory requirement in many shamanic cultures. Violence, masochism and death play important roles in psychological transformation. “Like a sickness and its cure together . . . Like rain and sun, like cold and heat” (Shakespeare in Love ). Linking back. How can you renew the soul without death? Even in love, the height of love, the happiness of golden light, bliss of presence in which one becomes with another; unites without thought. What has died, was, might seem unimportant – and often is. It doesn’t hurt to let that old self go after you’ve crossed the threshold, it’s insignificant that old self. It was. Nevertheless, something has died. Death (psychologically) needn’t be composed merely of suffering and pain, that’s the point. But we do become conscious of what we lose when it’s painful to us, and when we desire what presently can’t be attained. As a result the concept that death, that absence, is essentially pain is easily acquired. Though pain may not always be painful – it may become something else; anger, drive, moods, art, an entryway into new worlds – “from pain to ecstasy, including the wounding in which one is ‘delivered’ from the flat ennui of numbing conformity to cultural expectations.” Pain isn’t singular; is mysterious.

Pain wounds, kills, yet also impells a journey through darker lands. Hades enriches with darkness, intoxication, waters of forgetting & remembrance, risk. Pain is no opium, that is, suffering is no opium. Unless the pain becomes subliminal, with the painful state presenting itself as reality, as the table of social interaction. Rules of propriety. Parochialism, codified parochiality. Virtue and pain may become as intimately related as lovers, unconscious Gods. Then, isn’t it a clue, to seek the erasure of all ideologies? In that ideology, in virtu, is a form of parochialism, and parochialism treats pain in a certain way, a limited and one-sided way. If the deepest nature of pain and pleasure both are sought, a sense of poetry arises: “Pleasure is the pleasure of the powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation. The morality of the poet’s radiant and productive atmosphere is the morality of the right sensation” (Wallace Stevens). Nature is profoundly paradoxical. This poetic sense alone, it seems to me, is capable of defeating parochialism, at its root. Nonetheless we live in serious times and have no truck with vapid imaginings. It is precisely for this reason I desire to become one with a particular machine and risk death.

Found the Allen Ginsberg Library today, online. It’s brilliant. Filled with audio, video, photos, ephemera, manuscripts, and more.

 

Jim Kacian is among a handful of truly excellent haiku poets in English. He is also the publisher/owner of Red Moon Press. Jim has kindly given me permission to reprint the introduction to his book, Presents of Mind: Haiku & Illustrations (Katsura Press, 1996). This is writing which I’ve wanted to share for some time.

 

 

 

Here is an impression made of fragments from Book One, the Mandelbaum Translation.

two fish

Nicholas Lezard, someone who knows something about Ovid, in a review of a new translation (by David Raeburn) writes in the Guardian (excerpts):

. . . while it seems as though the Metamorphoses has never really gone away – Ovid’s line at the end about his own poetic immortality is still borne out – people don’t necessarily feel any urgent need to read it.

This is not exactly the case around my neck of the sacred woods. I have been doing some work for the last few years that has involved steeping myself in, among other things, a good deal of Graeco-Roman mythology. One unforeseen side-effect of this is that I have come closer to accepting this mythic corpus as a convincing explanation of human motives than any other philosophical system. I may not have a shrine to Jupiter in the back garden, but it feels like it’s only a matter of time.

The now-redundant prose translation was perfectly serviceable but it was, after all, in prose. And ever since I read Allen Mandelbaum’s amazing translation of The Divine Comedy (published by Everyman), the game has changed: you can actually translate from an ancient tongue and retain not only fidelity but poetry.

As it happens, Mandelbaum has translated the Metamorphoses (and his prosody is so good it’s actually distracting) – but you won’t find it for sale here unless you’re very lucky.

It is easier to read this for pure pleasure than just about any other ancient text apart, perhaps, from the Odyssey (with Apuleius’s Golden Ass coming in a close third). It is also (and for some reason I’d forgotten this) even gorier than the Iliad.

Ovid is modern in other ways: you will recognise his attentiveness towards the very mechanics of metamorphosis. Here is Actaeon, punished by Diana for accidentally seeing her in the nude: “The head she had sprinkled sprouted the horns of a lusty stag; / the neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips; / she changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender / forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin; / last, she injected panic …” What is that but, two millennia avant la lettre, a computer-generated animation in words?

Reading that, you may think the poetry of the translation isn’t that wonderful. This is what I thought at first, finding it hard to even recognise it as poetry rather than carefully sliced prose. Not really Raeburn’s fault: he isn’t a professional poet, and after all this is, as Dryden put it in his own translation of the work, a “vile degenerate age". But while Raeburn isn’t afraid of, shall we say, highly familiar imagery ("white as a sheet", and so on), the lines keep up a good six-stress pulse and sound much better if you imagine them being spoken aloud.

I’ve got this and another Metamorphoses post yet. There’s something seductive about the Golding translation, I’m posting the first 20 lines of the Epistle. They just don’t sign books like they used to:

The. xv. Bookes
of P. Ovidus Naso, entytuled
Metamorphosis, translated oute of
Latin into Englysh meeter, by Ar-
thur Golding Gentleman,
A worke very pleasaunt
and delectable.

With skill, heede, and judgement, this worke must be read,
For else to the Reader it standes in small stead.

from THE EPISTLE

At length my chariot wheele about the mark hath found the way,
And at their weery races end, my breathlesse horses stay.
The woork is brought to end by which the author did account
(And rightly) with externall fame above the starres to mount.
For whatsoever hath bene writ of auncient tyme in greeke
By sundry men dispersedly, and in the latin eeke,
Of this same dark Philosophie of turned shapes, the same
Hath Ovid into one whole masse in this booke brought in frame.
Fowre kynd of things in this his worke the Poet dooth conteyne.
That nothing under heaven dooth ay in stedfast state remayne. …
And next that nothing perisheth: but that eche substance takes
Another shape than that it had. Of theis twoo points he makes
The proof by shewing through his woorke the wonderfull exchaunge
Of Goddes, men, beasts, and elements, to sundry shapes right straunge,
Beginning with creation of the world, and man of slyme,
And so proceeding with the turnes that happened till his tyme.
Then sheweth he the soule of man from dying to be free,
By samples of the noblemen, who for their vertues bee
Accounted and canonized for Goddes by heathen men,
And by the peynes of Lymbo lake, and blysfull state agen…

 

Lately I’ve been reading versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is a book which Ezra Pound described as “the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare’s).” He was referring to the Golding translation, 1567, the first in English; Shakespeare’s Ovid. Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC-17 AD; bio, and links here) wrote Metamorphoses in exile, at the age of 52. Of the many translations available, the poet Ted Hughes, (whose free-verse translation, which won the 1997 Whitbread Award for a book of poetry), mentions: “However impossible these intensities might seem to be on one level, on another, apparently more significant level Ovid renders them with psychological truth and force. In his earlier books, preoccupied with erotic love, he had been a sophisticated entertainer. Perhaps here too in the Metamorphoses he set out simply to entertain. But something else joined in, something emerging from the very nature of his materials yet belonging to the unique moment in history – the moment of the birth of Christ within the Roman Empire” (Ted Hughes in The New York Review of Books, July 17, 1997).

