two fish

James Hillman in “A Terrible Love of War” (PDF review here) writes of America (pp. 127-28):

Mars is battle rage, an insane red fury in a field of action. Firing the weapon brings Mars immediately into the scene, saving a man from cowering and trembling, from feeling himself a victim, and shakes him from his self-occupied inertia at a loss to himself and to his unit.

Since the god is in the gun, the passionate love for these weapons may express less a love of violence than a magical protection against it. Handgun – a fetish or amulet to hold at bay the fear of injury or death, the passivity of inertia, and, in ordinary civilian life, to have in one’s hands a charm against the paranoid anxieties that haunt the American psyche. The continent is filled with roaming revenants, giant spirits of destroyed forests, buffalo spirits, slaughtered tribes, drowned valleys behind dams, ghosts of the lynched hanging from trees, miasma hovering over rapacious levelings and extractions, unjust executions named “due process,” knifings, abattoirs. The land not only remembers, it is humming with agonies, a pulsing layer of the collective unconscious deposited there by American deeds recorded as American history.

“Iron all of itself works on a man.” The automatic in my hand brings Mars to my side. God in his heaven may not smile on me or deliver me from the valley of death; he might long ago have forgotten my name and I may not be among the chosen, but so long as my gun is within my reach the ghosts can’t get me.

Caputo in Vietnam remembers one of his men who suddenly pops an old woman they were holding. The man later explains, “Phil, you know the gun just went off by itself.” Automatic. The autonomy of the god. Because a god is in the gun it is demonic, so that control of the gun in your hand is not altogether in your hands. The question remains whether control of weapons by humans can ever be achieved without a more radical appreciation of the inhuman factor.

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.

Yesterday I received an eloquent and fullsome reply to the post Hero As Myth: The Freedom To Live, from Joseph Rowe, whose recent artistic activities over are worth taking the time to view, read, and listen to. Visit the website Natural Chant and Rhythm, and have a listen to some of the CD tracks here; Natural Chant and Rhythm is led by

Catherine Braslavsky
 
 
and

Joseph Rowe

Joseph Rowe
Thanks for posting William Indick’s very useful resume and structural analysis of Campbell’s archetypal heroic voyage.

Also, thanks, Richard, for a superb reborn blog, so full of rich images and interesting themes!
For me, Joseph Campbell himself is a hero — and more importantly, a great spiritual, psychological, and literary teacher. I would even go so far as to say that for world culture in general, as well as American culture in particular, he has functioned as a kind of trans-cultural healer, helping (often in an indirect, unacknowledged way) to reconnect alienated, modern (postmodern, paramodern, whatever) humanity with our ancient, universal psychic and mythic roots … and leaves! Ever since George Lucas brought Campbell’s mythic insight to Hollywood with the first episode of Star Wars, cinematic art has perceptibly changed (notwithstanding the usual wasteland of mediocrity and routine mass entertainment, of course) — since that pivotal event of the 1970’s, movies have begun more and more often to dare to attempt the great themes of mythic, archetypal imagination, something which (with some exceptions, of course) was done before only in the most routine, predictable, stereotyped ways.

Strangely, Campbell’s writings are neglected, and mostly out of print here in France, where I’ve lived and worked for over 15 years — yet his indirect, invisible influence is still there, mostly through some of the best films and books of American culture (yes, there ARE a few good American influences in Europe, though I grant you, many more bad ones). But it never ceases to amaze me that only university scholars seem to have read or even heard of Campbell in this extremely literate country. I am certain this doesn’t reflect any lack of potential interest — still less intelligence, or imagination — among general readers in France. (Everyone seems to have read or at least heard of Mircea Eliade, for example.) Rather, it reflects the typical lack of imagination and intelligence of big publishers, which we see more and more of now, on both sides of the Atlantic…

However, what I really want to write about here in relation to real-life heroes is something very often overlooked: the question of the value of hero stories and myths for ordinary people. I perceive a serious and widespread confusion here, and it centers around the issue of amplification. Virtually all lives of heroes we hear about are amplified in some way. They exist on a larger scale than that of ordinary lives — maybe only a little larger, maybe vastly larger, as in myth, but almost always larger. This amplification is necessary for many reasons, but it must not be confused with the essential message. The problem is that many people — perhaps most — mistake this amplification aspect as having something to do with the real value, message, or teaching of the heroic story. This is a serious mistake, as bad as that of a would-be musician who yearns to have the same megawatt equipment as a famous rock group, so as to become a better musician. It also often leads to arrogance, inflation, and megalomania — or their shadow-opposites, lack of self-esteem, self-aggression, shame, nihilism, etc…

Modernist literary fashion sensed something of this, and created the anti-hero, with all the ironic and tragicomic aspects. But this threw out the baby with the bathwater.

What these heroic stories are always whispering to us, and the main reason they move us so deeply, is because they remind us that even the most ordinary and humble human life is inherently heroic — if only because we human beings are the only animal on this planet who are called to live in the conscious knowledge and certainty of our (and our loved ones’) inevitable death and pain. Unfortunately, instead of embracing and living up to this noble birthright (which is ours, whether we like it or not), most of us seem to want to flee it like the plague, and distract ourselves at any cost.

I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced that there are many real-life heroes whose scale of action is not at all amplified like that of the ones we hear of, and is often deceptively humble. Yet their “ordinary” heroism may be just as authentic and grand as that of a Neo, a Frodo, a Luke Skywalker, or even a Christ or a Buddha. I’m reminded of Henry Miller’s claim (I’ve never tracked down his source for this) that there is a Buddhist tradition which says that the greatest Buddhas have come in the form of countless human beings through the ages, who work quietly and in anonymity, so that their names never appear in the annals of the Sages, yet their influence is actually greater than all the famous Saviors put together, and that humanity would long ago have perished if not for their actions … I’m also reminded, somehow, of Wordsworth’s little jewel of a poem, “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.” Strictly speaking, the latter is not about heroism, but it suggests something I’m trying to get at…. that the people who truly get the message of the hero stories, and incarnate that message, are not the kind of people you are likely to hear about in “lives of the rich and famous….”

I’m interested in perusing the meaning of heroes for individuals these days. A couple weeks ago I sent out an email asking for personal stories – if you have personal, intimate and honest reflections of who your heroes are, and reflections on why, please send them, if inspired.