It should be possible to gather quite a large number of translations for comparison. Below are six diverse versions of the Invocation, which appears at the beginning of The Metamorphoses:

MY SOUL WOULD SING of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may the
song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world’s beginning to our day.
(Allen Mandelbaum, Trans. 1995)

Now I shall tell of things that change, new being
Out of old: since you, O Gods, created
Mutable arts and gifts, give me the voice
To tell the shifting story of the world
From its beginning to the present hour.
(Horace Gregory, trans., 1958)

OF bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
‘Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc’d from Nature’s birth, to Caesar’s times.
(translated into English verse under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, etc., 1717)

I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time.
(A. S. Kline, trans. 2000)

Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate,
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,
Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne.
(Arthur Golding, trans. 1567. Invocation here)

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed
to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods
inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves
and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song
in smooth and measured strains, from olden days
when earth began to this completed time!
(based on Brookes Moore, 1922)

Here are a few more links. Quotes from Ovid’s works, primary sources: ancient texts, Illustrating Ovid (links to rare historical illustrations), additional art influenced by, U. Vermont Ovid Project, voluminous links.

Check out Simon Cozen’s page here, he’s translating Sei Shonagon’s 10th century Pillow Book (Makura no Sôshi – from this Japanese source text). A brief informative overview of Sei Shonagon can be found at Liza Dalby’s site (where the above image was found). Boing Boing reports:

It’s easy to forget the fact that these words were written in the tenth century, because the results in this format read – well, rather like a blog. Some dates are fictitous, and some liberties have been taken to produce a coherent narrative stream in blog format – but the content is purported to be a faithful translation of the original.

Here’s a teaser, a post dated November 12, 987, titled Huh, Men!, which begins:

Current music: Banshikicho Netori
   Current mood: Confused

I will never understand men. Their emotions are just really strange, and I just can’t work out why they behave the way they do.

I mean, you’ll hear about a man who leaves a really pretty woman, and . . .

I think one of the great potentialities of poetry is that, while it moves on the surface with image and color and motion and sense, it develops, not an exposition finally, but a disposition . . . what art does, and what explanation can’t do, is that it stops. The poem ends. And at that point, it becomes a construct, a disposition rather than an exposition, and it is silent . . . and indefinable. And this cures us of the fragmentation that words imposed on us from the beginning (A.R. Ammons).

A few words from A.R. Ammons. From An Improvisation for Angular Momentum:
 
 
Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out . . .
 
 
from “An Interview with AR Ammons,”

It was when my little brother, who was two and
a half years younger than I, died at eighteen
months. My mother some days later found his
footprint in the yard and tried to build
something over it to keep the wind from
blowing it away. That’s the most powerful
image I’ve ever known.

(Michigan Quarterly Review. 28.1, 1989. William Walsh p. 117)

 
from another “An Interview with AR Ammons,”

I think one of the great potentialities of poetry is that, while it moves on the surface with image and color and motion and sense, it develops, not an exposition finally, but a disposition . . . what art does, and what explanation can’t do, is that it stops. The poem ends. And at that point, it becomes a construct, a disposition rather than an exposition, and it is silent . . . and indefinable. And this cures us of the fragmentation that words imposed on us from the beginning. You see, by the use of words and sentences and sense, we’re able to break down a silent world into certain clear things to say about it. But then we need to be rescued form the fragmentation we’ve made of the world. And we do that by art, by putting these motions back together and actually reaching the indefinable again. . . . it’s not a piece of knowledge that you put in books, but something you encounter, something you live with as if it were another person, as you come back again and again to a piece of sculpture and just stand and be with it. When we get to that point in a poem, where we be with it rather than ask what it means or explain how it got there, then we are back with the indefinable, we are restored to ourselves and feeling can move through us again.

(Poets in Person. Ed. Joseph Parisi. Chicago: Modern poetry Association, 1992. p. 58; also found here)

 
and another, from David Lehman:

Archie likes saying that his great motivation in poetry is anxiety, ferocious anxiety that “tries to get rid of everything thick and material – to arrive at a spiritual emptiness, the emptiness that is spiritual.”

But the final impression his lines have on the reader is of a sublime celebration of the way things are and a sublime indifference to all that would militate against poetry, “this way of writing” that is a “way of existing.” As he writes in Glare:

 
how wonderful to be able to write:
it’s something you can’t do, like

playing the piano, without thinking:
it’s not important thinking, but the

strip has to wind, the right keys
have to be hit, you have to look to

see if you’re spelling the words
right: maybe it’s not the thinking

but the concentration, which means
the attention is directed outside

and focused away from the self, away
from obsessive self-monitorings . . .
 
 

Impression, Rajiv Lather’s, horizon (Frogpond Journal 26:3, Fall 2003)

Impression, Ban’ya Natsuishi’s A Future Waterfall: 100 Haiku from the Japanese (Red Moon Press, 1999)

my son asks    casually       what a tree costs

 

John Stevenson Some of the Silence (Red Moon Press, 1999, p. 48)

 

“So, if any of my discoveries are important, the hole is. By hole I mean going outside the limitations of a picture frame and being free in one’s conception of art. . . . I did not make holes in order to wreck the picture. On the contrary, I made holes in order to find something else. They were never understood” (Lucio Fontana, 1968).
 
                              TV Time
 

flowers float above the moon blankets and tiger skin tawny orange her face moired in bla ck wildebeest herds edging a cross the plains before chang ing to channel 761 music and other available channels in 4″ rows
	bread bakes underwater the vi olent smell of bread is power li ttle money left now only paradi se or kerosene will end the col d season five yards away her hips south of the refrigerator d esperate for wheat I run down a dark wet street pulling out a gun past 3 sake shops red lant erns swaying in sleet falling fr esh from the bath
ten stories down laying on the floor our tired backs the night endless now that murder is co mmitted and the bakery theft i n the air surrounding her trea sure edging across the plains to flowers.

 
                             
 
twofish

Returning to the light topic of relationships between the Earth, poetry, psyche, and death (see this post) the following paragraphs are excerpted from the British critic Sir Frank Kermode, whose essay Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut appearing in the book Pieces of My Mind (pp. 153-57), is a gem. For the sake of space, you’ll have to put up with something of a jump start:

‘Poetically man dwells upon this earth’, said Holderlin. In the poverty of the Time Between, one establishes this dwelling by finding the poetry of the commonplace, in the joy of Danes in Denmark, the cackle of toucans in the place of toucans, in Elizabeth’s Park and Ryan’s Lunch. Stevens did it over and over again, observing the greater brilliancies of earth from his own doorstep. He dwelt in Connecticut as Santayana dwelt in the head of the world, as if it were origin as well as threshold. He wanted to establish Hőlderlin’s proposition, and every reader of Stevens will think of many more instances of his desire to do so. . . . The foyer, the dwelling place, might be Hartford or New Haven, Farmington or Haddam. The Captain and Bawda ‘married well because the marriage-place / Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell’ (Collected Poems, p.401). It was earth, and the poetry of the earth was what Holderlin sought and Heidegger demanded. Stevens was always writing it and naming the spot to which it adhered. This is what poets are for in a time of need. They provide a cure of that ground; they give it health by disclosing it, in its true poverty, in the nothing that is. The hero of this world, redeemer of being, namer of the holy, is the poet. Stevens has many modest images of him, yet he is the centre. In that same central place Heidegger sets Hőlderlin and adorns him with words that have special senses: truth, angel, care, dwell.