The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again–if the powers have remained unfriendly to him–his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).
– from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces

The text below, which I hope to comment on in the future, is exerpted from:
Classical Heroes in Modern Movies: Mythological Patterns of the Superhero
(Journal of Media Psychology, Volume 9, No. 3, Fall, 2004)
By William Indick, Ph.D.
Dowling College

The hero is the integral archetype in the collective unconscious of American culture. He is at once a collective and personal encounter, as each individual in the audience identifies personally with the hero’s story, while the hero simultaneously embodies the collective hopes and ideals of the culture that creates him. It is this compound phenomenon – the personal identification with the collective hero – that makes the hero archetype so psychologically powerful. This compound identification with the hero fulfills what Carl Jung called the “transcendent function” of myth and dreams.

In Jungian psychology, myths are collective dreams, the communal expression of a culture’s goals, wishes, anxieties and fears. Dreams, on the other hand, are personal myths. They are the individual expression of personal unconscious issues, amplified into visions and projected onto a screen in the “theater of the mind,” in the form of a personalized movie. Experiencing a modern myth in the form of a film is, in a Jungian sense, a transcendent experience, because when we identify with the hero and vicariously experience his journey, we transcend our own private conscious existence and integrate a collective cultural archetype. Furthermore, as a function of the film-going experience, we transcend our own individual neuroses, allowing ourselves to commune with the rest of the audience through a shared understanding, integrating the collective encounter on a personal level.

Joseph Campbell: The Hero’s Journey

Campbell’s model of the mythological hero, from his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), is by far the most influential, especially in the field of screenwriting, for several reasons. First, Campbell himself delineated clear stages of the hero’s journey, providing a distinct structure for screenwriters to follow when devising their plots and character development. Secondly, Campbell’s model is the most eclectic of the major studies, integrating Freudian, Rankian, Jungian and Frazerian theory into a cohesive pattern of heroic elements. And finally, Campbell arranged his model in three broad units, (“the nuclear unit of the monomyth”), which corresponds quite nicely with the three-act structure that most screenplays follow.

Campbell’s term “monomyth” is a reference to a term originally created by James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake (1939). It refers to the basic elements of myth, the archetypal qualities of all legends and heroes, that transcend individual cultures and specific periods of time. The monomyth is universal and timeless. Hence, the hero that Campbell explains is not one particular hero from one particular myth, but the universal qualities of all heroes from all myths… the “hero with a thousand faces.” The monomyth is universal and timeless because its basic form fulfills a psychological function for both the mythmakers and their audiences. Campbell explained it as follows:

“The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation – initiation – return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.”

The formula of the monomyth is then summarized as follows:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

And the specific actions within the three parts of the formula are explained as follows:

“The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle is lured… to the threshold of adventure… then the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of his mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), or his own divination (apotheosis)… The final work is that of the return… At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread… The boon he brings restores the world.”

Campbell went even further in his account, breaking this three-part, (or three-act), formula down into seventeen specific stages, each of which he explains in detail. The stages of the hero’s journey are as follows:

Act One: Departure

1. The Call to Adventure

2. Refusal of the Call

3. Supernatural Aid

4. The Crossing of the First Threshold

5. The Belly of the Whale

 

Act Two: Initiation

6. The Road of Trials

7. The Meeting with the Goddess

8. Woman as the Temptress

9. Atonement with the Father

10. Apotheosis

11. The Ultimate Boon

 

Act Three: Return

12. Refusal of the Return

13. The Magic Flight

14. Rescue from Without

15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold

16. Master of the Two Worlds

17. Freedom to Live

Views of this movie around the net:

Havana Journal
Che Guevara and The Motorcycle Diaries
“‘In a way, 1968 began in 1967 with the murder of Che,’ says the author and political journalist, Christopher Hitchens, who describes himself as ‘a recovering Marxist, not ashamed, not unbowed, but thoughtful’. Like many who came of age politically in the late Sixties, Hitchens was in thrall to the personality cult that attended Che. ‘His death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do - fought and died for his beliefs.’”

Commonweal
EASY RIDERS

Slate
Don’t Applaud this Movie
“In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”

Salon
Lefties demanding their Che or the highway may be disappointed . . .

New York Metro
Che Sera Sera – “The Motorcycle Diaries may be a sophisticated snow job, but it’s also true that the brutalities it serves up are not fictions and, in many ways, still exist in Latin America.”

Interviews

The Guardian
Interview with the director Walter Salles

Film Journal
Interview with the director Walter Salles

THE CUBA DIET
What will you be eating when the revolution comes?
Posted on Monday, June 6, 2005. Originally from Harper’s Magazine, April 2005, by Bill McKibben.

Cubans have as much food as they did before the Soviet Union collapsed. They’re still short of meat, and the milk supply remains a real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to normal—they’ve gotten that meal back. In so doing they have created what may be the world’s largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth.

Today
It was reported that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay tortured prisoners with the music of Christina Aguilera.

A study showed that the world military budget was about $1,035,000,000,000 in 2004; the United States accounted for nearly half of that.

Scientists in Los Angeles created a fusion reaction at around room temperature using a pyroelectric crystal.

Scientists studying the Devils Hole pupfish, of which only 180 remain, accidentally killed eighty of them.

Police in Nigeria arrested a cow for murder.

A Christopher Hitchens interview
From the magazine Stop Smiling, issue 20:

SS: You’ve written on a number of occasions, but never explained entirely, that you write in a somewhat posthumous manner.

CH: Write as if it’s your last words. Because then you can be sure that you don’t wonder, “Will the agent like this? Will my publisher say, ‘Well, couldn’t we punch it up a bit more or make it more fancy?’ What will my family think?” All the things that constrain people.
- - - - - - - - - -

SS: If you could meet one author that’s not alive anymore, who would it be?

CH: George Eliot. Eliot or Nabokov. I’d rather have met Orwell, I think. He was the guy who seemed to come the nearest to making journalism into literature, which is what I’m trying to do. . . .

I’m reading this guy. Orhan Pamuk, if you know him. Turkish writer. He’s a very brilliant Turkish novelist who, I think, is on to something. You’ll be hearing about him. And I read George Eliot a lot, whenever I can. And Joyce and [Jorge Luis] Borges. None of them contemporaries. But they really are contemporary. It’s the gold standard, the stuff people will always read.

Links to a prolific array of Hitchens articles and essays.

                 

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.

From a 27 Jan book review by David Bodanis of Einstein Defiant: Genius versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution, by Edmund Blair Bolles (Joseph Henry Press).

. . . Until 1915, for example, astronomers had to just accept that there were certain inexplicable shifts in the way that the planet Mercury traveled around the sun. Only when Einstein published his theory of general relativity did he show that Mercury was in fact following simple laws. If something seems unclear, at all random, it’s because we haven’t managed to look deeply enough beneath the surface.

But as the months went on, Heisenberg and even Born kept on insisting that there was no deeper reality that explained what was happening inside the atom. All we could possibly know, they contended, was that when a certain amount of energy was pushed into an atom, there were varying likelihoods that certain results – such as particular flashes of light – would come out.

Einstein was beside himself. It was obvious to him that this had to be wrong. “I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction.” But however much he tried to prove his belief, other physicists kept on finding evidence that backed up Heisenberg’s view. Before too long, this led to Heisenberg developing his famous uncertainty principle, which made clear just how impossible it was to ever have full information about every aspect of an electron’s instantaneous movement.

Bolles has written the best popular account I know of this central episode in 20th-century thought: the intense struggles between Einstein and other physicists – especially the kindly, shambling, yet brilliantly dogged Niels Bohr – about whether the universe could really be constructed with “gaps” in direct causality at its very core. The decades’ worth of letters between Einstein and his intimate friend Born, first published in 1971 and now reissued with a new preface by American scholars Kip Thorne and Diana Buchwald, is an immensely readable personal account of those debates. They provide even more depth to ongoing efforts to determine what “The Old One” – as Einstein referred to his understanding of God – had intended for our universe.

Gradually the world’s leading physicists moved away from Einstein’s view, and most of them considered him a relic by the time he moved to Princeton in the 1930s. One great thinker who did continue to take him seriously was Kurt Gödel, a quirky, brilliant logician, who had looked at the foundations of his own field – mathematical logic – much as Einstein had looked at the foundation of physics. Together, the two old men would take long regular walks in Princeton. Palle Yourgrau’s A World Without Time captures the mood of that autumnal friendship, as well as showing – though in a manner too technical for the ordinary reader – how Gödel developed musings that Einstein also had about the nature of time.

Was Einstein right about there being an explanation for everything if we look into it deeply enough? For decades almost all physicists were convinced he was totally wrong. More recently, there have been hints that aspects of what he had in mind might well hold. In some final letters to Born, when they were both ill and old, Einstein told his friend of his feelings about it all:

“I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret [my resistance] as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one.”

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.

The world comes round again, wondering how things are born. One way or another a sense of story is unavoidable, as much as language embodies or is haunted by its own failure. “Now I am ready to tell

how bodies are changed
Into different bodies.

I summon the supernatural beings
Who first contrived
The transmogrifications
In the stuff of life.
You did it for your own amusement.
Descend again, be pleased to reanimate
This revival of those marvels.
Reveal now, exactly
How they were performed
From the beginning
Up to this moment.

Before sea or land, before even sky
Which contains all,
Nature wore only one mask —
Since called Chaos.
A huge agglomeration of upset.
A bolus of everything—but
As if aborted.
And the total arsenal of entropy
Already at war within it.”

writes Ovid, through the genius of Ted Hughes, filtering who in the stuff from the beginning Which contains all. To imagine chaos, not as disorder, not as order’s opposite, not as abstract category but as upset, a fulfillment of abortion: its universe: entropy at war — a grevious roar, unutterable pain. “No sun showed one

thing to another,
No moon
Played her phases in heaven,
no earth
Spun in empty air on her own magnet,
No ocean
Basked or roamed on the long beaches.”

It was a quiet night, unutterable. Unutterability. So, could there be potential. Who can bear this primordial universe which cannot come to be except as the abortion of its own paradox. What strange brood we, to arise from horrid impossibility, taste of ultimate acid beneath the tongue, razor blades on skin, no vaulting dream, a horror so real that “land, sea, air were

all there
But not to be trodden, or swum in.
Air was simply darkness.
Everything fluid or vapour, form formless.”

worse, “each thing hostile

to every other thing: at every point
hot fought cold, moist dry, soft hard, and the weightless

resisted weight.” Imagine this endless war, existing in utter lack of revolution. Entropy warring with itself. If A = A, A wars with A. Self against self nature. Weightlessness resisting weight. If there is a hell, part of its horror would be such a stasis, in which psychic energy flows always against itself, not erasing but rather aborting its own life in self mutilation. Ovid declares, following the ancient Greek tales that our universe arises from this hell. It took some Other, a divine being to begin to sort out endless, static confusion. “Some such artist [as God or as a god] began to sort it out. In this way

the heap of all disorder
Earth
Was altered.
It was adorned with the Godlike novelty
of man.

“Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist… Art is a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process. That is why great works of art make us feel good” (Ted Hughes, 1930-1998).

Bloody hell, microcosmic urgencies, the insurrections of man: metamorphoses.

A strange new thirst, a craving, unfamiliar,
Entered his body with the water,
And entered his eyes
With the reflection in the limpid mirror. . .
As the taste of water flooded him
So did love.

(Ovid, Narcissus, trans. Ted Hughes, 1997)

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.

I submit Justice and Beauty are such [formulations of universal] principles from which an ecological psychology could be derived. James Hillman

Half of a lecture Justice and Beauty: Foundations of an Ecological Psychology is excerpted below:

First, psychology is anthropocentric. Its definition of consciousness, for instance declares (per definition) it impossible for anything but humans to be conscious. The self is still imagined like a pineal gland, a self-enclosed atomistic unit, neither inherently or necessarily communal. The planet is an alien place, essentially nihilistic, into which the individual human is thrown, alienated and anomic. Second, human-centered psychology fosters a disordered, senseless, and enslaved planet. By ripping the human soul from its womb in the anima mundi, the world soul, this mother of all phenomena becomes a corpse, reduced to measurement, experimental dissection and cannibalization of its body parts. Rivers and rocks, flowers and fish, defined as soulless in themselves can find value only by human assessment. For many centuries of our history and in most other cultures, an idea of the world soul endows all phenomena with meaning and intelligible intentions—and their own individual inwardness. Depth of soul lies not just in us; it resides in the planet’s own nature.