Heidegger gave the word dwell a special charge of meaning. Drawing on an old sense of the German word, he can say that ‘Mortals dwell in that they can save the earth’, that is, ‘set it free in its own presencing’, free, as Stevens would say, of its man-locked set. There is much more to dwelling, but I will mention only that to dwell is to initiate one’s own nature, one’s being capable of death as death, ‘into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death’. Furthermore, ‘as soon as man gives thought to his dwelling it is a misery no longer’; so out of its insecurity and poverty (‘man dwells in huts and wraps himself in the bashful garment,’ says Hőlderlin; ‘a single shawl / Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor. . .’, says Stevens [CP, p. 524]) he can build, can make poetry. For Heidegger is here meditating on Hőlderlin’s enigma, that we dwell poetically on this earth, even in a time of destitution, and that our doing so is somehow gratuitous, independent of our merits, a kind of grace.

But perhaps, after all, Stevens did know something about Being and Time. Perhaps it was knowing about it that sent him looking, in his seventies, for news of what that Swiss philosopher might have to say about his supreme poet. Heidegger wrestled with ideas we all wrestle with: the potentiality of no more being able to be there, he remarks, is the inmost, one might say the own-most, potentiality. We have many ways of estranging death; for example, we say, ‘Everybody dies’, or ‘one dies’. So we conceal our own ‘being-toward-death’; yet death is the ‘end’ of Being, of Dasein – and the means by which it becomes a whole. To estrange it, to make it a mere fact of experience, is to make it inauthentic. Being understands its own death authentically not by avoiding that dread out of which courage must come but by accepting it as essential to Being’s everydayness, which otherwise conceals the fact that the end is imminent at every moment. There must be a ‘running forward in thought’ to the potentiality of death.

Only where there is language is there world, says Heidegger; and only where there is language is there this running in thought, this authentication of death. It is the homecoming that calls for the great elegy; it is ‘learning at home to become at home’, as Heidegger says of the Hőlderlin elegy. ‘All full poets are poets of homecoming,’ he [Heidegger] says. And he insists that Hőlderlin’s elegy is not about homecoming; it is homecoming. Stevens knew this, whether he learned it from Heidegger or not. He knew the truth of many of Heidegger’s assertions, for example, about the nature of change in art. ‘The works are no longer the same as they once were. It is they themselves, to be sure, that we encounter . . . but they themselves are gone by.’ The work of art ‘opens up a world and at the same time sets his world back again on earth’. The perpetuation of such truth is the task of an impossible philosopher’s man or hero. Stevens’ poet works in the fading light; the ‘he’ of the late poems has to make his homecoming, has to depend on his interpreters to make it for themselves and understand that it is impermanent. The advent of the Supreme Poet, who would stop all this, is like the return of the god.

It should be added that the ‘he’, the poet, of some of the last [Stevens] poems, can be a ‘spirit without a foyer’ and search among the fortuities he perceives for ‘that serene he had always been approaching /As toward an absolute foyer . . .’ (Opus Posthumous, p.112). It is a different version of the running-toward-death, and Heidegger would have approved of that ’serene’, for Hőlderlin used the word and his glossator turned it over many times in his mind. Is this ordered serenity too easy? When we climb a mountain ‘Vermont throws itself together’ (OP, p. 115); Vermont does the work, provided, of course, that we climb the mountain. It is not quite easy, but it is of the essence that it is also not quite difficult. The greatest image of the being at the threshold of death is, I suppose, ‘Of Mere Being’, a poem that is also, one may be sure, very late. It contains a foreign song and a foreign bird. There is dread in it. Heidegger, I dare say, would have admired it . . .

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. . . . But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime (Emerson, Nature, Chap. 1).

The poet Stanley Plumley was interviewed last year in the Atlantic Monthly by Peter Davison, who writes in introduction, “For over thirty years Plumley, both as poet and as teacher, has explored the surfaces of nature and the darknesses of the human heart. A 2002 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters recently ratified his poetic reputation, though he has long been recognized by alert readers as one of the assured masters of contemporary American poetry.” Here are some excerpts form the interview Language Makes the Senses One, and a poem, Promising the Air.

Language, at its best, is not easy, even though the task of the poem, in Yeats’s famous phrase, is to make it “seem a moment’s thought.” For me, language rests in a state of night gravity, and I must work very hard to bring it effectively to light. “Promising the Air” and “Piano,” for me, are no less about silence and language as about a darkness — the one poem concerned with the invisible world, the other with the animal presence of something wholly other than human. There is a difference between facile and facility: the former you distrust, the latter you admire. Darkness is depth, I think, and the poets I admire have the facility of being in touch with and speaking from that sense of things.

Narrative, I believe, is indispensable to the lyric; it’s what makes it move instead of spinning its wheels. It’s what motivates the poem to turn, to go on, continue, rather than simply returning, over and over. Narrative provides the major formal tension to the lyric stability in a poem. It’s what causes the line to turn the corner. What is a “story” anyway but someone speaking, drawing a line that assumes a shape, a shape that becomes a figure But a line too straight is uninteresting; that’s why the “narrative” must break, bend, meander; that’s why indirection and juxtaposition are so important to maintaining the intensity, the surprise all art needs to keep the music going, the line moving. . . . Even metaphor, announced or otherwise, is an implicit narrative — “like a patient etherized upon a table” (T. S. Eliot); “Loneliness leapt in the mirrors, but all week/I kept them covered like cages” (W. S. Merwin). The subtext of narrative is time, the subtext of time is mortality, the subtext of mortality is emotion. Try to remove the narrative sense of things and you take out the heart, the cause of the effect.

As for the verb “to be” — I loathe the creative writing notion that verbs necessarily need to act, to juice the pale nouns and poor modifiers. Verbs are part, only part, of the voice of all the words. Perhaps, for me, state of being verbs are faster or more direct means between the subject and the complement. I don’t know, except that is verbs are quieter, more given to silence. Or perhaps, in my mind, all verbs are state of being, depending on what state of things, active or still, the writing is calling for.

I grew up with trees — I mean forests. My family, in both Ohio and Virginia, was in the lumber business. The picture on the cover of Boy on the Step is from the State of Ohio archive and it shows my father and uncle and grandfather, plus a cast of townsfolk, gathered around the first big log cut for the P. W. Plumly Lumber Corporation. It’s resting on the flatbed of a Ford truck the size of a semi. The photo was taken just before the Second World War. As with so many families, the war changed everything, but it made my grandfather a millionaire. My father and his brother worked for my grandfather through most of their twenties. As a small boy I would often tag along as they went out into the Blue Ridge to cut trees in the years right after the war. We’d be out for days. I don’t think my father liked cutting trees, which in those days was done by hand, with big double-manned bandsaws. You could see it in his face how it hurt him to bring them down, especially the really large oaks and poplars. You get to know trees intimately that way, by killing them. And a tree on the ground is a different thing altogether from a tree standing. It’s like a great dead or dying animal. No wonder the first poets were Druids.