Clearly, we need to start again. [We need principles that start not in the human mind but are given to the mind with the world.] We need to imagine an ecological psychology that takes its starting point [not in human concerns only but] in the planet’s concerns and its beings concerns, which we humans serve with our mental capacities. [That is, we do not dig in our philosophy, science, or theology for principles, nor turn only to our human experience; rather] we can attempt to formulate the principles already at work within the cosmos, grounding the value of all participants.

I submit Justice and Beauty are such [formulations of universal] principles from which an ecological psychology could be derived.

Justice and Beauty offer universals of archetypal strength because they are recurrent in time and ubiquitous in place, trans-cultural, immensely fecund. They muster emotive and symbolic expression and are instantly recognizable in daily affairs—and not only of humans. [Justice and Beauty are universals on which cultured communities and human dignity rely and aim to further.] Without them, existence becomes nasty and brutish. With them, the psyche finds itself in a cosmos of value, and psychology becomes the study of the ways any phenomenon measures its place in the world.

An idea of Justice has hardly been important to psychology, which has proceeded as if Justice can be ignored. Yet, Justice is the ruling principle of society, and of the natural world, formulated as natural law. The Greeks considered Justice (Themis) foundational, a great earth Goddess like Gaia, whom Zeus had to obey. She lies at the roots of the polis, the city, making civic cohesion possible, giving each its rightful place and cautioning each not to overstep its bounds.

Justice makes possible an inherently co-related society of beings [where mutual dependency is] based not on mutual usefulness and economic exchange, but on the bare fact of participatory existence. If all beings belong, then all are needed and useful, and justice prevails for each and every. Justice lies so deep, feels so innate, it works like an instinct. Transgressions spring quick to the eye; injustice stinks and wounds long fester. A sense of justice comes with the newest soul: the smallest child cries: “That’s not fair.”

Like this innate response to injustice, so there is an innate aesthetic response. All beings present themselves first of all aesthetically to each other as visible forms, textures, aromas, patterns, rhythms. The world is intelligible by means of these displays, allowing all beings to recognize one another. [The old Roman word for the display of phenomena was ostentatio, a Latin rendering of the Greek phantasia; phenomena show themselves as fantasy images giving impetus to imagination and asking for an imaginative response. The arts are thus the first mode of being in the world and responding to its display. Beauty and ugliness derive neither from personal taste, societal norms, or objective rules of form, but are given with the phenomenal cosmos in its presentation of itself. In fact, the original meaning of kosmos means fitting, decorous, the display of adornment, and is closer to our current world “cosmetics” than to the emptied out cosmos of vast gaseous space in which drift weightless cosmonauts above and beyond gravitas. And, because kosmos also means right order, beauty promotes justice.

I submit these principles are basic to cultures everywhere because they are given with the cosmos itself, and, since primordially given they are ecological guarantors. Psychology’s task is to rebuild its learning and its therapies on these ecological archetypals, so that the great wide world and its beings can never be outside its purview. [Because] justice and beauty [are not merely humanistic, religious, scientific or regional, they] allow many modes of implementation; yet transcend all implementation with an ideal claim of transcendental value, inspiring artistry, dignity and respect, and prompting lasting rectification of ugliness and wrong. For precisely ugliness and wrong are the major cause of a suffering planet, that blue ball wrapped in a whirlwind, so fragily afloat in a sea of stars.

link

Dear Readers,

I’ve recently returned to Japan, and hope to be posting again soon. Here’s a shot of Mt. Robson, from the spot where our raft put in on the Fraser River:

Located in the Fraser River Valley east of the Robson River; 4 km south of Berg Lake. Mount Robson is not only the highest mountain in the Canadian Rocky Mountains but one of the great mountains of the world, and deserving of inclusion in any select list on account of many striking characteristics and a form, beauty, and grandeur transcending any other of the greater peaks of the Rockies… The mountain is unique, and its massive precipices, seamed with different-coloured rock strata, enhance it in both beauty and stature.” These words were written by Frank Smythe, an English mountaineer who wrote dozens of books about the mountains of the world during the first half of the twentieth century and was widely regarded as an authority on the subject.

A class 3 to 3+ white water run. With a class 4+ to 5 waterfall partway through. Starts off with some easy class 2, then picks up with Goldpan Alley, a straight shot 3. The river calms down and then there comes a BIG hole, followed by a left turn and then two more bends. This is Vuarnet Ledges, class 3 to 3+. After this rapid the river runs straight for about 500 meters, before turning right. This is Rearguard falls, usually a class 5. There is an easy and well-used portage trail on the right.

My friend Jeff organized the trip, a 1500 mile drive (in 3 Aerostar vans) through Western Canada with outdoor activities, for 17 university students from Kumamoto, Japan. We got as far north as Jasper, as far west as Vancouver island, spending a day in Victoria and bungee jumping into a canyon outside of Nanaimo. As for me, I was impressed with the used bookstores in Victoria and would have happily planted myself in Vancouver for a few years . . .

A Tour of the Calculus by David Berlinski, a book I picked up in Banff, contains some amazing writing.

Another beautiful book found is The Encyclopedia of the Motorcycle, by Peter Henshaw. A large well-written book with superb photographs.

Generally speaking, the hardest aspect of living as an expat in southern Japan is the inability to browse English-language bookstores. I’m ready to open up a cafe-bookstore in the right place. Investors, feel free to drop me a line twofish at iyume dot com.

Hello readers. Creating this blog has been a worthwhile endevor for me. I’d like to continue with it, but wonder what readers like, don’t like, and would like to see more of – please leave feedback or any sort of comment in the next two weeks, by clicking on the comment link just below this post. I’m requesting you take a moment.

twofish heads to Western Canada for two weeks,
the next post should appear September 4.
- - - - -

Yesterday I wrote a rant to a good friend, I’ll post part of it here. The background to the rant has to do with a book. Occasionally a book comes along that affirms ideas and values you didn’t know needed affirming, and the information acts like a chariot enabling further confidence and strength to explore new territory. The slim volume, Egalitarian Typologies versus the Perception of the Unique, by James Hillman, is such a book. The versus in the title codifies a key consideration. Systems, particularly systems that organize persons into “types” (Jungian typology, the Eenneagram, astrological typing, the Buddha familes in Vajrayana Buddhism, the manual of mental disorders, etc.) while useful, worthwhile and therapeutically valuable, also by consequence minimize or ontologically devalue the perception of the unique. There is a polarity betweeen typologic systemization – and the perception of the unique.

The perception of the unique typically becomes subordinated to critical analytical systems of all sorts (categorizations are a means of typing), in order to extract meaning and data from the unique.