In a way, nature starts with the trees, these great flowers. Their presence is certainly powerful, but so is their silence; and what sweeter sound is there except wind in the leaves, the first music on the planet. After which comes birdsong, also in the trees. The human voice, projected, is, it seems to me, an extension of these natural sounds, just as we imitate the shapes in nature — the circle, the hexagon, the meander, and so forth. My sympathy, obviously, is with nature, while at the same time feeling separate. Our separateness is one of our basic themes in poetry. I sometimes think that the closer you feel with the natural world the closer you can be with other people. This may be Wordsworthian, but it’s true. Nature is a teacher. The more we, as a culture, alienate ourselves from it the more alien we become.

 

Promising the Air
 
A woman I loved talked in her sleep to children.
She would start her half of the conversation,
her half of asking, of answering the need to bring
the boy up the path from some dream-lake, some
 
wandering source, water, a river, or a road along
the tree-line of a river, she would say his small name,
then silence, privacy, the drift back to the center.
The child was the tenderness in her voice.
 
I can remember waking myself up talking, saying nothing
that mattered but loud enough for someone else to hear.
No one was there. It was like coming alive, suddenly,
in a body. I was afraid, as in the dark we are each time
 
new. I was afraid, word of mouth, out of breath.
Waking is the first loneliness –
but sleep can be anything you want, the path
to the summerhouse, silence, or a call across water.
 
I am taught, and believe, that even in light the mind
wanders, speaks before thinking. This piece of a poem
is for her who wept without waking, who, word for word,
kept her promise to the air. And for the boy.

 

Following up on some previous posts on John Taggart and Rothko, Philip Rowland has sent me The Game with Red, from Taggart’s Loop (pp. 232-3). Following the poem is an unrelated comment from Taggart, followed by excerpts from a Mark Scroggins review of Taggart in relation to loop music, in the online literary journal FlashPøint.

The Game with Red
 
 
How can a child immediately doubt what is taught? – Wittgenstein

 

Deepened by black red made deep by black

deepened and dark darker at the top

doorway without a door’s always darker

deep red dark red always darker at the top.

 

What I can do is move wandering movement

what I can do is move in a wandering movement

wandering stumbling on the wrong beat

child in the dark with my eyes closed

child in the language game with red

who cannot win the game with red

what I cannot do is get outside the doorway

the dark red doorway without a door

I cannot get outside the dark red doorway.

 
 
Loop: “Were You: Notes and a Poem for Michael Palmer:”

Primary: that the presumed goal of community is wrong and probably cannot be attained. The latter because individual vision challenges what has previously existed as a factor (agreed upon image) for unity. Individual vision, when first presented, must be perceived as a threat, actually as something promoting disunity. It’s remarkable that Blake continues to act in this way and will no doubt do so into the future. Could a church be organised around Blake?? His vision is too various.

 
 
From Taggart: Sound & Vision, by Mark Scroggins:

“The act of reading,” John Taggart writes in his book on Edward Hopper, Remaining in Light, “is akin to the ceaseless motion of an ant on a moebius strip.” For “reading,” read listening, and looking, as well — the “gift,” if you will, of sound and vision. A Möbius strip, of course, is a loop of paper — you can make one yourself — with a twist in it; it’s that twist that makes the loop’s face endless: a three-dimensional object with only one surface. Where does that highway go to?

The loop, whether actual or conceptual, was central to the early development of what came to be known as “minimalist” music. Steve Reich’s early pieces “It’s Gonna Rain” (1965) and “Come Out” (1966) were built out of tape loops; his “Violin Phase” pitted a taped violin part against a real-time violinist. Around the same time, Terry Riley was developing keyboard performance techniques that relied on loops and tape delays, most expansively showcased in his Rainbow in Curved Air album. The English composer Gavin Bryars’s “Sinking of the Titanic” was a fully-scored imitation of a vast, slowed-down tape loop; his “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” (1971) was built—famously or infamously—around a tape loop of an old tramp’s singing. Both of these Bryars works — not incidentally — were recorded and released in 1975 on Brian Eno’s Obscure records label, which also released the first recordings of another English minimalist, Michael Nyman — this, of course, long before Nyman became a soundtrack machine and minor celebrity. Five years later Eno produced Talking Heads’ Remain in Light.

In C is a composition for any number of musicians, playing any instruments capable of meeting the pitch requirements of the score. The score consists of fifty-three melodic figures, through which each musician progresses, determining for him- or herself how many times to repeat each figure and how to align it with what’s being played by the other members of the ensemble. The music coheres, both through the individual musicians’ sensitivity — their listening to their fellows — and through an underlying “pulse.” Not the pulse of a metronome or drum machine, nor the pulse of a tape loop — but an organic pulse, carried and passed along by the members of the collective. “Large definitions commit one to a long line,” Taggart writes. “The line is prevented from falling in on itself by a recurrent, but never exactly repeating, cadence. This cadence undergoes a continuous motion (transformation).” And the poem — like the score of In C — cannot be an experience only of vision, but must be a performed thing: “As I came to discover, such a poem would have to be read aloud to make sense. The reader would have to break the silence of the cold page. There could be a liberation of participation, an ending of the silence and solitude.”

“A recurrent, but never exactly repeating, cadence.” The mechanical loop repeats precisely, inexorably, with the sterility of Ford’s assembly line; the “exactly repeating cadence” is the Taylorization of the poet, the talented sophomore’s iambic pentameter. The mechanical loop’s contents, even when human-generated — Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz’s rhythms, the old tramp Gavin Bryars recorded one day in London — come back to us again and again, “same as it ever was.” The only thing that can be of interest about such loops is the human reaction to them.

Gertrude Stein, in 1934: “every time one of the hundreds of times a newspaper man makes fun of my writing and of my repetition he always has the same theme, always having the same theme, that is, if you like, repetition, that is if you like repeating that is the same thing, but once started expressing this thing, expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis . . . . insistence that in its emphasis can never be repeating, because insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in the same way because emphasis can never be the same not even when it is most the same . . . ” By itself, the tape loop goes nowhere, is pure repetition. When the voice enters — the voice that “invades,” that “lays,” that “eats the face away,” that “turns the face of the listener, member among the members, into its excrement” — when the voice enters, the tape loop becomes the Möbius strip.

“It occurs to me,” says Taggart, “that all my work, before and since [Slow Song for Mark Rothko], involves translation or, more accurately, transformation to make the poem a ‘sound object.’” Transformation rather than translation: transformation is “the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody” (Zukofsky).

The basis of all of Taggart’s poetry is looking — or listening, or reading — a repetitive, accretive, circling motion guided by need. “The poet, who is first a reader, makes no original discovery in reading. Instead, the poet becomes only more aware of the spider-web connectedness of his or her sources and of the innumerable ghostly speakers still beyond them.”

continues.

Over the course of some years of Buddhist-psychology practice and study, I learned that the self does not exist. Anyway, that the notion of self-existence is one of the major causes of confused mind. It was a rather outrageous idea in 1980, when I encountered it; this was prior to my exposure to heavy-handed postmodernist lit. crit. As a consequence, postmodernism was something of a let-down. When you look at concepts like vipassana (a variety of de-centered holonomic awareness) and “suchness” (a development of the Yogacharan Buddhist philosophic school, which offers the scent of immanent uncontained presencing), there is some shock involved. Postmodernism is partial and reductive, seen from such philosophical perspectives. Which isn’t what I wanted to talk about.