T,

if you were to read my haiku writings (i’m not recommending this, as they are focused on a research specialty), you’d find that my strongest “message” is AGAINST REDUCTION. I am interested in approaches which do not reduce the complexity and unknowingness of real experience, but rest in embodiments, flow with it.

Civilization is systems. Language is a system of signs (symbolic representations). So, systems define what we think of as human consciousness. It’s not a matter of getting rid of them, and it’s an impossible task in any case. But we need to have awareness of how exactly, precisely, systemic thinking and perspectives shrink/contain reality. From a Freudian perspective, you could say, we need to investigate how systems are used to defend against the overwhelming unknowingness we swim in.

The most difficult sort of awareness for a fish, is I think, the awareness of water. Water is an unconscious element for a fish, but arguably the most important element or the most primary element. If you were a fish, and you were begining to become aware of water, how would that awareness arise, how would the hints of water enter your senses? I’ll speculate (anthropomorphically): For a fish, water can never be perceived directly, it’s too close to fishness, to what root-fishness is. Hints of water come as unique, idiosyncratically arising psychic landscapes, as dreams, mystical visions, inspirations – in other words, fishness and waterness are “other” to each other – clearly separate, yet paradoxically, one does not exist without the other. You can’t have fishness without water, and you can’t have waterness without fish (because waterNESS, the NESSNESS of water is something only a fish can sense, in its fishlike way).

In a similar sense, as Jung thought, human consciousness is human because uniquely, humans have the capacity to reflection upon perception (some other animals have also a limited capacity in this regard). But the reflector itself, the existential (or ontological) reality of what reflects is hidden, is outside of perception; it’s not in time/space (as reflection occurs in any combination of prior to, during, following perception, is unconscious or an absence). Reflectivity is the water consciousness swims in.

So, notions of reflectivity arise as quasi-forms, perceptions, feelings, straynesses, meanderings, imaginations. That we reflect, that we swim in reflection (and by reflection I don’t mean thinking about life per se, but rather that we know for instance abstractions like “apple” or “time") brings up a useful point about wildness and reality:

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? (Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, 1995, pp. 163-172).

Ecology and wildness and “the grain of things” and complexity and “information” and “the imposition of order on chaotic nature:” these are the active elements of my current aspiration, seeking. I think what we lack in our culture is a healthy relationship with wildness, a valued means for evolving a sense of “the grain of things” (which involves both an art and craft of life). We need to let wildness in, respect this mind, without containing it. Finding the wild always humbles one.

Controlling and containing the life of wildness (i.e. egalitarian typologies, systems), can help with sorting out incomprehensible situations, confusions, reducing suffering, and can also provide tools for knowledge – science, technology, psychology. Certain “new” psycho-spiritual systems (like Ken Wilber’s integral theory of consciousness) use systems thinking and reality modeling extensively. But increasingly, I see the dangers. First and foremost is arrogance. Second is the separation and minimization of the energy and power of the wild and wildness and a lessening of respect for the universe at every level, by consequence.

So, I’m interested particularly in poetic in systems that deconstruct themselves, and that are paradoxical (like haiku, the work of Ammons, Stevens, etc). I think probably Zen philosophy comes closest, in terms of an experiential philosophy (though not institutionalized Zen Buddhism); Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Plotinus, even Plato use paradox and deconstructive techniques: meanings posed are self-erased, potentially leading one back experientially, kinesthetically, to the perception of the unique – I think this is crucially important to incorporate at every level of analysis in the art and science of systems which attempt to describe the psyche of individuals and/or society.

How’s that for a rant?

 

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.

 

 

 

I know very little about water. This post is a collection of links I found, in no particular order: just scratching the surface.

‘A strange new thirst, a craving, unfamiliar,
Entered his body with the water,
And entered his eyes
With the reflection in the limpid mirror. . .
As the taste of water flooded him
So did love.’

(Ovid, Narcissus, trans. Ted Hughes, 1997)

Gaston Bachelard has penned Psychoanalysis of Fire. Harder to acquire is his Psychoanalysis of Water it’s music actually, perhaps the title in error? Try instead, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, obtainable.

Mythology: The Water Deities

March 22: UNHCR marks World Water Day

Plants give up their secret of splitting water (26 Feb 2004)

WASHINGTON — Researchers said Thursday they had taken another step toward understanding how plants split water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, which may provide a cheap way to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel.

Water hotspots (a clickable map).

Porous paving and The Earth Sucks (Crumb Trail)

Is this Atlantis?

U.N. Warns of Dead Zones in World’s Oceans

Shared Oceans, Shared Future (US State Dept)

Water on Mars

FAVIGNANA, Italy - Over thousands of springtimes, as far back as Homer’s Odyssey, the fishermen of Favignana have battled giant bluefin tuna lured into vast chambers of intricate netting. This year, the nets were empty. Marine biologists say not only bluefin tuna but also other fish stocks are plummeting across the world, upsetting delicate natural food chains. Some fear irreversible damage has already been done. Even worse, international law experts add, little is being done to stop it. Despite all the evidence, high-tech fleets probe the last deepwater refuges, hardly troubled by authorities.

From the Negev Foundation:

The dramatic rise in human population in this century, coupled with over consumption and inadequate resource management, threatens the quality of life worldwide:

World population will double by 2025; nine-tenths of these people will be born in developing countries.

More than half the world’s population is concentrated on 5% of the land; nearly 90% live on less than one-fifth of the land.
About one billion people, one sixth of the world’s population, live in arid or semi-arid lands, of whom just two-thirds practice farming.

90% of world food aid is directed to populations in unproductive arid zones.

Since 1970, food production per capita has declined by at least 20% in Africa and parts of Asia due to desertification and mismanagement of fresh water.

About 800 million people are chronically undernourished because of poverty, insufficient production, inequitable food access and political turmoil.

Each year, an area the size of the state of Kansas, is impoverished due to encroaching deserts.

80 of the 100 countries experiencing increased desertification are developing countries

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.

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, 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)

 

It isn’t easy, these days, to find a deep psychological extrapolation of current events. William Van Dusen Wishard, author of Between Two Ages: The 21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning, and head of WorldTrends Research, a Washington-based consultancy specializing in the analysis and synthesizing of global trends, begins his thought-provoking 9/11 commemoration speech to the C.G. Jung Institute of New York, Sleepwalking Through the Apocalypse, with this perspective:

“In 1957 Peter Drucker wrote, ‘No one born after the turn of the 20th century has ever known anything but a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols.’ If Drucker’s right, and I personally think he is, despite all the political, social and technical advances of the past century, the underlying story of the 20th century was about a world where the historic social arrangements, spiritual underpinnings and psychological moorings that had anchored nations for centuries, have been in a transition of epochal proportions. The tectonic plates of life as we’ve known it are shifting.”

This lecture presents six major points of global shift, and discusses humanity’s future. It’s well worth reading in its complete form here; the excerpts below represent a jumping-off point rather than conclusion. Here are the six major thematic shifts Wishard presents:

First, science is in the process of redefining our understanding of terms first given us at the dawn of human consciousness: such terms as nature, human, and life. Increasingly, scientists are subordinating humans to technology. The faster computers go, the faster our whole tempo of life goes just to keep up. In essence, we may be abdicating our own psychological center of being and handing it over to the computer. Within the next three decades we’ll have reached the point where the question will be, “What are humans for in a world of completely independent, self-replicating technological capability?”

Second, for the first time in history, the Caucasian race is no longer reproducing itself. No European country is reproducing its population; nor are Caucasians in North America reproducing themselves. The implications of this are so far-reaching that it’s difficult even to speculate what they might be.

Third, future ages may view man’s seeing the Earth from the Moon as the defining event of all subsequent history. Joseph Campbell clearly considered it the most significant psychological event of the past several thousand years. Seeing Earth from the Moon vastly accelerated the collapse of all the boundaries that provide identity — boundaries of nation, race, religion, class and gender. Thus everyone, to some degree or other, faces a crisis of identity. This also profoundly affects the underpinnings of all religions, as every religion includes some cosmological concept of how the universe was first created. But space exploration has given us new and different information and perspective.

Fourth, for the first time in history, what constitutes a family is being redefined. This has acute implications for government, education, social cohesion and what we broadly term “civil society".

Fifth, the ability to create change, as well as the attitude that change is desirable, is now a global possession. Throughout history, in all civilizations, continuity rather than abrupt change has been the normal state of affairs. No society on the planet knows how to live with constant, radical change. Thus for the first time in history, every nation is, concurrently with all other nations, in a state of profound crisis as we try to adjust to an ever-accelerating pace of change. Thus there is no global center of stability and order such as Britain provided in the nineteenth century, and America supplied the second half of the twentieth century.

Sixth, our whole symbolic language has been devalued. For example, “Heaven” used to carry a sacred meaning. It was the dwelling place of the gods; a place people hoped to go when they died, our link with eternity. Now we speak simply of “space,” an endless void. Similarly, we used to speak of “Mother Earth,” which gives the earth a creative, nurturing implication. Now we speak only of “matter,” an abstract, lifeless substance. In this way, our symbolic language has been diminished. The function of symbolic language is to infuse into our conscious life some of the transcendent meaning that emanates from the unconscious realm, from the depths of our inner being. That connection has been weakened, so there’s far less transcendent vitality brought into our conscious life.

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.

 

In what manner is the Earth remembered, unbidden, how is environment woven into the skein of memory? This post is the first of a series presenting ways the Earth is remembered (send any selections you like to twofish@iyume.com).

Eighteen years have gone by, and still I can bring back every detail of that day in the meadow. Washed clean of summer’s dust by days of gentle rain, the mountains wore a deep, brilliant green. The October breeze set white fronds of head-high grasses swaying. One long streak of cloud hung pasted across a dome of frozen blue. It almost hurt to look at that far-off sky. A puff of wind swept across the meadow and through her hair before it slipped into the woods to rustle branches and send back snatches of distant barking – a hazy sound that seemed to reach us from the doorway to another world. We heard no other sounds.
  . . . .
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene I hardly paid it any attention. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that 18 years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn’t give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. . . . Scenery was the last thing on my mind.
 
Now, though, that meadow scene is the first thing that comes back to me. The smell of the grass, the faint chill of the wind, the line of the hills, the barking of a dog: these are the first things, and they come with absolute clarity. I feel as if I can reach out and trace them with a fingertip. And yet, as clear as the scene may be, no one is in it. No one. Naoko is not there, and neither am I. Where could we have disappeared to? How could such a thing have happened? Everything that seemed so important back then – Naoko, and the self I was then, and the world I had then: where could they have all gone? It’s true, I can’t even bring back her face – not straight away, at least. All I’m left holding is a background, pure scenery, with no people at the front.
  . . . .
There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand – where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a film. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. Wake up, it says. I’m still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I’m still here. The kicking never hurts me. There’s no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick.

                         Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (Vintage, pp. 2-4)

(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.

Printed dated printed books that is. The image on the left taken from the Gutenberg Bible (1455), the text of Book I of the Maccabees, not to get distracted but found on a Houghton-Mifflin site, a whiz-bang 16 chapter history of western civilization. Before I get to the 20,000 free book downloads I wanted to mention for those interested, a U. Texas, Austin site outlining the history of the book. The anatomy of a page of the Gutenberg Bible is neat, even neater, the British Library has a permanent online collection of international texts, a great Gutenberg Bible exhibition, and this version of the Diamond Sutra, (the image just below) the world’s earliest dated block-printed book (868 C.E.), and you can actually turn the pages of these books online in full color, including Leonardo’s Notebook, Sforza’s “Hours,” and Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an, Chaucer, Shakespeare, among others (using the Shockwave plugin). Very cool, turn pages by mouse, and use the “magnifying glass” tool to see fine print. Don’t miss the extremely rare Tyndale New Testament, the first translation of that Testament into English (1526). His work was considered heretical and all copies (either 3,000 or 6,000) were confiscated; Tyndale was strangled and burned on 6 October 1536, for his efforts (that the bible might appear in English for the general reader, rather than Church Latin).

So there really are at least 20,000 books available online, free. The online books page at U. Penn. has that and more: articles, news, reviews, &c. Search by author, title, subject, &c.

The tricky bit is that 10,000 of the 20,000 are from Project Gutenberg is among the most philanthropic online projects of all time. Begun in 1971 by Michael Hart, when he was given $100 million of mainframe computer time, the story goes that,

At any rate, Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of “normal computing,” that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given. . .so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. An hour and 47 minutes later, he announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries.