The idea that something doesn’t exist plays with language and concept. For something to not exist it must not be real, right? Could something be real and not exist? In the Heart Sutra there’s a section which goes: “no eye no ear no nose no tongue no body no mind no existence no non-existence no birth no old age no sickness no death.” But of course you have an eye? just, it doesn’t exist. Seems pretty paradoxical if not downright inane. Of course, there is – no answer – just like there is no eye. But in the same breath you could say there is an answer as there is an eye. How can something exist and not-exist?

Cute, but maybe serious at the same time; a language game. Serious, but with a sense of wicked humor. The Hindu Atman is conceived as an eternal adamantine atomic substance: the most eternal infinitely dense dot of Self, which is unchanging and eternal – to paraphrase. Buddhism’s revolution, in part, radically challenges the Hindu idea. No adamantine “thing-in-itself” – as long as you conceive of it as existing, a “thing” with basis in “existence.”

If we say “there is an eye,” “there is nature,” it amounts to the same thing – a use of language which habitually buys into (attaches) to the “concept of eye,” “concept of nature,” etc. It’s a problem of identity, and thus, literalism. In a sense, the Buddhist view proclaims that the cosmos in its varieties is not literal. “No existence” is a tease. Because we can as say just as well, “no non-existence.” So far, so good. Turning to the post-Jungian philosopher James Hillman, he refines what appears as the same articulation, saying that “mind is basically poetic in nature.”

I found an uncomfortable sub-text in my early-days-American-Buddhist-community, in that there was a lot of ego-suspiciousness going on. That devilish, suspect ego, fouling the nest. This was unfortunate. It seems that the real issue is the belief in the literalness of the literalizing function. The same thing maybe, but at higher resolution (which makes a difference).

In other words when we lose the world poetically, as the sense of multiple valence reduces to a mere literal, we thus become attached to a conceptual frame. Which isn’t such a bad thing from a pragmatic point of view. After all, what’s the problem in believing in what’s real? Why de-literalize the literal? And, what’s in it for me? Hard questions to answer: the universe, the Earth? Too glib? Something supra- or para- human. It’s possible that postmodernism hasn’t gone nearly far enough.

The postmodern locus (idea) of infinite relativity and decenterdness is fairly said to absolve any agent or agency of responsibility. Both Buddhism and postmodernism seem to say “everything you know is wrong” (a great epithet from the Fireside Theatre); habitual concept is challenged. But the Buddhist view is based on practice, particularly formless meditation practice; in any case, contemplative practices which attempt (by altering consciousness in various ways) to dissolve or irrupt conceptualizing altogether, and as partial consequence, the habitual ignoring of subtle conceptual formation in consciousness. Postmodernism, as theory, seems to offer endless conceptualization, or re-conceptualization: it seems mired in a (recursive) conceptual field of continually recentered and recentering possibles. A glaring example of the problem con be found here in Derrida’s response to the tragedy of 9/11 (from the book Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida by Giovanna Borradori).

In Buddhist philosophy, as experiential possibility, you have two things happening, prajna (aka wisdom) and upaya (aka skillfull means). Two wings of a bird (or the bird don’t fly). Here’s one mode of depiction: Prajna is the root: non-dual/non-conceptual mind. Upaya is what you’re going to do with that in the real world. The idea is that if you operate from conceptually-attached dualistic modes (concept and opposite concept: eye/no eye, etc.), your skillfulness or effectiveness is limited. But if your ground is non-dual suchness you work with the irreality of real things, that is, knowing metaphor, images, the soul of things. Soul. Right!

Hillman defines the soul as “that which deepens,” and, “that which turns events into experiences.” Almost as bad as no eye, no ear, but not quite.

Postmodernism seems to offer a means to break free of concept, but ends up with deconstructive/re-conceptual process, ad infinitum, where Buddhism and Archetypal (post-Jungian) psychology both offer teleology, that is, a path toward a goal, which is intimate, individualist and personal (the goal of unconfused mind in one case, individuation in the other). In both cases we are talking about adult development, and what Freud left out. In Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, Hillman writes,

The philosophical problem [of definition] arises from the soul’s own desire for self-knowledge which can best be satisfied in terms of its own constitution: images. . . . The statement . . . that “the primary metaphor of psychology must be soul” attempts two things: (a) to state the soul’s nature in its own language (metaphor) and (b) to recognize that all statements in psychology about soul are metaphors. In this way, soul-as-metaphor leads beyond the problem of “how to define soul” and encourages an account of the soul toward imagining itself rather than defining itself. Here, metaphor serves a psychological function: it becomes an instrument of soul-making (q.v.) rather than a mere “figure of speech,” because it transposes the soul’s questioning about its nature to a mythopoesis of actual imagining, an ongoing psychological creation (Berry 1982).

Soul-as-metaphor also describes how the soul acts. It performs as does a metaphor, transposing meaning and releasing interior, buried significance. Whatever is heard with the ear of soul reverberates with under- and overtones (Moore 1978). The perspective darkens with a deeper light. But this metaphorical perspective also kills: it brings about the death of naive realism, naturalism, and literal understanding (pp. 20-1).

“The death of naive realism, naturalism, and literal understanding.” Powerful stuff, and one can’t go back, hide like an ostritch, head in the sand. So, what to do when it is claimed that one has no literal authenticity, or “authentic entity” in one’s values or philosophy? (With reference to this post from crumbtrail, and the quote below.) Paul Wapner writes that,

When anti-environmentalists claim that, because there is no authentic entity called “nature,” we can choose to use trees, animals, canyons, and rivers as we see fit, staunch environmental modernists have little to say. They can disagree about first principles, complain about ontological and epistemological premises, but beyond this they have little to say. Simply rejecting eco-criticism and reasserting a modernist narrative doesn’t reckon with the intellectual weight of contemporary attacks on “nature.”

I think postmodernist relativism hasn’t got a prayer of finding a solution to its own problem, in its infinite journey toward partiality. An area ripe for further investigation involves qualitative experience: the hard problem of consciousness, a nut that science hasn’t yet cracked. Which brings up the question, what do we really need?

We may need the world in order to dream it.

Jung has remarked,

“It is not psyche which exists within man, but man whom exists within psyche.” “Matter as well as spirit appear in the psychic realm as distinctive qualities of conscious contents. The ultimate nature of both is transcendent, that is, noumenal, since the psyche and its contents are the only reality which is given to us without a medium” (The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, p 215f).

The unresolved play between Jungian Platonic archetypes, the imaginal and empiricism is marvelously resolved in Hillman’s work. “Without a medium” is an intriguing phrase, in association with “nonumenal: “a posited object or event as it appears in itself independent of perception by the senses.” In that human consciousness is reflective, and we cannot see such a similar process to any great extent in another creature (for comparative analysis), what is it that’s doing the reflecting? Perception itself (to go one step further) arises out of/in league with psychic reflection – otherwise it is impossible to language, think about, cognate thingness. All of which implies metaphor as a root of apprehension. The strong position in polar opposition to a literalist/empiricist perspective, is that metaphor is authentic reality. Perhaps a re-estimation of the power and importance of metaphor is in order. As a basis of apprehended reality it can kill, heal, well – how we deepen into apprehension. It may be we are in a state of denial or existential bias against a reasonable regard and valuing of metaphor and fantasy.