He then proceeded to type in the “Declaration of Independence” and tried to send it to everyone on the networks. . .which can only be described today as a not so narrow miss at creating an early version of what was later called the “Internet Virus.”

A friendly dissuasion from this yielded the first posting of a document in electronic text, and Project Gutenberg was born as Michael stated that he had “earned” the $100,000,000 because a copy of the Declaration of Independence would eventually be an electronic fixture in the computer libraries of 100,000,000 of the computer users of the future.

9,999 books later, Project Gutenberg has released a DVD and CD download, and you can read the details for downloading it here.

It will take some hardware and software knowledge though, to create the DVD or CD. If you aren’t computer savvy, by donating to the Gutenberg Project here, you will be sent two free DVDs (one to give away, they write). To download and create the DVD or CD, here are some steps:

1) The DVD contains 9,400 books, placed into e-text up to December 2003. The downloads are .ISO files, so you’ll need a DVD burner (like Nero), and a DVD recorder. For the CD, which contains 600 books, you need a CD-R recorder, or you can download a zipped file of the texts to load right on your computer.

2) For the CD, go here read the “readme txt” and download “PG2003-08.zip” which is a zipped .iso (370 megabytes) or the actual readable contents “PG2003-08_files.zip” (371 megs).

I downloaded the ISO file, unzipped it (took a while) and burned it to a CD. Make sure you “burn from an image.” In Nero, the command is (counter-intuitively) in the “recorder” menu. After burning, pop the CD out, put it back in, and let it autorun.

What you get on the CD: a complete “authors” list is here.

3) The DVD is a trickier business, and the recommendation seems to be to load free Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network software: BitTorrent or eMule, and then search for the Gutenberg files.

4) What you need is the “pgdvd.iso” file and it’s a whopper, about 4.14 gigabytes. Seems like a challenge.

Anyway, if you just want a few hundred books or so, try the online books page at U. Penn. or Project Gutenberg links. Definitely, 21st century.

Lanier, who coined the term “virtual reality,” recently gave a lecture entitled a 1000 year optimistic scenario. In an earlier short article, he advanced the thesis that It is collective self-flattery for members of the computer science community to argue that computers can be conscious. I will take the contrarian position and argue that they cannot.

Lanier’s homepage and bio are here. Some people make sense, he’s one of them. Jaron has written one half of a manifesto, which critiques and exposes various flaws in “cybernetic totalist” views (e.g. computers will soon become more intelligent than us). There are several future-truths posed in the manifesto, and it makes for provocative reading. Although oriented to the world of memes and computers and neural nets, it’s more about society, and worth the hassle of relating with sometimes unfamiliar templates.

In the half-manifesto he discusses such perspectives as:

Why stupid software will save the future from neo-Darwinian machines.

The fear: cyber-Armageddon in our lifetimes, a cataclysm brought on when computers become ultra-intelligent masters of matter and life.

For computers to design their own successors, someone has to write the initial software. Humans have given no evidence of this ability.

He also argues against annoyingly prevalent false or reductive scientistic beliefs, arising from the cybernetic totalist/cognitive-science camp:

Is a person a gene’s way of propagating itself? It would be just as reasonable to assert that
“A person is shit’s way of making more shit.”

Cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality.

People are no more than cybernetic patterns.

Reading in the newer theories utilizing the term “evolutionary” (psychology, linguistics, science, biology, etc.) there seems a sometimes pernicious reduction of the human (or sentient) states of affairs to computer models – as if the computational model contains all significance and intelligence in its orbit. This is convenient for those who believe that human intelligence is a variety or even cross-pollinating simulacrum of machine intelligence.

Here is a shot at a definition of reality, which Jaron articulated in an interview, published in the book Mavericks of the Mind (now online):

David: What is your definition of reality, and how do you think it’s created? In that context, what then is Virtual Reality?

Jaron: You’ll be shocked to know that I don’t have definitive answers to all deep philosophical questions. (laughter) I do have some thoughts on it, though. I’ll start with one definition which is a biological one. Reality is the global expectation of the nervous system for the next moment. In other words, the most flexible parts of the psyche and your body mold themselves to a rolling guess of what will probably come next.

The continuous, cinematic-style experience of reality that we have is an illusion created by our nervous systems. Our direct perception of this world is actually highly flawed. For starters, the blind-spot is a great example. Near the center of each of your eyes is this big, black hole where you don’t see anything, but you’re never aware of it. Your mind fills it in perfectly for itself, which it can do because it holds all the cards. Even aside from that, what your eyes actually see is not what you perceive them seeing. Your eyes see edges and boundaries and patterns and they don’t really see the picture that you see - that’s constructed on a running basis in your brain. They just physiologically do not pick up the picture that you’re seeing now.

Rebecca: And there are all those associations you have developed throughout your life that get psychologically attached to what you’re seeing.

Jaron: Yeah. Have you ever had the experience of looking at something and for a moment it’s just an abstraction and it’s weird and you don’t quite get it, then you recognize it, then you can only see it in the proper way, no matter how hard you try to see it `wrong’ again? Sometimes the top of a building in the distance will blend with the sky in an impossible way. That sort of thing. That’s an example of how every level of your being works together to create your sense of reality. What a computer person would call a `high-level’ idea of recognizing objects like building tops and understanding their functions and relationships helps the supposedly very low level function of just interpreting colors and edges and the visual scene.

So, what’s happening is there’s a sort of rolling effect… I hate to use the word model and I’m trying to avoid using it because I don’t really think that your brain represents the outside world in any kind of codified and consistent way. You don’t even need to study the brain to decide that, you can make philosophical arguments to show that that’s an unlikely thing to be going on.

But, I think on a sort of a more global level, your brain and your body together are adapting themselves to the reality and that’s also the process that lets you perceive it. So there’s this moment to moment process where your expectations happen to match up with the apparent consistency of the stimulation from your physical world, and those things together are reality for you.

David: Isn’t that a model?

Jaron: Yeah okay, it’s a model, but it’s not the usual kind of model that can be represented as an abstraction. I don’t want to say the word model, because if I do then a bunch of academic philosophers will write me nasty letters saying, “How dare you say that!?” (laughter) And yet it’s the closest thing you can say easily. Another definition of reality has to do with the mysterious or sublime stubbornness of things. There are a few things that are just intensely, stubbornly there all the time.