. . . “Fantasy” and “reality” change places and values. First, they are no longer opposed. Second, fantasy is never merely mentally subjective but is always being enacted and embodied. (Hillman 1972a, pp. xxxix-xl). Third, whatever is physically or literally ‘real’ is always also a fantasy image. Thus the world of so-called hard factual reality is always also the display of a specifically shaped fantasy, as if to say, along with Wallace Stevens, the American philosopher-poet of imagination on whom archetypal psychology often draws, there is always “a poem at the heart of things.” Jung stated the same idea (CW6: 78): “The psyche creates reality everyday. The only expression I can say for this activity is fantasy.” And he takes the word “fantasy” “from poetic usage” (CW 6: 743) (Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, p. 23).

Gary Snyder, quoted below, has written: “mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild.” As Snyder is an eco-critical thinker par excellence, I’m not sure why “rejecting eco-criticism and reasserting a modernist narrative . . .” would be a necessary reponse to a “literalist” challenge, on the part of environmentalists. At least as I understand Snyder’s stream of eco-critical thought. The real key is not in the classroom, so to speak, it’s in experience – the “hard problem” of consciousness; by which is meant, not purely empirical (that is, measurable, quantifiable) experience. Put the art pedal to the metal. Following this line, any decent synthesis involves aesthetic contact: soul, baby.

(to be continued)

Visiting Cass Dalglish’s page The Textual Dance: Allusion in the Oldest and Newest poetry, a surprise awaits toward the bottom, a flash-based poem which is a translation of an Ur text composed by Enheduanna (En-hedu-Ana is a title and means The High Priestess [named] Ornament of the Sky). Enheduanna wrote her poem of praise, nin-me-sar-ra, to the female deity Inanna; “pressed into clay over four thousand years ago, [it] is the first document in history to be signed by its author. . .”

She wrote as a poet writes, a poet who has command of metaphor, density and wordplay —— in this case —— sign play. A single Sumerian sign may have five, ten, twenty or more values.

Introductory paragraphs relate the oldest cuneiform poetics to Web excursions:

As we spring and leap and scroll along from image to thought to sight to sound on the world wide web, we leap from one idea to another, tying and untying, twisting and untwisting threads of understanding. This is the use of allusion, the employment of the “leap” to annex one poetic experience to another. It is visible in the works of poets who read their work aloud, and poets who publish their words in the hard-inked pages of a book. It is this very use of allusion that is at the core of every poem. It is this allusive dance which gives the poem it’s energy and its density, regardless of whether the poet fixes a metaphor into paper with pigment, embeds a reference in clay, or floats it electronically in hyperspace.

Ambiguity is essential if we are to understand what the Sumerian poet wrote when she pressed signs into clay, for the signs themselves, multivalent and in some cases embedded one in another, make the poem. This is the Sumerian woman writer’s “feminine text,” which, as Retallack says, “implicitly acknowledges and creates the possiblility of other/additional/ simultaneous texts” . . . When the possibilities of meaning are layered, simultaneously, one atop the other, layers of meaning in a Sumerian text are visible. The cuneiform line seen in this fashion calls to mind what Stephanie Strickland has described as “embeddedness” or “nestedness” in poetry.

Which leads to a discussion of poetry hypertext. Hypertext poet Jim Rosenberg’s Diffraction Through was chosen to illustrate “a cluster of simultaneous thoughts:”

Rosenberg says the electronic poem alters “phrase into super-word, phrase cluster into an ignition where the resonances will seem to move, as a flame moves, though the words are fixed and do not change . . . ” Rosenberg says his images stack “atop one another (as) simultaneities, as the world is full of simultaneities of lives, of thoughts, of desires, of reaching and refusals: the word not as a solo act but as a particle in a field, autonomous, an object in a field where to exist is to be combined, to be juxtaposed, to radiate from a layer, one of many layers: sheets as the great stacks of beckons to the eye call juxtaposed not by design but because to be in a packed cluster of circumstance is the natural condition of being".

This would seem to relate to image schemas, as discussed in Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, and memorably presented in H.D.’s Palimpsest.

(About this web log. Note concerning web presence: you can find my bio here, here are some writings on haiku; a recent music project is here, composed with Jeff Cairns. )

This web log is loosely concerned with the theme of wildness and the wild; its loss, invalidation and voiding, whether this arrives from the personal microcosmically stray dream-image, political, social, scientific perspective (e.g. genomic, cybernetic), literary perspective, cultural noodling, work-stress realm, psychology, etc. So, critique is one purview. On the flip side, the question of what the wild is, how wildness might be touched, moved towards, sensed – what its value might be – these represent arcs of question and aspiration. Rather than answers, I believe relationship is a focus. James Hillman discusses the classical Greek meaning of the word therapy as “therapeia,” “to attend upon.” The meaning of psychology (a logos of psyche: to give psyche an adequate account of itself) then is “to attend upon psyche.” In this sense, the psychology of the wild becomes relevant as an active movement: how to attend upon, give attendance to wilds; to wildness. To attend and enter.

An example of attending to the psyche of something primordial, elemental is Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire. Thoreau found wildness as a highest value, articulating a non-dual awareness of wildness. Wildness as not merely an outer environmental issue nor interior state disconnected from relative extensive reality. This brings up the old question of subjectivity vs. objectivity (with subjectivity, as fancy, often getting short shrift). One response to the subjective-objective conundrum regarding nature comes from modern haiku. The Japanese poet Hoshinaga Fumio comments,

I write about or touch upon human heart and feeling, by creating human mental images. The human mental image does not have a typical form, such as a cake cut into four quarters – a mental picture is not like that; it has no form. . . . Disharmonies lead to harmonies . . . the Japanese sense of nature is in harmony, that is, the harmony of: person (human being) and nature; no separation – in its widest sense. Without the sense of harmony with nature, Japanese literature would become very weak (personal communication).

Hoshinaga’s creation of “human mental images” is directly related to his 40-year oeuvre of acclaimed haiku. How we find harmony, in the sense Hoshinaga describes, seems relevant. At this precise point in human history various writers have sensed we are on the brink of losing the wild, except perhaps as fairytale or entertainment fantasy; this process is happening on a number of levels, imaginative, social, technological, etc. I’d like to present a few phrases from Emerson and Thoreau. Here is the opening sentence from Thoreau’s essay, Walking:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement…

Thoreau includes “person” in his sense of nature, through advancing the idea of a person leaving the three estates of church, government and society, in order to seek direct contact with the wild, not by goal-oriented behavior, but rather by meandering or wandering in or through wild places, spaces, with the sense of never returning.

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again – if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man – then you are ready for a walk.

Seeking a sacred earth, sacred sense of being. To do this one must become “a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.” A bit later, a statement which resonates strongly 150 years later:

In Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Thoreau is often misquoted, with “wilderness” replacing “wildness.” While the two are related, one is external, extensive, while the other is a move towards an aesthetic in which experiences are sought: varieties of contact.

In Nature Emerson wrote, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” A short way down the page he added, “But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical.” Valuing the wild implies sensing, contemplating universals, which tend to be discredited or devalued, in comparison to realistic, pragmatic ideas or goals. It can be argued that strong thinking itself is now held in social question. These lines from Yeats’ Second Coming seem to match the current media climate:

. . . everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
. . .

Gary Snyder writes that mind is fundamentally wild:

I will argue that consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild. “Wild” as in wild ecosystems – richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information. At root the real question is how we understand the concepts of order, freedom, and chaos. Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art (also read “language") a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world? Observation, reflection, and practice show artistic process to be the latter (A Place in Space, pp. 163-172).

These are some of the ideas that hover, in terms of this web log. I feel that we have reached a time when the perseverance of the wild is at issue.

One of the challenges of cultural existential bias is acknowledging that we possess it. Without looking toward the obscure shadows cast, we may end up destroying or eroding what is of universal value: human identity and meaning, in one instance. I think this is one of Bill McKibben’s points when he writes that,

[Human gene manipulation and DNA improvement is] “Going for perfection,” [as] Watson calls it. But in fact such genetic tampering threatens to destroy the very things that give meaning to human life. From a certain vantage point, meaning has been in decline for a very long time, almost since the beginning of civilization. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors inhabited a very different world from ours, a meaning-saturated world where every plant and animal was an actor the way people are actors, where even rocks and canyons and rivers could speak. We look at that same world and see either silent landscape or pile of resources; either it has gone mute or our hearing is nowhere near as sharp. . . . the context of our lives began to shrink much more quickly in the last five hundred years. As science offered first new explanations and then new technologies, we have traded in the old contexts that informed human lives, bargaining them away in return for freedom, for Liberation (Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age).

As we advance we may wish to turn anew toward the forgotten or abandoned. I would like to extend my brief encapsulation but this post is becoming long. Ursula Le Guin’s A Very Warm Mountain, discusses the personification of the natural world in a way that has provoked my introspection: must we personalize the non-human, incorporate it into society in order to preserve its value, living in an age between myths? James Hillman comments in Beauty Without Nature; Refounding the City that “nature” should not necessarily be equated only with wilderness or non-human zones, that (to reduce a complex story) the crucial experience of aesthetic arrest may be found in the city, in art, as well as within wilderness – aesthetic perception of the wild is qualitative and not mutually exclusive (one zone cannot be sacrificed for another). One of Hillman’s points is that it may be possible to design a sense of the wild into the city – in such a city, it would become less necessary to mass exodus to the beach or “managed” nature on the weekends, in order to seek after the longed-for distance, in Weil’s sense, distance which is the soul of beauty.

The wild and anarchy are dissimilar templates. Gary Snyder points out that sensing the wild involves “the grain of things . . . measured chaos,” ideas also found in Classical Greece. Chaos (lack of pattern) was equated with aesthetic ugliness. So, the cosmos as cosmetic, cosmos as craft.

The above are loosely related speculations. I believe it is possible to go beyond a dualistic psychology that polarizes nature and culture. At the same time, whatever polemic or dialectic might be hashed out, I’m working from an internal poetic course, an unformed and unframed discontinuity, from disharmonies that may lead to harmonies – saunters on occasion, seeming to be a verb.

 

I saw then in the ocean everything of life among the reef,

Rainbow parrot-fish, Bluefin Trevally, Pyramid Butterflyfish,

Potter’s Angelfish, octopii, Hawaiian Cleaner Wrasse, Whitemouth Moray,

Whale Shark, Peacock grouper, Rockmover, Bluespine Unicornfish,

Glasseye, Lei Trigger-fish. Swimming under banded light

at a weightless depth

above land below sky in the blank wide bed of breath or restful dreaming

among the concave sands between corals.

 

Tending to instruments of time pressure in the tank

holding the console up to the mask seconds pass along

the precise boundary-lines of the dive event, underside of the boat

far above in the vertical horizon held from drifting current,

scuds to invisibility far from shore on a warm merciless sea.

Fins gently rudder in an effortless slow gymnastic spiral flip

arcing this quiescent traveler consciousness closer to the reef:

heartbeats mingle with silvered exhaust bubbles the

inhale-exhale of the regulator valve breathing

through the ocean’s fluid element, limitless space,

elements become the body in an age before eyelids.

Thinking down here is incomplete where light

as it moves along the bottom patterns

ripples like eels.

 

The softest caresses cause waves to wash through, the politics of love:

thoughts pass along in their entirety, as unburdened senses

become fragile to the hardened glance, acuity in breathing

disappearing cruise ships reaching your sovereign mouth,

sovereign arms, tongue that tastes of pelagic cuisine,

Ahi tuna, Sturgeon, Puffer or Jake.

 

I love things that leave room to dream David Lynch A succession of minor roads and a highway are not at all the same thing. . . The highway isn’t something that extends from one road to another, it’s a dimension spread out in space, the presencing of an original reality. If I take the highway as an example, it’s because. . . it’s a path of communication. . . the highway is an undeniable signifier in human experience. Lacan

Why bring up Lacan now, just when the screaming baby’s been rocked to sleep after a decade or two? One of the comments on Dhalgren, in the post below, likened the book to a moebius strip. It turns out that Dhalgren and the moebius strip (of time/space) have had an impact on David Lynch.

Regarding Paz’s comment that man is never identical with himself, Lacan seems to echo this statement, from his own unique perspective. Speaking of Lacan, the moebius and Lynch, in the review below, it’s hard to miss relationships with Paz and scenarios in Dhalgren, as well as with Buddhist philosophy (a mobius strip appears to have two sides, a “duality,” but has only one; thus, non-duality and logical paradox result). Pressing on, here is this paragraph, from the article On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology, by Bernd Herzogenrath:

According to Lacan, the human being is entangled in three registers, which Lacan calls the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. Whereas the imaginary constitutes the (perceptual) realm of the ego, the register that accounts for a (however illusive) notion of wholeness and autonomy, the symbolic is the field of mediation that works according to a differential logic. Whereas the imaginary constantly tries to ‘heal’ the lack-of-being of the subject, the symbolic accepts castration. The human subject is thus doubly split: on the imaginary level between the ego and its mirror image, while on the symbolic level it is language and the inscription into a specific socio-cultural reality and its rules that bars the subject from any unity. Thus, this forever lost unity belongs to the third register: the real, which is simply that which eludes any representation, imaginary or symbolic. Because of this lack, the subject, which, according to Lacan, is an effect of the signifier, aims at recreating that lost unity. The ’strategy’ of desire emerges as a result of the subject’s separation from the real and the ‘means’ by which the subject tries to catch up with this real, lost unity again. It is thus desire that accounts for the subject’s trajectory through the human world, which according to Lacan “isn’t a world of things, it isn’t a world of being, it is a world of desire as such.” This is true for Lynch’s movies, as well for the relation of the spectator to the cinema in general. ( Other Voices, v.1, n.3, January 1999)

Pithy.
What I like is that the third register is the “lost” register, the real, “eludes any representation, imaginary or symbolic,” and “isn’t a world of things, it isn’t a world of being, it is a world of desire. I’m attracted by this idea, that the real has a taste of “the forever lost unity,” or cognates as a lack (of representation). So, imagination is working to “heal the lack of being of the subject [person].” Fragments of fragmentary knowings and sensations, which (sorry) are a sort of lost highway. Also the “doubly split” nature of the ego (meaning, here, self-concept, I suppose). Imagination becomes a force of will: it seeks to “heal,” while the symbolic “accepts castration.” This Freudian reference would have to be explained: castration of what, exactly? Existential reality-sense, wholeness or unity; empowering suchness?