David: Philip K. Dick once said that “reality is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.” [from the novel Ubik ]

Jaron: That’s absolutely excellent. There are only a few things that fall in that category - I think there are three. There’s this everyday, mundane physical world which seems awfully persistent, and the fact that Marin hasn’t made it disappear is good evidence that nobody could. (laughter) And then there’s the world of moods and essences and artistic feelings and styles, and those things are intensely real to me on a deep level; the sense of experience itself including the differentiation of different experiences. The other stubborn item is that mysterious thing called mathematics - it’s just really stubbornly there.

David: And just a brief definition of mathematics in that context?

Jaron: Mathematics is an inevitable path you go down when you start thinking about things in some way other than as an undifferentiated whole - which is any kind of thinking, really.

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

Samuel R. Delany wrote Dhalgren (1974), a most intriguing and brilliant science fiction novel. My friend John and I today marveled again at the opening lines:

to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. The in-dark answered with wind.

In a brief review of the new edition, Joe Hartlaub writes:

William Gibson’s introduction to the new Vintage edition (2001) is as good and as honest as any I’ve ever read. Gibson admits that he doesn’t understand Dhalgren and that it probably isn’t meant to be understood. He describes it as a “prose city” and in so doing pretty much nails the book dead on. Dhalgren takes place in an urban landscape where the laws of nature have broken down and the laws of mankind have as well; there is no way to tell which breakdown preceded the other. It begins in medias res and ends the same way. The characters wander through its mad landscape with no particular effect, with nothing in particular to propel them along, other than the overriding drive to continue existence. Yet. . . Delany’s skills as a wordsmith cannot be denied. The prose in Dhalgren is undeniably wonderful, a feast, an embarrassment of riches.

Taken as an appreciation of the power of language in the hands of a master, Dhalgren has few peers. As a story? Don’t expect to understand it. It is simply there, an account, if you will, of a world and lives that may or may not exist, that may happen or may have happened already. At 800 pages, it is worth the time and effort for the beauty of its language.

A spot editorial:

What is Dhalgren? Dhalgren is one of the greatest novels of 20th-century American literature. Dhalgren is one of the all-time bestselling science fiction novels. Dhalgren may be read with equal validity as SF, magic realism, or metafiction. Dhalgren is controversial, challenging, and scandalous. Dhalgren is a brilliant novel about sex, gender, race, class, art, and identity.

Read the book! (gads)

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.

Years ago, was shocked, reading Gore Vidal’s Burr to discover that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with Sally Hemings, “his” African-American slave. Jefferson-idolizing friends refused my phone calls. Bill Clinton has put this fact into his memoir (page 822), “it has recently come to light that Thomas Jefferson fathered several children with slave Sally Hemings” (quoted from Slate). In 1999, E. M. Halliday, writing in the New York Times, titled his op-ed piece A More or Less Proven Liason. The Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, based on DNA analysis, determined in its year-2000 findings that the evidence:

Indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings’s children appearing in Jefferson’s records.

The pertinent facts are here.

Precious little is known about Sally Hemings, and her image is lost to history; nonetheless, a novelization of her life has been well-received (her fictional image, above). All of which has little to do with Clinton’s affairs, though it was on his mind to mention, apparently. Thank you, Bill, for setting the record straight in such a public manner. Would you mind clearing up the misperceived Iraq-al-qaeda-9/11 connection, while you’re at it. Best of luck.

     After reading a review of the Lombard consensus, appearing in the New York Times today, it became clear that some thought experiments are perhaps pathetically timid. “Liberal” seems to be creeping back into the speakable lexicon, but “visionary” has some way to go.

What would you do with $50 billion?… Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and environmental iconoclast, brought eight economists, including three Nobel Prize winners… to rank the world’s 10 worst problems. Forget politics, they were told, just look at how to get the most bang for the buck… Global warming is a serious problem, the group concluded, but regarded every proposal as having costs that were likely to exceed the benefits.

The $50 billion question isn’t bogus, but it operates from a set of intrinsic limitations: conceptual, procedural and economic. There may also be bias, in that acclaimed professionals, if suggesting far-out, visionary ideas, based on possibles and supposeds run the risk of being labeled cranks. While the report seems valuable in terms of certain actualities, there are many unknowns that cannot be easily addressed by isolated programs with limited budgets.

I wonder what answers might be found if we provided a different set of guidelines for a new thought-experiment:

1. You have an unlimited amount of money.
2. You have 50 years to implement your proposals.
3. Your target solution concerns, at a minimum, the 7th generation from the present, in terms of time.
4. You must collaborate with at least two specialists from research fields other than your own.
5. Consider non-zero sumness as a highest value in weighting possible solutions (non-zero-sumness is a higher value than economic gain, though related to it).
6. Non-zero sum proposals which extend beyond the 7th generation receive a proportionally higher rating, vis their effect through extended time.

Non zero sum is based on Richard Wright’s thesis in Nonzero.

Solar Power via the Moon is a concept untouched by the Lombard wunderkinder; only one possible concept for re-inventing the intra-ecospheric paradigm. Lest quackery is pondered, examine the well-discussed article and testimony of Dr. David R. Criswell: Senate Hearing on Lunar Exploration (Criswell’s biography here). A good idea? Unclear. Possible idea? I’m not saying I approve of the above solution; there are environmental concerns and other questions. But I doubt truly visionary projects were considered by the Lomborg-funded group. People like Buckminster Fuller imagined new visions for humanity, new paradigms, with roaring courage. We need to continue looking into the farther future in as non-zero-sum a manner as possible, I ponder. What would be the result of a worldwide, low-cost, renewable energy source? Where to begin? Perhaps, beyond ourselves:

I am reminded of a comment made by the Buddhist teacher Guru Amrit Desai, when he looked out of his car window and saw that he was in the midst of a gang of Hell’s Angels. After studying them in great detail for a long while, he finally exclaimed, “They really love their motorcycles.” There was no disdain in this observation. Guru Desai was truly moved by the purity of their love for the beauty and power of something that was outside themselves,

Ray Kurtzweil recently remarked, reviewing Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. Whether cellular automata rule 110 is the ultimate reductive answer to the question of life in the universe, as 42 was for the computer Deep Thought, built by pan-dimensional mice in Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, only time will tell. The Hell’s Angels might have been consulted by the Lombardians, in this regard:

The Menace is loose again… the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches… like Genghis Kahn on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter’s leg with no quarter asked and none given… Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on (Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels p. 1).

We’re the one-percenters, man – the one percent that don’t fit in and don’t care.