Anyway, “the symbolic” is a “field of mediation,” and we find out that, in terms of symbolic field, for persons: “it is language and the inscription into a specific socio-cultural reality” that delimit this field. Language is a mediation which then “accepts castration.” This would seem to open certain doors of poetic possibility, regarding the potential powers of language and its reach, in mediating between the registers mentioned. There are three registers (not states, levels, realities, or modes).

[Register (def.): the range of a human voice or a musical instrument; a portion of such a range similarly produced or of the same quality; any of the varieties of a language that a speaker uses in a particular social context.]

“Entangled - in registers:” rather moebius-like. Well, since we swim in a world of desire, not things or being (this is how we fundamentally Lacan the world), “it is thus desire that accounts for the subject’s trajectory through the human world.” I’ll leave it to Buddhist philosophers to address the question of whether desire is an aspect of confused mind or not. Tantric Buddhism would seem to suggest not; it would be attachment that’s at issue, not the energy of desire itself, right? So, can we look to a poetics of desire? It would seem so.

Immediately I recall Yosano Akiko’s Tangled Hair, one elegant resolution or revolution of register-use in language, that is, a paradoxical collusion between three registers: imagination bringing the scent of wholeness or unity, symbolic language, and “brute” realism. Since it’s poetry, we must ask whether this (or any) language, as mediation, accepts castration (to coin the phrase). Lacan seems to imply that language does not necessarily have to accept castration. Not being a Lacanian thinker, I can only speculate that Paz’s idea: “poetic creation begins as violence to language” is relevant here. It is not language itself, but the force of desire mediated through it which “uproots words” and “wrests them from their habitual connections and occupations”. The will of Eros, an erotic aspiration, and a wild one, wild as a violent sea, a black hole, all that cannot finally or ever be tamed. Three of Yosano’s translated tanka:

The girl, twenty –
Her black hair flows through her comb
How arrogant
How beautiful her spring

Who shall I tell of the color rouge
My blood waves
thoughts of spring
life in its prime

Black hair
a thousand strands of hair
tangled hair –
my thoughts so tangled
my thoughts get tangled

The relationship between poetry and violence: ideas that spring from Octavio Paz, in his book The Bow and the Lyre. Looking at dreamlife, myth interpreted as psychologic process (path), fairytales – violence as act and environment seems of neccessity. Maybe you imagine a mellow dude. Someone as psychically equanimious as they are laid back in-person: would you consider that person non-violent? Or, new-ager warmth and compassion – doesn’t this sort of approach to peace or harmony become cloying, boring? What about the edge – and why do we need – sharp edges, cuts into speech and context? Why do realities need irruption? Wouldn’t we prefer edges that are non-violent? It seems discrimination between psychic and literal worlds is necessary – we would not harm literal beings as we certainly do words, those multiferous symbols. Yet it seems strange, even shocking the idea that,

Poetic creation begins as violence to language.

What is the angst that urges us, impells to remake, reform, bring the new? Mustn’t there be something, terribly, horribly or irritatingly wrong with what is, in order for creative urgencies to – urge themselves onto us, onto things-as-themselves? To create what is not, to make more beautiful, whole, to purify, to reclaim, reawaken, recover, own, fight erasures, abandon to them, to make visible, to give sight, orient to what shines, to follow “the morality of right sensation” (Stevens). Language is reality, and has life, fairly said, is mind. Why then, violence? Paz writes:

The first act in this operation is the uprooting of words. The poet wrests them from their habitual connections and occupations: separated from the formless world of speech, words become unique, as if they had just been born. The second act is the return of the word: the poem becomes an object of participation. Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or uprooting, which pulls the word from the language; the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality. Alternating in a manner that may aptly be called cyclical, their rotation engenders the spark: poetry (p. 28-9).

Uprooting, wresting from habitual connections and occupations, separation. Rending and return (gravity). These are the processes which lead to participation in the poem. Participation rooted in intriguing disjunctions:

Man is never identical to himself. His mode of being, the thing that distinguished him from other living beings, is change. Or as Ortega y Gasset says: man is an insubstantial being: he lacks substance. And precisely what characterizes the religious experience is the abrupt leap, the fulminating change of nature. Therefore it is not true that our feelings are the same before the real tiger and the tiger-god. . . A description of the experience of the divine as something outside us would also be inadequate. [This] experience includes us, and its description will be our own description (p. 105).

Death is involved. Language is harmed, and this harm involves psychic sentience – without sacred violence, the lifeblood of poets, there could be no purification. Perhaps we arrive in a new land, whose realities have so altered the habitual meanings of words that “violence” and “harm” become unfamiliar, more non-dual, as conceptual terms. Nonetheless, they are the most accurate words we have to provide the concepts. The poet must exit language and culture; to do this is dangerous and also violent. You don’t just fall out in new-age softness, or in the manner of a trek through managed wilderness. It’s a tough business. Birth is violent, death: nature is violent. There may be no exact solution. Paradoxical elements, superposed, provide one synthesis in partial answer to the question of creative need and violence:

Words become unique, as if they had just been born.

Man is never identical to himself.

Participation.

Here’s a song I wrote last week
(with thanks to Kate).
Feel free to do something with it,
as licensed under this
Creative Commons Artist License.

North of Hollywood

tomorrow
lights up in the city garage
cindy sings a refrain
her slicker caught in rain
to find a life in orange
by the carousel of music
found against another star
sequins of las vegas
heartthrob songs
cruisin as a demimonde
among the carnage

CHORUS:
who’s that lady
it’s an LA bar
the chandelier sways
against the guitars
uncertain limits
from a man with a rose
bourbon on the rocks
tastes better cold
. . .

only
a vandal dreams forever
with a crease and a gun
3 am in the morning blood
drains against the sun
it don’t take much
to memorize the lines
tickets are easy
posing silhouettes breezy
drinks down Chandler novels
dressing an Egyptian idol
got her own brains
writing on dirty trains
this day and age

CHORUS

fifteen
sixteen hours a day
working up and back the highway
a knife and a match and a quarter moon
deep blue sky at a quarter past noon
with the tv playing old cartoons
black stagedoor lighting the dunes
spilling quarters on the floor
diamonds from a penny jar
in a montage

CHORUS

bones
crossing sunset and avenue E
sightlines painted against the sea
flames the bomber doesn’t see
fallen in a single victory
torn mulholland missives
the book of love and kisses
slicker caught in rain
fingerprints on windowframes
among the footage

TAG
end

An addition to my earlier Rothko post, the first stanza of Slow Song for Mark Rothko, by John Taggart (Poems for the New Millennium vol. 2, p. 704):

I

To breathe and stretch one’s arms again
to breathe through the mouth to
breathe through the mouth to utter in
the most quiet way not to whisper not to whisper
to breathe through the mouth in the most quiet way to
breathe to sing to breathe to sing to breathe
to sing the most quiet way.

To sing to light the most quiet light in darkness
radianta radianta
singing light in darkness.

To sing as the host sings in his house.